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 thatâs 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, âtrying to actively do good in some restricted domain is morally right (e.g., virtuous), even when weâre not justified in thinking this will have net-positive consequences[1] according to impartial altruismâ. Letâs call this intuition Local Altruism is Right (LAR). Iâm definitely sympathetic to this. I just think we should be cautious about extending LAR beyond fairly mundane âcommon senseâ cases, especially to longtermist work.
For one, the reason most of us bothered with EA interventions was to do good âon netâ in some sense. We werenât explicitly weighing up all the consequences, of course, but we didnât think we were literally ignoringsome consequences â we took ourselves to be accounting for them with some combination of coarse-grained EV reasoning, heuristics, âsymmetryâ principles, discounting speculative stuff, etc. So itâs 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 ârestricted domainâ isnât too contrived in some sense, rather itâs some natural-seeming category of moral patients or welfare-relevant outcome.
(How we delineate âcontrivedâ vs. ânot contrivedâ is of course rather subjective, which is exactly why Iâm suspicious of LAR as an impartial altruistic principle. Iâm just taking the intuition on its own terms.)
Iâm 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 âspeculativenessâ (see âimplementation robustnessâ).
(âSpeculativenessâ, too, is subjective. And while I definitely find it intuitive that our impacts on more robustly foreseeable moral patients are privileged,[3] I havenât 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 doesnât 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 donât seem more âspeculativeâ, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about).
Trying to prevent digital suffering (even pre-space colonization): All the interventions Iâm aware of are so apparently non-implementation-robust that I donât have the LAR intuition here. Example here.
If we instead said something like âthis intervention is implementation-robust w.r.t. helping some specific subset of digital minds,â that subset feels contrived, so I still wouldnât 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/âright.) As Iâve argued here and here, the interventions EAs have proposed to reduce extinction risk donât 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! Iâm keen to think more about what non-consequentialist altruism under unawareness might look like.
In the definition of LAR, âtrying to actively do goodâ is the key phrase. I find it pretty intuitive that we donât need conditions nearly as strong as (1)+(2) below when weâre asking, âShould you refrain from doing [intuitively evil thing]?â
Maybe the most promising angle is to show that itâs 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 â 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 donât know.
I think the âother values we hold dearâ 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.
Iâm not sure about this, though. As I wrote in a previous comment:
The reasons to do various parochial things, or respect deontological constraints, arenât like this. They arenât grounded in something like âthis thing out there in the world is horrible, and should be prevented wherever/âwhenever it is [or whoever causes it]â.
The concern Iâve tried to convey in our discussion so far is: Insofar as our moral reasons for action are grounded in âthis thing out there in the world is horrible, and should be prevented wherever/âwhenever it is [or whoever causes it]â, then shining the spotlight of our active altruism on beings who happen to be salient/ânear to us is arbitrary. To me, active âaltruismâ per se[1] is pretty inextricable from anti-arbitrariness.
And Iâm saying, suppose for a moment weâre no longer trying to be actively altruistic, and instead consider normative reasons that arenât grounded in the above. Then, prioritizing those whom you actually have special relationships with isnât 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 thatâs tractable! But the worry is that itâs not.)
Is your position something like, âWe also have special relationships with strangers who are near to usâ? 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 thereâs 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 âspeculativeâ 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 /â mechanisms weâre 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
Iâm also very interested in this question, because it isnât 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 Iâm skeptical of my intuitions here, since maybe itâs 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 donât seem more âspeculativeâ, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about)
Iâd be curious to hear more about this. What are the robust-seeming arguments?
The âlower meat productionâ â âhigher net primary productivityâ â âhigher wild animal sufferingâ 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 donât feel that the ârobustnessâ of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the ârobustnessâ 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? Iâm aware there are good arguments for it, but Iâd be surprised if someone couldnât come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I donât think thatâs a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? Youâd 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? Iâve 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 wasnât clear! I wasnât 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 didnât mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that theyâre 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 ârobustnessâ vs âspeculativenessâ.)
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, âtrying to actively do good in some restricted domain is morally right (e.g., virtuous), even when weâre not justified in thinking this will have net-positive consequences[1] according to impartial altruismâ. Letâs call this intuition Local Altruism is Right (LAR). Iâm definitely sympathetic to this. I just think we should be cautious about extending LAR beyond fairly mundane âcommon senseâ cases, especially to longtermist work.
For one, the reason most of us bothered with EA interventions was to do good âon netâ in some sense. We werenât explicitly weighing up all the consequences, of course, but we didnât think we were literally ignoring some consequences â we took ourselves to be accounting for them with some combination of coarse-grained EV reasoning, heuristics, âsymmetryâ principles, discounting speculative stuff, etc. So itâs 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 ârestricted domainâ isnât too contrived in some sense, rather itâs some natural-seeming category of moral patients or welfare-relevant outcome.
(How we delineate âcontrivedâ vs. ânot contrivedâ is of course rather subjective, which is exactly why Iâm suspicious of LAR as an impartial altruistic principle. Iâm just taking the intuition on its own terms.)
Iâm 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 âspeculativenessâ (see âimplementation robustnessâ).
(âSpeculativenessâ, too, is subjective. And while I definitely find it intuitive that our impacts on more robustly foreseeable moral patients are privileged,[3] I havenât 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 doesnât 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 donât seem more âspeculativeâ, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about).
Trying to prevent digital suffering (even pre-space colonization): All the interventions Iâm aware of are so apparently non-implementation-robust that I donât have the LAR intuition here. Example here.
If we instead said something like âthis intervention is implementation-robust w.r.t. helping some specific subset of digital minds,â that subset feels contrived, so I still wouldnât 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/âright.) As Iâve argued here and here, the interventions EAs have proposed to reduce extinction risk donât 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! Iâm keen to think more about what non-consequentialist altruism under unawareness might look like.
I mean to include Cliftonâs Option 3 as a possible operationalization of ânet-positive consequences according to impartial altruismâ.
In the definition of LAR, âtrying to actively do goodâ is the key phrase. I find it pretty intuitive that we donât need conditions nearly as strong as (1)+(2) below when weâre asking, âShould you refrain from doing [intuitively evil thing]?â
Maybe the most promising angle is to show that itâs 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 âother values we hold dearâ 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.
Iâm not sure about this, though. As I wrote in a previous comment:
The concern Iâve tried to convey in our discussion so far is: Insofar as our moral reasons for action are grounded in âthis thing out there in the world is horrible, and should be prevented wherever/âwhenever it is [or whoever causes it]â, then shining the spotlight of our active altruism on beings who happen to be salient/ânear to us is arbitrary. To me, active âaltruismâ per se[1] is pretty inextricable from anti-arbitrariness.
And Iâm saying, suppose for a moment weâre no longer trying to be actively altruistic, and instead consider normative reasons that arenât grounded in the above. Then, prioritizing those whom you actually have special relationships with isnât 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 thatâs tractable! But the worry is that itâs not.)
Is your position something like, âWe also have special relationships with strangers who are near to usâ? 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 thereâs 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 âspeculativeâ 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 /â mechanisms weâre 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
Iâm also very interested in this question, because it isnât 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 Iâm skeptical of my intuitions here, since maybe itâs easier than I think to get information about far future beings and harder than I think to get information about nematode sentience.
Iâd be curious to hear more about this. What are the robust-seeming arguments?
The âlower meat productionâ â âhigher net primary productivityâ â âhigher wild animal sufferingâ 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 donât feel that the ârobustnessâ of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the ârobustnessâ 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? Iâm aware there are good arguments for it, but Iâd be surprised if someone couldnât come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I donât think thatâs a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? Youâd 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? Iâve 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 wasnât clear! I wasnât 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 didnât mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that theyâre 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 ârobustnessâ vs âspeculativenessâ.)