Podcaster and Blogger—strong believer in effective altruism and have taken the giving pledge.
My weekly blog and podcast at nonzerosum.games is a world-help site of sorts—focussing on win-win games as essential to facing global issues. I explore game-theoretical approaches to real world issues in an accessible way, using illustrations, simulations and badly drawn graphs.
Thanks Toby :)
I’m not sure that’s how time works, I don’t see that scaling makes any difference.
If wealth-building wasn’t just wealth-hoarding (which is the most lucrative way of wealth building that we have at present—see Thomas Piketty r>g) this might be a worthwhile approach—thinking about who is a better steward of the investment (I think an excess of paternalism might be playing a part in this assessment) but wealth-hoarding results in greater inequality, which is what we’re trying to avoid, surely, with charitable giving.
I agree though that there is probably a sweet-spot.
I think the logic of the article is assuming the your money accrues compound interest only if you hold on to it. But if you give that money to someone else, they too can put it in the bank and accrue interest, the fact that they do something different with it (like staying alive) suggests there is something more valuable in that choice. Before putting money in the bank we often invest in ourselves, like paying for a tertiary education for instance, and that itself pays off more than that money would in the bank. The same logic stands for the person someone donates to. For instance I’m currently paying for a friend’s daughter in Africa to go through medical school, that’s costing me money now that will result in her supporting her wider family for an entire generation before I die. Their family might be self-sufficient by that time.
I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction between this situation on an individual level or a population level. If everyone gives at death, then a huge amount of money that could have been given earlier and could have accrued out-weighed benefits for the recipients stays with the wealthy, and those potential recipients die or fail to benefit from having the money earlier.
It seems obvious on the face of it that saving until you die will leave you the most to give to charity. But this discounts the benefits of having that money earlier for the recipient.
Thank for hearing me. Now that I see your approach is not as hard-line as it seemed to be, I largely agree with your concerns and hopes for the future. I think many of the texts that discuss consequentialism generally do so by straw-manning a very short-term, limited view of consequentialism, and so I’m not surprised that texts you’ve read on the subject have given you this impression of it.
Playing out those situations for longer or involving more variables generally aligns utilitarianism with our more liberal moral intuitions. For instance the “solution” to the illegal immigration problem omits the entire point of seeking refuge from a country to begin with, that those refugees are hoping for a better life, solving the problem of illegal immigration bars all those people from seeking a better life, intuitively we know this reduces their well-being, and so part of what is so wrong about the solution is this unspoken part of it, which is quantifiable in utilitarian terms.
It’s also important to consider why anti-immigration proponents want to keep those people out—out of a fear that those others don’t share our values, and so “protecting our values” which is seen as a virtue by many (not me), plays a role in this unsavoury situation.
But as I say in the post, this playing out of the calculus to cover every possibility is not feasible in general, so virtues, or behavioural rules of thumb that generally result in positive outcomes is more practicable. And as I said in the comment, virtue ethics is also a better way to judge character.
I think EA has some major problems especially when it gets into long-termism, and measuring extreme threats that are extremely unlikely against sure threats that are measurably bad.
Okay so, writing this:
Do you think that we can culturally evolve to not need any behavioural guard-rails?
Does not mean I...
believe that moral evolution has stopped right at the customs of your time
If I said “to not need the guard rails we have at the moment” then you would have a point, but the word “any” means any level of guard rails down to anything above zero.
I’m just going to clarify, I am putting forward an inclusive position that says there can be value in the different perspectives (how much value each has can be anything above zero). You are putting forward an exclusive position that says virtue ethics is the only morally relevant position—therefore you must show that consequentialist calculus or deontology has zero benefit. So, all I have to do is show that any level of guard rails are necessary (anything down to zero) for the deontological part of this inclusive position, and all I have to show is that a consequentialist calculus is in any way useful for deriving virtues.
So, please don’t strawman the position by stating that I have claimed more than I am claiming.
And in terms of showing that a consequentialist calculus is useful in validating virtue ethics, you’ve done it yourself. Comparing a virtue ethics approach to a utilitarian approach:
Twenty thousand altruists can save quite a few people from malaria in Africa, but a rational social movement for moral improvement that has an emotional impact on its members in a similar way to how compassionate religions have done so far could reach millions of people.
Why mention the millions of people affected, if consequences aren’t important? You are running a utilitarian calculus here to justify the virtue ethics approach, which is exactly what I said utilitarian calculus is useful for.
So, at this point I’ve questioned if moral evolution could reach the point where there is no need for any guard rails at all (not the current level of guard rails we have at present) and have shown that you yourself use utilitarianism in the way I’ve suggested we all do.
I do think there is something to learn from Amish and other plain communities, and I support what you say that it might be productive to research what allows for this sort of harmony without the strictures of the legal system. I recognise the benefits of “copy plus modification” in moral evolution. Though I don’t think the Amish are the first thing people think of when imagining an open and free utopia—my general impression is that the harmony is born out of an effective brainwashing campaign, but I’m open to research that shows the utility of other mechanisms in the Amish community that might be applied to a free society.
Personally I don’t think modern society has exhausted its evolutionary path when we look at global trade and the utilitarian benefits (that can be quantified through the gathering of statistics) of social programs and prison reform that we see in Northern Europe. Modern society isn’t a capitalist monolith, it’s an evolving system with many open paths. If we measure quantifiable results like recidivism in the prison system, the level of extreme poverty in relation to various policies and trade and (meaningful) measures (not GDP) of wellbeing in terms of the welfare state, then we can evolve a system where more people exist in an interdependent relationship, which incentivises harmony in a way that is not coercive but rather mutually beneficial.
We can only do this though by measuring outcomes (consequences) and it might require us to wind back some outdated virtues that keep us following paths that are unproductive: like the value of ‘my personal freedom to bear arms’, or ‘my righteous revenge in the punishment of the wicked’, or ‘my in-group exists in a zero-sum relationship to a given out-group’. These values are held by some people, and acting on the these values is seen by some as virtuous. The only way to learn that they are not virtuous is for someone to show them that acting on those values has negative outcomes—which again, requires a consequentialist argument.
So, I am in no way discounting the central utility of virtue ethics, it is the guide for 90% of my day-to-day behaviour, it is meaningful and practical, and is the best way to judge a person’s character. My daughter actually made a good point the other day that, on an individual level, judging a person by the virtues they exhibit is a much better way of assessing their character than how much good they’ve done in the world through a utilitarian calculus, because people have very different capacities for effecting good in the world. For instance, 10 years ago judging Elon Musk on his utility would have measured him as one of the best people in the world—which has been completely turned on its head over the past 10 years (depending on your opinion of Elon Musk of course). Whereas if you’d judged him on his character—being abusive to workers, jumping from relationship to relationship, calling a volunteer worker a pedo-guy with no supporting evidence to millions of followers, buying a McLaren F1 and crashing it immediately etc—then with that assessment you’d have been much less surprised at his “turn”.
Anyway, just thought I’d add that I agree with you that virtue ethics is important. Please don’t (and this may be an unnecessary pre-emtive request) claim in your reply that I think virtue ethics is somehow irrelevant just because I want to also include other perspectives.
There are effectively laws protecting against cannibalism, as there are laws against murder, and against abuse or desecration of a corpse.
I’m afraid what’s wrong with you is that, like any scholar of the 19th or 18th century, you believe that moral evolution has stopped right at the customs of your time
Where do you get this idea from? I explicitly stated in my comment:
Laws are informed of course by moral evolution, and I advocate for updating rules based on a utilitarian calculus.
I certainly don’t think we’ve arrived at an end-point to moral development, and I also recognise that morals will change depending on what suits our civilisation (if we live in a system that effectively incentivises pro-social behaviour then this will hopefully enable increased freedoms) I’m just saying there’s likely a limit in terms of our instincts, and addressing mental hardware on a biological level has its own ethical questions.
To be clear, I’m not a fan of deontology, and I don’t think it’s useful for deriving values, I think moral actions are largely a function of virtue ethics, but I think that we need some metric by which we measure virtues, and that lies in some form of consequentialism.
However, all these behaviours existed in human cultures of the past, and it wasn’t criminal laws that made them disappear
I don’t see that you have any support for this claim. Laws against cannibalism and child sexual abuse have undoubtedly made those practices less prevalent, that’s how laws work. Laws are informed of course by moral evolution, and I advocate for updating rules based on a utilitarian calculus (unlike traditional deontology that gets these values out of a religious text or other such arbitrary source).
So there is only one valid ethic: virtue ethics
How do you determine what are virtues though? If there is not some consideration of consequences?
Do you think that we can culturally evolve to not need any behavioural guard-rails, given that we are not robots, but rather evolved primates whose instincts were shaped for a much more dangerous environment? I mean, it would be nice to believe that, but I don’t see much evidence for it. Child abusers still exist in societies where cultural norms assume it to be wrong, child abusers largely know that what they are doing is wrong, and understand why, but are never the less compelled to do it—Don’t you think it’s a little naive to think that this can be changed simply by continued cultural evolution?
I’m not understanding the distinction you’re making between the “experience” and the “response.” In my example, there is a needle poking someone’s arm. Someone can experience that in different ways (including feeling more or less pain depending on one’s mindset). That experience is not distinct from a response, it just is a response.
Now you appear to be using a definition of “response” that is synonymous with “experience”. Before you were using “experience” to describe “freaking out” which I would see as a “response” to an “experience” (an action you take after having experienced something). If this is a semantic issue, I don’t need you to subscribe to my definitions, just know these are the definitions I’m using, and hopefully my meaning is clear.
However, in the links I included in my previous comment, I suggested there are people who explicitly reject the view that this is all that matters
I find these explicit rejections unconvincing. People often self-report inaccurately. The tendency to value beauty, for instance, is quite easily reducible to pleasure-seeking. We have biologically induced feelings of pleasure that are associated with beauty, that correlate with evolutionary advantages.
I have challenged you to genuinely try this with a moral tenet you and I would agree on. If you are genuinely interested in trying to understand my point, I think this is the best way for you to understand it.
And again, assuming the experience of pain is inescapable, why does it follow that it is necessarily bad?
The inescapable nature of the experience is not what makes it good or bad, otherwise I would have called it “Inescapable experience” and not stipulated “value-laden”. A neutral value like the click of a finger is still inescapably value-laden, it’s just the value is neutral (zero), and therefore not really relevant when extending into a moral discussion.
I believe I have already provided arguments to support the two questions you’ve asked, but in short:
It is definitionally bad—if pain and suffering was a good experience we would call it pleasure. I think your confusion might be to do with a sense that a “moral” good is necessarily something that is imposed on a person or action, I disagree with this directionality. My point is that “moral” goods are emergent extrapolations derived from inherently good or bad experiences.
This is the foundational claim of the theory, it cannot be proved, but it can be falsified. I’m saying this is a worthwhile framework of understanding that I believe is consistent with reality, and as such might actually be real. But like with any theory, this can only be provisionally verified by numerous examples of where it is consistent, and if it is inconsistent it should be able to be showed to be so.
I’m not asking you to falsify it, you are welcome to try if you want. I would prefer you took the challenge I’ve provided, as this will actually help you understand the proposition. I am offering an explanation and a framework that I think has high utility. Whether you adopt it or not is up to you. You don’t have to falsify it to reject it.
I can see how encouraging this sort of “cause neutrality” might keep people cognisant of particular programs in a given field that is not, in general, highly ranked for effectiveness where nevertheless that particular program is very effective, perhaps?
I haven’t actually observed this issue, the project of EA seems all about beginning neutral and ending up with a hierarchy—if it is swerving away from this approach then that seems antithetical to the general mission.
On a personal note, I generally try to direct my giving towards the least emotive topics (general funds for boring diseases), assuming that there will be an over-supply for more emotive areas.
One of the issues that negates growth in the ethical meat market is that it is essentially competing on two fronts. On one front you have people who don’t consider the ethics of what they’re eating, and on the other end you have people that care so much about animals that they don’t eat animals at all.
This means that the market for ethical meat exists in a narrow band between these two groups, and may always struggle to reach critical mass. If, for instance, the ethical market is 10% but 5% of people are vegan, that’s half your ethical market gone, meaning you lose many economies of scale, and also you lose an opportunity to grow, because the more concerned people become about animal welfare the more people will also become vegan or vegetarian, in one door, out the other. I’m not suggesting of course that vegans should eat meat in order to bolster the market, just that it’s a tricky issue for this reason.
I think the video does a good job of trying to broaden that narrow band, by focusing on animal welfare rather than the body-count of animals. This might be a good approach. I can almost imagine a world where everyone is vegan, but I can much more easily imagine a world where 10% of people are vegan, but where 100% of the meat is ethically grown, which would be an immeasurably better situation than the one we have at present (until of course we consider the environmental impacts). So, although it’s a tricky issue, it’s worth pursuing.
Agreed, creating this sort of selection pressure against foundations less able or less willing to fork out for expensive conferences is likely to bias the conclusions of summit (potentially in exactly the wrong direction)—this gets exacerbated if scholarships are snapped up by unscrupulous organisations.
It is news to me that this isn’t already the case, seems like an obvious positive, both for the potentially higher ratings (not being down-adjusted) and as instructive for the organisations themselves.
This is a beautiful piece of writing, thanks for telling your story and the work you do. I’m reminded of a quote by ZeFrank:
The thoughts that I have in my head that make me feel the most lonely, because I don’t think that anyone else thinks them, are also the thoughts that have the most potential to make me feel connected.
I think this line is especially important:
Speaking as a trained crisis counselor, people on those lines absolutely want to talk to you. You are not a burden.
It must be difficult given the narrow perspective you outline to realise this, but I think it’s really important to understand—not all others are merely transactional, human connection has a value of its own.
Again, lovely, important piece.
Thanks for this, a hadn’t discovered this yet, what great resource (and thorough).
There is probably a self-selection pressure against conservatives in that generally conservatives support individual freedoms over collective cooperation, and all of these projects seem to require some sacrifice of individual freedoms in service of collective goals.
This is just a reality of dealing with long term issues, thinking collectively becomes a priority.
But I agree that actual outreach to conservatives is worthwhile, to avoid an echo chamber—and there may be conservative solutions that have not been fairly considered, after all individual freedoms are a good in themselves and can lead to unexpected benefits collectively too (like the free market in many respects).
I see this as somewhat of an uphill battle though, as I expect self-selection to be the main obstacle for conservatives who might be put off by collectivism, and feel they are already doing their part by contributing to their church. In saying this, I guess the solution would be to acknowledge these realities when designing outreach messaging.
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for your comment. I think you’re conflating “experience” with “response”, I’m speaking specifically about the experience. My daughter, for instance, gets immunotherapy every month, 3 injections, her response to her experience of these injections is pretty chill, and no doubt her actual pain tolerance has increased in a more mechanical way than just her learned behaviour, but she still experiences pain, she is always a little nervous how much each will hurt—she doesn’t get to choose in advance the goodness or badness of the experience, it’s a matter of luck (she can of course choose, or train herself not to react in a way that makes the experience worse, by not tensing her muscle or flinching).
On the other hand, paying attention to a click of the fingers involves no inescapable pain or pleasure, so your sense that it has no inherent moral quality is consistent with my position. The only moral value I can see is if that you’ve potentially stopped the person doing what they would have preferred to continue doing (perhaps concentrating on book or a video game, or sleeping) which might inescapably bring them some small amount of suffering—their reaction is in part up to them (in part automatic) and is only morally relevant in that it might indicate whether you caused them suffering or not.
The same conflation between “experience” and “response” might apply your claim about hedonism. I also see hedonism as a response to the world, a behaviour connoting the short-term, selfish, simplistic pursuit of pleasure. For instance, given this conversation and our previous conversations, a pursuit of pleasure might lead me to avoid this conversation (jk), but actually that would be entirely unsatisfying and feel like an unfinished project. I also think in the long run, I believe that nailing down a moral foundation that is transferrable between humans of different backgrounds is worthwhile pursuit, which, if successful, will help spread greater well-being (in terms derivable from IVLEs). Addressing questions about my position helps me understand it better and equips me for conversations in the future, making the time spent on this response valuable to me. I happen to be a person with plenty of pleasure and happiness in my life, I get greater pleasure now by helping others and thinking about ways to help understand and spread understanding about human nature (that’s why I’m an EA and on this forum). I might, had I not seen the connection to long term pleasure, say I was simply seeking “truth” or “kindness” or “harmony” but my moral values that drive me to these “higher” goods are all derivable from my understanding of my own inescapably value-laden experiences and those of others. And btw, I don’t see their reducibility as diminishing in any way, in fact I see this as strengthening, in the same way that scientifically reducing a phenomenon makes it more understandable, more real, rather than stealing the magic away.
The reason I challenged you to look at a moral value you and I might agree on (you can assume I hold pretty standard moral views, I don’t need to provide a list) and see if you can derive this from IVLEs, is because I see people, invariably taking moral positions that appear to implicitly assume my foundational position. I’m suggesting that making this implicit assumption explicit would make communication and agreement about moral issues clearer and more tractable, which could have profound implications for our ability to cooperate and live in peace. I believe if you try this challenge, you’ll find yourself quite capable of deriving moral values from IVLEs.
Thanks again for your comment, I appreciate your input. By challenging you I’m not meaning to be a pain. In my experience, people can often only fully get a view once they’ve genuinely tried it on. You might still disagree, and that’s fine, I’m just asking you to try it on.
It’s interesting to think of this as a humanitarian arms race in reverse, competition to contribute to international aid has just experienced a massive “disarmament” in the US, allowing the UK “disarm” too. It could also be that Starmer is hoping to placate or disrupt reactionary movements as they inevitably rise in the UK. Ian Bremmer points out that the Europe lags behind the US in terms of these movements.
But it’s all very depressing.
As of the last couple of months, not confident at all. You make good points about progress made in China, and they go some way to balance human rights abuses (but nothing really balances those), but they’re not really the factors that are at play for me. I’m more concerned with the mental stability of the leadership in the US.
I’ve been running into something I think of as “The Narrow Band Dilemma” where a moderate ethical position is fragile because it is in a battle on two fronts between a popular more pure ethical position and a popular unethical or a-moral position.
The first example is ethically produced meat / free-range farming, where a slightly more expensive product tries to find a market that loses patrons on both sides, either people who don’t care about where their meat comes from, or care more about the expense than the ethics on the one hand, and the people who forgo meat altogether (vegans / vegetarians) on the other. As messaging successfully advertises the benefits of ethical meat production, it gains market share from one end of the spectrum (the “I care about ethics but can’t justify the additional expense”) but loses them on the other because the heightened awareness of animal cruelty drives ethical meat eaters away from eating meat altogether.
I noticed another example today in moderate Christianity, where it is flanked by fundamentalism and atheism. The more that Christians want to align their beliefs with modern secular ethics (moving away from fundamentalism), the more they are likely to leave the faith altogether.
Now, I’m not actually saying this is a problem, just a phenomenon I’ve noticed, I’m an atheist, so don’t mind if more people come to think as I do, but I’d also like more Christians to be more moderate, but I can see it’s difficult to build critical mass when they exist in a narrow band. I am in the narrow band when it comes to ethical meat, and I have seen how long it has taken for ethical meat products to become ubiquitous and accessible, and truly ethical real meat (lab grown) is still a way off. I imagine, if a much larger market had emerged (without the pressures of the narrow band), it’s possible this could be available already.