Effective altruism: Difference between revisions

Effective altruism is a

Philosophical principles of effective altruism include impartiality, cause neutrality, cost-effectiveness, and counterfactual reasoning. Common practices of effective altruists include significant charitable donation, sometimes through publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income, and basing career choices on the amount of good that the career achieves, which may include the strategy of earning to give. Many effective altruists have prioritized taking action to address global poverty, animal welfare, and risks to the survival and flourishing of humanity and its descendants over the long-term future.

Various critics of effective altruism have objected to the practice of cause prioritization and to what they perceive as bias toward measurable interventions as well as neglect of more radical economic changes.

Philosophy

Philosophers play an important role in effective altruism. Much of the published literature on the subject poses philosophical questions about why and how to use evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. It then tries to figure out the most plausible answers to those questions, so that people can act on the basis of those answers.^[6][7] Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to why and how to do it.^[8]

The "guiding question"^[3]: 14 of effective altruism is: how can we, individually and collectively, do the most good?^{[2]: 5 [6]} Subsequent questions include:

• "What counts as 'the most good'?"^[2]: 7
• "How can I do the most good, given what others are likely to do?"^[6]
• "Does everyone's suffering count equally?"^[2]: 7
• "Does 'the most good you can do' mean that it is wrong to give priority to one's own children?"^[2]: 8
• "What about other values, like justice, freedom, equality, and knowledge?"^[2]: 8
• "Can everyone practice effective altruism?"^[2]: 9
• Is it better to think of effective altruism "as an 'opportunity' or an 'obligation'"?^[7]: 16
• "What if one's act reduces suffering, but to do so one must lie or harm an innocent person?"
  the ends justify the means"?^[7]
  ^: 20
• "What would have happened otherwise?"[3]^: 13
• "What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?"^[3]: 13

Effective altruists have yet to reach consensus on the answers to such questions.

Effective altruists such as Kelsey Piper reported that the questions posed by effective altruism have helped them learn more about complex problems as well as gain a deeper sense of meaning and a feeling of satisfaction from helping others more effectively.^[11]

The following subsections describe important ideas that are discussed in the published literature about effective altruism.

Impartiality

Altruism, or benefitting others, can be driven by various motivations and justifications, including impartial or impersonal reasoning and sentiments such as sympathy and compassion.^[12] Much of the published literature on effective altruism emphasizes impartial or impersonal reasoning and concludes that, other things being equal, everyone's well-being (and suffering) counts equally, without regard to individual identities.^{[2]: 85–95 [6][7]: 17–19} For example, philosopher Peter Singer, in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", wrote:^{[13]: 231–232, 237}

It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society. Previously, ... this may hardly have been feasible, but it is quite feasible now. From the moral point of view, the prevention of the starvation of millions of people outside our society must be considered at least as pressing as the upholding of property norms within our society.

This view has been influential among effective altruists.^[14] Singer's arguments for impartiality were later repeated in other books by Singer^[2][15] and expanded in the 1996 book Living High and Letting Die by philosopher Peter Unger.^[16]

Impartiality about benefitting others combined with seeking to do the most good is compatible with prioritizing benefits to those who are in a worse state, because anyone who happens to be worse off will benefit more from an improvement in their state, all other things being equal (see § Global poverty alleviation below).^[6]

Impartiality is also the basis of what is called the cause neutrality of effective altruism (see § Cause prioritization below): choosing among possible altruistic activities or causes (problems) based on whether they will do the most good with limited resources—as opposed to choosing among them based on other factors such as personal connections.^[6]

Some effective altruists have argued that because the total sum of members of future generations will be larger than the current population, the way to do the most good is to focus on promoting long-term well-being by, for example, reducing

Singer speculated in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" that whether people think and act impartially is likely to be affected by social influence: "What it is possible for a man to do and what he is likely to do are both, I think, very greatly influenced by what people around him are doing and expecting him to do."^[13]: 237 In his 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do, Singer admitted that even though he had argued in 1972 that "we ought to give large proportions of our income to disaster relief funds", he did not do it himself: "even though I argued that this is what we ought to do, I did not do it myself".^[2]: 13 He noted the role of social influence and psychological inertia as obstacles to acting altruistically.^{[2]: 13–14} Sociological research has shown that social influence can undermine altruistic activity.^[22] To support people's ability to act altruistically on the basis of impartial reasoning, the effective altruism movement promotes additional values and actions that are not part of the minimal philosophical core of effective altruism, such as a collaborative spirit, honesty, transparency, and publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income or other resources.^[1]: 2

Cause prioritization

Many nonprofits emphasize effectiveness and evidence, but this is usually done with a single cause (problem) in mind, such as education or climate change.^[23] Effective altruists, however, seek to compare the relative importance of different causes and allocate resources among them objectively, adopting cause neutrality.^[24] One approach to cause neutrality, for example, is to choose the highest priority causes based on whether activities in each cause area efficiently advance broad goals, such as increasing human or animal welfare, and then focus attention on interventions in those cause areas.^[25]

The information required for cause prioritization may involve collecting and processing complex

Effective altruist organizations have argued that some charities are far more effective than others, either because some do not achieve their goals or because of the varying cost of achieving those goals.[29]^[30] When possible, they seek to identify charities that are highly cost-effective, meaning that they achieve a large benefit for a given amount of money.^[31] For example, they select health interventions on the basis of their impact as measured by lives extended per dollar, quality-adjusted life years (QALY) added per dollar, or disability-adjusted life years (DALY) reduced per dollar. This measure of disease burden is expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability, or early death.

Some effective altruism organizations prefer randomized controlled trials as a primary form of evidence,^[31][32] as they are often considered to be at the highest level of evidence, e.g., in healthcare research.^[33] Others have argued that requiring this stringent level of evidence unnecessarily narrows the focus to only those issues on which this kind of evidence can be developed, and that the history of philanthropy suggests that many effective interventions have proceeded without this level of evidence.^[34]

Room for more funding

Effective altruist organizations consider the expected impact of a funding increase rather than evaluating the average value of all donations to the charity.^[35][36] Effective altruists would avoid donating to organizations that lack "room" for more funding – those that face bottlenecks other than money that would prevent them from effectively employing additional resources.^[37] For example, a medical charity might not be able to hire enough doctors or nurses to distribute the medical supplies it is capable of purchasing, or it might already be serving all of the potential patients in its market.

Counterfactual reasoning

Effective altruists have argued that counterfactual reasoning is important to determine which course of action maximizes positive impact. Many people assume that the best way to help people is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services,^[38] but since charities and social-service providers can usually find people willing to work for them, effective altruists would compare the amount of good somebody does in a conventional altruistic career to how much good would have been done had the next-best candidate done the work instead. According to this reasoning, the marginal impact of a career is likely to be smaller than the gross impact.^[39][40]

Behavior

The philosophical or intellectual part of effective altruism, described above, is about learning how to do the most good through the use of evidence and reasoning. The behavioral or practical part is about using what has been learned.^[6][7]: 14

Donation

Effective altruism encourages significant charitable donation. Some believe it is a moral duty to alleviate suffering through donations if the other uses of those funds do not offer comparable benefits to oneself,^[13] leading some of them to lead a frugal lifestyle in order to give more.^[41]

Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an organization whose members have pledged to donate at least 10% of their income for the remainder of their working lives to the causes that they believe are the most effective. GWWC was founded in 2009 by Toby Ord, a moral philosopher, who lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the balance of his income.^[42]

The Founders Pledge is a similar initiative run by the nonprofit Founders Forum for Good where startup founders make a legally binding commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity in the event that they sell their business.^[43][44] By January 2019, three years after launch, more than 1400 entrepreneurs had pledged an estimated $700 million and at least $91 million had been donated.^[45]

Career choice

Effective altruists have argued that one's career is an important determinant of the amount of good one does,^[46] both directly (through the services one provides) and indirectly (through one's consumption/investment/donation decisions).^[47]

80,000 Hours is an organization that conducts research on which careers have the largest positive social impact and provides career advice based on that research.^[48][49] It considers both direct and indirect kinds of altruistic employment.^[50][51]

Earning to give has been proposed as a possible strategy for effective altruists. This strategy involves choosing to work in high-paying careers with the explicit goal of donating large sums of money to charity.^[52][53] William MacAskill argued in 2014 that sufficient donations might justify an otherwise morally controversial career, since the marginal impact of taking an unethical job is small if someone else would have taken it regardless, while the impact of the donations could be large.^[47] In 2017, 80,000 Hours recommended that it is better to avoid careers that do significant direct harm, even if it seems like the negative consequences could be outweighed by donations. This is because the harms from such careers may be hidden or otherwise hard to measure, and because they think it is important to account for moral uncertainty—for example, not knowing to what degree one should minimize the negative consequences that one hopes to outweigh by donations.^[54]

Pundit

The effective altruism organization The Life You Can Save, which originated from Singer's book with the same name,[15] works to alleviate global poverty by promoting evidence-backed charities, conducting philanthropy education, and changing the culture of giving in affluent countries.^[66][67]

While much of the initial focus of effective altruism was on direct strategies such as health interventions and cash transfers, more systematic social, economic, and political reforms that would facilitate larger long-term poverty reduction have also attracted attention.

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an effective altruism organization that evaluates animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those tackling factory farming.^{[84][85][2]: 139} Faunalytics is an organization loosely affiliated with the effective altruism community that focuses on animal welfare.^[86][87] The Sentience Institute is an effective altruism think tank founded in 2017 to expand the moral circle to other species.^[88][89]

Long-term future and global catastrophic risks

Focusing on the long-term future, some effective altruists believe that the total value of any meaningful metric (wealth, potential for suffering, potential for happiness, etc.) summed up over future generations, far exceeds the value for people living today.^{[59][17][90][91]} Some researchers have found it psychologically difficult to contemplate the trade-off; Toby Ord stated, "Since there is so much work to be done to fix the needless suffering in our present, I was slow to turn to the future."^[92]: 8 Reasons Ord gave for working on long-term issues include a belief that preventing long-term suffering is "even more neglected" than causes related to current suffering, and that the residents of the future are even more powerless to affect risks caused by current events than are current dispossessed populations".^[92]: 8

Philosophically, assessing the suffering of future populations involves multiple considerations. First, humanity (and other animals) may not exist at all, in which cases there is no suffering to alleviate (presuming that the process of eliminating the population does not itself involve suffering). Second, the cost of an incremental reduction in suffering in the future may be higher (e.g., because of increasing healthcare costs) or lower (brought down, e.g., by the ever-crashing cost of computing or renewable energy). Third, the value of a benefit or cost is affected by the time preferences of the recipient and the payer. Fourth, future suffering may be alleviated by current spending, potentially at a lower cost. Fifth, alleviating suffering sooner may have a knock-on effect of reducing/increasing future suffering. Sixth, if investing money produces outsized returns, that may provide the ability to reduce total suffering by more than if the money is instead donated before it can accumulate. Seventh, future populations may be so much wealthier than the current population that, even if a particular reduction in suffering costs more then than it does today, the population might still be better off by waiting.^[93] Singer argued that existential risk should not be "the dominant public face of the effective altruism movement" because he claimed that doing so would drastically limit the movement's reach.^[94]

In particular, the importance of addressing

Organizations that work actively on research and advocacy for improving the long term future, and have connections with the effective altruism community, are the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Future of Life Institute.^[98] In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is focused on the more narrow mission of managing advanced artificial intelligence.^[99][100]

History

The movement that later adopted the name effective altruism was created in the late 2000s as a community formed around

Effective altruism conferences (called Effective Altruism Global) have been held since 2013.^[105][106] In 2015, Singer published The Most Good You Can Do.^[80] In the same year MacAskill published Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.^{[107][108][31]}

In 2018, American news website Vox launched its Future Perfect section, led by journalist Dylan Matthews.^[109] Future Perfect has published written pieces and podcasts on the mission of "Finding the best ways to do good",^[110][111] including topics such as effective philanthropy,^[112] high-impact career choice,^[48] poverty reduction through women's empowerment,^[113] improving children's learning efficiently through improving environmental health,^[114] animal welfare improvements,^[84] and ways to reduce global catastrophic risks.^[115]

Key figures

Key figures in the effective altruism movement have included:

• Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer^[116]
• Oxford University philosopher Derek Parfit^[117]
• Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz^[118]
• Future of Humanity Institute director Nick Bostrom^[103]: 110
• Global Priorities Institute director Hilary Greaves^[119]
• Oxford University philosopher William MacAskill^[31]
• Future of Humanity Institute researcher Toby Ord^[120]
• Professional poker player Liv Boeree^[121][122]
• Artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky^{[citation needed]}
• GiveWell co-founder and Open Philanthropy Project CEO Holden Karnofsky^[104]
• Nanyang Technological University economist Yew-Kwang Ng^[123]
• Vox columnist Kelsey Piper^[124]

Criticism

Claims that comparisons within and across cause areas are illegitimate

Ken Berger and Robert Penna of Charity Navigator derided effective altruism as "defective altruism" and condemned its practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another", calling this "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word".^[125]

Bias toward measurable interventions

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry warns about the "measurement problem", stating that some areas, such as medical research, or helping to reform third-world governance "one grinding step at a time", are hard to measure with controlled cost-effectiveness experiments and therefore risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement.^[57] Jennifer Rubenstein also hypothesizes that effective altruism can be biased against difficult-to-measure causes.^[104]

Perceived neglect of radical economic change

Mathew Snow argued that effective altruism "implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place".^[126] Various critics have similarly objected to effective altruists' neglect of political causes such as anti-capitalism that change "the existing global institutional order".^[127] Joshua Kissel replied that anti-capitalism is compatible with effective altruism in theory, while adding that effective altruists and anti-capitalists have reason to be more sympathetic to each other.^[58] Brian Berkey argued that support for institutional change does not contradict the principles of effective altruism, because effective altruism is open to any action that will have the greatest positive impact on the world, including the possibility of changing the existing global institutional order.^[127] Elizabeth Ashford argued that people are separately obligated to donate to effective aid charities and to reform the structures that are responsible for poverty.^[128]

See also

Notes and references

Further reading

• Earle, Samantha; Read, Rupert (March 2016). "Effective altruism: Is it effective? Should it be more affective?".
  doi:10.5840/tpm20167378
  .
• Gabriel, Iason (August 2016). "Effective altruism and its critics".
  doi:10.1111/japp.12176. Archived
  from the original on 2021-02-15. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
• OCLC 1101772304
  .
• Lechterman, Theodore M. (June 2019). "Being good in a world of uncertainty: a reply to Temkin". Journal of Practical Ethics. 7 (1): 33–39.
• Lechterman, Theodore M. (January 2020). "The effective altruist's political problem". Polity. 52 (1): 88–115.
  S2CID 212887647
  .
• MacAskill, William (June 2019c). "Aid scepticism and effective altruism". Journal of Practical Ethics. 7 (1): 49–60.
• doi:10.5840/tpm20167379. Archived
  (PDF) from the original on 2021-02-15. Retrieved 2020-02-05.
• Singer, Peter; Saunders-Hastings, Emma; Deaton, Angus; Gabriel, Iason; Janah, Leila; Acemoglu, Daron; Brest, Paul; MacFarquhar, Larissa; Tumber, Catherine; Reich, Rob (July 1, 2015). "Forum: The logic of effective altruism". Boston Review. Archived from the original on February 5, 2020. Retrieved February 5, 2020. An article based on the preface and first chapter of Singer's book The Most Good You Can Do was published in the Boston Review on July 1, 2015 with a forum of responses by other writers and a final response by Singer.
• Temkin, Larry S. (June 2019). "Being good in a world of need: some empirical worries and an uncomfortable philosophical possibility". Journal of Practical Ethics. 7 (1): 1–23.
• Zuolo, Federico (July 2019). "Beyond moral efficiency: effective altruism and theorizing about effectiveness".
  hdl:11567/1005385. Archived
  from the original on 2021-02-15. Retrieved 2020-02-05.

External links

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• Effective Altruism
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