Musings on non-consequentialist altruism under deep unawareness
(This is a reply to a comment by Magnus Vinding, which ended up seeming like it was worth a standalone Quick Take.)
From Magnus:
For example, if we walk past a complete stranger who is enduring torment and is in need of urgent help, we would rightly take action to help this person, even if we cannot say whether this action reduces total suffering or otherwise improves the world overall. I think that’s a reasonable practical stance, and I think the spirit of this stance applies to many ways in which we can and do benefit strangers, not just to rare emergencies.
The intuition here seems to be, “trying to actively do good in some restricted domain is morally right (e.g., virtuous), even when we’re not justified in thinking this will have net-positive consequences[1] according to impartial altruism”. Let’s call this intuition Local Altruism is Right (LAR). I’m definitely sympathetic to this. I just think we should be cautious about extending LAR beyond fairly mundane “common sense” cases, especially to longtermist work.
For one, the reason most of us bothered with EA interventions was to do good “on net” in some sense. We weren’t explicitly weighing up all the consequences, of course, but we didn’t think we were literally ignoringsome consequences — we took ourselves to be accounting for them with some combination of coarse-grained EV reasoning, heuristics, “symmetry” principles, discounting speculative stuff, etc. So it’s suspiciously convenient if, once we realize that that reason was confused, we still come to the same practical conclusions.
Second, for me the LAR intuition goes away upon reflection unless at least the following hold (caveat in footnote):[2]
The “restricted domain” isn’t too contrived in some sense, rather it’s some natural-seeming category of moral patients or welfare-relevant outcome.
(How we delineate “contrived” vs. “not contrived” is of course rather subjective, which is exactly why I’m suspicious of LAR as an impartial altruistic principle. I’m just taking the intuition on its own terms.)
I’m at least justified in (i) expecting my intervention to do good overall in that domain, and (ii) expecting not to have large off-target effects of indeterminate net sign in domains of similar “speculativeness” (see “implementation robustness”).
(“Speculativeness”, too, is subjective. And while I definitely find it intuitive that our impacts on more robustly foreseeable moral patients are privileged,[3] I haven’t found a satisfying way of making sense of this intuition. But if we want to respect this intuition, condition (ii) seems necessary. If the set of moral patients A seems no less robustly foreseeable than set B, why would I morally privilege B? Cf. my discussion here.)
Some examples:
Trying to reduce farmed animal suffering: Depends on the intervention.
I have the LAR intuition for things like donating to humane invertebrate slaughter research, which doesn’t seem to have large backfire risks on other animals in the near term. (Even if it does plausibly have large backfire risks for future digital minds, say.)
For me LAR is considerably weaker for things like vegan advocacy, which has a lot of ambiguous effects on wild animal suffering (which don’t seem more “speculative”, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about).
Trying to prevent digital suffering (even pre-space colonization): All the interventions I’m aware of are so apparently non-implementation-robust that I don’t have the LAR intuition here. Example here.
If we instead said something like “this intervention is implementation-robust w.r.t. helping some specific subset of digital minds,” that subset feels contrived, so I still wouldn’t have the intuition in favor of the intervention.
Trying to prevent extinction: (Assuming a non-suffering-focused view for the sake of argument, because lots of EAs seem to think trying to prevent extinction is common-sensically good/right.) As I’ve argued here and here, the interventions EAs have proposed to reduce extinction risk don’t seem to satisfy condition (i) of implementation robustness above. Even if they did, off-target effects on animal suffering arguably undermine condition (ii) (see e.g. this post).
None of which is to say I have a fleshed-out theory! I’m keen to think more about what non-consequentialist altruism under unawareness might look like.
In the definition of LAR, “trying to actively do good” is the key phrase. I find it pretty intuitive that we don’t need conditions nearly as strong as (1)+(2) below when we’re asking, “Should you refrain from doing [intuitively evil thing]?”
Maybe the most promising angle is to show that it’s normatively relevant that our beliefs about the more distant moral patients are (qualitatively?) less grounded in good reasons (see Clifton).
To clarify, the context of the quoted remark was that, just as we can care for those we love in the face of cluelessness, we can likewise care for and benefit strangers.
Specifically in relation to this:
we still have reason to respect other values we hold dear — those that were never grounded purely in the impartial good in the first place. Integrity, care for those we love, and generally not being a jerk, for starters. Beyond that, my honest answer is: I don’t know.
I think the “other values we hold dear” can and should also include a strong focus on helping strangers as well, even if challenges from cluelessness and the like were to prove devastating to standard versions of consequentialism. I mostly responded to what I saw as an overly exclusive focus on those we love versus others.
I’m not sure about this, though. As I wrote in a previous comment:
The reasons to do various parochial things, or respect deontological constraints, aren’t like this. They aren’t grounded in something like “this thing out there in the world is horrible, and should be prevented wherever/whenever it is [or whoever causes it]”.
The concern I’ve tried to convey in our discussion so far is: Insofar as our moral reasons for action are grounded in “this thing out there in the world is horrible, and should be prevented wherever/whenever it is [or whoever causes it]”, then shining the spotlight of our active altruism on beings who happen to be salient/near to us is arbitrary. To me, active “altruism” per se[1] is pretty inextricable from anti-arbitrariness.
And I’m saying, suppose for a moment we’re no longer trying to be actively altruistic, and instead consider normative reasons that aren’t grounded in the above. Then, prioritizing those whom you actually have special relationships with isn’t arbitrary in the relevant sense. Because those relationships give you a reason to prioritize them. (Of course, if we started from an impartial altruistic perspective, this reason would be dwarfed by our duty to reduce large-scale suffering overall, insofar as that’s tractable! But the worry is that it’s not.)
Is your position something like, “We also have special relationships with strangers who are near to us”? I might be sympathetic to that, but it seems like it needs more unpacking.
Like I said, I do share the LAR intuition in some limited contexts, and it would be pretty sad if there’s no non-arbitrary way to make sense of active altruism at all. I find this situation unsettling. But I currently feel confused as to how much I honestly endorse LAR.
I find myself wondering what counts as “speculative” vs not. Here are some guesses at sufficient conditions for speculativeness:
An effect is speculative if it is highly sensitive to:
Physical or metaphysical assumptions that are themselves speculative
E.g., theories of cosmology, solutions to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, theories of consciousness
Facts about the world / mechanisms we’re presently unaware of
E.g., improvements to SOTA AI architectures and training methods, entirely new mechanisms for extinction, facts challenging our current understanding of macroeconomics, biology, etc
I’m also very interested in this question, because it isn’t obvious to me where to draw the line in fields like wild animal welfare. I think I know as little about nematode sentience + welfare, for example, as I do about possible far future beings.
Maybe one difference is that it at least feels possible in theory to get more information about nematodes, but not really possible to get more information about far future beings? Although I’m skeptical of my intuitions here, since maybe it’s easier than I think to get information about far future beings and harder than I think to get information about nematode sentience.
vegan advocacy [...] has a lot of ambiguous effects on wild animal suffering (which don’t seem more “speculative”, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about)
I’d be curious to hear more about this. What are the robust-seeming arguments?
The “lower meat production” ⇒ “higher net primary productivity” ⇒ “higher wild animal suffering” connection seems robust to me. Or not that much less robust than the intended benefit, at least.
This might not be the place for a discussion of this, but I personally don’t feel that the “robustness” of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the “robustness” of the idea that factory farms contain a crazy amount of suffering.
In the first instance, the specific chain of arrows above seems quite speculative, since we really have no idea how land use would change in a world with no factory farming. Are we that confident net primary productivity will increase? I’m aware there are good arguments for it, but I’d be surprised if someone couldn’t come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I don’t think that’s a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? You’d need to show that wild+farmed animal welfare on post-factory farmed land uses is lower than wild+farmed animal welfare on current land uses, and that seems very sensitive to specific claims about moral weights, weights between types of suffering, empirical information about wild animal quality of life, what it means for a life to be net-negative, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by robustness? I’ve just finished reading your unawareness sequence and mostly feel clueless about everything, including what it could mean for a reasoning chain to be robust.
Sorry this wasn’t clear! I wasn’t thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didn’t mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that they’re large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of “robustness” vs “speculativeness”.)
Musings on non-consequentialist altruism under deep unawareness
(This is a reply to a comment by Magnus Vinding, which ended up seeming like it was worth a standalone Quick Take.)
From Magnus:
The intuition here seems to be, “trying to actively do good in some restricted domain is morally right (e.g., virtuous), even when we’re not justified in thinking this will have net-positive consequences[1] according to impartial altruism”. Let’s call this intuition Local Altruism is Right (LAR). I’m definitely sympathetic to this. I just think we should be cautious about extending LAR beyond fairly mundane “common sense” cases, especially to longtermist work.
For one, the reason most of us bothered with EA interventions was to do good “on net” in some sense. We weren’t explicitly weighing up all the consequences, of course, but we didn’t think we were literally ignoring some consequences — we took ourselves to be accounting for them with some combination of coarse-grained EV reasoning, heuristics, “symmetry” principles, discounting speculative stuff, etc. So it’s suspiciously convenient if, once we realize that that reason was confused, we still come to the same practical conclusions.
Second, for me the LAR intuition goes away upon reflection unless at least the following hold (caveat in footnote):[2]
The “restricted domain” isn’t too contrived in some sense, rather it’s some natural-seeming category of moral patients or welfare-relevant outcome.
(How we delineate “contrived” vs. “not contrived” is of course rather subjective, which is exactly why I’m suspicious of LAR as an impartial altruistic principle. I’m just taking the intuition on its own terms.)
I’m at least justified in (i) expecting my intervention to do good overall in that domain, and (ii) expecting not to have large off-target effects of indeterminate net sign in domains of similar “speculativeness” (see “implementation robustness”).
(“Speculativeness”, too, is subjective. And while I definitely find it intuitive that our impacts on more robustly foreseeable moral patients are privileged,[3] I haven’t found a satisfying way of making sense of this intuition. But if we want to respect this intuition, condition (ii) seems necessary. If the set of moral patients A seems no less robustly foreseeable than set B, why would I morally privilege B? Cf. my discussion here.)
Some examples:
Trying to reduce farmed animal suffering: Depends on the intervention.
I have the LAR intuition for things like donating to humane invertebrate slaughter research, which doesn’t seem to have large backfire risks on other animals in the near term. (Even if it does plausibly have large backfire risks for future digital minds, say.)
For me LAR is considerably weaker for things like vegan advocacy, which has a lot of ambiguous effects on wild animal suffering (which don’t seem more “speculative”, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about).
Trying to prevent digital suffering (even pre-space colonization): All the interventions I’m aware of are so apparently non-implementation-robust that I don’t have the LAR intuition here. Example here.
If we instead said something like “this intervention is implementation-robust w.r.t. helping some specific subset of digital minds,” that subset feels contrived, so I still wouldn’t have the intuition in favor of the intervention.
Trying to prevent extinction: (Assuming a non-suffering-focused view for the sake of argument, because lots of EAs seem to think trying to prevent extinction is common-sensically good/right.) As I’ve argued here and here, the interventions EAs have proposed to reduce extinction risk don’t seem to satisfy condition (i) of implementation robustness above. Even if they did, off-target effects on animal suffering arguably undermine condition (ii) (see e.g. this post).
None of which is to say I have a fleshed-out theory! I’m keen to think more about what non-consequentialist altruism under unawareness might look like.
I mean to include Clifton’s Option 3 as a possible operationalization of “net-positive consequences according to impartial altruism”.
In the definition of LAR, “trying to actively do good” is the key phrase. I find it pretty intuitive that we don’t need conditions nearly as strong as (1)+(2) below when we’re asking, “Should you refrain from doing [intuitively evil thing]?”
Maybe the most promising angle is to show that it’s normatively relevant that our beliefs about the more distant moral patients are (qualitatively?) less grounded in good reasons (see Clifton).
To clarify, the context of the quoted remark was that, just as we can care for those we love in the face of cluelessness, we can likewise care for and benefit strangers.
Specifically in relation to this:
I think the “other values we hold dear” can and should also include a strong focus on helping strangers as well, even if challenges from cluelessness and the like were to prove devastating to standard versions of consequentialism. I mostly responded to what I saw as an overly exclusive focus on those we love versus others.
I’m not sure about this, though. As I wrote in a previous comment:
The concern I’ve tried to convey in our discussion so far is: Insofar as our moral reasons for action are grounded in “this thing out there in the world is horrible, and should be prevented wherever/whenever it is [or whoever causes it]”, then shining the spotlight of our active altruism on beings who happen to be salient/near to us is arbitrary. To me, active “altruism” per se[1] is pretty inextricable from anti-arbitrariness.
And I’m saying, suppose for a moment we’re no longer trying to be actively altruistic, and instead consider normative reasons that aren’t grounded in the above. Then, prioritizing those whom you actually have special relationships with isn’t arbitrary in the relevant sense. Because those relationships give you a reason to prioritize them. (Of course, if we started from an impartial altruistic perspective, this reason would be dwarfed by our duty to reduce large-scale suffering overall, insofar as that’s tractable! But the worry is that it’s not.)
Is your position something like, “We also have special relationships with strangers who are near to us”? I might be sympathetic to that, but it seems like it needs more unpacking.
Like I said, I do share the LAR intuition in some limited contexts, and it would be pretty sad if there’s no non-arbitrary way to make sense of active altruism at all. I find this situation unsettling. But I currently feel confused as to how much I honestly endorse LAR.
As opposed to deontological(-ish) prohibitions against harming strangers.
Thanks for writing this, Anthony!
I find myself wondering what counts as “speculative” vs not. Here are some guesses at sufficient conditions for speculativeness:
An effect is speculative if it is highly sensitive to:
Physical or metaphysical assumptions that are themselves speculative
E.g., theories of cosmology, solutions to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, theories of consciousness
Facts about the world / mechanisms we’re presently unaware of
E.g., improvements to SOTA AI architectures and training methods, entirely new mechanisms for extinction, facts challenging our current understanding of macroeconomics, biology, etc
I’m also very interested in this question, because it isn’t obvious to me where to draw the line in fields like wild animal welfare. I think I know as little about nematode sentience + welfare, for example, as I do about possible far future beings.
Maybe one difference is that it at least feels possible in theory to get more information about nematodes, but not really possible to get more information about far future beings? Although I’m skeptical of my intuitions here, since maybe it’s easier than I think to get information about far future beings and harder than I think to get information about nematode sentience.
I’d be curious to hear more about this. What are the robust-seeming arguments?
The “lower meat production” ⇒ “higher net primary productivity” ⇒ “higher wild animal suffering” connection seems robust to me. Or not that much less robust than the intended benefit, at least.
This might not be the place for a discussion of this, but I personally don’t feel that the “robustness” of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the “robustness” of the idea that factory farms contain a crazy amount of suffering.
In the first instance, the specific chain of arrows above seems quite speculative, since we really have no idea how land use would change in a world with no factory farming. Are we that confident net primary productivity will increase? I’m aware there are good arguments for it, but I’d be surprised if someone couldn’t come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I don’t think that’s a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? You’d need to show that wild+farmed animal welfare on post-factory farmed land uses is lower than wild+farmed animal welfare on current land uses, and that seems very sensitive to specific claims about moral weights, weights between types of suffering, empirical information about wild animal quality of life, what it means for a life to be net-negative, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by robustness? I’ve just finished reading your unawareness sequence and mostly feel clueless about everything, including what it could mean for a reasoning chain to be robust.
Sorry this wasn’t clear! I wasn’t thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didn’t mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that they’re large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of “robustness” vs “speculativeness”.)