Giving Game 2017 results

This past week I ran a 'Giving Game' for my Effective Altruism class, letting each student decide (after class discussion) how to allocate £100 of my charitable budget for the year.  There was just one restriction: if they wanted to pick something other than one of the four EA Funds options (which have expert managers directing funds in the fields of "global health & development", "animal welfare", "long-term future", and "EA community"), they had to convince at least one other classmate to join them.  In the first seminar group, half the class ended up choosing alternative options; in the second, all stuck with the EA funds.  The end result was a bit more varied and (less conservative) than the first time I tried this, so that was interesting to see.  (I think it helped both to allow individual discretion rather than requiring group consensus decisions, and also to have the new "EA funds" available to enable responsibly contributing to a cause area without having to identify or select particular outstanding organizations within the area.  You can now just make the value judgment, and defer to trusted experts on the empirical details.)

Drawing the Consequentialism / Deontology Distinction

I previously mentioned that Setiya's 'Must Consequentialists Kill?' defines consequentialism vs deontology in a way that I think we should resist.  (This is part of what allows Setiya to reach his surprising-sounding conclusion that "consequentialists" aren't committed to killing one to prevent more killings.)  Setiya defines "consequentialism" as the conjunction of two theses:

ACTION-PREFERENCE NEXUS: Among the actions available to you, you should perform one of those whose consequences you should prefer to all the rest.
AGENT-NEUTRALITY: Which consequences you should prefer is fixed by descriptions of consequences that make no indexical reference to you.