Thanks for the thread, WeAreNow.
I made some comments on a utilitarian major
here. Two things to consider:
- Might you want to make a lot of money after graduation? If so, your major should probably be mostly focused on that. (Still, even if this is the case, you could still design a utilitarian major for other students.)
- What sub-topics would it focus on? Effective altruism could take 15 majors' worth of material, and the course of study would be pretty different between Third-world health interventions vs. whether insects can suffer, for example. Of course, the core material is fairly common across everything, especially economics, psychology, and statistics.
Ruairi wrote:I'd been thinking about FHI and wondering if it would be possible for us to have a "Institute for Wild Intervention Studies" or something, as this might attract attention and money to do research??? (are FHI given money to do research?)
I would love to have such an institute.
As far as FHI, it was founded as part of the
James Martin 21st Century School with an initial $100 million grant from James Martin. So these things don't come free, but you can get a lot done with a big donor on your side.
That said, there are lots of general grants that could potentially be directed toward wild-animal studies, especially philosophy grants. For example, a friend of mine observed that the Templeton Foundation funds some pretty out-there projects and has a lot of money. I'm doubtful that wild animals would be their cup of tea, but Templeton Foundation is an illustration of the point that there might be organizations out there whose grants we could apply for.
(FYI, I also quite enjoy reading the work of the
Foundational Questions Institute, although work on cosmology instead of wild animals, and they fund science-oriented research rather than ethics.)
) is not seen as a possible field of study to the general population.
).
