Spencer Greenberg

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1,056 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Spencer Greenberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

One other thing I want to note is that I think there are many people that reject their being

moral truths that are objective, and yet they sort of act as though they believe it.

And I think to that group, I would especially recommend at least thinking about valuism, because if you reject objective moral truth,

yet you're still trying to maximize the good or do the best moral thing, what is grounding that?

And I would say, well, I don't know what is grounding that other than your own values.

I don't know what you can ground that in other than your values.

So at least I would consider whether you're sort of like accidentally pretending that you believe in objective moral truth because you don't know what else to do.

And I'd say, well, there is something to ground that in.

Absolutely.

So first of all, things like existential risk are incredibly bad according to almost everyone's values.

And so I think that even if everyone were valueless in the hypothetical thought experiment, I think they would be taken incredibly seriously, far more seriously than society takes them today.

And there'd be a significant amount of effort to reduce existential risk.

And I think many of the cause areas, if not all of the effective altruism cause areas, would also be like extremely high priority to people with values philosophy.

Not everyone, because people's values differ, but like almost everyone has values around reducing suffering.

They don't want even strangers, people they've never met to suffer, they don't want animals to suffer, right?

So it actually is, it's not the biggest value for most people, but it's a significant value for almost everyone.

So I do think valueism kind of gets you to similar places as effective altruist thinking.

However, I also think that it much is less likely to grind you to a pulp than philosophies like utilitarianism, where I think utilitarianism, and there's not a claim about being true or not.

I'm just talking about the psychological effects of it.

If you really deeply buy into it, I think it can have very...

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