Hi,
Thanks for this post. The relationship between EA and well-known moral theories is something I've wanted to blog about in the past.
So here are a few points:
1. EA does not equal utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism makes many claims that EA does not make:
EA does not claim whether it's obligatory or merely supererogatory to spend one's resources helping others; utilitarianism claims that it is obligatory.
EA does not make a claim about whether there are side-constraints - certain things that it is impermissible to do, even if it were for the greater good. Utilitarianism claims that it's always obligatory to act for the greater good.
EA does not claim that there are no other things besides welfare that are of value; utilitarianism does claim this.
EA does not make a precise claim about what promoting welfare consists in (for example, whether it's more important to give one unit of welfare to someone who is worse-off than someone who is better-off; or whether hedonistic, preference-satisfactionist or objective list theories of wellbeing are correct); any specific form of utilitarianism does make a precise claim about this.
Also, note that some eminent EAs are not even consequentialist leani...
I'm not a memetic architect of the EA movement; but speaking as an observer it seems pretty clear that EA is about doing good by helping others. If you care about other things in addition to helping others, there's still a place for you in the movement, as long as you want to set aside a portion of your resources and help others as much as possible with it. On the other hand, if you aren't interested in the charities that most effectively help people, GiveWell is of no use to you and the EA movement doesn't seem very relevant to you either.
Your interests are broader than the interests held in common by the EA community. This shouldn't be a problem, but reading between the lines it looks like you're disappointed by the movement because they were dismissive of a charitable cause that's important to you. I think it would be best if the EA movement framed its distinctions in terms of "effective (at helping people) vs. not effective (at helping people) charities", instead of "good vs. bad charities", at least in public statements. It was my impression that they're doing a good job of this, but I could be wrong.
I think putting "altruist" in the name is more explicit about their utilitarianism than any disclaimer could possibly be.
1) As an EA I strongly resist any attempt to say that EA as utilitarianism as I would see doing so as harmful for the movement and it would exclude many of the non-utilitarian EAs I know.
Ea is not utilitarianism. There is no reason why you cannot apply rationality to doing good and be an EA and believe in Christian ethics / ethical anti-realism / virtue ethics / deontolgical ethics / etc. For example I have an EA friend who would never kill one person to save 5 people, but believes strongly that we should research and give to the very best charities and ...
My sentiments exactly. Thank you for this well-written and badly-needed post. (Also for correctly understanding the meaning of "utilitarianism".)
Value is complex. Helping people is good, but so is truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition, and many other things.
I think your critique would have a higher chance of improving (in your view) something if you framed it as a concern about your personal values not being included adequately, rather than a two-line (plus an overused link that is begging the question as well) "refutation" of utilitarianism that also implicitly includes the controversial premise of moral realism.
A while ago I suggested to [one of the leaders of the Center for Effective Altruism] the creation of a charity to promote promise-keeping. I didn't claim such a charity would be an optimal way of promoting happiness, and to them, this was sufficient to show 1) that it was not EA - and hence 2) inferior to EA things.
Keeping promises is a good thing.
I've heard the claim that societies and subcultures where people expect promises to be kept, will prosper over those where people don't. (I've also heard the claim that members of the latter groups tend to r...
I found I agreed with the summary, but I think for different reason than the OP.
It would be more accurate to label what goes on around here in the name of Effective Altruism as Effective Utilitarianism, as an equal weighting between people is usually baked into the analysis. That doesn't have to be the case for Altruism.
Most people do not have identical values. This means that if you're trying to help a lot of people, you have to rely on things you can assess most easily. It's a lot harder to tell how much truth beauty or honor (ESPECIALLY honor) someone has access to than how much running water or whether they have malaria. I say we should concentrate on welfare and let people take care of their own needs for abstract morality, especially considering how much they will disagree on what they want.
Effective altruism doesn't say anything about general ethics, and I don't k...
‘A charity that very efficiently promoted beauty and justice’ would still be a utilitarian charity (where the form of util defined utility as beauty and justice), so if that’s not EA, then EA does not = utilitarianism, QED.
Also, as Ben Todd and others have frequently pointed out, many non-utilitarian ethics subsume the value of happiness. A deontologist might want more happiness and less suffering, but feel that he also had a personal injunction against violating certain moral rules. So long as he didn’t violate those codes, he might well want to maximise efficient use of welfare.
truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition
None of these can be easily measured, and to have any of these you need to have basic wellbeing covered. You can't really tell other people you're being effective if you've got nothing to show for it, so I think your criticism is misplaced.
So would you accept the very repugnant conclusion for total preference utilitarianism?
I did not mention it because I didn't want to belabor my view, but no, I wouldn't. I think that one of the important Ideals that people seem to value is that a smaller population of people with highly satisfied preferences is better than a larger population with lives barely worth living, even if the total amount of preference satisfaction is higher in the large population. That's one reason why the repugnant conclusion is repugnant. This means that sometimes it is good to add people, at other times it is bad.
Of course, this view needs some qualifiers. First of all, once someone is added to a population, they count as being part of it even after they are dead, so you can't arrive at an ideal population size by killing people. This also entails accepting the Sadistic Conclusion, but that is an unavoidable part of all types of Negative Utilitarianism, whether they are of the normal variety, or the weird "sometimes negative sometimes positive depending on the context" variety I employ.
I think a helpful analogy would be Parfit's concept of "global preferences," which he discusses on page 3 of this article. Parfit argues that we have "Global Preferences," which are meta-preferences about what sort of life we should live and what sort of desires we should have. He argues that these Global Preferences dictate the goodness of whether we develop a new preference.
For instance, Parfit argues, imagine someone gets you addicted to a drug, and gives you a lifetime supply of the drug. You now have a strong desire to get more of the drug, which is satisfied by your lifetime supply. Parfit argues that this does not make you life better, because you have a global meta-preference to not get addicted to drugs, which has been violated. By contrast (my example, not Parfit's) if I enter into a romantic relationship with someone it will create a strong desire to spend time with that person, a desire much stronger than my initial desire to enter the relationship. However, this is a good thing, because I do have a global meta-preference to be in romantic relationships.
We can easily scale this up to population ethics. I have Global Moral Principles about the type and amount of people who should exist in the world. Adding people who fulfill these principles makes the world better. Adding people who do not fulfill these principles makes the world worse, and should be stopped.
And it, too, seems to be selfish in a way, although this would have to be argued for further.
Reading and responding to your exchange with other people about this sort of "moral selfishness" has gotten me thinking about what people mean and what concepts they refer to when they use that word. I've come to the conclusion that "selfish" isn't a proper word to use in these contexts. Now, obviously this is something of a case of "disputing defintions", but the word "selfish" and the concepts it refers to are extremely "loaded" and bring a lot of emotional and intuitive baggage with them, so I think it's good mental hygiene to be clear about what they mean.
To me what's become clear is that the word "selfish" doesn't refer to any instance where someone puts some value of theirs ahead of something else. Selfishness is when someone puts their preferences about their own life and about their own happiness and suffering ahead of the preferences, happiness, and suffering of others.
To illustrate this, imagine the case of a racial supremacist who sacrifices his life in order to enable others of his race to continue oppressing different races. He is certainly a very bad person. But it seems absurd to call him "selfish." In my view this is because, while he has certainly put some of his preferences ahead of the preferences of others, none of those preferences were preferences about his own life. They were preferences about the overall state of the world.
Now, obviously what makes a preference "about your own life" is a fairly complicated concept (Parfit discusses it in some detail here). But I don't see that as inherently problematic. Most concepts are extremely complex once we unpack them.
I did not mention it because I didn't want to belabor my view, but no, I wouldn't. I think that one of the important Ideals that people seem to value is that a smaller population of people with highly satisfied preferences is better than a larger population with lives barely worth living, even if the total amount of preference satisfaction is higher in the large population.
It seems to me like your view is underdetermined in regard to population ethics. You introduce empirical considerations about which types of preferences people happen to have in order...
Summary: The term 'effective altuist' invites confusion between 'the right thing to do' and 'the thing that most efficiently promotes welfare.' I think this creeping utilitarianism is a bad thing, and should at least be made explicit. This is not to accuse anyone of deliberate deception.
Over the last year or so, the term 'Effective Altruist' has come into use. I self-identified as one on the LW survey, so I speak as a friend. However, I think there is a very big danger with the terminology.
The term 'Effective Altruist' was born out of the need for a label for those people who were willing to dedicate their lives to making the world a better place in rational ways, even if that meant doing counter-intuitive things, like working as an Alaskan truck driver. The previous term, 'really super awesome hardcore people', was indeed a little inelegant.
However, 'Effective Altruist' has a major problem: it refers to altruism, not ethics. Altruism may be a part of ethics (though the etymology of the term gives some concern), but it is not all there is to ethics. Value is complex. Helping people is good, but so is truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition, and many other things.
A charity that very efficiently promoted beauty and justice, but only inefficiently produced happiness, would probably not be considered an EA organization. A while ago I suggested to [one of the leaders of the Center for Effective Altruism] the creation of a charity to promote promise-keeping. I didn't claim such a charity would be an optimal way of promoting happiness, and to them, this was sufficient to show 1) that it was not EA - and hence 2) inferior to EA things.
Such thinking involves either a equivocation or a concealed premise. If 'EA' is interpreted literally, so 'the primary/driving goal is to help others', then something not being EA is insufficient for it to not be the best thing you could do - there is more to ethics and the good, than altruism and promoting welfare. Failure to promote one dimension of the good doesn't mean you're not the optimal way of promoting their sum. On the other hand, if 'EA' is interpreted broadly, as being concerned with 'happiness, health, justice, fairness and/or other values', then merely failing to promote welfare/happiness does not mean a cause is not EA. Much EA discussion, like on the popular facebook group, equivocates between these two meanings.*
...Unless one thought that helping people was all their was to ethics, in which case this is not equivocation. As virtually all of CEA's leaders are utilitarians, it is plausible that is was the concealed premise in their argument. In this case, there is no equivocation, but a different logical fallacy, that of an omitted premise, has been committed. And we should be just as wary as in the case of equivocation.
Unfortunately, utilitarianism is false, or at least not obviously true. Something can be the morally best thing to do, while not being EA. Just because some utilitarians have popularized a term which cleverly equivocates between "promotes welfare" and "is the best thing" does not mean we should be taken in. Every fashionable ideology likes to blurr the lines between its goals and its methods (is Socialism about helping the working man or about state ownership of industry? is libertarianism about freedom or low taxes?) in order to make people who agree with the goals forget that there might be other means of achieving them.
There are two options: recognize 'EA' as referring to only a subset of morality, or recognize as 'EA' actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness.
* Yes, one might say that promoting X's honor thereby helped X, and thus there was no distinction. However, I think people who make this argument in theory are unlikely to observe it in practice - I doubt that there will be an EA organisation dedicated to pure retribution, even if it was both extremely cheap to promote and a part of ethics.