“I know how it feels to think that pure motives and actions must somehow translate into good for the world. It’s a natural way for humans to think, and the pathology of it only really becomes clear when someone takes moral behavior very seriously, which is tragic because caring about morality is a good thing.

It’s a hard thing to learn, but we have to learn to see moral actions mechanistically the way we see less charged issues. We have to demand to know how an action will affect the good outcome we want, and we have to be open-minded about weighing the various harms and goods that the various available options entail. We have to see moral problems as problems to be solved instead of just evils to oppose. This is why the Effective Altruism movement is so important to me.”

— Holly Elmore, We have to think mechanistically about morality