
Tyler Cowen on Effective Altruism (University of St Andrews)
The Valmy
00:00
I Don't Like Eating Octopus, Right?
I don't think there's some natural unit where we can measure my happiness from the eating if indeed I liked it, versus the pain suffered by the octopus. So when there's no natural unit, I tend to think the problem is more in kind. The termite sense of the meaningful life, maybe it's about chewing up buildings, right? There may not be. That's an epistemic problem. But still, I don't see that there's commensurability. Well, this is an interesting place to end with what it's like to be a termite, I guess. I'll never know.
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