Strategy analyst at Innosight in Boston.
I graduated from Dartmouth College last year with a B.A. in philosophy and have been interested in EA for about 4 years. I currently work for a long-term strategy consultancy. I also have been serving on the Board of Directors of Positive Tracks, a national social change nonprofit, for five years. Within EA, I’m particularly interested in ethical theory and animal welfare.
Hi David, thanks for the reply. I think I just totally disagree that humanity stopped pursuing ambitious goals. Just yesterday, we generated energy with nuclear fusion. We’ve reduced the price of solar cells by over 100x in a few decades. Hundreds of millions of people in China/India/Africa, etc. have been lifted out of extreme poverty. There are thousands of scientists pursuing cures for cancer and dementia. I could go on...
Humanity has trillions of dollars to spend, and it goes big on video games, consumer electronics, and fast food.
But our government doesn’t have trillions of dollars and we have a ton of really important stuff to spend it on. I just think that improving education, closing the racial wealth gap, offering food stamps—heck, even building infrastructure here on earth are far more important. We can do multiple things at once, but we can’t do everything. Every additional spend means something else has to be cut. Space exploration is near the bottom of my list of things I think our govt should spend on.
Hey Brad! I love the idea. I’m late to this comment section and many of my initial reactions were discussed at length. That being said here are a few ideas/questions which haven’t gotten much attention:
You say that very few companies explicitly mention who benefits from their profits, but I think this is changing. More and more products state that their parent companies are woman-owned or Black-owned, etc.. I wonder if there is research about whether this sort of marketing actually drives sales. Regardless, the ubiquity of this sort of marketing is further evidence that this matters to consumers. Moreover, the very fact that CSR/ESG markets (for consulting, marketing, research, etc) are both well over $1B is good evidence for your cause...
Interestingly, I feel like a lot of these products (those that state the identity of their ownership/leadership) are in luxury good markets. Makeup and fashion immediately come to mind. I agree that the “no-brainer” is a viable opportunity to change consumer habits, but you might also consider looking into more price inelastic markets. These markets may be easier to enter (I feel like new fashion brands crop up every day) but your presence might also be more ephemeral compared to CPGs. Taking this further, imagine a new car company like Rivian decided to donate all profits. I’d hypothesize that for a lot of folks that would be the deciding feature to influence a large purchasing decision (like a car).
In the price elastic market I would guess it doesn’t matter much what causes you choose to benefit. As you state, people make these decisions quickly and if they see “all profits to charity”, that will likely be enough. This is probably different in the luxury market because consumers are deliberating longer and it would be nice if the product somehow correlated with the cause.
I just wanted to say it’s really heartening for me to know that there’s so much good work going into aligning intl aid with the priorities of its recipients. As many have noted on this forum in the past few months, the potential for impact here is massive. Thank you!
If innovation really has stalled (which I’m skeptical of in the first place) it’s not because the space race is (mostly) over. There are deeply important issues on Earth for us to solve, and millions of people are innovating towards solutions to them every day. Sure, designing a tele-health or mobile banking system for people living in extreme poverty isn’t as sexy as landing on the moon, but it’s surely innovation. These types of projects may not dominate the news cycle but they represent the beginning of an alignment of research and development with the flourishing of all humans (and animals). Space exploration does not.
You say that we should aim higher than our current massive endeavors (eliminating diseases, expanding clean energy, protecting animal rights and natural habitats). But decades of work has proven that these endeavors are extremely difficult. Every marginal dollar and hour spent on these projects counts. And space exploration distracts from urgent need for innovation in these areas.
Thanks for fleshing this out—that all makes sense to me.
Thanks for the detailed reply to the trauma case. Your delineation between various definitions of personhood are helpful for interrogating my other questions as well.
If it is the case that a “new” welfare subject can be “created” by a traumatic brain injury, then it might well be the case that new welfare subjects are created as one’s life progresses. This implies that, as we age, welfare subjects effectively die and new ones are reborn. However, we don’t worry about this because 1. we can’t prevent it and 2. it’s not clear when this happens / if it ever happens fully (perhaps there is always a hint of one’s old self in one’s new self, so a “new” welfare subject is never truly created).
Given the same argument applies to non-human animals, we could reasonably assume that we can’t prevent this loss and recreation of welfare subjects. Moreover, we would probably come to the same conclusions about the badness of the death of the animals, even if throughout their lives they exist as multiple welfare subjects that we should care about. Where it becomes morally questionable is in considering non-human animals whose lives are worse than not worth living. Then, there should be increased moral concern for factory farmed animals given we accept that: 1. their lives are worse than not worth living; 2. they instantiate different welfare subjects throughout there life and 3. there is something worse about 2 different subjects each suffering for 1 year than 1 subject suffering for 2 years. (Again I don’t think I accept premise 2 or 3 of this conclusion, I just wanted to take the hypothetical to its fullest conclusion.)
Thanks for writing this up! It was helpful to give a concrete example to bolster the argument you made in the last post.
I’m curious if anybody has considered temporality as an element of this question? Some (maybe) relevant questions:
Does my current brain constitute the “same” conscious system as I did when I was 2 years old?
What about somebody who undergoes a traumatic brain injury and becomes a “new person” with regard to personality/memory/learned behaviors?
If congruity/consistency between one’s self(ves) at different life-stages is related to memory, might non-human animals actually have far more conscious (sub)systems over their lifetimes than humans?
What does this imply about death? If some factory-farmed animals have lives that are worse than worth living, do we have even more evidence that they would be better off dying sooner (before they develop more conscious systems/subsystems)?
If these ideas have any amount of credence, how might we possibly quantify this?
I have little background in philosophy of mind, and there’s a good chance your team has already considered/debunked these ideas, but I wanted to throw them out there as food for thought anyway.
Interesting article—thanks for sharing. My main problem with it has to do with the moral psychology piece. You write that:
It’s “disgusting and counterintuitive” for most people to imagine offsetting murder.
and
“Most of us still live in extremely carnist cultures and are bombarded with burger ads and sights of people enjoying meat next to us all the time like it is perfectly harmless.”
In my opinion, these two arguments together make meat offsets a bad idea. People are opposed to murder offsets (no matter how theoretically effectively they may be) because murder feels like a deeply immoral thing to do. However, most people feel that eating meat is not deeply immoral—most people do it every day. I’d imagine folks react the same way to meat offsets as they do to carbon offsets. They think, “well I know I probably shouldn’t eat so much meat / consume so much carbon, but I’m not gonna stop, so this offset makes some sense”. But this is the wrong way to think about eating meat (and perhaps consuming carbon, too, but that’s beside the point). We want people to feel that eating meat is immoral; we want them to feel that it’s a form of killing a sentient being. And the availability of an offset trivializes the consumption.
I’m on board with your consequentialist reasoning here, but I’m worried the availability meat offsets may cause people’s moral opinion on animal ethics to regress.
Okay, I see now. I read that as “one-tenth” not one out of 10.
I’m on board with your lack-of-guardrails argument against utilitarianism. I hope arguments like the one made in this post help to construct them so we don’t end up with another catastrophe.
I disagree that I argue against a strawman. The media’s coverage of Bankman-Fried frequently implies that he used consequentialism to justify his actions. This, in turn, implies that consequentialism endorses fraud so long as you give away your money. Like I said, the arguments in the post are not revolutionary, but I do think they are important.
You give no evidence for your claim that hardcore utilitarians commit 1⁄10 of the “greatest frauds”. I struggle to even engage with this claim because it seems so speculative. But I will say that I agree that utilitarianism has been (incorrectly) used to justify harm. As I stated:
“the EA movement is broadly consequentialist, so we should examine our own theoretical endorsements under a broadly consequentialist framework. If we determine that publicly advocating consequentialism directly causes many people to act immorally “in the name of consequentialism”, we should either 1. change our messaging or 2. stop advocating consequentialism even if it’s still what we truly believe”
Part of my motivation for making this post was helping consequentialists think about our actions—specifically those around the idea of earning to give. In other words, the post is intended to clarify some “ethical guardrails” within a consequentialist framework.
That’s a very fair point—unimaginable is the wrong word. I guess I’ll say I find it curious.
To use a stronger example, suppose a dictator spends all day violating the personal rights of her subjects and by doing so increases overall well-being. I find it curious to believe she’s acting morally. You don’t need to believe in the intrinsic badness of rights violations to hold this point of view. You just have to believe that objective moral truth cannot be fully captured using a single, tidy theory. Moral/ethical life is complex, and I think that even if you are committed to one paradigm, you still ought to occasionally draw from other theories/thinkers to inform your moral/ethical decision making.
This agrees with what you said in your first comment: “We need many other areas of study and theory to guide in specific areas.” As long as this multifaceted approach is at least a small part of your overall theory, I can definitely imagine holding it, even if I don’t agree.
Thanks for the insight. Fortunately, you don’t have to agree with this disclaimer in my post for the rest of the argument to remain sound.
That being said, I find it perfectly reasonable for one’s actions to be primarily (or even almost entirely) guided by consequentialist reasoning. However, I cannot understand never considering reasons stemming from deontology or virtue ethics. For example, it’s impossible for me to imagine condemning a gross rights violation purely based on its consequences without even considering that perhaps violating personal rights has some intrinsic dis-value.
Ecomodernists are more meliorist, while effective altruists are more longtermist.
Admittedly, “meliorism” is a new concept for me, but I’m confused how it is in conflict with longtermism. Aren’t most EA-proposed solutions to longtermist problems based on human technological/social progress?
Anand Giridharadas
Thanks for the post! I agree that identifying those universal maxims or norms seems impossibly difficult given the breadth of humanity’s views on morality. In fact, much of post-Kantian deontological thinking can be described as an attempt to answer the very question you ask in this post. I’m also not a trained philosopher (and I lean more towards consequentialism myself), but I’ll share a few notes that might help:
Most modern non-consequentialists have much more abstract moral/ethical theories than “follow the categorical imperative”. For example, contractualists believe that these norms are only hypothetical and could only be agreed upon universally in an imagined scenario—for Rawls this was the original position. More modern contractualists like Tim Scanlon push this further. Scanlon summarizes his moral theory as: “An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement”. The key word here is “reasonably”. Scanlon pretty much wrote an entire book about what it means to reasonably reject a set of principles. The point is that these more modern deontological theories abstract away from our earthly moral disagreements. Many of them rely on a the existence of an objective moral truth that we can strive to emulate through rational discourse. In this way, it actually doesn’t matter much what people or animals care about or their current moral customs.
Other modern deontologists are more concerned with rights and obligations. In my opinion, these moral theories are too much about what we are barred from doing (don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t violate anyone’s right to privacy, etc.) than what we should do. Regardless, given you believe in the objective existence of these rights, employing them gives a more clear-cut guide to moral action than the categorical imperative alone. These philosophers would use this reasoning to dispute your claim that deontologists are “more likely to ignore what people unlike themselves care about”.
You write that a “deontologist might not draw any repugnant conclusions”. All moral theories have shortcomings, and I think that all draw repugnant conclusions in certain hypothetical situations. In turn, philosophers who defend these theories either explain away the problem, “band-aid” their theory, or bite the bullet. There are a bunch of problems I could mention for deontology, but perhaps the most famous is the Inquiring Murderer problem.
I think it’s worth noting that consequentialism has its fair share of epistemic problems. Determining the well-being or preferences or desires of others, especially when they are halfway around the world, is no easy task. Plus, even if you know what would make others’ lives go better, it’s often difficult to know how to bring about these outcomes.
TLDR: I agree that deontology has serious epistemic problems, and in practice, deontologists might be more prone to ignoring people unlike themselves (because they are far away or because they have different views). However, much work has been done to demystify non-consequentialist theories and make them actionable—it’s just highly complex. In general, I tend to agree with Derek Parfit when he argues that all moral theorists are “climbing the same mountain on different sides” in their search for moral truth.
Yes, exactly. One might even wonder if, because a GiveWell recommendation generates SO much funding, select on the ground charities have conformed to the point that we might consider GiveWell (via their standards/eval criteria) an essential part of their operation model. (I don’t have the info/experience to support this claim—just interesting food for thought...)
You selected three positions that Singer holds that are not radical—this does not make him non-radical. Singer’s views on the moral demandingness of giving and vegetarianism are certainly radical by most standards. Nobody had published these views before The Life You Can Save or Animal Liberation. Whether or not you agree with his views on the killing of severely disabled children, it was also highly radical at the time of publication.
You are ascribing an implicit value-judgment on radicalism, when being a radical is not ceteris paribus a bad thing. I only had two sentences to write this comment, so I couldn’t elaborate, but when I included Singer it was because he’s closely associated with the idea that every dollar spent is a dollar that could be donated, so most spending and ineffectively donating are morally wrong. This is a radical consequentialist view (which I don’t necessarily disagree with btw) that differs greatly from, for example, Giving What We Can’s recommended pledge to give 10% of income.
EA should not be an identity. There is too much disagreement within the movement (this is good!) to consider yourself “an EA”.
I love this piece—super well argued. Your argument applies to virtue ethics too if you replace “RIGHTS” with any virtue claimed to be intrinsically valuable by the virtue ethicist.