I disagree that it's immoral to value the lives of their fellow citizens so much more than those of foreigners. If I help a homeless person in my home town get a job, I have benefitted myself by making my own environment safer and more productive in a way that is not true if I do the same for someone halfway around the world. So it seems to me clearly rational to value my neighbors and fellow citizens more than foreigners. You might then say that even if it is rational, it is immoral, because one should value all lives equally. But that strikes me as circular, since the very question is whether it is immoral not to value all lives equally.
I am not making an abstract point. To me, it seems clearly true that I should love my wife more than my neighbor, my friends more than strangers, my community more than my country, and my fellow citizens more than foreigners. Is there anything inconsistent or illogical about that belief?
It's not inconsistent in that it's a way you can act, but the world becomes worse when everyone decides to aggressively favor their tribe above everyone else.
That's why people don't like EA types - I say "I love my wife more than a random stranger" and they say "You are aggressively favoring your tribe." That sanctimony that turns people off.
Who does that? Certainly not Peter Singer, who has been asked many times whether he favors his children and grandchildren, always acknowledges that he does, and admits that he doesn't have a great ethical justification for this.
And that's exactly the problem. Any gathering whether people are seriously discussing whether they have a "great ethical justification" to care more about their own children than strangers isn't a movement, it's an insane asylum. You might as well be discussing whether there's an ethical justification for walking on your feet instead of your hands.
My point is not that you're wrong for having an affinity for friends and family. I prioritize my friends and family over other people too (partly because they're not going to be prioritized by anyone else, partly because it's just a normal human value). But obviously the world would be a lot better if people cared about strangers as much as they cared about their own kin, so it makes sense as a sort of moral aspiration.
Yes, but I think the EA would argue that the benefit of the job to the homeless person (and the added gains to you) are still outweighed by the much larger size of the benefit experienced by someone(s) in poverty on the other side of the world as would be generated by the same amount of effort you expended helping the homeless person. Consider for example two levers. Both take the same amount of effort/money to pull. Pulling one lever gets your homeless person a job. Pulling the other lever saves three lives from death, but you don't know these people and never will.
They then might ask you if you *had* gone and helped any homeless people get jobs lately - the point being they've made it very easy to do a lot of good. Your issues in the later comment about not believing them sound a bit crankish also, they document their reasonings and rankings very well.
There's certainly nothing inconsistent about our behaving largely as you describe, nor illogical in most senses. I guess I'd just say it sounds like a part of decision making that is not moral philosophy. Moral theories (whether consequentialist, deontological, or virtue theoretic) aim to map the gaps between what comes completely natural to us, and a less natural but more justified basis for our choices.
Another practical point they seem to miss is that I have a lot more information about the efficacy of local giving. It is notorious that many charities are inefficient at best, or grifts at worst. My wife and I are both active locally and between us, I have a pretty good idea of how effectively my donations will be spend, and I can target charities that I know are well run. Re foreign charities, the EA types want me to spend time getting information directly - why should I do that just so I can give effectively to foreign charities, when I already have all the information I need to give locally? Or they want me to trust them that eg mosquito nets in Africa are good - but why should I believe them? That they call themselves altruists is not enough.
> Most EAs, if asked, would prefer a tax increase on the wealthy over marginal extra donations to AMF, for example
How is this compatible with the "effective" part of EA, though? Government taxes are notoriously both diffuse and highly inefficient ways to get what you want. Like, that tax increase might just go straight into weapons manufacture, or subsidizing loss-making operas or increasing the wages of civil servants or one of a million things that isn't malaria nets for Africa.
I'd have thought actually that being libertarian is basically a requirement to call yourself an EA, as government spending is usually "local", so if you think the most effectively altruistic thing you can do with your money is spend it on poor third world countries, you should be arguing for as much tax cuts as possible and to keep government out of things.
Hearing you say that it's the opposite, moves me closer to the position espoused above where it's claimed that EA is just liberals pretending to be something else, which makes sense because insisting that everyone should care about the problems of far away third world countries more than what's going on in their neighbourhood is a very lefty thing to do.
Is Gates really effective, I wonder? I know he's super into malaria stuff but I talked a couple of years ago to a malaria researcher who painted a very dark picture of the effect GF funding had on the malaria world.
The gist of it was that Gates only really cares about eradication efforts, not mitigation/control. A lot of malaria researchers don't think eradication is actually reasonable, but hide their own views and even lie about what they think to get access to Gates funding. This leads to a lot of risky and ethically dubious grants, for example, initiatives to spray whole areas with anti-malarial drugs. If it works, you kill all the mosquitos in that area and malaria disappears for a while (until they move back in from other areas). If it fails, well you just created drug-resistant malaria and now your best weapon in hospitals for genuinely sick people is gone. But because Gates only wants eradication, that's the sort of thing that happens anyway.
Also apparently a lot of the researcher there is fraudulent for the usual reasons.
So this is the sort of problem with the "effective" part of EA. Especially for things that happen far away, at the end of a long chain of people, it can become hard to know if you're really improving things or actually making them worse.
I think Richard's error here is to conflate the idea that everyone is to some degree a utilitarian with the idea that everyone engages in and approves of atheistic moral philosophizing.
Most people rely on some combination of moral intuitions (i.e. going with their gut, some combination of inborn disposition and societal conditioning) and religious/spiritual thinking (not necessarily anything resembling an orthodox religion -- can easily be something as vague as "karma" in the pop New Age sense). "Everyone is a utilitarian" is really describing a moral intuition: if we can help two people instead of one with an equivalent effort, then sure, let's help two. This is distinct from the atheistic moral philosophy of utilitarianism. Which, ironically, is without utility for most people.
Only a small slice of the population places any weight on atheistic moral philosophy: the idea that, although there is no ultimate meaning to anything, it's still a worthwhile exercise to start with your moral intuitions but then construct elaborate mental frameworks around what is good and bad -- even when this takes you to morally unintuitive places. For what reason? None, really -- just a semi-autistic, systematizing personality that has rejected religion and spirituality while at the same time not being content to rely entirely on intuition.
Naturally, most people really dislike this exercise because most people dislike weird, autistic things. They also dislike when people promote things that strongly contradict their moral intuitions, like having sex with dogs.
If you have the atheistic moral philosophizing personality type, then what you're doing seems clearly better than what the normies are doing: you're developing internally-consistent systems! More internally consistent = more true! But this isn't necessarily true when we're talking about systems that are ultimately meaningless. Since the only reason non-religious people care about morality is because they don't want to contradict their intuitions (i.e. their conscience) and feel bad, and since systematizing requires approving of morally unintuitive things, then clearly systematizing is worse for them. Plus it requires a bunch of extra work.
Agreed. If I remember correctly, the big three systems in academic philosophy are utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, and all run into problems fast. We all pretty much subscribe to an incoherent mix of the three, because it is impossible to do otherwise.
"We all pretty much subscribe to an incoherent mix of the three"
I suppose I'd go further and say that people hold plenty of heuristics that don't really belong in any of these categories. Though sometimes people might use arguments from those systems to rationalize and sound better than what they really believe.
For example, utilitarians have tried to compute the value of animal life based on neurons, with no special preference given to humans. Which of course can lead to some counter-intuitive conclusions no one wants to accept (e.g. there is some number of maggots that is equal to the life of a child).
Normal people have a number of heuristics to consider the value of animal life, but a common one is that it's better to kill ugly things than cute things. Which is an idea that you could force into one of the philosophical systems if you had to -- is animal cuteness a virtue? does it convey utility? -- but forcing is indeed all you're doing there.
Well. you can view morality as a social tool - to judge how much effort others put in to make the world a better place. We have strong intuitions about this at the local level, religious or not. So trying to tie that to what will actually make the world a better place - based on rationality rather than religion - doesn’t seem to need much further justification
"Atheistic moral philosophizing" is necessary to actually follow simple moral intuitions many have, like "don't hurt people", "think critically about your behavior" and "help others the best way you can".
Agree with almost everything except the speculation around whether EA ideas would better propagate without a movement.
It's true that many EAs are former bleeding hearts but a non trivial number are people like me, who don't score particularly high on empathy or compassion but were convinced by the arguments. And most people who fall in this camp, even if often neuroatypical, aren't autistic enough to make decisions or sacrifices based on these arguments if there isn't some mechanism for social rewards on this basis. The intertia is massive - in my example, working in biosecurity is something that no one else in my MBA class even considered. The reason I did was because in addition to being convinced some lunatic or Jihadi group could very plausibly kill millions of people with an engineered pandemic because of our collective stupidity, I knew it would give me a professional and social community that I could go back to if this weird bet didn't pay off. In other words, It's good that we have a community where status somewhat tracks how much good you do. Now EA doesn't do this even close to perfectly (something I want to write about another time) but it does it better than any other place does.
> Based on what EAs have written, I have replaced much of the shrimp and chicken in my diet with beef and pork, which they say gets rid of most of the harm, but I’m not going any further than that.
I think this argumentation is totally mistaken and the net effect of your actions has sadly been to increase, not decrease, suffering.
As I argued here https://akarlin.com/animals/, it is likely that capacity to suffer is correlated to cognitive capacity. Consequently, even taking bulk into account, it seems that it is better to eat beef or chicken than pork, pigs being about as smart as the smartest dog breeds, and far better to eat fish (salmon in particular mostly die bad deaths anyway so I don't think catching and eating them even increases suffering over the fact of their existence), and one can destroy and consume arbitrary amounts of crustaceans (lobsters have 100,000 neurons, that's less than the ant's 250,000) and be ethically almost indistinguishable from a vegetarian. After all the vegetarian still ends up swallowing some bugs.
As you probably gathered from the above, I am mostly a pescetarian, although I do eat chicken and beef because of protein and taste, respectively, as well as cooking convenience. If fish could be made relatively more convenient, then I would be happy to switch over entirely until the development of lab meats.
The factory farming thing is not exactly new or some kind of innovation by EA. PETA has been around forever. The reality is people care more about people than animals. There isn't any kind of logical argument you can make against that. The fact that EAs both treat this as some kind of novel problem they spotted for the first time, and then just take it for granted that you are obligated to value animal life as much as they claim to in the same way that everyone hates vegans for, really does not endear them to people.
Going back to PETA, people don't hate PETA because PETA is some kind of moral mirror that actually makes them feel bad. They hate PETA because PETA are annoying, obnoxious moral busybodies wasting everyone's time with a problem that, to be frank, most people don't care about and don't consider a problem at all. EAs are less overtly meddlesome, but the same basic thing applies.
Effective Altruists are basically utilitarians who have finally realised that utilitarianism is actually really complicated and thus requires a lot of math. This is a step forward, but they are still massively underestimating how complicated utilitarianism really is. They are analogous to socialists who believe that AI can solve the economic calculation problem.
Some of their recommendations are good, like that you should try to eat only free range meat. But all of their good recommendations have been made by others already, and also some of their bad ones (note that SA cited EA as influencing the British government to abandon its correct pandemic policy and embrace its failed lockdown policy).
It doesn't matter if your calculations are imperfect, they just need to be better than the alternative. In the case of communism, the alternative is the calculation done by the prices mechanism which is mostly quite good, we don't have a prices mechanism for morality. What normally happens in the world is mostly determined by power dynamics and outdated moral intuitions meant to function in small tight knit hunter gatherer societies. Even a naive utilitarian calculation can outcompete this reality in the average case.
Well, I've already cited an example, according to Scott Alexander, in which his gang got their calculations wrong and encouraged Britain to lock down three times.
I think EA works well, relative to moral intuition and traditional ideas, in a case like factory farming, which didn't exist until recently and where people do not have direct exposure to what is happening. Buying meat from a butcher seems to be much the same as it ever was even though actually it's totally different.
In the first line of this article, RH links to SA where he writes that EA 'positively influenced some countries' pandemic policies' with a link to a tweet by Dominic Cummings in which he credits reading EA blogs with changing his mind from a herd immunity to a lockdown policy (elsewhere Cummings has written about being the de facto swing vote in the cabinet).
In addition to the general wrongness of lockdowns, it needs to be said that it was especially disastrous to move to a lockdown policy on the fly, after a pandemic had already started, and just ignore decades of pandemic planning. And it was especially, especially disastrous to try and do this in a country like Britain with highly eroded state capacity and famous inability to control costs. This is how you spend 35 million pounds on a tracing app that was *literally never even used*. How's that for effective altruism?
Strongly feel like EA people can't seem to figure out why people don't like their philosophy because they seem unable to conceive of a moral philosophy outside of their own. Even when they try to understand others, like you've done here, they can't get outside the window of their own philosophy, so they never see why anyone is disagreeing with them and think it's just deficiencies on the parts of their counterparties -- feeling dumb, feeling defensive, feeling imposed upon. When in fact the most common moral stances are totally unrecognizable by utilitarianism, and no amount of understanding them *in terms of utilitarianism* will ever be able to comprehend them.
No point in disagreeing with the article line-by-line; you'll get the idea from the intro:
> I think EAs miss just how much their ideology offends people by its very nature.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
> EAs are, for example, attacked for being both “woke” and “white supremacist,” which is an indication that each side is basically just throwing out the worst epithet they have at the group.
This is just dumb; different people say different things for all reasons, and the only thing less useful than averaging over the opinions of a large disparate group is averaging over the opinions of the complement of that group.
> The main problem I think people have with EA is that it is a mirror. It tells you exactly what you are doing wrong, and why.
Completely disagree. The reason they dislike it is that it strikes them as profoundly immoral. Especially immoral is the fact that EA can't comprehend how EA could be immoral.
> Everyone accepts utilitarianism to some degree.
The degree to which they *don't* is what you're entirely missing.
I really like EA and generally loathe the people who loathe it, but I wildly disagree with the overall assessment here. First, there's no "one" reason people dislike it, because the reasons are highly bifurcated by ideology. Rightists hate it because they oppose egalitarianism in general, and more specifically they hate the idea of forking over vast resources to save Africans, whom they regard essentially as some sort of mammalian locust swarm. Leftists, on the other hand, hate it because it prominently features people they culturally pattern match to "libertarian tech bros" who don't have the same political bêtes noires as they do (preoccupation with fighting racism/capitalism/transphobia/"justice"/whatever) and who don't consider revolutionary change to be desirable, much less absolutely mandatory.
Second, at least with regard to the latter camp (leftists), I think they dislike it in a sense because it doesn't shame or call people Hitler *enough*. That is, EA's are generally extremely chill, affectively positive, conflict-averse people who favor emotional carrots over sticks. But the most strident leftist critics of EA like Timnit Gebru are the polar opposite of that, and love nothing more than blaming problems of subalterns on the actions or indifference of heartless Westerners (specifically white Westerners).
If I were tasked with popularizing EA in some Leftist (with a capital "L") space, I'd advocate for all the same causes with all the same fervor, but I'd go out of my way to emphasize notions of guilt and complicity of Western societies over literally everything else. Africa is only poor because of centuries of ruthless colonialist resource extraction, which *you* personally benefit from every day from, you monster, so the very least you could do is donate 10% of your income. Call it "direct action" or "mutual aid" or "reparations" or whatever. Make sure to include a lot of historical anecdotes about affluent white people visiting Third World countries and behaving in some entitled manner in the midst of crushing subsistence poverty, and go out of your way to compare those people to complacent Americans who feast in blissful ignorance while the rest of the world burns. Drop the word "justice" at every possible opportunity, and loudly insinuate that anyone who doesn't participate hates "justice" and favors oppression. You get the picture.
The correct answer to animal suffering isn't to reduce the efficiency of our farming methods, but to breed dumber animals which don't suffer as much under the same conditions.
I don't hate EA. I mostly scoff at it while appreciating some of its value. Obviously charity ratings are very useful; who among us can do that kind of diligent drill-down legwork. I review various ratings now and then over the years, as I evaluate charities and decide how to donate.
But EA types, IME, tend to wildly overstate the "objective" and "obvious" value of their simplistic (and inevitably "biased") numeric formulas, presuppositions, and resulting evaluative conclusions. Scoff. So I look well beyond that, when seeking input on the charities I choose to support.
That so many prominent EAers think their judgments are superior to others' because they've won the economic survivorship/success lottery is quite offputting, but I just shake my head, roll my eyes, and sigh resignedly at the foolishness of humankind. Then ignore a decent chunk of what they have to say.
1. Richard, did you ever read the Caplan vs Huemer debate on animal rights?
2. Is it worse for a chicken to be eaten by a human than get torn apart in the wild by a fox?
3. “People often say that EA has a cold or autistic feel to it, but the irony of this is that modern Westerners with their WEIRD morality seem that way to much of the rest of the world.” Isn’t WEIRD just white? Won’t that disappear if the West is turned into the Third World demographically?
2. Wild animal suffering is an EA cause area -- though not a very tractable one. Also most EA's don't mind killing animals (or raising them to be killed) if it's done painlessly.
These issues are crazy complicated and radical, so yes, most EAs haven't really thought through all of their implications and are often naive, but at least they're trying.
EA, being basically extreme utilitarianism, has the same issue that all utilitarianism has: it requires you to be able to accurately evaluate the proper utility function, which is a hard problem in general. With deontology (eg "thou shalt not kill"), you are unlikely to get the most moral outcome imaginable, but you are also unlikely to cause disaster. With utilitarianism, maybe your master plan to save the world works out, and the ends end up justifying the means—or maybe you are Stalin, you deluded yourself into believing that communism could work, and now millions are dead for nothing. IOW, deontology is the allowance that utilitarianism makes for human fallibility.
EAs, having higher IQs, are less likely to make certain kinds of dumb mistakes when evaluating utility functions. But, being human, they still have many weaknesses, for example arrogrance, which can lead them astray if not checked. Scott Alexander is pretty humble, I am not worried about him; you, Richard, are not humble at all, so I trust your version of EA less.
I'm not sure the typical normie is familiar enough with EA philosophy to know it views them as dumb and immoral, or would really care even if they did. Mostly they just think EA is weird and confusing. Also the media stories around EA have been almost exclusively negative (just because that's more clickbaity than "organisation is run well and achieves things") and popular opinion usually just reflects back whatever narrative is in the media.
On another point, I wouldn't describe a personal philosophy that's so centred around social status, social perceptions and comparisons with what the rest of society happens to be doing as strong, rational or masculine.
I think this is a great example of how, if your premise if dead wrong, everything that stems from it just gets in increasingly wrong until it becomes sick.
It IS sick to lop off your heathly body parts to strangers. It IS sick to treat animals as equal in rights to human beings. It IS sick to focus all your charitable attention on those who are the worst off in far corners of the remote world, simply because you value the suffering of the anonymous person in the worst possible scenario, over your neighbor and friend, BECAUSE he is your neighbor and friend - literally you are saying, those I value, my friends and family and even my own body, should come last because they are values to me.
This is what the consistent adherence to Alturism gets. And it is totally impossible even under EA. Even after they admit to generating wealth, so that they can "effectively" help the anonymous poor, they still have to face the metaphysical fact that they must eat, sleep, and care for their bodies needs while others are more deserving. The truth is that the only way to be any kind of "Effective" Alturist is to treat your body like a used car and strip it for parts killing yourself- presumably, for an EA, after working hard to send money to strangers in far off corners you don't know. Once you can no longer work, what's the point of feeding this worn out body, that has already lived, and has viable parts that could offer someone else, younger who hasn't lived a chance?
The truth is that the only way to counter the increasingly ugly, but completely logical path here, is to embrace a rational philosophy of self interest that places the individual *yourself* as the base of morality. When you follow that path, consistently, it leads to the idea that one should trade value for value with people instead of sacrificing to them. It follows naturally that you shouldn't rob or cheat them, because when you violate the rights of others you invite them to do the same to you. When a society consistently follows these beliefs in leads to Capitalism and "effectively" more wealth for the poor than any alturist has ever given away. Because you can't hand out to others what has never been produced, and you can't produce with the right to work for your own values.
I disagree that it's immoral to value the lives of their fellow citizens so much more than those of foreigners. If I help a homeless person in my home town get a job, I have benefitted myself by making my own environment safer and more productive in a way that is not true if I do the same for someone halfway around the world. So it seems to me clearly rational to value my neighbors and fellow citizens more than foreigners. You might then say that even if it is rational, it is immoral, because one should value all lives equally. But that strikes me as circular, since the very question is whether it is immoral not to value all lives equally.
I am not making an abstract point. To me, it seems clearly true that I should love my wife more than my neighbor, my friends more than strangers, my community more than my country, and my fellow citizens more than foreigners. Is there anything inconsistent or illogical about that belief?
It's not inconsistent in that it's a way you can act, but the world becomes worse when everyone decides to aggressively favor their tribe above everyone else.
That's why people don't like EA types - I say "I love my wife more than a random stranger" and they say "You are aggressively favoring your tribe." That sanctimony that turns people off.
Who does that? Certainly not Peter Singer, who has been asked many times whether he favors his children and grandchildren, always acknowledges that he does, and admits that he doesn't have a great ethical justification for this.
And that's exactly the problem. Any gathering whether people are seriously discussing whether they have a "great ethical justification" to care more about their own children than strangers isn't a movement, it's an insane asylum. You might as well be discussing whether there's an ethical justification for walking on your feet instead of your hands.
My point is not that you're wrong for having an affinity for friends and family. I prioritize my friends and family over other people too (partly because they're not going to be prioritized by anyone else, partly because it's just a normal human value). But obviously the world would be a lot better if people cared about strangers as much as they cared about their own kin, so it makes sense as a sort of moral aspiration.
Yes, but I think the EA would argue that the benefit of the job to the homeless person (and the added gains to you) are still outweighed by the much larger size of the benefit experienced by someone(s) in poverty on the other side of the world as would be generated by the same amount of effort you expended helping the homeless person. Consider for example two levers. Both take the same amount of effort/money to pull. Pulling one lever gets your homeless person a job. Pulling the other lever saves three lives from death, but you don't know these people and never will.
They then might ask you if you *had* gone and helped any homeless people get jobs lately - the point being they've made it very easy to do a lot of good. Your issues in the later comment about not believing them sound a bit crankish also, they document their reasonings and rankings very well.
There's certainly nothing inconsistent about our behaving largely as you describe, nor illogical in most senses. I guess I'd just say it sounds like a part of decision making that is not moral philosophy. Moral theories (whether consequentialist, deontological, or virtue theoretic) aim to map the gaps between what comes completely natural to us, and a less natural but more justified basis for our choices.
Another practical point they seem to miss is that I have a lot more information about the efficacy of local giving. It is notorious that many charities are inefficient at best, or grifts at worst. My wife and I are both active locally and between us, I have a pretty good idea of how effectively my donations will be spend, and I can target charities that I know are well run. Re foreign charities, the EA types want me to spend time getting information directly - why should I do that just so I can give effectively to foreign charities, when I already have all the information I need to give locally? Or they want me to trust them that eg mosquito nets in Africa are good - but why should I believe them? That they call themselves altruists is not enough.
> Most EAs, if asked, would prefer a tax increase on the wealthy over marginal extra donations to AMF, for example
How is this compatible with the "effective" part of EA, though? Government taxes are notoriously both diffuse and highly inefficient ways to get what you want. Like, that tax increase might just go straight into weapons manufacture, or subsidizing loss-making operas or increasing the wages of civil servants or one of a million things that isn't malaria nets for Africa.
I'd have thought actually that being libertarian is basically a requirement to call yourself an EA, as government spending is usually "local", so if you think the most effectively altruistic thing you can do with your money is spend it on poor third world countries, you should be arguing for as much tax cuts as possible and to keep government out of things.
Hearing you say that it's the opposite, moves me closer to the position espoused above where it's claimed that EA is just liberals pretending to be something else, which makes sense because insisting that everyone should care about the problems of far away third world countries more than what's going on in their neighbourhood is a very lefty thing to do.
Is Gates really effective, I wonder? I know he's super into malaria stuff but I talked a couple of years ago to a malaria researcher who painted a very dark picture of the effect GF funding had on the malaria world.
The gist of it was that Gates only really cares about eradication efforts, not mitigation/control. A lot of malaria researchers don't think eradication is actually reasonable, but hide their own views and even lie about what they think to get access to Gates funding. This leads to a lot of risky and ethically dubious grants, for example, initiatives to spray whole areas with anti-malarial drugs. If it works, you kill all the mosquitos in that area and malaria disappears for a while (until they move back in from other areas). If it fails, well you just created drug-resistant malaria and now your best weapon in hospitals for genuinely sick people is gone. But because Gates only wants eradication, that's the sort of thing that happens anyway.
Also apparently a lot of the researcher there is fraudulent for the usual reasons.
So this is the sort of problem with the "effective" part of EA. Especially for things that happen far away, at the end of a long chain of people, it can become hard to know if you're really improving things or actually making them worse.
I think Richard's error here is to conflate the idea that everyone is to some degree a utilitarian with the idea that everyone engages in and approves of atheistic moral philosophizing.
Most people rely on some combination of moral intuitions (i.e. going with their gut, some combination of inborn disposition and societal conditioning) and religious/spiritual thinking (not necessarily anything resembling an orthodox religion -- can easily be something as vague as "karma" in the pop New Age sense). "Everyone is a utilitarian" is really describing a moral intuition: if we can help two people instead of one with an equivalent effort, then sure, let's help two. This is distinct from the atheistic moral philosophy of utilitarianism. Which, ironically, is without utility for most people.
Only a small slice of the population places any weight on atheistic moral philosophy: the idea that, although there is no ultimate meaning to anything, it's still a worthwhile exercise to start with your moral intuitions but then construct elaborate mental frameworks around what is good and bad -- even when this takes you to morally unintuitive places. For what reason? None, really -- just a semi-autistic, systematizing personality that has rejected religion and spirituality while at the same time not being content to rely entirely on intuition.
Naturally, most people really dislike this exercise because most people dislike weird, autistic things. They also dislike when people promote things that strongly contradict their moral intuitions, like having sex with dogs.
If you have the atheistic moral philosophizing personality type, then what you're doing seems clearly better than what the normies are doing: you're developing internally-consistent systems! More internally consistent = more true! But this isn't necessarily true when we're talking about systems that are ultimately meaningless. Since the only reason non-religious people care about morality is because they don't want to contradict their intuitions (i.e. their conscience) and feel bad, and since systematizing requires approving of morally unintuitive things, then clearly systematizing is worse for them. Plus it requires a bunch of extra work.
Agreed. If I remember correctly, the big three systems in academic philosophy are utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, and all run into problems fast. We all pretty much subscribe to an incoherent mix of the three, because it is impossible to do otherwise.
"We all pretty much subscribe to an incoherent mix of the three"
I suppose I'd go further and say that people hold plenty of heuristics that don't really belong in any of these categories. Though sometimes people might use arguments from those systems to rationalize and sound better than what they really believe.
For example, utilitarians have tried to compute the value of animal life based on neurons, with no special preference given to humans. Which of course can lead to some counter-intuitive conclusions no one wants to accept (e.g. there is some number of maggots that is equal to the life of a child).
Normal people have a number of heuristics to consider the value of animal life, but a common one is that it's better to kill ugly things than cute things. Which is an idea that you could force into one of the philosophical systems if you had to -- is animal cuteness a virtue? does it convey utility? -- but forcing is indeed all you're doing there.
Well. you can view morality as a social tool - to judge how much effort others put in to make the world a better place. We have strong intuitions about this at the local level, religious or not. So trying to tie that to what will actually make the world a better place - based on rationality rather than religion - doesn’t seem to need much further justification
"Atheistic moral philosophizing" is necessary to actually follow simple moral intuitions many have, like "don't hurt people", "think critically about your behavior" and "help others the best way you can".
Agree with almost everything except the speculation around whether EA ideas would better propagate without a movement.
It's true that many EAs are former bleeding hearts but a non trivial number are people like me, who don't score particularly high on empathy or compassion but were convinced by the arguments. And most people who fall in this camp, even if often neuroatypical, aren't autistic enough to make decisions or sacrifices based on these arguments if there isn't some mechanism for social rewards on this basis. The intertia is massive - in my example, working in biosecurity is something that no one else in my MBA class even considered. The reason I did was because in addition to being convinced some lunatic or Jihadi group could very plausibly kill millions of people with an engineered pandemic because of our collective stupidity, I knew it would give me a professional and social community that I could go back to if this weird bet didn't pay off. In other words, It's good that we have a community where status somewhat tracks how much good you do. Now EA doesn't do this even close to perfectly (something I want to write about another time) but it does it better than any other place does.
> Based on what EAs have written, I have replaced much of the shrimp and chicken in my diet with beef and pork, which they say gets rid of most of the harm, but I’m not going any further than that.
I think this argumentation is totally mistaken and the net effect of your actions has sadly been to increase, not decrease, suffering.
As I argued here https://akarlin.com/animals/, it is likely that capacity to suffer is correlated to cognitive capacity. Consequently, even taking bulk into account, it seems that it is better to eat beef or chicken than pork, pigs being about as smart as the smartest dog breeds, and far better to eat fish (salmon in particular mostly die bad deaths anyway so I don't think catching and eating them even increases suffering over the fact of their existence), and one can destroy and consume arbitrary amounts of crustaceans (lobsters have 100,000 neurons, that's less than the ant's 250,000) and be ethically almost indistinguishable from a vegetarian. After all the vegetarian still ends up swallowing some bugs.
As you probably gathered from the above, I am mostly a pescetarian, although I do eat chicken and beef because of protein and taste, respectively, as well as cooking convenience. If fish could be made relatively more convenient, then I would be happy to switch over entirely until the development of lab meats.
Thanks, this is very interesting.
Most of salmon available for food is farmed, and has pretty bad life. For wild caught salmon it's a different story.
The factory farming thing is not exactly new or some kind of innovation by EA. PETA has been around forever. The reality is people care more about people than animals. There isn't any kind of logical argument you can make against that. The fact that EAs both treat this as some kind of novel problem they spotted for the first time, and then just take it for granted that you are obligated to value animal life as much as they claim to in the same way that everyone hates vegans for, really does not endear them to people.
Going back to PETA, people don't hate PETA because PETA is some kind of moral mirror that actually makes them feel bad. They hate PETA because PETA are annoying, obnoxious moral busybodies wasting everyone's time with a problem that, to be frank, most people don't care about and don't consider a problem at all. EAs are less overtly meddlesome, but the same basic thing applies.
Although PETA is not EA and (unlike EA) seems to be interested in animal rights as much as animal welfare, PETA's founders were inspired by Peter Singer's book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Newkirk#Founding_of_PETA
Effective Altruists are basically utilitarians who have finally realised that utilitarianism is actually really complicated and thus requires a lot of math. This is a step forward, but they are still massively underestimating how complicated utilitarianism really is. They are analogous to socialists who believe that AI can solve the economic calculation problem.
Some of their recommendations are good, like that you should try to eat only free range meat. But all of their good recommendations have been made by others already, and also some of their bad ones (note that SA cited EA as influencing the British government to abandon its correct pandemic policy and embrace its failed lockdown policy).
It doesn't matter if your calculations are imperfect, they just need to be better than the alternative. In the case of communism, the alternative is the calculation done by the prices mechanism which is mostly quite good, we don't have a prices mechanism for morality. What normally happens in the world is mostly determined by power dynamics and outdated moral intuitions meant to function in small tight knit hunter gatherer societies. Even a naive utilitarian calculation can outcompete this reality in the average case.
Well, I've already cited an example, according to Scott Alexander, in which his gang got their calculations wrong and encouraged Britain to lock down three times.
I think EA works well, relative to moral intuition and traditional ideas, in a case like factory farming, which didn't exist until recently and where people do not have direct exposure to what is happening. Buying meat from a butcher seems to be much the same as it ever was even though actually it's totally different.
When did Scott claim credit for lockdowns?
In the first line of this article, RH links to SA where he writes that EA 'positively influenced some countries' pandemic policies' with a link to a tweet by Dominic Cummings in which he credits reading EA blogs with changing his mind from a herd immunity to a lockdown policy (elsewhere Cummings has written about being the de facto swing vote in the cabinet).
In addition to the general wrongness of lockdowns, it needs to be said that it was especially disastrous to move to a lockdown policy on the fly, after a pandemic had already started, and just ignore decades of pandemic planning. And it was especially, especially disastrous to try and do this in a country like Britain with highly eroded state capacity and famous inability to control costs. This is how you spend 35 million pounds on a tracing app that was *literally never even used*. How's that for effective altruism?
This is a fully general argument against having any ideological bent at all.
Strongly feel like EA people can't seem to figure out why people don't like their philosophy because they seem unable to conceive of a moral philosophy outside of their own. Even when they try to understand others, like you've done here, they can't get outside the window of their own philosophy, so they never see why anyone is disagreeing with them and think it's just deficiencies on the parts of their counterparties -- feeling dumb, feeling defensive, feeling imposed upon. When in fact the most common moral stances are totally unrecognizable by utilitarianism, and no amount of understanding them *in terms of utilitarianism* will ever be able to comprehend them.
No point in disagreeing with the article line-by-line; you'll get the idea from the intro:
> I think EAs miss just how much their ideology offends people by its very nature.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
> EAs are, for example, attacked for being both “woke” and “white supremacist,” which is an indication that each side is basically just throwing out the worst epithet they have at the group.
This is just dumb; different people say different things for all reasons, and the only thing less useful than averaging over the opinions of a large disparate group is averaging over the opinions of the complement of that group.
> The main problem I think people have with EA is that it is a mirror. It tells you exactly what you are doing wrong, and why.
Completely disagree. The reason they dislike it is that it strikes them as profoundly immoral. Especially immoral is the fact that EA can't comprehend how EA could be immoral.
> Everyone accepts utilitarianism to some degree.
The degree to which they *don't* is what you're entirely missing.
I really like EA and generally loathe the people who loathe it, but I wildly disagree with the overall assessment here. First, there's no "one" reason people dislike it, because the reasons are highly bifurcated by ideology. Rightists hate it because they oppose egalitarianism in general, and more specifically they hate the idea of forking over vast resources to save Africans, whom they regard essentially as some sort of mammalian locust swarm. Leftists, on the other hand, hate it because it prominently features people they culturally pattern match to "libertarian tech bros" who don't have the same political bêtes noires as they do (preoccupation with fighting racism/capitalism/transphobia/"justice"/whatever) and who don't consider revolutionary change to be desirable, much less absolutely mandatory.
Second, at least with regard to the latter camp (leftists), I think they dislike it in a sense because it doesn't shame or call people Hitler *enough*. That is, EA's are generally extremely chill, affectively positive, conflict-averse people who favor emotional carrots over sticks. But the most strident leftist critics of EA like Timnit Gebru are the polar opposite of that, and love nothing more than blaming problems of subalterns on the actions or indifference of heartless Westerners (specifically white Westerners).
If I were tasked with popularizing EA in some Leftist (with a capital "L") space, I'd advocate for all the same causes with all the same fervor, but I'd go out of my way to emphasize notions of guilt and complicity of Western societies over literally everything else. Africa is only poor because of centuries of ruthless colonialist resource extraction, which *you* personally benefit from every day from, you monster, so the very least you could do is donate 10% of your income. Call it "direct action" or "mutual aid" or "reparations" or whatever. Make sure to include a lot of historical anecdotes about affluent white people visiting Third World countries and behaving in some entitled manner in the midst of crushing subsistence poverty, and go out of your way to compare those people to complacent Americans who feast in blissful ignorance while the rest of the world burns. Drop the word "justice" at every possible opportunity, and loudly insinuate that anyone who doesn't participate hates "justice" and favors oppression. You get the picture.
I stopped at "I am too masculine, smart, and brave..."
The correct answer to animal suffering isn't to reduce the efficiency of our farming methods, but to breed dumber animals which don't suffer as much under the same conditions.
You're just describing lab-grown meat.
I don't hate EA. I mostly scoff at it while appreciating some of its value. Obviously charity ratings are very useful; who among us can do that kind of diligent drill-down legwork. I review various ratings now and then over the years, as I evaluate charities and decide how to donate.
But EA types, IME, tend to wildly overstate the "objective" and "obvious" value of their simplistic (and inevitably "biased") numeric formulas, presuppositions, and resulting evaluative conclusions. Scoff. So I look well beyond that, when seeking input on the charities I choose to support.
That so many prominent EAers think their judgments are superior to others' because they've won the economic survivorship/success lottery is quite offputting, but I just shake my head, roll my eyes, and sigh resignedly at the foolishness of humankind. Then ignore a decent chunk of what they have to say.
1. Richard, did you ever read the Caplan vs Huemer debate on animal rights?
2. Is it worse for a chicken to be eaten by a human than get torn apart in the wild by a fox?
3. “People often say that EA has a cold or autistic feel to it, but the irony of this is that modern Westerners with their WEIRD morality seem that way to much of the rest of the world.” Isn’t WEIRD just white? Won’t that disappear if the West is turned into the Third World demographically?
No, WEIRD is not just white. WEIRD is about culture not ethnicity. Plenty of non white WEIRDS these days.
2. Wild animal suffering is an EA cause area -- though not a very tractable one. Also most EA's don't mind killing animals (or raising them to be killed) if it's done painlessly.
These issues are crazy complicated and radical, so yes, most EAs haven't really thought through all of their implications and are often naive, but at least they're trying.
Put more simply: EA's vibe like "experts." We're currently in an expert-aversion economy of ideas.
EA, being basically extreme utilitarianism, has the same issue that all utilitarianism has: it requires you to be able to accurately evaluate the proper utility function, which is a hard problem in general. With deontology (eg "thou shalt not kill"), you are unlikely to get the most moral outcome imaginable, but you are also unlikely to cause disaster. With utilitarianism, maybe your master plan to save the world works out, and the ends end up justifying the means—or maybe you are Stalin, you deluded yourself into believing that communism could work, and now millions are dead for nothing. IOW, deontology is the allowance that utilitarianism makes for human fallibility.
EAs, having higher IQs, are less likely to make certain kinds of dumb mistakes when evaluating utility functions. But, being human, they still have many weaknesses, for example arrogrance, which can lead them astray if not checked. Scott Alexander is pretty humble, I am not worried about him; you, Richard, are not humble at all, so I trust your version of EA less.
"IOW, deontology is the allowance that utilitarianism makes for human fallibility." Sounds a bit like R.M Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism
I'm not sure the typical normie is familiar enough with EA philosophy to know it views them as dumb and immoral, or would really care even if they did. Mostly they just think EA is weird and confusing. Also the media stories around EA have been almost exclusively negative (just because that's more clickbaity than "organisation is run well and achieves things") and popular opinion usually just reflects back whatever narrative is in the media.
On another point, I wouldn't describe a personal philosophy that's so centred around social status, social perceptions and comparisons with what the rest of society happens to be doing as strong, rational or masculine.
I think this is a great example of how, if your premise if dead wrong, everything that stems from it just gets in increasingly wrong until it becomes sick.
It IS sick to lop off your heathly body parts to strangers. It IS sick to treat animals as equal in rights to human beings. It IS sick to focus all your charitable attention on those who are the worst off in far corners of the remote world, simply because you value the suffering of the anonymous person in the worst possible scenario, over your neighbor and friend, BECAUSE he is your neighbor and friend - literally you are saying, those I value, my friends and family and even my own body, should come last because they are values to me.
This is what the consistent adherence to Alturism gets. And it is totally impossible even under EA. Even after they admit to generating wealth, so that they can "effectively" help the anonymous poor, they still have to face the metaphysical fact that they must eat, sleep, and care for their bodies needs while others are more deserving. The truth is that the only way to be any kind of "Effective" Alturist is to treat your body like a used car and strip it for parts killing yourself- presumably, for an EA, after working hard to send money to strangers in far off corners you don't know. Once you can no longer work, what's the point of feeding this worn out body, that has already lived, and has viable parts that could offer someone else, younger who hasn't lived a chance?
The truth is that the only way to counter the increasingly ugly, but completely logical path here, is to embrace a rational philosophy of self interest that places the individual *yourself* as the base of morality. When you follow that path, consistently, it leads to the idea that one should trade value for value with people instead of sacrificing to them. It follows naturally that you shouldn't rob or cheat them, because when you violate the rights of others you invite them to do the same to you. When a society consistently follows these beliefs in leads to Capitalism and "effectively" more wealth for the poor than any alturist has ever given away. Because you can't hand out to others what has never been produced, and you can't produce with the right to work for your own values.