I think there are several different activities that people call “impact attribution”, and they differ in important ways that can lead to problems like the ones outlined in this post. For example:
if I take action A instead of action B, then the world will be X better off,
I morally “deserve credit” in the amount of X for the fact that I took action A instead of B.
I think the fact that any action relies enormously on context, and on other people’s previous actions, and so on, is a strong challenge to the second point, but I’d argue it’s the first point that should actually influence my decision-making. If other people have already done a lot of work towards a goal, but I have the opportunity to take an action that changes whether their work succeeds or fails, then for sure I shouldn’t get moral credit for the entire project, but when asking questions like “should I take this action or some other?” or “what kinds of costs should I be willing to bear to ensure this happens?”, I should be using the full difference between success and failure as my benchmark. (That said, if “failure” means “someone else has to take this action instead” rather than “it’s as if none of the work was done”, the benchmark should be comparing with that instead, so you need to ensure you are comparing the most realistic alternative scenarios you can.)
I mostly-disagree with this on pragmatic grounds. I agree that that’s the right approach to take on the first point if/when you have full information about what’s going on. But in practice you essentially never have proper information on what everyone else’s counterfactuals would look like according to different actions you could take.
If everyone thinks in terms of something like “approximate shares of moral credit”, then this can help in coordinating to avoid situations where a lot of people work on a project because it seems worth it on marginal impact, but it would have been better if they’d all done something different. Doing this properly might mean impact markets (where the “market” part works as a mechanism for distributing cognition, so that each market participant is responsible for thinking through their own alternative options, and feeding that information into the system via their willingness to do work for different amounts of pay), but I think that you can get some rough approximation to the benefits of impact markets without actual markets by having people do the things they would have done with markets—and in this context, that means paying attention to the share of credit different parties would get.
Is it at least fair to say that in situations where the other main actors aren’t explicitly coordinating with you and aren’t aware of your efforts (and, to an approximation, weren’t expecting your efforts and won’t react to them), you should be thinking more like I suggested?
Thank you for writing this piece, Sarah! I think the difference stated above between: A) counterfactual impact of an action, or a person; B) moral praise-worthiness is important.
You might say that individual actions, or lives have large differences in impact, but remain sceptical of the idea of (intrinsic) moral desert/merit – because individuals’ actions are conditioned by prior causes. Your post reminded me a lot of Michael Sandel’s book, The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel takes issue with the attitude of “winners” within contemporary meritocracy who see themselves as deserving of their success. This seems similar to your concerns about hubris amongst “high-impact individuals” .
I think there are several different activities that people call “impact attribution”, and they differ in important ways that can lead to problems like the ones outlined in this post. For example:
if I take action A instead of action B, then the world will be X better off,
I morally “deserve credit” in the amount of X for the fact that I took action A instead of B.
I think the fact that any action relies enormously on context, and on other people’s previous actions, and so on, is a strong challenge to the second point, but I’d argue it’s the first point that should actually influence my decision-making. If other people have already done a lot of work towards a goal, but I have the opportunity to take an action that changes whether their work succeeds or fails, then for sure I shouldn’t get moral credit for the entire project, but when asking questions like “should I take this action or some other?” or “what kinds of costs should I be willing to bear to ensure this happens?”, I should be using the full difference between success and failure as my benchmark. (That said, if “failure” means “someone else has to take this action instead” rather than “it’s as if none of the work was done”, the benchmark should be comparing with that instead, so you need to ensure you are comparing the most realistic alternative scenarios you can.)
I mostly-disagree with this on pragmatic grounds. I agree that that’s the right approach to take on the first point if/when you have full information about what’s going on. But in practice you essentially never have proper information on what everyone else’s counterfactuals would look like according to different actions you could take.
If everyone thinks in terms of something like “approximate shares of moral credit”, then this can help in coordinating to avoid situations where a lot of people work on a project because it seems worth it on marginal impact, but it would have been better if they’d all done something different. Doing this properly might mean impact markets (where the “market” part works as a mechanism for distributing cognition, so that each market participant is responsible for thinking through their own alternative options, and feeding that information into the system via their willingness to do work for different amounts of pay), but I think that you can get some rough approximation to the benefits of impact markets without actual markets by having people do the things they would have done with markets—and in this context, that means paying attention to the share of credit different parties would get.
Is it at least fair to say that in situations where the other main actors aren’t explicitly coordinating with you and aren’t aware of your efforts (and, to an approximation, weren’t expecting your efforts and won’t react to them), you should be thinking more like I suggested?
I think maybe yes? But I’m a bit worried that “won’t react to them” is actually doing a lot of work.
We could chat about more a concrete example that you think fits this description, if you like.
Thank you for writing this piece, Sarah! I think the difference stated above between: A) counterfactual impact of an action, or a person; B) moral praise-worthiness is important.
You might say that individual actions, or lives have large differences in impact, but remain sceptical of the idea of (intrinsic) moral desert/merit – because individuals’ actions are conditioned by prior causes. Your post reminded me a lot of Michael Sandel’s book, The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel takes issue with the attitude of “winners” within contemporary meritocracy who see themselves as deserving of their success. This seems similar to your concerns about hubris amongst “high-impact individuals” .