Walter Veit

This is a crosspost from my Substack. The Role of Emotional Suffering in the Animal Kingdom The Problem of Animal Suffering for Theism While non-human animal emotions received very little attention during the heyday of behaviorism, scientific research interest has steadily grown in the subject of the last decades. But...

Crossposted from my substack. Procreative Beneficence and Genetic Enhancement 1. Introduction Imagine a world where everyone is healthy, intelligent, long living and happy. Intuitively this seems wonderful albeit unrealistic. However, recent scientific developments in genetic engineering, namely CRISPR/Cas bring the question into public discourse, how the genetic enhancement of humans...

This is a crosspost from my Substack newsletter. This month’s most embarrassing piece of public philosophy appeared on invitation in a piece for The Economist by the Stanford philosopher Leif Wenar. Once more, Wenar tries to gain publicity by singing an obituary for effective altruism, one that oozes with self-confident...

This is a crosspost from my substack. Effective altruism has received a lot of media attention since the Department of War CTO of the United States declared that there follow “Americanism, NOT Effective Altruism.” One of the main critiques of effective altruists is to accuse them of being utilitarians. It’s...

Crosspost Once upon a time, public intellectuals routinely made it into the news to discuss political, economic, medical, and scientific issues. To some extent, this is still true, but the appreciation for expertise has been eroded over time. Large parts of the political spectrum do not trust experts, unless, of...

Pseudo-Philosophy vs Arguments, Reasons, and Evidence (And an Invitation to Debate) Crosspost from my newsletter What to make of ‘common sense’ objections to effective altruism? The economist Bryan Caplan has weighed in yesterday with his own assessment of the effective altruism movement, which has recently received a lot of hostile...

Zero-sum thinking, probability neglect, and other failures of reasoning crosspost Are we living in a simulation? No. But it is surreal that effective altruism has become the recent target of the official account for the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. It’s probably the first...