Can Political Theory be a consequentialist response to Cluelessness?

[Sarah Weiler]

This essay was inspired by the Effective Altruism Forum’s Cluelessness Critiques Competition^[1]. It is not an entry to this competition. I decided during the drafting phase that my response is better described as a tentative direction for further exploration than a committed argument, which is why I post it as a contribution to discussions around cluelessness alongside the competition but not as an entry to it.

In a nutshell

What I want to explore in this essay is whether approaches in the tradition of Political Theory can and should be action-guiding for a consequentialist who accepts the challenge of cluelessness as described and discussed in Di Giovanni’s sequence.

By “political theory”, I mean those traditions of thought that grapple with questions about how we organise our communities, how we decide to live together, and how we act on collective problems/​goals. This includes questions about the institutions, laws, and social arrangements we use to organise our co-existence. It can also include questions around how we want to relate to one another, how we want to treat the people in our communities, and how we define those communities in the first place.

This version of political theory, as far as I understand, is often seen as an alternative to consequentialist ethics. My reading, however, is that as a consequentialist I have reason to care about questions of political theory: the kinds of communities we build (and maintain) have morally relevant effects on the welfare and flourishing we can enable. A community in which respect is widely extended and mutually expected, for instance, strikes me as more enabling than one in which respect is scarce: enabling flourishing in the present because each individual is treated with decency, but maybe also increasing our chance of greater flourishing in the future because respect-preserving communities are better placed to detect and prevent moral atrocities before (or as) they happen.

Questions within political theory are thus centrally about the conditions under which good outcomes become more available and terrible ones harder to reach. I believe (but am not sure) that we can be less clueless about which conditions those are and how to establish them than we can be about the kinds of longtermist interventions that Di Giovanni challenges in his sequence.

Why I think political theory may allow us to have some clue about large-scale consequences

Di Giovanni himself grants that unawareness isn’t decision-relevant at scales where we have (A) some grasp of the mechanisms at work and (B) some inductive evidence of success. His argument is that impartial altruism operates at a scale where we have neither. My hunch is that the questions of political theory may allow us to retain actionable care for longtermist concerns, without moving into territories where A and B are no longer available. Two reasons why they might:

1. We get some meaningful feedback. Our intuitions about what makes communities resilient, stable, and conducive to flourishing are not wholly unchecked by experience. We all live in communities, often several communities at the same time, and we can use our experiences in those communities to test and improve intuitions about what makes them “go well” (i.e., makes them into spaces that allow wellbeing to flourish and reasonable decisions to be made).

2. We have some historical evidence. There are large grey areas where the historical evidence cannot be a conclusive arbiter between competing visions of political community. But historical evidence does give us some meaningful insights into how different arrangements play out (for instance, historical evidence suggests that large concentrations of power in the hands of individual leaders carry a large risk of catastrophic failure).

That said, a lot of uncertainty and unawareness remains. Judgements about how we should live together are underdetermined by the evidence. The reason why I see potential value in the political theory direction is that these judgements can be well-reasoned, tested against relevant intuitions and historical evidence, honed in deliberation with others (who can offer slightly different intuitions and/​or readings of the historical evidence, making us less unaware collectively than we would be individually), and they can be revised when experience pushes back. It seems to me that these considerations push our judgements about how we should live together outside the zone of utter arbitrariness and incomparability.

A note on political neutrality

Basing some of our actions to improve the world on arguments of political theory means giving up a claim to political neutrality. Not in the sense of abandoning the view that much political bickering is dogmatic and epistemically unsatisfactory — I very much want to hold on to a rejection of that kind of bickering. But in the sense of committing to certain beliefs about what kinds of communities we hope to see in the world, and committing to actions that seek to bring these communities about. Committing to such a picture requires a willingness to work towards a way of living together without decisive evidence that this way of living together will play out as planned. I think that, as long as we are honest about our political commitments and our underlying reasons for it, and as long as we remain open-minded to those commitments being challenged, the costs of abandoning political neutrality may well be worth paying (and may, indeed, be the more honest version of what most people committing to any view of how to improve the world effectively are already doing implicitly^[2]).

This is not actually a committed defense of an argument, but rather a plea for others to help me explore the argument

I have not explored political theory as a source of action-guiding insight nearly as far as would be needed to properly make or evaluate the case sketched here. What I’ve offered are traces of a direction, and the argument would need much more work. In particular, I don’t have proper responses to the following questions (yet?):

• Do our intuitions about what kinds of political communities lead to better outcomes, as judged by an impartial altruist, really track reality reliably enough to escape cluelessness?

• Can we really think about political theory as a consequentialist endeavour, or am I doing injustice to both political theorists and ethical consequentialists by trying to bring the two together?

• Can we engage with political theory in a truthseeking, non-dogmatic manner? How do we avoid drifting into political bickering that gets us nowhere?

• Political theory only speaks to one subset of actions for making the world better. How should we think about it in connection to others, such as the kinds of neartermist interventions that we aren’t clueless about and thus want to pursue?

I’d like for this essay to be read as an opening rather than a conclusion. If any of it seems worth pursuing to you, I’d be glad to join forces: reading works of political theory together (incl. identifying relevant publications in the first place), and exploring whether and how we can have truth-seeking conversations about political questions. Relatedly, I’d be very curious to hear from anyone who knows of traditions within EA or consequentialist ethics already saying some version of this!

1. ^

   Though I haven’t been able to engage as deeply as I wanted, the competition did prompt me to think about arguments around Cluelessness in the context of effective altruism /​ consequentialist ethics in a more focused manner than I would otherwise have done. I value that experience and how it has helped me clarify my own thinking and the underlying motivations of some of my actions. Thanks to Toby Tremlett, Will Aldred, and Antonio Di Giovanni for hosting the competition and producing such a well-structured compilation of relevant resources!

2. ^

   I would argue that most interventions, including near-termist interventions, are not apolitical and free from visions of the kinds of community that are desirable either. And I would argue that effective altruism would benefit from making these visions and their underlying assumptions more transparent (to others and to ourselves), devoting time to scrutinising them, and making a serious effort to expose them to critique from genuinely different vantage points. But that is, I think, a different argument and should go into a different post.

[Alex Novikau]

Interesting idea to bring the two together. If we agree that our ability to predict the consequences of our actions is limited and we live in a fundamentally unpredictable world, would it follow that all else equal we should prioritize flexibility, ability to adapt and error correct in response to changing circumstance in our political organisation, which usually means decentralization, pluralism, rule of law and democracy?