I’m fairly confident the Church does not endorse basing moral decisions on expected value analysis; that says absolutely nothing about the compatibility of Catholicism and EA. For example, someone with an unusually analytical mindset might see participation in the EA movement as one way to bring oneself closer to God through the theological virtue of charity.
Yeah, I don’t think I phrased my comment very clearly.
I was trying to say that, if the Christian conception of heaven/hell exists, then it is highly likely than an objective non-utilitarian morality exists. It shouldn’t be surprising that continuing to use utilitarianism within an otherwise Christian framework yields garbage results! As you say, a Christian can still be an EA, for most relevant definitions of “be an EA”.
You’re right. What I was trying to get at was that I presume Catholics would start with different answers to axiological questions like “what is the most basic good?”. Where I might offer a welfarist answer, the Church might say say “a closeness to God” (I’m not confident in that). Thus, if a Catholic altruist applies the “effective” element of EA reasoning, the way to do the most good in the world might end up looking like aggressive evangelism in order to save the most souls. And that if we’re trying to convince Catholic Priests to encourage the Church use its resources for usual EA interventions, it seems like you’d need to either employ a different set of arguments than those used to convince welfarists/utilitarians or convince them to adopt answer to the question we started with.
Tl;dr the moral framework of most religions is different enough from EA to make this reasoning nonsensical; it’s an adversarial move to try to change religions’ moral framework but there’s potentially scope for religions to adopt EA tools
Like I said in my reply to khorton, this logic seems very strange to me. Surely the veracity of the Christian conception of heaven/hell strongly implies the existence of an objective, non-consequentialist morality? At that point, it’s not clear why “effectively doing the most good” in this manner is a more moral [edit: terminal] goal than “effectively producing the most paperclips”. It’s not surprising that trying to shoehorn Christian ideas into a utilitarian framework is going to produce garbage!
I agree that this implies that EA would have to develop a distinct set of arguments in order to convince priests to hijack the resources of the Church to further the goals of the EA subculture; I also think this is an unnecessarily adversarial move that shouldn’t be under serious consideration.
That doesn’t mean that the ideas and tools of the EA community are inapplicable in principle to Catholic charity, as long as they are situated within a Catholic moral framework. I’m confident that e.g. Catholic Relief Services would rather spend money on interventions like malaria nets rather than interventions like PlayPumps. However, even if the Catholic Church deferred every such decision to a team of top EAs, I don’t think the cumulative impact (under an EA framework) would be high enough to justify the cost of outreach to the Church. I’m not confident of this though; could be an interesting Fermi estimate problem.
(I’ve been trying to make universally applicable arguments, but it feels dishonest at this point not to mention that I am in fact Catholic.)
This is all really interesting, and thank you all for chiming in. Liam, I’m curious—do you adopt EA tools within a Catholic moral framework, or do you practice Catholicism while adopting a different moral framework? I figure your participation in EA is some sort of anecdata.
The answer to your question is basically what I phrased as a hypothetical before:
participation in the EA movement as one way to bring oneself closer to God through the theological virtue of charity.
I was involved in EA at university for 2 years before coming to believe Catholicism is true, and it didn’t seem like Church dogma conflicted with my pro-EA intuitions at all, so I’ve just stayed with it. It helped that I wasn’t ever an EA for rigidly consequentialist reasons; I just wanted to help people and EA’s analytical approach was a natural fit for my existing interests (e.g. LW-style rationality).
I’m not sure my case (becoming both EA and Catholic due to LW-style reasoning) is broadly applicable; I think EA would be better served sticking to traditional recruiting channels rather than trying to extend outreach to religious people qua religious people. Moreover, I feel that it’s very very important for EA to defend the value of taking ideas seriously, which would rule out a lot of the proposed religious outreach strategies you see (such as this post from Ozy).
I’m not sure I understand your objection, but I feel like I should clarify that I’m not endorsing consequentialism as a sort of moral criterion (that is, the thing in virtue of which something is right or wrong) so much as I take the “effective” part of effective altruism to imply using some sort nonmoral consequentialist reasoning. As far as I understand (which isn’t far), a Catholic moral framework would still allow for some sort of moral quantification (that some acts are more good than others or are good to a greater degree), e.g. saints are a thing. If so, then (I think) it seems sensible to say a Catholic could sensibly take the results of a consequentialist reasoning as applied to her own framework as morally motivating reasons to choose one act over another.
My worry is that if that framework holds only one value as most basic, then this consequentialist reasoning might (edit: depending on the value) validly lead to the conclusion that the way to do the most good is something radically different from the things that this subculture tends to endorse, and that this should count towards the concern that this subculture’s actions could produce serious disvalue (edit: disvalue from, say, the moral consequentialist’s point of view).
On the other hand if this framework is some sort of pluralist/virtue system (you mentioned a virtue of charity), then yeah I definitely agree that effective altruism could represent the pursuit of excellence in such a virtue or that “effectiveness” could be interpreted as a way of saying that the altruist is simply addressing what he takes to be his most stringent obligations with regard to his duty of charity. These, though, I think would count as different arguments (i.e. arguments which make sense to Catholics) than those which utilitarians take to give morally motivating reasons.
I’m fairly confident the Church does not endorse basing moral decisions on expected value analysis; that says absolutely nothing about the compatibility of Catholicism and EA. For example, someone with an unusually analytical mindset might see participation in the EA movement as one way to bring oneself closer to God through the theological virtue of charity.
The set of tools EA provides for considering how to help others, and the network/community, could be useful for any altruist.
Utilitarianism is less compatible with Catholicism.
Yeah, I don’t think I phrased my comment very clearly.
I was trying to say that, if the Christian conception of heaven/hell exists, then it is highly likely than an objective non-utilitarian morality exists. It shouldn’t be surprising that continuing to use utilitarianism within an otherwise Christian framework yields garbage results! As you say, a Christian can still be an EA, for most relevant definitions of “be an EA”.
You’re right. What I was trying to get at was that I presume Catholics would start with different answers to axiological questions like “what is the most basic good?”. Where I might offer a welfarist answer, the Church might say say “a closeness to God” (I’m not confident in that). Thus, if a Catholic altruist applies the “effective” element of EA reasoning, the way to do the most good in the world might end up looking like aggressive evangelism in order to save the most souls. And that if we’re trying to convince Catholic Priests to encourage the Church use its resources for usual EA interventions, it seems like you’d need to either employ a different set of arguments than those used to convince welfarists/utilitarians or convince them to adopt answer to the question we started with.
Tl;dr the moral framework of most religions is different enough from EA to make this reasoning nonsensical; it’s an adversarial move to try to change religions’ moral framework but there’s potentially scope for religions to adopt EA tools
Like I said in my reply to khorton, this logic seems very strange to me. Surely the veracity of the Christian conception of heaven/hell strongly implies the existence of an objective, non-consequentialist morality? At that point, it’s not clear why “effectively doing the most good” in this manner is a more moral [edit: terminal] goal than “effectively producing the most paperclips”. It’s not surprising that trying to shoehorn Christian ideas into a utilitarian framework is going to produce garbage!
I agree that this implies that EA would have to develop a distinct set of arguments in order to convince priests to hijack the resources of the Church to further the goals of the EA subculture; I also think this is an unnecessarily adversarial move that shouldn’t be under serious consideration.
That doesn’t mean that the ideas and tools of the EA community are inapplicable in principle to Catholic charity, as long as they are situated within a Catholic moral framework. I’m confident that e.g. Catholic Relief Services would rather spend money on interventions like malaria nets rather than interventions like PlayPumps. However, even if the Catholic Church deferred every such decision to a team of top EAs, I don’t think the cumulative impact (under an EA framework) would be high enough to justify the cost of outreach to the Church. I’m not confident of this though; could be an interesting Fermi estimate problem.
(I’ve been trying to make universally applicable arguments, but it feels dishonest at this point not to mention that I am in fact Catholic.)
This is all really interesting, and thank you all for chiming in. Liam, I’m curious—do you adopt EA tools within a Catholic moral framework, or do you practice Catholicism while adopting a different moral framework? I figure your participation in EA is some sort of anecdata.
The answer to your question is basically what I phrased as a hypothetical before:
I was involved in EA at university for 2 years before coming to believe Catholicism is true, and it didn’t seem like Church dogma conflicted with my pro-EA intuitions at all, so I’ve just stayed with it. It helped that I wasn’t ever an EA for rigidly consequentialist reasons; I just wanted to help people and EA’s analytical approach was a natural fit for my existing interests (e.g. LW-style rationality).
I’m not sure my case (becoming both EA and Catholic due to LW-style reasoning) is broadly applicable; I think EA would be better served sticking to traditional recruiting channels rather than trying to extend outreach to religious people qua religious people. Moreover, I feel that it’s very very important for EA to defend the value of taking ideas seriously, which would rule out a lot of the proposed religious outreach strategies you see (such as this post from Ozy).
I’m not sure I understand your objection, but I feel like I should clarify that I’m not endorsing consequentialism as a sort of moral criterion (that is, the thing in virtue of which something is right or wrong) so much as I take the “effective” part of effective altruism to imply using some sort nonmoral consequentialist reasoning. As far as I understand (which isn’t far), a Catholic moral framework would still allow for some sort of moral quantification (that some acts are more good than others or are good to a greater degree), e.g. saints are a thing. If so, then (I think) it seems sensible to say a Catholic could sensibly take the results of a consequentialist reasoning as applied to her own framework as morally motivating reasons to choose one act over another.
My worry is that if that framework holds only one value as most basic, then this consequentialist reasoning might (edit: depending on the value) validly lead to the conclusion that the way to do the most good is something radically different from the things that this subculture tends to endorse, and that this should count towards the concern that this subculture’s actions could produce serious disvalue (edit: disvalue from, say, the moral consequentialist’s point of view).
On the other hand if this framework is some sort of pluralist/virtue system (you mentioned a virtue of charity), then yeah I definitely agree that effective altruism could represent the pursuit of excellence in such a virtue or that “effectiveness” could be interpreted as a way of saying that the altruist is simply addressing what he takes to be his most stringent obligations with regard to his duty of charity. These, though, I think would count as different arguments (i.e. arguments which make sense to Catholics) than those which utilitarians take to give morally motivating reasons.