I am researching philosophy and EA ideas after a career in finance and real estate. See my website http://jamesaitchison.co.uk
James Aitchison
What books or papers have been most important for Andreas? What books does he recommend that EAs should read?
Thank you for this article, full of nuance.
I think what makes effective altruism unique is that it is trying without preconceptions to work out how to do the most good. Beneficentric people may help neighbours, or civic groups, or charities, or religions, or pressure groups, or political parties, but these different approaches are not ranked by effectiveness.
There have always have been some saints, but it is a new idea to try to be an impartial moral maximiser, working through an information-hungry social movement.
Another advantage from global poverty and health projects is demonstrating clearly the multiplier effect of donations. The base case is a cash transfer to a person with one hundredth of the donor’s income, which should give a one hundred times boost to welfare. From this compelling starting point we can then proceed to argue why in expectation other projects may do even better. We can picture a range of projects from those with good evidence base but returns only a modest multiple above cash transfers (bed nets) to project which could produce higher returns but have limited evidence (charity start ups). Doners may want to fund along this continuum.
I was struck by your paragraph ‘ A wildly successful EA movement could do as much good for the world as almost any other social movement in history. Even if the movement is only marginally successful, if the precepts underlying the movement are somewhat sound, the utility implications are enormous.’
I suspect if EA is to do massive good, this is more likely to come from developing and promoting ideas such as extinction risk reduction that come to be adopted politically, rather than from EA’s direct philanthropy. The biggest wins may come through political channels.
I agree with your arguments against focusing too much on longtermism.
A further addition to the EA quiver would be reading groups to discuss the best books related to EA. As with the Socrates Cafe, discussions could be structured around answering a central question.
Thank you for introducing your site which I am finding very valuable. I am enjoying both your archive of articles and your most recent posts and have subscribed to your newsletter. Thank you also for utilitarianism.net which is great to have as a public resource.
Yes, it is harder to care for distant or statistical people even if it is normatively the right thing to do. We shouldn’t overestimate how much we can do by will power alone, but changing norms may be effective.
A Problem with Motivation
A brilliant article, thank you. My highlight: We are part of a ragtag team of people who try to care about everyone and everything that matters. We are the first true attempt at applied impartial good maximization.
I was interested to see the suggestion that rational discussions of value are cut short by the is-ought gap. This has been an influential view but I have a different angle.
We should acknowledge that normative judgements have a different semantic nature from the factual. When we use normative words such as ‘ought’ and ‘good’ we make judgements relative to ends or other criteria. Factual judgements report on facts in the world, normative judgements report on relations between objects and criteria. Judgements of practical reason, of how we ought to act, are about our means and our ends.
But we can and do reason about both means and ends. Judgements of practical reason range from the certain ‘You ought to turn right to get to the station’ to the unknowable ‘Ought I to take this job for my long-run happiness?’ There are better and worse ends—welfare is clearly more important than grass-counting and there are strong arguments why welfare is a better end than national glory.
Among ends, happiness seems to have a special place. We are creatures with valenced experience and we are directly aware that our own enjoyment is good and our suffering is bad. Reason seems to require us to expand the circle to also consider the enjoyment and suffering of other creatures. If nothing else, extremes of enjoyment and suffering surely matter.
How much should you do ‘off your own bat‘ (to use the British cricket idiom)? Well, most value comes from people working in their roles, or from working with others to create change, but sometimes there are opportunities that would be missed without an individual going out on a limb.