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Effective Altruism. Philosophical Issues
This is the first collective study of the thinking behind the effective altruism movement. This movement comprises a growing global community of people who organise significant parts of their lives around the two key concepts represented in its name. Altruism is the idea that if we use a significant portion of the resources in our possession—whether money, time, or talents—with a view to helping others then we can improve the world considerably. When we do put such resources to altruistic use, it is crucial to focus on how much good this or that intervention is reasonably expected to do per unit of resource expended (as a gauge of effectiveness). We can try to rank various possible actions against each other to establish which will do the most good with the resources expended. Thus we could aim to rank various possible kinds of action to alleviate poverty against one another, or against actions aimed at very different types of outcome, focused perhaps on animal welfare or future generations. The scale and organisation of the effective altruism movement encourage careful dialogue on questions that have perhaps long been there, throwing them into new and sharper relief, and giving rise to previously unnoticed questions. In this volume a team of internationally recognised philosophers, economists, and political theorists present refined and in-depth explorations of issues that arise once one takes seriously the twin ideas of altruistic commitment and effectiveness.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
272 pages, Hardcover
Published September 19, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 11, 2020
Superb, accessible, thought-provoking collection! Greaves and Pummer have chosen and commissioned articles on a surprisingly wide variety of topics, and from a real diversity of (sometimes critical) perspectives. We have familiar views rehearsed or reprinted from central figures in the effective altruism movement; but just as many illuminating 'outsider' perspectives and novel concepts being introduced.
The first two chapters cover some of the basic motivations, misconceptions, and terminology associated with effective altruism. In “The Definition of Effective Altruism”, Will MacAskill outlines what ‘effective altruism’ does and does not mean—defending the Centre for Effective Altruism's definition:
Note the (potentially surprising) absence of any claim to the effect that you should do any of the above! Sure, many effective altruists believe as much; but leaving normative claims outof the official definition makes sense.
Toby Ord's “The Moral Imperative Toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health” was an early landmark for effective altruism. The idea is straightforward: in discussing the ethics of global health, cost-effectiveness might strike many as a technical afterthought relative to considerations of justice, equality etc. But just learning about the stark differences in cost-effectiveness between interventions in the same area—sometimes many orders of magnitude—is enough to dispel this impression. The plain facts here speak so loudly that commentary or philosophising is almost unnecessary: for instance, “the least effective HIV/AIDS intervention produces less than 0.1 per cent of the value of the most effective”. Compare, for instance, spending $40,000 on training a guide dog and its recipient, or else on eye surgeries undoing damage from trachoma:
I thought this was clear and compelling enough to refer to anybody curious about the ideas which underpin effective altruism.
In “Evidence Neutrality and the Moral Value of Information”, Amanda Askell asks: when choosing among interventions with equivalent expected value, is there ever good reason to back the intervention with the least evidential support—i.e. the most speculative such interventions? Spoiler: yes! And for fascinating and convincing reasons!
In the next article, Lauri Paul's recent writing about 'Transformative Experience' is adapted for the context of effective altruism. The general idea is that certain experiences or changes are dramatic enough that (i) actually undergoing them is a necessary condition for knowing what they're like; and (ii) you emerge with (substantially) new preferences, sense of identity, or beliefs. For instance, it is virtually impossible to make a fully informed decision about having a child or getting married if you haven’t before been married or had children. As applied: how should an aspiring effective altruist plan her career if she lacks the experience to make an informed decision, nor the time to try every alternative? Should she “earn to give” if her future hedge-fund-manager-self eventually writes-off her original intention as naïve, youthful optimism? Made me curious to check out the 'book'.
In “Should We Give to More Than One Charity?”, James Snowden asks: (unsurprisingly) should we give to one charity? Snowden's answer, counterintuitive but tricky to dispute, is no. Provided you're not a billionaire—in which case, refer to the original text for guidance.
Next, Nick Beckstead effectively presents a SparkNotes summary of his thesis arguing for the overwhelming importance of the far future. This piece made tangible an idea which is often to hard to grasp intuitively, even if you find it conceptually watertight: that the value of the long-term future is staggeringly huge in expectation, and should factor into our moral priorities with corresponding urgency and weight. Here's the back-of-the-envelope calculation Beckstead proposes: let's say (conservatively) humanity has a 1% chance of surviving for another billion years. This will almost certainly involve developing the technology for colonising space—so conditional on surviving that long, let's say humanity again has at least a 1% chance of spreading through the stars and thereby surviving for 100 trillion years. The expected duration of humanity's future lifespan is therefore at least 1% × 1% × 100 trillion = 10 billion years. Like Toby Ord’s comparisons of cost effectiveness, that figure alone might be enough to make the longtermist case.
Next comes “Effective Altruism, Global Poverty, and Systemic Change”, in which Iason Gabriel and Brian McElwee argue that the effective altruism movement has largely overlooked a class of causes that sit somewhere between existential risk reduction (see previous) and narrowly targeted, epistemically secure interventions in global health. The former class addresses potentially enormous payoffs or losses with correspondingly slim probabilities and / or confidences. The latter deals with smaller payoffs, but with fewer unknowns and high confidence of success—being backed by fairly unequivocal kinds of empirical feedback. Addressing global poverty via systemic change falls somewhere in the middle along both dimensions. The authors cite books like Blood Oil, The Great Escape, and Why Nations Fail as identifying such neglected systemic causes of poverty—like global supply chains sustaining authoritarian regimes, rent-seeking and ‘extractive’ political institutions, and tax evasion which "deprives countries of vast capital flows that could be used to improve the lives of their citizens". They also note, and the historical record apparently bears out, that few equivalently serious systemic social problems are tackled without advocacy movements and targeted campaigns. Yet, targeted movements pulling on the right levers can result in disproportionately significant and cost-effective outcomes. I learned, for instance, about one such initiative called Global Witness:
So seeking out systemic change seems (i) somewhat tractable and achievable; (ii) promises huge potential payoffs, and (iii) answers the charge that more targeted and practical interventions (bed nets, nutritional supplements...) 'plaster over' symptoms of (unaffected or even indirectly reinforced) systemic causes. It isn't immediately clear, then, why effective altruists are not on the whole more interested in systemic change. One explanation—mere risk aversion—clearly won't stick, given the vanishing probabilities involved in existential-risk reduction. Gabriel and McElwee point instead to an aversion to taking political sides (broadly construed). Whatever the reason, the conclusion seems right:
I think this was my favourite of the bunch—challenging and convincing. And for further reading, take a look at these pieces in favour and these pieces opposing the claim that "effective altruists neglect systemic change".
In “The Hidden Zero Problem: Effective Altruism and Barriers to Marginal Impact”, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears point out a simple and worrying way in which small individual donations might sometimes have no marginal impact whatsoever, despite the effectiveness of the recipient charities. This is when wealthy (i.e. billionaire) donors make commitments to ‘top-up’ the funds of that charity whenever it falls short of its fundraising goal. If, for illustration, you choose to donate £100 to AMF, this might just mean that some billionaire coughs up £100 less at the end of the year—money which likely instead falls into some ‘saving for a new luxury item’ jar. In this way, the counterfactual effect of donating to effective charities backed by ‘top-up’ pledges from wealthy donors may be to “merely to transfer money to a billionaire in the United States, and accomplish nothing for the global poor.”
There were also a handful of articles introducing philosophical concepts that were mostly new to me — the ‘possiblism’ vs ‘fallibilism’ dispute, the notion of ‘membership duties’ derived from citizenship and the resulting ‘cooperative utilitarianism’, the conditions under which one has satisfied duties to assist, the difference between ‘sympathy’ and ‘abstract benevolence’, and the so-called ‘callousness objection’. And a couple more besides. All equally deserving of comment, but this review is already too long.
Heartily recommended for anybody curious about live and nuanced issues in effective altruism beyond the standard arguments for and against. Five stars!
The first two chapters cover some of the basic motivations, misconceptions, and terminology associated with effective altruism. In “The Definition of Effective Altruism”, Will MacAskill outlines what ‘effective altruism’ does and does not mean—defending the Centre for Effective Altruism's definition:
Effective altruism is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.
Note the (potentially surprising) absence of any claim to the effect that you should do any of the above! Sure, many effective altruists believe as much; but leaving normative claims outof the official definition makes sense.
Toby Ord's “The Moral Imperative Toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health” was an early landmark for effective altruism. The idea is straightforward: in discussing the ethics of global health, cost-effectiveness might strike many as a technical afterthought relative to considerations of justice, equality etc. But just learning about the stark differences in cost-effectiveness between interventions in the same area—sometimes many orders of magnitude—is enough to dispel this impression. The plain facts here speak so loudly that commentary or philosophising is almost unnecessary: for instance, “the least effective HIV/AIDS intervention produces less than 0.1 per cent of the value of the most effective”. Compare, for instance, spending $40,000 on training a guide dog and its recipient, or else on eye surgeries undoing damage from trachoma:
We could thus use our entire budget to provide a single guide dog, helping one person overcome the challenges of blindness, or we could use it to cure more than 2,000 people of blindness. If we think that people have equal moral value, then the second option is more than 2,000 times better than the first. Put another way, the first option squanders about 99.95% of the value that we could have produced.
I thought this was clear and compelling enough to refer to anybody curious about the ideas which underpin effective altruism.
In “Evidence Neutrality and the Moral Value of Information”, Amanda Askell asks: when choosing among interventions with equivalent expected value, is there ever good reason to back the intervention with the least evidential support—i.e. the most speculative such interventions? Spoiler: yes! And for fascinating and convincing reasons!
In the next article, Lauri Paul's recent writing about 'Transformative Experience' is adapted for the context of effective altruism. The general idea is that certain experiences or changes are dramatic enough that (i) actually undergoing them is a necessary condition for knowing what they're like; and (ii) you emerge with (substantially) new preferences, sense of identity, or beliefs. For instance, it is virtually impossible to make a fully informed decision about having a child or getting married if you haven’t before been married or had children. As applied: how should an aspiring effective altruist plan her career if she lacks the experience to make an informed decision, nor the time to try every alternative? Should she “earn to give” if her future hedge-fund-manager-self eventually writes-off her original intention as naïve, youthful optimism? Made me curious to check out the 'book'.
In “Should We Give to More Than One Charity?”, James Snowden asks: (unsurprisingly) should we give to one charity? Snowden's answer, counterintuitive but tricky to dispute, is no. Provided you're not a billionaire—in which case, refer to the original text for guidance.
Next, Nick Beckstead effectively presents a SparkNotes summary of his thesis arguing for the overwhelming importance of the far future. This piece made tangible an idea which is often to hard to grasp intuitively, even if you find it conceptually watertight: that the value of the long-term future is staggeringly huge in expectation, and should factor into our moral priorities with corresponding urgency and weight. Here's the back-of-the-envelope calculation Beckstead proposes: let's say (conservatively) humanity has a 1% chance of surviving for another billion years. This will almost certainly involve developing the technology for colonising space—so conditional on surviving that long, let's say humanity again has at least a 1% chance of spreading through the stars and thereby surviving for 100 trillion years. The expected duration of humanity's future lifespan is therefore at least 1% × 1% × 100 trillion = 10 billion years. Like Toby Ord’s comparisons of cost effectiveness, that figure alone might be enough to make the longtermist case.
Next comes “Effective Altruism, Global Poverty, and Systemic Change”, in which Iason Gabriel and Brian McElwee argue that the effective altruism movement has largely overlooked a class of causes that sit somewhere between existential risk reduction (see previous) and narrowly targeted, epistemically secure interventions in global health. The former class addresses potentially enormous payoffs or losses with correspondingly slim probabilities and / or confidences. The latter deals with smaller payoffs, but with fewer unknowns and high confidence of success—being backed by fairly unequivocal kinds of empirical feedback. Addressing global poverty via systemic change falls somewhere in the middle along both dimensions. The authors cite books like Blood Oil, The Great Escape, and Why Nations Fail as identifying such neglected systemic causes of poverty—like global supply chains sustaining authoritarian regimes, rent-seeking and ‘extractive’ political institutions, and tax evasion which "deprives countries of vast capital flows that could be used to improve the lives of their citizens". They also note, and the historical record apparently bears out, that few equivalently serious systemic social problems are tackled without advocacy movements and targeted campaigns. Yet, targeted movements pulling on the right levers can result in disproportionately significant and cost-effective outcomes. I learned, for instance, about one such initiative called Global Witness:
...founded in 1993 to help tackle illicit financial flows to authoritarian regimes, including the trade in blood diamonds. Operating with an annual budget of several thousand dollars, the organization spearheaded efforts to establish the Kimberly Process for diamond certification and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of its efforts. More recently, it was the driving force behind the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an endeavour which has led corporations to publicize trillions of dollars of previously hidden financial transactions.
So seeking out systemic change seems (i) somewhat tractable and achievable; (ii) promises huge potential payoffs, and (iii) answers the charge that more targeted and practical interventions (bed nets, nutritional supplements...) 'plaster over' symptoms of (unaffected or even indirectly reinforced) systemic causes. It isn't immediately clear, then, why effective altruists are not on the whole more interested in systemic change. One explanation—mere risk aversion—clearly won't stick, given the vanishing probabilities involved in existential-risk reduction. Gabriel and McElwee point instead to an aversion to taking political sides (broadly construed). Whatever the reason, the conclusion seems right:
[T]he greatest positive impacts on the world can be achieved not through iterated small-scale interventions, but rather through systemic initiatives that alter the rules within which actors operate and that challenge the values that underpin them. Exerting even small leverage over very large systems could in principle have much greater impact than efforts to optimize within the status quo.
I think this was my favourite of the bunch—challenging and convincing. And for further reading, take a look at these pieces in favour and these pieces opposing the claim that "effective altruists neglect systemic change".
In “The Hidden Zero Problem: Effective Altruism and Barriers to Marginal Impact”, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears point out a simple and worrying way in which small individual donations might sometimes have no marginal impact whatsoever, despite the effectiveness of the recipient charities. This is when wealthy (i.e. billionaire) donors make commitments to ‘top-up’ the funds of that charity whenever it falls short of its fundraising goal. If, for illustration, you choose to donate £100 to AMF, this might just mean that some billionaire coughs up £100 less at the end of the year—money which likely instead falls into some ‘saving for a new luxury item’ jar. In this way, the counterfactual effect of donating to effective charities backed by ‘top-up’ pledges from wealthy donors may be to “merely to transfer money to a billionaire in the United States, and accomplish nothing for the global poor.”
There were also a handful of articles introducing philosophical concepts that were mostly new to me — the ‘possiblism’ vs ‘fallibilism’ dispute, the notion of ‘membership duties’ derived from citizenship and the resulting ‘cooperative utilitarianism’, the conditions under which one has satisfied duties to assist, the difference between ‘sympathy’ and ‘abstract benevolence’, and the so-called ‘callousness objection’. And a couple more besides. All equally deserving of comment, but this review is already too long.
Heartily recommended for anybody curious about live and nuanced issues in effective altruism beyond the standard arguments for and against. Five stars!
September 2, 2020
While a few arguments in this book didn't seem overly impressive, the large majority of them, particularly the Hidden Zero Problem and Beyond Individualism, render this a must-read for all those affiliated with the EA community who really want to sink their teeth into something a bit more thought-provoking than your standard 'intro to EA book'. I'm quite glad I read this prior to making my first larger donation, and clearly have a bit more research to do prior to the end of this year!
April 1, 2023
This book takes a dive into the philosophy of effective altruism, offering a chapter discussing a definition of the term, before looking at longtermism, the primacy of public health in the movement, and many niche topics around. Naturally, its a book for people who really want to dive into the philosophical weeds of the movement, and will be less interesting to casual readers or those interested in the effective altruism movement.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews