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.
Neat stuff here—thank you for the thoughtful comment!
I agree that few people believe that their choice of intervention is actually the most useful and that we often lavish praise onto people who do just a lot of good. For example, many people consider characters like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates very praiseworthy because, even though they have private jets, they still do a lot of good.
I also agree that maximization ought not be reveled as an imperative. An imperative to maximize, like thick consequentialism as a moral theory generally, is too demanding. Following this, I struggle to see why we need it at all. Folks who truly want to do a lot of good will still perform optimization calculations even if they aren’t explicitly trying to maximize. This makes maximization neither a normative nor descriptive part of anything we do.
In your example about “the same money could carry you much further towards your goal if you did X”, there is no maximization rhetoric present. If you were using maximization as a “wrong but useful” model, you would likely say something like, “I deduced that the same money could carry you farthest if you did X, so don’t give to community theater and don’t do Y or Z either unless you show me why they’re more effective than X”.
As an analogy, you don’t have to try to be the best philosopher of all time in order to produce great thinking.
Great post—and I agree that it’s too narrow to ever claim that one is simply doing ethics through a singular lens.
Another interesting facet of this: as we make moral theories more complex by “Band-Aiding” their flaws, we end up incorporating aspects of different moral theories. Take rule consequentialism which states that “an act is morally wrong if and only if it is forbidden by rules justified by their consequences” (SEP). In a way, this is a combination of the universal maxim idea from deontology and utilitarianism.
Derek Parfit has been working on this stuff for decades. His three part series On What Matters attempts to combine consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics into a single moral theory he calls “Triple Theory”. Parfit’s Triple Theory is summarized as:
An act is wrong if and only if, or just when, such acts are disallowed by some principle that is:
(1) one of the principles whose being universal laws would make things go best,
(2) one of the only principles whose being universal laws everyone could rationally will....
(3) a principle that no one could reasonably reject. (Clickable link)
In essence, Parfit argues that all moral theorists are “climbing the same mountain on different sides” in their search for objective moral truth.
Great post—I think this is a really important meta-topic within EA that doesn’t get enough airtime. It might also be worth considering the “hidden zero problem” coined by Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears here. The thrust of their argument is that if a charity is funded by the ultra-rich or their foundations, small donations may have measurably 0 impact.
As an example: suppose NGO X wants $10M in funding for 2022. Foundation X has been NGO X’s largest donor for a few years running. If small donors give NGO X $8M in 2022, Foundation X will fully fund it to $10M, but if small donors give $8M, Foundation X will give $1M more and still fully fund it to $10M. This means that some of the small donations did 0 impact other than saving Foundation X some cash.
Of the top of my head, there are a few obvious problems with the hidden-zero problem:
Foundations having more money isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if they give their assets away relatively quickly and effectively.
How are we supposed to know how much a certain real foundation like Open Philanthropy plans to give certain organizations?
Many charities don’t have such cut-and-dried budgets and fundraising goals. E.g., if GiveDirectly gets more money in 2022, it will simply give away more money by expanding the number of recipients and/or its geographical operations.
Regardless, Budolfson and Spears did a lot of fancy math to show the hidden zero problem is worth taking seriously in many cases, especially within EA.
All that being said, it’s not clear to me how the hidden zero problem impacts your claim here. On one hand, if we intentionally diversify funding sources, charities might raises their budgets and demand the same amount from big foundations. However, if these foundations see that more money is coming in from more donors, they might decide the charity/cause is no longer “neglected” and choose to reduce the size of their grant.
Would love to hear thoughts on this from people more deeply entrenched in the grant-making world...
Thanks for the post! Super cool to show why/how this matters more to smaller donors!
I never claimed that the rich are rich because they are frugal. I made the normative claim that the rich ought to be much more frugal, and in order for them to do that, we should praise their frugality as altruism (so long as they donate the money and not pass it down as generational wealth).
I also never claimed that the rich “become poor” through spending. The rich seldom truly become poor, even if they make terrible investments.
I agree with your last point—that’s precisely the kind of argument I am trying to make with this piece: we care far too much about the ultra-wealthy’s virtue signaling and not enough about what they actually do with their money.
I agree that Americans are not more valuable than any other people, but EA orgs like GiveDirectly have made the choice to support impoverished Americans because they are based in the US and can reach them more easily.
Point taken—I suppose my comment was a little oversimplified. I do think that identifying recipients is probably easier in the U.S., but that’s irrelevant considering a poor American lives on $50/day versus $1-2 in Kenya.
I suspect the real reason, which is maybe worth centering in this post, is that the pool of money that people are potentially willing to donate to Americans is a) very large, b) not fungible with money they would otherwise donate to global poverty.
Yes, this is the motivation behind my question. GiveDirectly states that “the additional attention from U.S. work generated $70 million in new donations for our Africa programs from donors who initially only gave to our U.S. COVID-19 response.” In some cases, it may be wise for EA-aligned organizations to funnel some of their interventions “closer to home” for their donors. GiveDirectly was able to spur new funding opportunities by directing some of their revenue to U.S. recipients. Perhaps an org focused on health media campaigns in Africa could better fundraise in the U.S. by touting a the success of an U.S. program. Again, I don’t think U.S.-based interventions are ever as effective as those in poorer nations, but they have the potential to expand the donor base of EA orgs.
Super interesting history here—thanks for sharing this research!
You note at the end that large, multi-focal charities are different because “a lot of their funding goes to running their own programs instead of regranting, though they do some of both”. It’s worth noting that when you give to funds like the GiveWell Unrestricted Fund, you support GiveWell’s operations. In fact, about 2% of GiveWell’s overall spend last year was on internal ops. While 2% is a tiny number compared to organizations like Oxfam or IRC, it’s still worth noting. I am in no way criticizing the $11M GiveWell spent on their operations last year—GiveWell needs this money to offer their services and conduct research.
Another complicating factor is that GiveWell chose last year to begin “rolling over” funds. In practice, this meant that $66M donated to the Top Charities Fund in 2021 did not get donated in 2021. Again, I am not criticizing this decision, but it means that when you give to the fund, your donation is not necessarily immediately directed to an NGO. To your point, the same is/was certainly also true of United Way or the Community Chest. But folks should know that when they give to the Top Charities Fund, they cannot expect their donation to reach the bank account of a charity as quickly as if they had donated directly.
Neither of these factors was mentioned in Giving What We Can’s post as potential reasons against giving to a fund, but in my opinion, GiveWell shouldn’t be reluctant to share these details. I think that if anything, GiveWell explaining their internal ops and roll over funding strategy helps demystify the new EA incarnation of the charitable fund. Instead of billing it as something entirely novel, GiveWell et al. should bill it as a vast improvement on previous efforts to pool and direct charitable donations more effectively.
Oops—I realized I understood this incorrectly and have edited my comment. Thank you for the clarification.
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...)
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.
Anand Giridharadas
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?
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.
Thank you for reading the post and for the helpful comment! I totally agree that “do a lot of good” isn’t particularly unique or sexy a message. As I mentioned in the post, I believe that part of EA’s early appeal was that maximization was so radical and elusive. I do think there is a fairly big difference between the two messages though, especially when it comes to elite donors. Academics like Anand Giridharadas (in Winners Take All) and Rob Reich (in Just Giving) argue that elite philanthropy is often a well-disguised charade to boost the donor’s own power and status. I’m sympathetic to the argument that sometimes, these elites are unaware of the ways in which their giving (e.g. to private schools, religious institutions, the arts, etc.) increase existing inequalities. However, it’s also easy to argue that some of these wealthy individuals are not doing “a lot of good”. I don’t think “do a lot of good” is some magic bullet that will fix billionaire philanthropy, but I also think that it might make it easier to convince elites they need to change their philanthropy (and other actions...) than the rhetoric of maximization.
Great point about 80k Hours. It’s certainly interesting to take a macro-level view of what a large group or whole society could do with respect to cause areas. It reminds me a little bit of trying to reason like a Rawlsian about ideal theory. Our decisions as individuals become incredibly contingent on what other members of the group decide, especially other members with wealth and power. In this ideal world, the “Neglect” area becomes arguably the most important, which seems to take away from the power of EA (because, as you say, our niche is taking on the big things not just the things that nobody is doing). I think we’re in a time when there are tons of Important and Tractable causes which aren’t being altogether neglected but still need more resources. All this is just roundabout way of saying I’m skeptical of both the usefulness and feasibility of trying to take the macro perspective and maximize a group’s impact.
I’m particularly sympathetic to your point about elitism, and part of my motivation for this post was to try to temper that problem within EA. In my conversations with friends about EA, it’s never the idea of maximization that changes their worldview. Instead, they’re usually more interested in the argument that there are big ways to make impact which elite philanthropy largely ignores. If you’re talking with somebody who dedicates her free time volunteering for an org like Make A Wish, maximization is a non-starter, but sewing the seed that there might be additional avenues for impact will at least allow for some discourse.
On your last point, I think that the “everybody just does a little good” world is already the world we live in! I agree that there is serious need to for groups of people to tackle the big things, but in an ideal world, this is what governments do. Just like many nonprofits say, EA’s main goal should be to not need to exist (because institutions are tackling high-ITN goals efficiently).