Beneficentrism

An updated version of this post is now available at Good Thoughts.

Philosophical discussion of utilitarianism understandably focuses on its most controversial features: its rejection of deontic constraints and the "demandingness" of impartial maximizing.  But in fact almost all of the important practical implications of utilitarianism stem from a much weaker feature, one that I think probably ought to be shared by every sensible moral view.  It's just the claim that it's really important to help others.  As Peter Singer and other effective altruists have long argued, we're able to do extraordinary amounts of good for others very easily (e.g. just by donating 10% of our income to the most effective charities), and this is very much worth doing.

It'd be helpful to have a snappy name for this view, which assigns (non-exclusive) central moral importance to beneficence.  So let's coin the following:

Beneficentrism: The view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important.

Is Effective Altruism "Inherently Utilitarian"?

A recent post at the Blog of the APA claims so.  Here's why I disagree...

It's worth distinguishing three features of utilitarianism (only the weakest of which is shared by Effective Altruism):

(1) No constraints.  You should do whatever it takes to maximize the good -- no matter the harms done along the way.

(2) Unlimited demands of beneficence: Putting aside any intrinsically immoral acts, between the remaining options you should do whatever would maximize the good -- no matter the cost to yourself.

(3) Efficient benevolence: Putting aside any intrinsically immoral acts, and at whatever magnitude of self-imposed burdens you are willing to countenance: you should direct your selected resources (time, effort, money) that are allocated for benevolent ends in whatever way would do the most good.

EA is only committed to feature (3), not (1) or (2).  And it's worth emphasizing how incredibly weak claim (3) is.  (Try completing the phrase "no matter..." for this one.  What exactly is the cost of avoiding inefficiency?  "No matter whether you would rather support a different cause that did less good?" Cue the world's tiniest violin.)

The Most Important Thing in the World

Sometimes we may dismiss a problem as "not the most important thing in the world".  Which raises the (surprisingly neglected!) question: what is, literally, the most important thing in the world?

In 'The Case for Strong Long-Termism', Greaves & MacAskill argue that the correct answer is: improving the long-run future. I'll try to summarize some of the core considerations here (with any flaws in the exposition being my own), but interested readers should of course check out the full paper for all the details.

First note that the near term -- the next hundred years, say -- is a vanishingly tiny proportion of all time, and contains an even tinier proportion of all the valuable entities (e.g. sentient lives) that could potentially exist (if we don't wipe ourselves out first).  It would seem to follow, on almost any plausible population axiology (whether 'total', 'average', or anything in-between -- so long as it does not intrinsically discount the value of future lives relative to current ones), that the overall value of the world will be determined almost entirely by the (quantity and) quality of far-future lives.  All of us existing today are, by comparison, a single speck of dust in the desert.  We matter immensely, of course, but no more than any other speck, and there are an awful lot more of them, in aggregate, than there are of us.

So if there's anything we can feasibly do to improve the trajectory of the long-run future, in expectation, the value of doing so seems likely to swamp every other possible consideration.

Where Best to Give

Probably everyone reading this (myself included!) ought to donate more to effective charities.  But, as non-experts in the field, most of us shouldn't try to pick directly which charity (or charities) to support.  We're obviously not qualified to do that. Instead, we should pick which experts we trust to defer to.  Fortunately, there are now easily-recognizable experts in the field, which makes it easier than ever before for the rest of us to know where best to donate.

In short: most people should simply donate to GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund, for a traditionally-focused "safe bet" that they can feel confident about.

But if you're the paradoxical sort who would like to do even better than "maximum" impact, and you trust Effective Altruist organizations, I would instead recommend donating through EA Funds.  You can divide your donation between four fund areas (each of which has its own specialist grant managers for disbursing the funds to where, within their remit, they are most needed):

(1) Global Health & Development

(2) Animal Welfare

(3) Long-Term Future

(4) EA Infrastructure

Giving Game 2020 results

This semester, I got my 'Effective Altruism' class to decide how to allocate $5000 in donations between the four EA funds. (Half the funds were provided by UM Ethics Programs, as the result of an internal grant request I submitted for this purpose. The other half were matching funds from my personal charitable budget.)  Our resulting breakdown was as follows:

* Global Health & Development: $2500

* Animal Welfare: $700

* Long-Term Future: $1450

* Effective Altruism Meta: $350

Philanthropy Vouchers and Public Debate: Political vs Civic Advocacy

It's interesting to compare the ways we talk and think about political vs non-political (civic/philanthropic or market) agents, advocacy, and organization.  Consider the common objection to Effective Altruism, that it allegedly "neglects the need for systemic change."  I've rebutted this objection before, but a different aspect of it that I want to focus on today is that the criticism seems to presuppose that only politics can be systemic.  But why assume that?

Charity Vouchers: Decentralizing Public Spending

People sometimes object to the charitable tax deduction on grounds that it is "undemocratic", incentivizing wealthy individuals to exert philanthropic influence instead of filling the public purse. On the other hand, well-targeted philanthropy surely achieves more good than paying extra to the government (which may just go to paying down the public debt, funding unnecessary wars, military parades for the Great Patriotic Leader, corporate welfare, and tax breaks for the wealthy).  If choosing where best to donate your money, "the US government" would seem an unlikely answer.  We recognize that charities could use extra funds more effectively. So it seems worth exploring ways to boost the philanthropic sector whilst avoiding the potential downside of concentrating power in the hands of the ultra-wealthy. The obvious solution: charity vouchers.

MacAskill on Aid Skepticism

The whole paper is great, but I especially wanted to share his concluding remarks:

Often, critics of Peter Singer focus on whether or not aid is effective. But that is fundamentally failing to engage with core of Singer’s argument. Correctly understood, that argument is about the ethics of buying luxury goods, not the ethics of global development. Even if it turned out that every single development program that we know of does more harm than good, that fact would not mean that we can buy a larger house, safe in the knowledge that we have no pressing moral obligations of beneficence upon us. There are thousands of pressing problems that call out for our attention and that we could make significant inroads on with our resources. Here is an incomplete list of what $10,000 can do (noting, in each case, that any cost-effectiveness estimates are highly uncertain, with large error bars, and refer to expected value):

• Spare 20 years’ worth of unnecessary incarceration, while not reducing public safety, by donating to organisations working in criminal justice reform (Open Philanthropy Project 2017b).

• Spare 1.2 million hens from the cruelty of battery cages by donating to corporate cage-free campaigns (Open Philanthropy Project 2016).

• Reduce the chance of a civilisation-ending global pandemic by funding policy research and advocacy on biosecurity issues (Open Philanthropy Project 2014).

• Contribute to a more equitable international order by funding policy analysis and campaigning.

In order to show that Singer’s argument is not successful, one would need to show that for none of these problems can we make a significant difference at little moral cost to ourselves. This is a very high bar to meet. In a world of such suffering, of such multitudinous and variegated forms, often caused by the actions and policies of us in rich countries, it would be a shocking and highly suspicious conclusion if there were simply nothing that the richest 3% of the world’s population could do with their resources in order to significantly make the world a better place.The core of Singer’s argument is the principle that, if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do so. We can. So we should.

Giving Game 2017 results

This past week I ran a 'Giving Game' for my Effective Altruism class, letting each student decide (after class discussion) how to allocate £100 of my charitable budget for the year.  There was just one restriction: if they wanted to pick something other than one of the four EA Funds options (which have expert managers directing funds in the fields of "global health & development", "animal welfare", "long-term future", and "EA community"), they had to convince at least one other classmate to join them.  In the first seminar group, half the class ended up choosing alternative options; in the second, all stuck with the EA funds.  The end result was a bit more varied and (less conservative) than the first time I tried this, so that was interesting to see.  (I think it helped both to allow individual discretion rather than requiring group consensus decisions, and also to have the new "EA funds" available to enable responsibly contributing to a cause area without having to identify or select particular outstanding organizations within the area.  You can now just make the value judgment, and defer to trusted experts on the empirical details.)

How bad?

Compare five seriously bad things:

(1) Unjust discrimination along the lines of racism, sexism, etc., in Western countries.
(2) War and terrorism
(3) Global poverty
(4) Animal suffering (from factory farming)
(5) Global catastrophic (i.e. civilization-ending) risks

Just how bad is each of these, in the world as we find it today?  If you could prevent just one of them, which would it be?  (What would your rank ordering be if you weren't sure how many philanthropic wishes the genie was going to give you?)

Effective Altruism, Radical Politics and Radical Philanthropy

It can sometimes be difficult to discern precisely what's in dispute between Effective Altruists and their (leftist) critics. This is perhaps in part due to EA's being such a big tent that objecting to one proposal or proponent is not necessarily an objection to EA itself.  To clarify the latter, I see Effective Altruism as a matter of two core commitments:

(1) The "Altruism" bit: A commitment to making the world a better place -- including a willingness to expend some non-trivial proportion of one's own resources to this end.

(2) The "Effective" bit: A commitment to using these resources as effectively and efficiently as possible (based on the best available evidence, analysis, etc.).

Philanthropic Focus vs Abandonment

This seems a lamentably common way of thinking:

[Chief Executive of Oxfam GB] Goldring says it would be wrong to apply the EA philosophy to all of Oxfam's programmes because it could mean excluding people who most need the charity's help. For a certain cost, the charity might enable only a few children to go to school in a country such as South Sudan, where the barriers to school attendance are high, he says; but that does not mean it should work only in countries where the cost of schooling is cheaper, such as Bangladesh, because that would abandon the South Sudanese children.

Fuzzy group-level thinking allows one to neglect real tradeoffs, and pretend that one is somehow helping everyone if you help each group a little bit.  But this is obviously not true.  If there are more Bangladeshi children in need of education than your current budget can provide for, then by spending the rest of your budget on educating a few kids in South Sudan, you are abandoning a greater number of Bangladeshi children.

My Giving Game results

In my Effective Altruism class this past week I've run a "giving game", getting the students, in small groups, to discuss & decide where to donate £100 of my money.  It was quite interesting.

One potential downside of requiring the decisions to be made by consensus in small groups (of three or four students each) was that this ended up creating a bit of a bias towards conservative / "safe" choices from GiveWell's top charities, rather than more speculative (but potentially high upside) options about which there were disagreements within the group.  For example, one group had members initially supporting animal welfare, climate change mitigation, and criminal justice reform, but since they couldn't resolve these disagreements in the hour allotted for discussion and debate, they ended up agreeing to fund a deworming charity instead.  Another student favoured existential risk reduction, but again could not reach consensus on this within their group.

If I do this again in future years, I might try to think of an alternative way of implementing the giving game to allow the students a bit more free reign. E.g., one option would be to give each student £50 (or whatever) that they can allocate individually, or perhaps with the additional requirement that they must find / convince at least one other student in the class to share their choice of charity (to encourage argument and discussion).  Discussion could then proceed in small groups of rotating membership (rather than having fixed groups as we did this year).  Something I'll think about, anyway.

As for the verdicts, following my students' directions, I have just donated:
* £200 to the Against Malaria Foundation,
* £200 to GiveDirectly,
* £100 to each of SCI and Deworm the World,
* £100 to Project Healthy Children,
* £100 to Cool Earth,
* £100 to Animal Equality, and
* £100 to Basic Needs (an international mental health charity).

Most of these donations got a further 25% boost from UK Gift Aid; for UK taxpayers, donating via the GWWC Trust is very helpful in this respect!

What charities do you consider most effective?  Comments / suggestions welcome!  (I'm quite partial to meta-charities, myself...)

Opposite Day: "Charity begins at home" edition

It's been almost a decade since my evil twin Ricardo last posted on this blog. I invite him back today to share a horribly misguided speech that he recently gave as part of a debate in St Andrews on the topic 'Charity begins at home'. (They needed someone to defend that awful claim, and I wasn't entirely comfortable about it myself, so sent along my evil twin to do the job. Here's what he came up with...)

Lichtenberg on Effective Altruism

Judith Lichtenberg has a pretty misguided -- and often misleading -- hit piece on the Effective Altruism movement, which concludes:

The effective altruists have shown that, without undue burdens, many of us can and should do a lot more than we do now. But in their zeal to maximize effectiveness, they distort human psychology, undervalue the contributions made by ordinary people, and neglect the kind of structural and political change that is ultimately necessary to redress the suffering and radical inequality we see around us.

Her criticisms are not well-supported.

WaPo forum on Effective Altruism

The Washington Post is discussing Effective Altruism.  There are two critical contributions, neither of which I find very compelling:

(1) William Schambra claims that most Americans are too selfish to care about global problems or contribute to global charities: "Given the American tendency towards materialism and individualism, we cannot rely on grand causes to summon us to public-mindedness. Rather, it comes only when it is shown that public involvement is closely linked to our personal interests."

Beyond lip service: betting for beliefs, donating for values

"Talk is cheap."  So we're told to "put our money where our mouth is," to ensure intellectual integrity.  On the (esp. econ) blogs I read, this principle is most commonly applied to beliefs: Alex Tabarrok writes that "a bet is a tax on bullshit".  Bryan Caplan respects the loser of a bet as having "far more honor than the mass of [people] who live by loose and idle talk."

Part of what's so challenging about effective altruism, I think, is that it extends the principle to our values. (Another part is that many people don't like ranking the sacred.  But it's related: both stem from the demand to take values seriously, and move beyond cheap talk.)  Interestingly, it's a challenge that applies more or less whatever our values are.  If we really care about X, for any X, why aren't we investing more of our resources (time, money, or whatever) into X, when effective opportunities present themselves (or into searching for effective opportunities in the meantime)?  The honest answer, I guess, is that we often don't really care about these things as much as we'd like to think we do.  But we surely do often care at least some, and then it may just be a kind of habitual inertia that prevents us from doing more.  The challenge from EA -- to put our values into practice -- might then prompt us to bring our behaviour more into line with our reflectively-endorsed values. (Or so I hope!)

Some possible examples:

Effective Altruist Philosophers

Alexander Dietz (USC) has put together a new website promoting effective altruism amongst philosophers:

Are you a philosopher who wants to make the world a better place? Make a public pledge to donate 1% or more of your income to the most effective charities, and see which other philosophers have done the same. [...]

Research has shown that people become significantly more willing to change their giving habits when they see others giving around them. And since academic philosophers represent an especially tight-knit community, many of whom are especially likely to be interested in ethical issues, publicly pledging your support could be particularly effective in encouraging other philosophers to give.

It's an excellent initiative, and I hope it secures widespread support throughout the profession! (The list of philosophers who have pledged is sorted by university, which may help promote a little healthy competition between departments -- and might, for example, be a useful resource for prospective graduate students seeking indications of how "ethically engaged" the climate in various departments is...)

Moral Priorities

Robin Hanson notes that people generally don't like "ranking the sacred" (his example: "fighting cancer" vs. "working for racial justice").  This is a big part of what Effective Altruism is all about -- not just aiming to do some good, but seriously taking an evidence-based approach to doing the most (expected) good that one can (for a given level of investment, be it of time, money, or whatever).  This seems to rub some people the wrong way, which is frustrating since we should surely prefer that people allocate their moral efforts wisely, doing more rather than less good when possible.

December Donations

Happily, I was in a position this year to make donations worth around 8 kidneys, mostly split between SCI (deworming: most cost-effective "quality of life"-improving intervention) and GWWC (growing the effective altruism community, so more money is donated wisely in future).

For anyone interested in donating to GiveWell-recommended charities, check out the Effective Altruism hub on how to donate most tax-efficiently in your country.  E.g., for UK taxpayers, giving via the GWWC trust allows the charity to claim "Gift Aid" from the UK government -- increasing the size of your donation by 25% at no added cost to you. (Donations directly to SCI are already Gift Aid eligible, but this allows you to donate to other GiveWell-recommended charities in addition.)  If GiveWell doesn't process your donation, be sure to fill out a donation report to help them track their "money moved".

My take on GiveWell's top charities: