Beneficentrism
2025-03-15
Beneficentrism as ‘utilitarianism light’
I stumbled upon this interesting article by Richard Y. Chappell1 (from 2022) arguing for a new and more lightweight take on utilitarian ethics, which he coined ‘Beneficentrism’:
[Beneficentrism is] just the claim that it’s really important to help others—however distant or different from us they may be.
This sounds ‘obvious’, but in the wake of the FTX collapse the criticism on related concepts such as Effective Altruism (EA) is piling up (e.g., see here or here), and there are other philisophical problems with ‘dogmatic utilitarianism’, for example the repugnant conclusion2. All this risks throwing the baby out with the bath water: instead of debating the pros and cons of longtermism or how seriously we should take the various trolley problems, Beneficentrism just puts forward a moral ground rule that is sufficiently fuzzy to avoid such problems, while still making the point that helping others — as effectively as we can — is important. I like this term and I also like to have a word for this concept of a non-dogmatic utilitarianism.
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He is a professor of philopsophy at the University of Miami. ↩
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TLDR: In a society with
npeople living blissful lives, utilitiarianism suggests to increase the size of the society further, starting withn+1, even if this slightly reduces the quality of life for the others. This argument can be re-applied until you reach a state where a society has much more members, but each of them would almost be suicidal, i.e. barely preferring to keep on living. This conclusion is indeed repugnant. ↩
