I think this argument is wrong for broadly the reasons that pappubahry lays out below. In particular, I think it’s a mistake to deploy arguments of the form, “the benefit from this altruistic activity that I’m considering are lower than the proportional benefits from donations I’m not currently making, therefore I should not do this activity.”
Ryan does it when he says:
How long would it take to create $2k of value? That’s generally 1-2 weeks of work. So if kidney donation makes you lose more than 1-2 weeks of life, and those weeks constitute funds that you would donate, or voluntary contributions that you would make, then it’s a net negative activity for an effective altruist.
One way I look at it is that I wouldn’t donate a kidney in order to get $2,000 (whether that was to be spent on myself or donated to effective charities), or equivalently, that I am prepared to pay $2,000 to keep my second kidney. This means that, for me at least, donating is dominated by extra donations.
The problem with these comparisons is that they’re totally made up. There’s a potential one-off activity (donating a kidney) which, Thomas argued above, has large benefits to recipients relative to costs to the giver. There’s also a question about how much you donate to charity. Based on the rationales you’re giving here, someone who is happy with the cost/benefit tradeoff of donating a kidney as a one off, but is convinced that it’s not as good cost/benefit as further donations, should actually increase their donations. However, my impression is that that has not been the reaction to these arguments; instead they justify current behavior/levels of altruism. (Toby, Ryan, correct me if I’m wrong here.) But donating a kidney would, according to most parties to the discussion, be net beneficial on its own terms. So the net impact of these arguments is to prevent people from taking positive sum altruistic actions, thereby reducing value.
There are kinds of costs that do mix between these two activities—genuinely foregone wages. And if your foregone wages were large and you decided that you would offset donations rather that consumption or savings with them, it would be perfectly appropriate to conduct this comparison. (Similarly, if the financial risk to future donations were higher, that would also make sense to offset.) But idly speculating about how much you’d have to be paid to do something, while taking the current level of donation as fixed, results in net negative impacts.
I think it’s a problem when the “effective” side of “effective altruism” is used as a argument against the “altruism” side. I should note that Jeff Kaufman and I had this framework argument on his post on this topic a while back on Less Wrong.
“The problem with these comparisons is that they’re totally made up.”
I don’t think this is true. I think Toby has been giving >50% of his funds and works on FHI full-time. I’ve used my savings to implement a career change that I wouldn’t pursue for selfish reasons. So I do think we’re bottlenecked substantially by our available resources at this point, making the comparison legitimate.
I think that it’s good to be a bit softer on people who are partially altruistic though. Dewey has said that effective altruism is what he calls the part of his life where he takes the demandingness of ethics seriously. Jeff Kaufman has written about making a budget for spending on others so one does not go insane about self/other tradeoffs during every visit to the supermarket. Utilitarianism gets roundly criticised for its vulnerability to this objection of ‘demandingness’ and some people find it quite psychologically challenging to (Jess’ recent post here). So I lean toward including people who give only a smaller fraction of themselves to others.
I guess this might be the underlying disagreement. You see this as harmful because it will discourage a beneficial act (even though I don’t think it’s that beneficial, I admit that this is the part that gives me the most pause), whereas on balance, I think the main issue at stake here is our inclusiveness.
There’s a further question of how seriously to take these opportunity cost arguments in general, which I think will be picked up in Katja’s thread on vegetarianism.
To follow up on Alexander’s point a bit, I think applying the charitable benefits standard to non-charity decisions leads to some really weird results. For example, say someone who identifies as an EA chooses to give 10% of her income each year to a GW charity, and she’s choosing employment between being a schoolteacher for $50K a year or a job that’s not especially prosocial that pays $55K a year; say she has no innate preference between them, prefers to make more money all things being equal, and that being a schoolteacher would be worthmore than the $500 donation.
According to the logic Alexander points to about kidney donation, when deciding whether to forgo the $5000 to choose a socially beneficial job, the right calculus is -- 1. does giving up that money do as much good as donating to a GW charity (i.e. saving a life) and 2. if no, EAs shouldn’t do it. That leads to the really weird result, though, of committing EA ideology to rejecting socially positive choices even if they involve fairly small sacrifices (here $5,000).
Let me give one final thought experiment on this point, which can be a variant of the child-drowning-in-the-puddle—let’s say instead of a child drowning, it’s an older woman, and you’re wearing expensive clothing that’ll be ruined. If the EA standard is—don’t do altruistic acts that aren’t of similar value to GW charitable donations—that principle could very well commit you to not saving the older woman, which, again, seems bizarre.
To be clear, that’s not to say that should mean donating a kidney—far from it. Instead considering kidney donation is a way of broadening the options available to EAs beyond giving money.
I think this argument is wrong for broadly the reasons that pappubahry lays out below. In particular, I think it’s a mistake to deploy arguments of the form, “the benefit from this altruistic activity that I’m considering are lower than the proportional benefits from donations I’m not currently making, therefore I should not do this activity.”
Ryan does it when he says:
Toby says:
The problem with these comparisons is that they’re totally made up. There’s a potential one-off activity (donating a kidney) which, Thomas argued above, has large benefits to recipients relative to costs to the giver. There’s also a question about how much you donate to charity. Based on the rationales you’re giving here, someone who is happy with the cost/benefit tradeoff of donating a kidney as a one off, but is convinced that it’s not as good cost/benefit as further donations, should actually increase their donations. However, my impression is that that has not been the reaction to these arguments; instead they justify current behavior/levels of altruism. (Toby, Ryan, correct me if I’m wrong here.) But donating a kidney would, according to most parties to the discussion, be net beneficial on its own terms. So the net impact of these arguments is to prevent people from taking positive sum altruistic actions, thereby reducing value.
There are kinds of costs that do mix between these two activities—genuinely foregone wages. And if your foregone wages were large and you decided that you would offset donations rather that consumption or savings with them, it would be perfectly appropriate to conduct this comparison. (Similarly, if the financial risk to future donations were higher, that would also make sense to offset.) But idly speculating about how much you’d have to be paid to do something, while taking the current level of donation as fixed, results in net negative impacts.
I think it’s a problem when the “effective” side of “effective altruism” is used as a argument against the “altruism” side. I should note that Jeff Kaufman and I had this framework argument on his post on this topic a while back on Less Wrong.
“The problem with these comparisons is that they’re totally made up.” I don’t think this is true. I think Toby has been giving >50% of his funds and works on FHI full-time. I’ve used my savings to implement a career change that I wouldn’t pursue for selfish reasons. So I do think we’re bottlenecked substantially by our available resources at this point, making the comparison legitimate.
I think that it’s good to be a bit softer on people who are partially altruistic though. Dewey has said that effective altruism is what he calls the part of his life where he takes the demandingness of ethics seriously. Jeff Kaufman has written about making a budget for spending on others so one does not go insane about self/other tradeoffs during every visit to the supermarket. Utilitarianism gets roundly criticised for its vulnerability to this objection of ‘demandingness’ and some people find it quite psychologically challenging to (Jess’ recent post here). So I lean toward including people who give only a smaller fraction of themselves to others.
I guess this might be the underlying disagreement. You see this as harmful because it will discourage a beneficial act (even though I don’t think it’s that beneficial, I admit that this is the part that gives me the most pause), whereas on balance, I think the main issue at stake here is our inclusiveness.
There’s a further question of how seriously to take these opportunity cost arguments in general, which I think will be picked up in Katja’s thread on vegetarianism.
To follow up on Alexander’s point a bit, I think applying the charitable benefits standard to non-charity decisions leads to some really weird results. For example, say someone who identifies as an EA chooses to give 10% of her income each year to a GW charity, and she’s choosing employment between being a schoolteacher for $50K a year or a job that’s not especially prosocial that pays $55K a year; say she has no innate preference between them, prefers to make more money all things being equal, and that being a schoolteacher would be worthmore than the $500 donation.
According to the logic Alexander points to about kidney donation, when deciding whether to forgo the $5000 to choose a socially beneficial job, the right calculus is -- 1. does giving up that money do as much good as donating to a GW charity (i.e. saving a life) and 2. if no, EAs shouldn’t do it. That leads to the really weird result, though, of committing EA ideology to rejecting socially positive choices even if they involve fairly small sacrifices (here $5,000).
Let me give one final thought experiment on this point, which can be a variant of the child-drowning-in-the-puddle—let’s say instead of a child drowning, it’s an older woman, and you’re wearing expensive clothing that’ll be ruined. If the EA standard is—don’t do altruistic acts that aren’t of similar value to GW charitable donations—that principle could very well commit you to not saving the older woman, which, again, seems bizarre.
To be clear, that’s not to say that should mean donating a kidney—far from it. Instead considering kidney donation is a way of broadening the options available to EAs beyond giving money.