Letter to a Young Philosopher: Don’t become an effective altruist
by Alice Crary, a talk at opp (Oxford Public Philosophy), Thursday June 11, 2020, 5pm (12pm EST)
Introduction
My remarks today are taken from an article I just finished writing with the title “Letter to a young philosopher: don’t become an effective altruist.” The article is a contribution to a collective project that began just a few months ago, in February of this year, at an animal law and policy summit in Miami. The topic is, as the title indicates, effective altruism, which I will refer to simply as EA. Although I assume most of you know quite a bit about what this is, I won’t take it for granted. Very roughly, EA is a program for identifying and promoting social contributions that do the “most good” per expenditure of time or money and that are in this sense “most efficient.” EA is the— quite young—brainchild of current Oxford philosophers, and Oxford University is home to some relatively new institutes and programs that develop and make use of its ideas, e.g., the Global Priorities Institute, the Future of Humanity Institute and Oxford EA.
The animal policy summit I attended in February permitted time for casual conversation among a variety of activists. These included sanctuary managers, directors of non-profits dedicated to ending factory farming, vegan educators, directors of veganism-oriented, anti-racist public health and food access programs, etc. It also included some academics. As some of the activists were talking, they got on to the topic of how charitable giving on EA’s principles had either deprived them of significant funding, or, through the threat of the loss of funding, pushed them to pursue programs at variance with their missions. There was general agreement that EA was having a damaging influence on animal advocacy. Someone in the group suggested that we gather our perspectives on EA into an edited volume, and someone else proposed that we compose our respective thoughts in the form of letters, as if to an effective altruist, explaining how in our view EA is problematic.
The piece from which I am drawing my talk today is my “letter” for this project. I don’t have time to share the whole letter with you. I am leaving out many passages, including descriptions of the actual work of EA-affiliated groups that rate animal charities. Here is a précis of what I do say. I briefly describe EA, then talk about three criticisms to which it is subject. First, there’s the institutional critique, which I think is the best known critique, if also the least threatening to EA. Second, there’s what I call philosophical critique, which, as I present it, is different from other critiques sometimes put under this same heading. Third, there’s composite philosophical-institutional critique, which I think is the most important. After discussing all three, I briefly comment on the philosophical-institutional critique in reference to discussions of EA’s institutional culture.
Description of EA
It is important to take care in specifying what EA is. The earliest accounts present it in broadly consequentialist terms (see esp. MacKaskill 2015 and Singer 2015), and consequentialist ideas inform the way EA is implemented by many groups. Consequentialism is a big tent, leaving room for many positions. Some advocates argue that it is not necessary for effective altruists even to be consequentialists (e.g., Vinding 2018). Others go farther, claiming that EA is “independent of any theoretical commitments” (McMahan 2016, 93). Here I’ll set aside the question of whether one can be an effective altruist without being a consequentialist. The consequentialist stances that figure in the articulation and actualisation of EA presuppose a distinctive philosophical worldview, and we can move from criticism of this worldview to an attack on those aspects of EA that have been most destructive within the pro-animal community. The resulting non-consequentialist outlook makes it possible to expose as confused EA-style talk of doing “most good,” and to delegitimise evaluations of charitable organisations that presuppose the coherence of such talk.
Consequentialism is the view that moral rightness is a matter of the production of the best consequences or best state of affairs. What is “best” is what has the most value. So consequentialist stances are grounded in prior theories of value. Within this scheme, consequentialists can—as commentators have observed—be open about what things are assessed as right or wrong (see, e.g., Parfit 1984, 25). They can talk about the rightness not only of actions but also of anything else that has consequences, including sets of actions. Consequentialists can also be fairly open about what count as values, although, we’ll see, their epistemological assumptions constrain their views.
Effective altruists show their consequentialist stripes by locating themselves within the spaces of alternatives that consequentialism, as I just presented it, leaves open. During the brief history of EA, effective altruists have tended to take as the objects of moral assessment particular actions, while also taking as their core value the sort of well-being that can be measured with the metrics of welfare economics. These assessments are often complex, involving many steps. But I will leave out details.
There is a further respect in which effective altruists fly consequentialist colours. Consequentialists sometimes insist that moral reflection is undertaken from the “point of view of the universe” (Singer 2015, 84-85; Singer and Lazari-Radek 2014; the original source of this gesture is Sidgwick), accenting that they conceive such reflection as disengaged and maximally dispassionate. This abstract moral epistemology is one of the marks of a moral radicalism often celebrated by consequentialists. The morally radical suggestion is that our ability to act so as to produce value anywhere places the same moral demands on us as does our ability to produce value in our immediate practical circumstances. This radical twist on consequentialism’s abstract moral epistemology is integral to two of effective altruists’ signature gestures. First, effective altruists inherit it when they exhort us to be guided by their recommendations in a way that treats as irrelevant the question of who is helped (Singer 2015, Ch. 8), without favouring projects to which we have particular attachments (MacKaskill 2015, 41). Second, effective altruists’ characteristic injunctions are enjoinders to do the most good, and this gesture also depends on an abstract approach to moral epistemology. The approach excludes any virtue-oriented take on actions that would enable us to construe rightness as appropriately engaged responsiveness to circumstances, making it seem more natural to account for rightness by looking to the value of the consequences actions produce. Consequentialists may hold that there are multiple kinds of valuable things, and there has never been “a consensus among [them] about the relative weights of any sets of values” (Hiller 2017, 270). But it is still the idea that rightness is a matter of the value of quantifiable consequences that makes it seem coherent to speak, EA-style, of single judgments about how to do the most good.
EA’s image of moral reflection, as proceeding from a god’s eye view, places constraints on how we can conceive of values. It leaves no room for views on which values are only recognisable as such from engaged standpoints. Among the views excluded are various subjectivist views as well as Kantian constructivist views of the kind Christine Korsgaard favours. Also excluded are views on which values are simultaneously woven into the fabric of reality and such that we require particular sensitivities to recognise them. This last exclusion is the one that most matters here. To many it won’t seem like an exclusion at all because it is so metaphysically and epistemologically heterodox. But at Oxford if one overlooks the views in question (i.e., views on which values are simultaneously woven into the fabric of reality and such that we require particular sensitivities to recognise them), one is forgetting a key stretch of local philosophical history. Such views figured prominently in 20th century Oxford moral philosophy, in particular in the work of a group of women philosophers at Oxford during and after World War II (see the website of the University of Durham-based research group “(In Parentheses)”). To forget this part of our philosophical heritage is to overlook notable resources for criticising consequentialism, which can then be brought to bear on EA.
The institutional critique
The class of things that, for consequentialists, are assessable as right or wrong can in principle—we saw—include not only single actions but anything that has consequences. The institutional critique attacks effective altruists for operating with a damagingly narrow interpretation of this class. The critique targets effective altruists’ tendency to focus on single actions and their proximate consequences and, more specifically, to focus on simple interventions that reduce suffering in the short term. Advocates of the institutional critique are on the whole concerned to decry the neglect of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering. Insofar as the metrics that effective altruists use are designed to detect the short term impact of particular actions, their tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting “measurability bias.” A leitmotif of the institutional critique is that this bias veers toward obscuring the structural, political roots of global misery (see esp. Clough 2015; Deaton 2015; for a critique of welfarist trends in development work that anticipates and parallels the institutional critique of EA, see, e.g., Duffield 2001; Fassin 2010; Tirman 2003).
A number of effective altruists have responded to the institutional critique. Responses generally allow that some EA programs have placed undue stress on quantitative tools for capturing short term effects of single actions and that, in over stressing “the importance of relying on quantitative evidence” (Berkey 2018), they have indeed demonstrated measurability bias (e.g., Sebo and Singer 2018, 34-35). The responses mostly also claim that, properly understood, EA calls on us to evaluate anything with relevant consequences, including systematic efforts to produce institutional change. The idea is that EA can treat the institutional critique as an internal critique that, instead of calling its commitments into question, obliges it to more faithfully realise its own core tenets.
I think it is right to credit these responses to the institutional critique with hitting their mark. I also think it would be wrong to conclude that effective altruists can simply treat the institutional critique as an internal critique. The institutional critique can be given a philosophical twist that transforms it into a challenge to EA’s core tenets. To see this we need before us the philosophical critique of EA.
The philosophical critique
The target of this critique is the abstract or god’s eye moral epistemology that informs EA’s understanding of itself as capable of arriving single judgments about how to do the most good. The critique alleges that it is morally and philosophically problematic to construe moral reflection as abstract. Advocates of this critique sometimes represent themselves as building on a line of argument that that Bernard Williams develops in publications in the 1970s and 1980s, about how efforts in ethics to look at our lives from an Archimedean point oblige us to abstract from our most valued relationships and practices and represent a threat to our integrity (Williams 1973; Williams 1981; Williams 1985, Chs. 2 and 8; for references to Williams in philosophical critiques of EA, see, e.g., Krishna 2016 and Srinivasan 2015). The effective altruists who respond to the philosophical critique tend to take Williams to be urging us to protect our integrity even at the cost of doing the wrong thing (see Berkey 2018, note 67 and related text; McMahan 2016; Singer 2015, 48-49, 85 and 102). They regard this solicitude toward the self as misplaced and self-indulgent, so they dismiss EA’s philosophical critics’ gestures as lacking in philosophical interest.
The stance of these effective altruists is understandable. The interpretation of Williams they favour is textually reasonable and widely received. It is difficult to find a philosophical critique of EA that is elaborated precisely enough to make it clear that this take on it is inaccurate. Even so, there is good reason to think that this is, for effective altruists, a missed opportunity for fundamental self- criticism. It is not difficult to further develop philosophical critics’ worries about a god’s eye morality so that it rises to the level of a devastating objection. Suppose we bring together worries about point-of-viewless moral reflection with views about values, of a sort I touched on a moment ago, on which concepts of values determine worldly patterns that aren’t indifferently available. Now the point of the philosophical critique is not that effective altruists’ moral epistemology imposes integrity-threatening moral demands. The simpler but more substantial point is that it deprives us of the very resources we need to recognise what matters morally.
This philosophical critique brings into question effective altruists’ very notion of doing the “most good.” As effective altruists use it, this phrase presupposes that the rightness of a social intervention is a function of its consequences and that the outcome involving the best consequences counts as doing most good. This idea has no place within an ethical stance that underlies the philosophical critique. Adopting this stance is a matter of seeing the real fabric of the world as endowed with values that reveal themselves only to a developed sensibility. To see the world this way is to leave room for an intuitively appealing conception of actions as right insofar as they exhibit just sensitivity to the worldly circumstances at hand. Accepting this appealing conception of action doesn’t commit one to denying that right actions frequently aim at ends. Here acting rightly includes acting in ways that are reflective of virtues such as benevolence, which aims at the well-being of others. With reference to the benevolent pursuit of others’ well-being, it certainly makes sense to talk about good states of affairs. But it is important, as Philippa Foot once put, “that we have found this end within morality, forming part of it, not standing outside it as a good state of affairs by which moral action in general is to be judged” (Foot 1985, 205). Right action also includes acting, when appropriate, in ways reflective of the broad virtue of justice, which aims at an end—giving people what they are owed—that can conflict with the end of benevolence. If we are responsive to circumstances, sometimes we will act with an eye to others’ well-being, and sometimes with an eye to other ends. In a case in which it is not right to improve others’ well-being, it makes no sense to say that we produce a worse result. To say this would be to pervert our grasp of the matter by importing into it an alien conception of morality. If keep our heads, we will say that the result we face is, in the only sense that is meaningful, the best one. There is here simply no room for EA-style talk of “most good.”
The philosophical critique confronts EA with challenges that it cannot meet simply with internal adjustments. The suggestion of the critique is that EA’s claim to be directing us to do the most good founders on a misunderstanding of the nature of morality and that the enterprise needs to be either radically reconceived or abandoned altogether.
The philosophical-institutional critique
It is possible to deepen the philosophical critique by combining it with the institutional critique. The institutional critique alleges that EA disregards the kinds of systematic actions needed to affect social change, and the philosophical critique alleges that EA’s god’s eye moral epistemology wrongly restricts its view of what values are like. What might be called the philosophical-institutional critique—or the composite critique for short—sounds themes from the philosophical critique in attacking EA’s abstract moral epistemology, while sounding themes from the institutional critique in claiming that this commitment to abstraction deprives EA of resources necessary for describing the social world, disqualifying it from the task of assessing efforts to affect social change. The core of the composite critique is the idea that social phenomena are ontologically distinctive and that distinctive methods are required to bring them into focus. Social phenomena are taken to be irreducibly ethical and such that we require particular modes of affective response to see them clearly (Crary 2020). Against this backdrop, EA’s abstract epistemological stance seems to veer toward removing entirely it from the business of social understanding.
It is not hard to find congenial accounts of the demands of social thought. Social critics often attack abstract approaches to social relations for obscuring from view social structures that are internal to grave injustices. It is a leitmotif of feminist theory and critical race theory that gender-based and racist abuses are not as such indifferently open to view and that they only come into focus through the lens of a sense of the social suffering that systematic sexist and racist bias occasions (see Crary 2018; Mills 1998). In suggesting that EA lacks the tools to illuminate social life, detractors from EA who sympathise with the composite critique may rightly represent themselves as aligned with these radical traditions.
Within the consequentialist frame in which EA is originally at home, it seems unproblematic to couch moral assessment, quantitatively, in terms of doing the most good, and this seems to justify trafficking in the sorts of tropes of economic efficiency that effective altruists often use in their assessments. Some critics of EA who sound themes from the composite critique are especially hard on effective altruists for thus relying on economic instruments. “The most crucial political lack of EA,” one critic declares, “is its tendency not to question the overarching political-economic frame of (neo)liberal-capitalist individualism” (Read 2018). Underlying this charge is a very particular diagnosis of our social condition. The thought is that the great social malaise of our time is the circumstance, sometimes taken as the mark of neoliberalism, that economic modes of reasoning have overreached so that things once rightly valued in a manner immune to the logic of exchange have been instrumentalised (see, e.g., Habermas 1987). It is not merely that, in thus spilling outside their proper domain, instrumental categories are supposed to have become ideological, blocking us from seeing what social life is like. The task of arriving a more just and faithful image of our lives is supposed to call for challenging the predominance of instrumental economic concepts by insisting on the kind of practically and emotionally demanding thought that, according to the composite critique, is necessary for social understanding (see, e.g., Adorno and Horkheimer 2002). Considered in this context, EA’s reliance on economic terms to evaluate social interventions can seem like an insensitive insistence on “speaking in the proprietary language of the illness” (Srinivasan 2018). It can seem like EA’s own advertisement of its inability to address our plight.
We could summarise the force of the composite critique like this. Effective altruists are hampered by abstract methodological commitments that seem to speak against the very sort of engaged thought we need if we’re to do descriptive justice to social relations and identify promising efforts at structural transformation. Even if through sheer luck effective altruists hit upon well thought-out social interventions to assess, their efforts are marred by a confusion about what morality is that leads them to appeal to an empty notion of most good, instead of considering the rightness of the interventions themselves. Given these constitutional limitations, isn’t it clearly wrong to have charitable given be EA-directed?
A concluding remark on institutional culture
It is possible to develop a criticism of EA’s institutional culture that parallels the composite critique. As recently as 2015, a critic could plausibly observe that EA had “so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men” (Srinivasan 2015). Since then, proponents of EA and EA- affiliated groups have placed significant new stress on inclusiveness. These and other moves toward inclusiveness are designed, not just to bring in participants with different social identities, but to make room for their distinctive standpoints and ideas.
On the surface these gestures are attractively non-tokenizing. But they aren’t accompanied by any acknowledgment of the extent to which the very framework of EA constrains available moral and political outlooks. EA’s framing excludes views of values as real but indifferently inaccessible aspects of the world—views associated with the work of a set of women moral philosophers who were prominent at Oxford in the mid twentieth century—and it also excludes views of the demands of world-guided social thought as essentially perspectival—views associated with central currents of feminist and critical race theory, and also Marxian social theory. For all of the suggestive signaling toward diversity of ideas, EA as it stands cannot make room for individuals who find in these traditions the things they most need to say. For EA to make space for these individuals, it would have to acknowledge that their moral and political beliefs pose threats to its guiding principles and that these principles themselves are contestable. To acknowledge this would be to concede that EA, as it is currently conceived, might need to be given up. It would be to concede that EA is subject to a philosophical-institutional critique that aims at its very foundations.
