On Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism (EA) seems to be in an introspective mood at the moment. Various people are thinking about it at the meta level (as, I am sure members of the EA community would say). Here is my modest contribution to the zeitgeist.

It seems to me that the appeal of EA – which is a real and powerful one – derives almost entirely from the present material circumstances of the modern world. Let me explain what I mean. 

You, who live in a rich country, have a fair bit of spare cash. By which I mean that, should you want to buy an expensive cup of coffee from a carefully tattooed gentleman in a pleasant coffee shop, you can do so without a second thought (or at least without a third one). You can buy a couple of t-shirts, order a pizza to be delivered to your home or stay in a hotel for a night or two. But consider this: instead of doing any of those things you could save a number of lives by spending the money on mosquito nets or de-worming tablets or childhood vaccinations. Sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? At no great cost to yourself, you could do loads of good. Maybe, now you come to think of it, if you look around your home and see all the plastic tat that has accumulated, you reckon you could do without a few things in order to save even more lives. Fair enough, really. Where do I sign up?

Oh, and while we are on the subject of giving money to charity, here’s another thought. You know how sometimes you give money to this charity that does this Good Thing, and sometimes you give it to that other charity that does that Other Good Thing? Wouldn’t it be a good idea if someone worked out which was a better use of money? Well, it turns out they have and if you give money to this charity right here then your money will do 100x as much good as giving it to that charity over there. Again, that sounds good, doesn’t it? Sign me up!

Those couple of points, made without any reference to abstruse moral philosophy or thought experiments involving drowning children, explain at least 90% of the appeal of EA: it explains why you might think of EA as providing a guide for how you ought to live your life.

EA might be a rather radical guide to life. Toby Ord, the great godfather of EA, has capped his income at £18,000 pa (some years back - the amount has gone up with inflation) and gives the rest away to effective charities. OK, maybe you don’t want to go that far, but I think you can at least see the appeal of it: he gets to carry on living a reasonably comfortable life in a rich country, while also doing masses of good. EA could lead you to pursue a successful professional life in financial services in order to give away even more money to deserving causes.

But I hope you can also see that this appeal is heavily dependent on the way things are right now. Once upon a time, to put it bluntly, everyone was poor. The chance that you had the means to make massive improvements to the material circumstances of other people without impairing your own circumstances was tiny. There were of course some rich people and stories abound, both in Christian and non-Christian contexts, of rich people giving away all their possessions and living lives of material poverty and spiritual wealth thereafter. But the number of people who had sufficient wealth to make a big difference with their donations was always tiny. For one thing, there were no low-cost, high-impact interventions of the kind we see nowadays with mosquito nets and childhood vaccines. The traditional charitable Grands Projets – founding an almshouse or orphanage (i.e. relieving homelessness and providing welfare), endowing scholarships for children’s education or establishing a hospital – were all big ticket items; and they still are. Cutting back on your lattes and forgoing foreign holidays won’t cut it, and the philanthropists who set up mediaeval charities didn’t do it by forgoing a few pints of mead either.

It was really only in Victorian times that the world saw the combination we see now: a significant number of people, sufficiently well off that their charitable giving, without reducing the givers to penury, might make a noticeable difference to the material circumstances of its beneficiaries, and with the ability to send those donations to strangers in far-off countries where the money would do most good. Almost immediately those circumstances arose, so did something akin to EA – and it was just as quickly mocked in the form of Mrs Jellaby, the philanthropist in Bleak House who is so devoted to improving the lot of distant Africans that she neglects her nearest and dearest.

There are a number of reasons why that combination of circumstances might not endure. With luck, poor countries will become at least middle-income ones, and the chance that your rich-country pennies can make a material difference to people’s life outcomes will reduce massively. Once a country is rich enough to pay for its own clean drinking water, free primary education, childhood immunisation programmes and malaria nets – and it doesn’t have to be very rich to pay for all of these – then what good can your money do?

There are of course plenty of deserving causes in rich and middle-income countries, but they are not cheap or easy to fix. Think of the child who suffers from a rare disease which might be treated by expensive experimental drugs overseas, or the woman near suicide with eating disorders and horrendous depression who might benefit from spending 6 months in a residential treatment centre attended by highly trained professionals, or the homeless man addicted to drugs who needs, at the very least, a clean studio flat and a drug treatment programme. All are deserving causes, but, as with the almshouses of old, not ones that you can do much about without reducing yourself to penury: you have enough trouble housing yourself in London, let alone finding the money to house a drug addict as well.

These are the kinds of good causes that exist in rich and middle-income countries, and they are ones where EA’s appeal is at its lowest. Traditional ties of love and affection seem more convincing: if it were your son who was the homeless drug addict then you might well be heading to the bank manager to seek a second mortgage, but for someone you’ve never met (and who, whisper it quietly, maybe brought it on himself) … ?

Moreover, these kinds of problems are ones where the “Effective” element of EA is at its most doubtful. Clean drinking water, malaria nets, vaccines and de-worming tablets work. But the problems of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction are notoriously intractable. If there were reliable ways of solving them then they would not affect the citizens of rich countries (and the children of wealthy and privileged families) nearly as much as they do. Even where possible solutions exist, we wonder whether they might have unintended consequences: would a residential treatment course help X to kick his drug habit or merely introduce him to new friends with new vices? Does housing the homeless encourage the reckless behaviour that generates yet more homelessness? Are we ready to pay the price of the Singaporean solution to drug addiction: the death penalty for drug dealers? EA proponents are keen to carry out the research and find the answers - but where should such research be targetted? Wouldn’t it be better to spend the money on malaria nets than researching "First World Problems"?

Part of the appeal of EA rests on the sheer amount of low-hanging fruit that we see – the easy opportunities for great outcomes. But that fruit might get picked. If the opportunities to do good deeds become uncertain, expensive and at least plausibly counter-productive then the appeal of dedicating one’s life to maximising good outcomes will be massively reduced.

There is another part of EA’s appeal too: the chance for you to make a difference by taking some time and care about how you live your life and make your charitable donations. And, again, that might change.

One plausible scenario for the future is that everyone will be vastly richer than we are now. In a world of that kind, EA becomes unappealing for quite different reasons. Imagine being so rich that if someone you knew slightly were to suffer an appalling accident and need millions of pounds' worth of home improvements, experimental medical treatments, or perhaps new body parts grown from scratch by nanobots or genetically engineered from special pigs then you could cover the cost using the money you happen to have in your pocket. You’d happily do that and forget about it. But, equally, the victim of the accident would be able to do that too, using her loose change. What would EA tell you to do then? How would it provide a guide for living your life?

You might, I suppose, want to travel the world looking for natural disasters whose victims you could help. But equally, you might feel happy leaving it to the unimaginably rich (by our standards) locals to do the same - after all, they would be better placed to do so. All charities would then be reduced to the level of the school fair seeking to raise money for a new sports pitch: fine, but no great call on your sympathy if it isn’t your local school. We don’t see people ranking the “deservingness” of school fairs, nor would we consider it worth anyone’s while to do so. Again, in those material circumstances, we would feel the moral demands of those we know and love – perhaps obligations to spend time with them rather than money on them – more strongly than those of strangers.

None of this amounts to an argument one way or the other about EA. All I am seeking to do is show that the latent utilitarianism – or at least the “all other things being equal then utilitarianism is a good guide”-ism – of EA is peculiarly plausible to us as things currently stand given the phenomenal and perhaps only temporary fact that many people in rich countries have the power to do significant amounts of material good for people in poor countries at low to moderate cost. Change any of those facts and, rightly or wrongly, EA looks much less appealing.

The points I have made above are, I suspect, not unknown to the reflective EA community. But there is a further point which may be new.

I have written above about people’s material circumstances, by which I mean their food, housing, clothing, health and so on. These are important parts of life. I find it hard to think of any sensible moral system that does not hold that feeding the hungry or healing the sick are at least prima facie good things to do. But people’s material circumstances are not their only circumstances.

One example of this is a traditional charitable purpose that I mentioned above in passing: education. We know that education can improve a person’s material circumstances: it can lead to better jobs, connections or opportunities, or simply to the use of better agricultural techniques. On the other hand, it might not improve one's circumstances at all: it might create bored children or introduce people to new ways of ruining their environment. But in either case we do not value education merely for its consequences: people have always valued education for its own sake, for enriching students, leading them closer to God or Wisdom or Understanding Nature or what have you, or simply for giving them a better life, all things considered, regardless of the quality of the food in front of them, the clothes on their back, the money in their bank accounts or their impact on the world. Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

How is a good of this kind to be measured against Quality Adjusted Life Years and US$ in Purchasing Power Parity? With difficulty. But we see even the poorest people dedicating their time, effort and resources to educational, spiritual and cultural goods at the expense of purely material ones and we would be morally blind if we were to ignore this.

Here’s a related point, thinking more specifically about what you might do with your life. Mozart was often financially successful and, one might suppose, could have used more of his income to improve the lot of the widows and orphans of Salzburg than he in fact did. But it is perfectly clear that his greatest contribution to the happiness and achievements of mankind was – and always would have been, no matter what moral advice he was given – composing music. Indeed we would now be better off if he had taken better care of himself and lived as long as, say, Haydn rather than dying young. 

But, as has been widely observed, we live in an age in which artistic or cultural achievements of that kind do not appear to be possible. I was listening to the radio the other day and was told that I was about to hear a recording premiere of a violin concerto. My heart sank and I steeled myself for the inevitable onslaught of tedium, discord or both. Perhaps it would do me good, I thought grimly. But then it was explained that the concerto was an eighteenth century one by a then-fashionable French composer recently recorded for the first time. Instantly my spirits lifted and, sure enough, it was jolly, tuneful and enjoyable. The stark fact is that a forgotten composer of the eighteenth century, whose work no-one bothered to record until recently, produces more joy than today’s top professionals in the field.

If you were asked to advise a promising young composer of today whether they would bring more overall benefit to mankind by writing music or getting a job in finance and using the money they earn to relieve poverty and disease then it is perfectly plausible to consider that the latter is the better option. But you would be thinking differently if you were advising a promising young composer in the eighteenth or even nineteenth century. 

One reason that the improvement of material circumstances is so morally tempting today is that the improvement of people’s moral or cultural circumstances seems so difficult. If we lived in an age in which we reasonably expected our poets to produce epics for the ages, or our painters to produce masterpieces that will require the protection of glass cases in the Louvres of the future, then, I am sure, we would be far less ready to find it plausible that the most good that could be done by a bright and cultured young person educated at one of our ancient universities would be to pursue a working life devoted to the philistine manipulation of money in order to give generously to charities that distribute malaria nets or arrange complicated webs of kidney donations. For all the good that such a life might accomplish, there is surely something limited, something mean or monochrome, about the idea of setting out to live it. To relieve the most hunger among the most people would be a worthwhile achievement for a pig, but surely not for Socrates? 

I doubt that Ord himself would disagree with any of this. His recent book The Precipice, which I recommend to you, is about how important it is for humanity to save itself from the risks to its existence in order that, in the fullness of time, it can reach its full potential. The full potential of humanity does not solely lie in alleviating extreme poverty, valuable though that is, but rather in the various soaring achievements in the arts and sciences that he alludes to throughout the book. What is humanity – what are humans – being saved for? The answer cannot be: in order to save more humans. 

In short, I think of EA as a laudable attempt by morally serious individuals to find meaning and purpose in a world in which there appear to be few other outlets for such impulses. In that regard, it is similar to ‘wokeness’. So many people, on both sides of the debates, spend so much time and energy on objectively quite minor matters (e.g., microaggressions – the clue is in the “micro” – pronouns, Donald Trump, Drag Queen Story Hour) as if they are slavery or Nazism all over again. Why? Surely, in large part, because there are few other endeavours that appear worthy of their devotion. 

The possibility that progress or human improvement might be obtained by anything other than merely technological or political means seems to have faded from the imagination of Western culture. If (when?) it returns then I expect the allure of EA to fade away. In the meantime, EA seems to me a far better use of one’s time than litigating the pronoun wars. At the very least, think about giving more money to charity and giving it to better charities - EA is right about that.