For example, suppose Victoria hears about EA through GWWC and wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. She makes the pledge and gives $1m to ACE charities, which she wouldn’t have found otherwise (and otherwise would have donated to a non-effective animal charity let’s suppose). Who counterfactually produced the $1m donation benefit: Victoria, GWWC or ACE? Each of them is a necessary condition for the benefit: if Victoria hadn’t acted, then the $1m wouldn’t have been donated; if GWWC hadn’t existed, then the $1m wouldn’t have been donated; and if ACE hadn’t existed then the $1m wouldn’t have been donated effectively. Therefore, Victoria’s counterfactual impact is $1m to effective charities, GWWC’s counterfactual impact is $1m to effective charities, and ACE’s impact is $1m to effective charities.
Apparent paradox: doesn’t this entail that the aggregate counterfactual impact of Victoria, GWWC and ACE is $3m to effective charities? No. When we are assessing the counterfactual impact of Victoria, GWWC and ACE acting together, we now ask a different question to the one we asked above viz. “if Victoria, GWWC and ACE had not acted, what benefit would there have been?”. This is a different question and so gets a different answer: $1m.
A good way of seeing this is to think about a single actor taking three actions. Suppose that you come across a child drowning in a pond. You pull the child out, call emergency services, and perform CPR until an ambulance arrives. While it may be the case that each of your actions saved the child’s life (in the sense that the child would have died if any one of the actions had not been taken), it is certainly not the case that your three actions collectively saved three lives. And if that’s true of three actions taken by a single person, it should also be true of three actions taken by three separate people.
A good way of seeing this is to think about a single actor taking three actions. Suppose that you come across a child drowning in a pond. You pull the child out, call emergency services, and perform CPR until an ambulance arrives. While it may be the case that each of your actions saved the child’s life (in the sense that the child would have died if any one of the actions had not been taken), it is certainly not the case that your three actions collectively saved three lives. And if that’s true of three actions taken by a single person, it should also be true of three actions taken by three separate people.
Great point!