Hey David, Thanks very much for this article. Definitely gives us plenty of food for thought. I think the point about distinguishing judgements about characters from ones about actions is particularly interesting. I think in many ways one of the things effective altruism is often trying to do is get away from judgements about characters, and instead focus on judgements about actions.
Thanks for your suggestions on the pledge. This is definitely something we’ve considered in the past. One important thing to say is that the Pledge should absolutely not be used to distinguish ‘good people’. As you say, giving 10% of your income is just more viable for some people than others. I think it’s really important that we move away from judging people as good or bad in general. You might say a similar thing about vegnism: it might be tempting to classify people as good or bad based on whether they’re vegn or not; but some people have health reasons for not being veg*n, some people believe they can do more good by not being, etc.
At the same time, one thing that GWWC is trying to highlight is how well off people in many rich countries are compared to people globally, even if they aren’t well off by their country’s standards. The fact that someone on the median wage in the UK is in the top 5% of incomes worldwide (ppp adjusted) does indicate that many of us are better off than we might have thought, which might make us feel more able to donate than we previously had. But how able people are to donate will depend on their individual circumstances and feelings, so it doesn’t seem sensible for us to pick a cut-off.
I also think the simplicity of the message is pretty crucial. A large part of what GWWC is trying to achieve is to show people that donating 10% of one’s income isn’t an unachievably high bar, but something that many people do. The power of this comes from being able to say ‘we are a community of x people who all actually give 10% of their wages’ – that is much more powerful than saying ‘we are a community of people who would give 10% of our wage if they were above £x’. This is all the more so because we actually even get objections along the lines of ‘but giving away 10% is easier for people less wealthy than me, because it means they’re giving away less’ (my parents are sympathetic to that line of reasoning – they’re members, but they wouldn’t be if they earned more).
I’m not convinced that your characterisation of the ethical views of effective altruists is accurate, and I think it could be harmful to simplify in the way that you do. While it’s true that quite a few of the people who started the effective altruism movement put more credence in welfarist consequentialism than in many other normative theories, that has two caveats: There was a big selection effect at the start – Toby Ord and Will MacAskill met through studying Ethics, so it’s unsurprising they would have similar views. Also, many of the people I imagine you’re talking about not only have a great deal of moral uncertainty, they’re actually leaders in the field of moral uncertainty. That both means that it’s incorrect to ascribe ‘narrow consequentialism’ to them, and that the description of being arrogant and dogmatic is less true of them than most other ethicists. The view many of the people around at the start of the GWWC would probably be most accurately described as something like ‘welfarist with constraints’. In some cases (like me), that means having the most credence in some form of scalar utilitarianism, some in prioritarianism, some in a deontological framework incorporating human rights (plus a bunch of uncertainty). Because deontological theories put huge weight on not breaking rights, while consequentialism would typically only imply on the balance of probabilities it was somewhat better to break them in extreme cases, the credences I described should be summarised as welfarism with constraints. In other cases (like Andreas Mogensen, one of the other founders of GWWC and Assistant Director up until last month) people placed most credence in some form of deontology, which none-the-less holds consequences in terms of welfarism to be important.
I definitely agree with the idea we should be trying to make our writing accessible and clear, rather than technical. I would guess that’s something most people already have as an ideal, just not one they always manage to achieve (that’s definitely how I feel!). I also think it’s crucial we recognise the importance of causes like fighting discrimination, and in particular the benefit we get from people who have experienced it speaking up, despite it being difficult (and often frustratingly repetitive) to do so.
(Sorry this ended up rather long, speaking of writing succintly!)
Thanks so much for this! Really good and persuasive points.
One important thing to say is that the Pledge should absolutely not be used to distinguish ‘good people’.
My worry is this isn’t realistic, even if ideally it we wouldn’t distinguish people like this. For example, having taken the pledge myself and told people about it I was congratulated (especially by other EAs). This simple and unavoidable kind of interaction rewards pledgers and shows that their moral status in the eyes of others has gone up. To me, it seems a real problem that this kind of status and reward is so much harder for the poor to attain.
Further, making the Pledge is bound to be an important part of engaging with the movement, even if we don’t use it to distinguish virtuous people. To me, again, this feels like a serious issue.
so it doesn’t seem sensible for us to pick a cut-off. I also think the simplicity of the message is pretty crucial… [it’s powerful that we can] say ‘we are a community of x people who all actually give 10% of their wages’
Great point! I’m interested to know how we currently accommodate the exception the the rule: students? Could we do the same thing for an income clause as well? To me an income exception seems better motivated because
i) its a more important access issue, and
ii) the pledge is already about lifetimes earnings, so wouldn’t be particularly harder for a student to make (they can just give a little later) than a non-student.
I’m not convinced that your characterisation of the ethical views of effective altruists is accurate, and I think it could be harmful to simplify in the way that you do… the description of being arrogant and dogmatic is less true of them than most other ethicists.
This is a really good point and i’ll keep this in mind, especially about the uncertainty. [To be clear neither Toby nor William MacAskill have ever done any of the things I objected to.] It’s not clear to me that calling them narrow utilitarians is misleading though (unless they’re deontologists)
To me, it seems a real problem that this kind of status and reward is so much harder for the poor to attain.
Why, do you believe we should redistribute moral virtue?
The Pledge is trying to encourage people to donate more, so it assigns status on that basis. We don’t want to reduce that incentive, it is already weak enough.
I mentioned this on Facebook before (I hope I don’t sound like a broken record!), but the feelings of fellow aspiring EAs, while no doubt important, completely pales in comparison to that of the population we’re trying to serve. Here’s an analogy from GiveDirectly:
https://www.givedirectly.org/blog-post.html?id=1960644650098330671
“through my interactions with the organization, it’s become clear that their commitment is not just to evidence – it’s to the poor. Most international charities’ websites prominently feature photos of relatable smiling children, but not GiveDirectly, because of respect for beneficiaries’ privacy and security. Many charities seem to resign themselves to a certain degree of corruption among their staff, but GiveDirectly is willing to install intrusive internal controls to actively prevent corruption.”
Is intrusive internal controls “unfair” to GiveDirectly’s staff members? In some sense, of course...other NGOs don’t do this. In another, more important sense, however, GiveDirectly workers are still way better off than the people they’re transferring money to.
In a similar sense, while “the poor” (by that, I assume you mean people making in the 80th percentile of income) will find it more difficult to meet the GWWC pledge, and maybe it’s less “fair” for them to feel altruistic, it’s even less fair to die from malaria. Ultimately my greatest priority isn’t fellow EAs. Paul Farmer said that his duty is [paraphrasing] “first to the sick, second to prisoners, and third to students.” I think this is the right model to have. Conventional models of morality radiates outwards from our class and social standing, whereas a more universalist ethic will triage.
If this is not obvious to you, imagine, behind the veil of ignorance, the following two scenarios:
1) You’re making minimum wage in the US. You heard about the Giving What We Can pledge. You would like to contribute but know that you have a greater obligation to your family. You feel bad about the situation in Africa and wished that those elitist EAs didn’t shove this into your face.
2) Your child, your second child, has convulsions from a fever. You don’t know why, but you suspect that it’s due to malaria. Your first child has already died of diarrhea. You didn’t work today to take care of your child, but you know your family has very little savings left for food, never mind medicine.You’re crying and crying and crying but you know you shouldn’t cry because it’s a waste of resources and anyway the world isn’t fair and nobody cares.
I apologize for the pathos, but it seems blatantly clear to me that 2) is a substantially greater issue than 1). I suspect that my usual M.O of arguing rationally isn’t getting this across clearly.
I agree with this. Let me make explain why I stand by the point that you quote me on.
Tl;dr: by “negative effects” I wasn’t talking about the hurt feelings of potential EAs.
My point wasn’t the following:
“It’s unfair on relatively poor potential EAs, therefore it’s bad, therefore let’s change the movement”
As you stress, this consideration is outweighed by the considerations of those the movement is trying to help. I accept explicitly in the article that such considerations might justify us making EA elitist.
My point was rather that people criticise us for being elitist etc. Having an elitist pledge reinforces this image and prevents people from joining—not just those in relative poverty. This reduces our ability to help those in absolute poverty. You don’t seem to have acknowledged this point in your criticisms.
“Also, many of the people I imagine you’re talking about not only have a great deal of moral uncertainty, they’re actually leaders in the field of moral uncertainty. That both means that it’s incorrect to ascribe ‘narrow consequentialism’ to them, and that the description of being arrogant and dogmatic is less true of them than most other ethicists. The view many of the people around at the start of the GWWC would probably be most accurately described as something like ‘welfarist with constraints’.”
I’m not sure you are actually talking about the same groups of people. I read that section as focusing on the LW/Rationalist segment of EA, rather than the Oxford Philosophy contingent. Unsurprisingly, the people who have studied philosophy are indeed closer to the combined views of most philosophers.
Hey David, Thanks very much for this article. Definitely gives us plenty of food for thought. I think the point about distinguishing judgements about characters from ones about actions is particularly interesting. I think in many ways one of the things effective altruism is often trying to do is get away from judgements about characters, and instead focus on judgements about actions.
Thanks for your suggestions on the pledge. This is definitely something we’ve considered in the past. One important thing to say is that the Pledge should absolutely not be used to distinguish ‘good people’. As you say, giving 10% of your income is just more viable for some people than others. I think it’s really important that we move away from judging people as good or bad in general. You might say a similar thing about vegnism: it might be tempting to classify people as good or bad based on whether they’re vegn or not; but some people have health reasons for not being veg*n, some people believe they can do more good by not being, etc. At the same time, one thing that GWWC is trying to highlight is how well off people in many rich countries are compared to people globally, even if they aren’t well off by their country’s standards. The fact that someone on the median wage in the UK is in the top 5% of incomes worldwide (ppp adjusted) does indicate that many of us are better off than we might have thought, which might make us feel more able to donate than we previously had. But how able people are to donate will depend on their individual circumstances and feelings, so it doesn’t seem sensible for us to pick a cut-off. I also think the simplicity of the message is pretty crucial. A large part of what GWWC is trying to achieve is to show people that donating 10% of one’s income isn’t an unachievably high bar, but something that many people do. The power of this comes from being able to say ‘we are a community of x people who all actually give 10% of their wages’ – that is much more powerful than saying ‘we are a community of people who would give 10% of our wage if they were above £x’. This is all the more so because we actually even get objections along the lines of ‘but giving away 10% is easier for people less wealthy than me, because it means they’re giving away less’ (my parents are sympathetic to that line of reasoning – they’re members, but they wouldn’t be if they earned more).
I’m not convinced that your characterisation of the ethical views of effective altruists is accurate, and I think it could be harmful to simplify in the way that you do. While it’s true that quite a few of the people who started the effective altruism movement put more credence in welfarist consequentialism than in many other normative theories, that has two caveats: There was a big selection effect at the start – Toby Ord and Will MacAskill met through studying Ethics, so it’s unsurprising they would have similar views. Also, many of the people I imagine you’re talking about not only have a great deal of moral uncertainty, they’re actually leaders in the field of moral uncertainty. That both means that it’s incorrect to ascribe ‘narrow consequentialism’ to them, and that the description of being arrogant and dogmatic is less true of them than most other ethicists. The view many of the people around at the start of the GWWC would probably be most accurately described as something like ‘welfarist with constraints’. In some cases (like me), that means having the most credence in some form of scalar utilitarianism, some in prioritarianism, some in a deontological framework incorporating human rights (plus a bunch of uncertainty). Because deontological theories put huge weight on not breaking rights, while consequentialism would typically only imply on the balance of probabilities it was somewhat better to break them in extreme cases, the credences I described should be summarised as welfarism with constraints. In other cases (like Andreas Mogensen, one of the other founders of GWWC and Assistant Director up until last month) people placed most credence in some form of deontology, which none-the-less holds consequences in terms of welfarism to be important.
I definitely agree with the idea we should be trying to make our writing accessible and clear, rather than technical. I would guess that’s something most people already have as an ideal, just not one they always manage to achieve (that’s definitely how I feel!). I also think it’s crucial we recognise the importance of causes like fighting discrimination, and in particular the benefit we get from people who have experienced it speaking up, despite it being difficult (and often frustratingly repetitive) to do so. (Sorry this ended up rather long, speaking of writing succintly!)
Thanks so much for this! Really good and persuasive points.
My worry is this isn’t realistic, even if ideally it we wouldn’t distinguish people like this. For example, having taken the pledge myself and told people about it I was congratulated (especially by other EAs). This simple and unavoidable kind of interaction rewards pledgers and shows that their moral status in the eyes of others has gone up. To me, it seems a real problem that this kind of status and reward is so much harder for the poor to attain.
Further, making the Pledge is bound to be an important part of engaging with the movement, even if we don’t use it to distinguish virtuous people. To me, again, this feels like a serious issue.
Great point! I’m interested to know how we currently accommodate the exception the the rule: students? Could we do the same thing for an income clause as well? To me an income exception seems better motivated because i) its a more important access issue, and ii) the pledge is already about lifetimes earnings, so wouldn’t be particularly harder for a student to make (they can just give a little later) than a non-student.
This is a really good point and i’ll keep this in mind, especially about the uncertainty. [To be clear neither Toby nor William MacAskill have ever done any of the things I objected to.] It’s not clear to me that calling them narrow utilitarians is misleading though (unless they’re deontologists)
Why, do you believe we should redistribute moral virtue?
The Pledge is trying to encourage people to donate more, so it assigns status on that basis. We don’t want to reduce that incentive, it is already weak enough.
No, but it’s unfair that it’s harder for the poor to attain the status. That has negative effects which I talked about in the article.
I mentioned this on Facebook before (I hope I don’t sound like a broken record!), but the feelings of fellow aspiring EAs, while no doubt important, completely pales in comparison to that of the population we’re trying to serve. Here’s an analogy from GiveDirectly: https://www.givedirectly.org/blog-post.html?id=1960644650098330671
“through my interactions with the organization, it’s become clear that their commitment is not just to evidence – it’s to the poor. Most international charities’ websites prominently feature photos of relatable smiling children, but not GiveDirectly, because of respect for beneficiaries’ privacy and security. Many charities seem to resign themselves to a certain degree of corruption among their staff, but GiveDirectly is willing to install intrusive internal controls to actively prevent corruption.”
Is intrusive internal controls “unfair” to GiveDirectly’s staff members? In some sense, of course...other NGOs don’t do this. In another, more important sense, however, GiveDirectly workers are still way better off than the people they’re transferring money to.
In a similar sense, while “the poor” (by that, I assume you mean people making in the 80th percentile of income) will find it more difficult to meet the GWWC pledge, and maybe it’s less “fair” for them to feel altruistic, it’s even less fair to die from malaria. Ultimately my greatest priority isn’t fellow EAs. Paul Farmer said that his duty is [paraphrasing] “first to the sick, second to prisoners, and third to students.” I think this is the right model to have. Conventional models of morality radiates outwards from our class and social standing, whereas a more universalist ethic will triage.
If this is not obvious to you, imagine, behind the veil of ignorance, the following two scenarios:
1) You’re making minimum wage in the US. You heard about the Giving What We Can pledge. You would like to contribute but know that you have a greater obligation to your family. You feel bad about the situation in Africa and wished that those elitist EAs didn’t shove this into your face.
2) Your child, your second child, has convulsions from a fever. You don’t know why, but you suspect that it’s due to malaria. Your first child has already died of diarrhea. You didn’t work today to take care of your child, but you know your family has very little savings left for food, never mind medicine.You’re crying and crying and crying but you know you shouldn’t cry because it’s a waste of resources and anyway the world isn’t fair and nobody cares.
I apologize for the pathos, but it seems blatantly clear to me that 2) is a substantially greater issue than 1). I suspect that my usual M.O of arguing rationally isn’t getting this across clearly.
I agree with this. Let me make explain why I stand by the point that you quote me on. Tl;dr: by “negative effects” I wasn’t talking about the hurt feelings of potential EAs.
My point wasn’t the following: “It’s unfair on relatively poor potential EAs, therefore it’s bad, therefore let’s change the movement” As you stress, this consideration is outweighed by the considerations of those the movement is trying to help. I accept explicitly in the article that such considerations might justify us making EA elitist.
My point was rather that people criticise us for being elitist etc. Having an elitist pledge reinforces this image and prevents people from joining—not just those in relative poverty. This reduces our ability to help those in absolute poverty. You don’t seem to have acknowledged this point in your criticisms.
“Also, many of the people I imagine you’re talking about not only have a great deal of moral uncertainty, they’re actually leaders in the field of moral uncertainty. That both means that it’s incorrect to ascribe ‘narrow consequentialism’ to them, and that the description of being arrogant and dogmatic is less true of them than most other ethicists. The view many of the people around at the start of the GWWC would probably be most accurately described as something like ‘welfarist with constraints’.”
I’m not sure you are actually talking about the same groups of people. I read that section as focusing on the LW/Rationalist segment of EA, rather than the Oxford Philosophy contingent. Unsurprisingly, the people who have studied philosophy are indeed closer to the combined views of most philosophers.
But the LW segment believe that value is fragile and that the ends don’t justify the means!
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!