The Tiny Flicker of Altruism

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack. 

between status, power, and identity, is there any room for the real thing?

Dan Williams’ 2024 posts on altruism and cynicism struck a chord with me. In the posts, Dan reflects on the basic and, as far as I can tell, well-accepted story of the origins of altruistic sentiment in humans. Glossing over considerable detail: cooperation and trust create gains from trade and social interdependence that improves the genetic fitness of all the individuals concerned, so traits that tend to signal cooperativeness and trustworthiness get favored and altruism is one of those traits. The trouble is that you only get as much altruism as improves your own reproductive success and well… if you only have a thing to the extent there’s something in it for you, you run into some definitional problems with calling that thing altruism.

I interpret Williams as not being too worried about the definitional problem here. The self-interested component of altruism is mostly unconscious; our actual intentions are good. All that’s happening is that in some extreme cases, our altruistic motivation will dry up in ways that we don’t predict or endorse, but since they’re extreme cases, there’s no reason to panic – this is just the cost of doing business. Williams points to the increased rates of divorce when one spouse has an unforeseen financial windfall: their options for spouses dramatically and permanently improved, so they leave their original spouse. Very bad for the original spouse, yes, but these things are rare. This hardly upends the foundations of social trust or the existence of niceness.

The problem is what if way more than just “humans getting along” matters and it matters a lot?

And also, wait, why am I assuming this works out even for just humans? Slavery, colonialism, vast inequality, preventable death, disease…

One part of me wants to appeal to something objective-seeming: the point of view of the universe, what character a dominant species needs to best guide the valenced experience of every experiencer of a life.

But really I want this to be a post about beauty and frailty.

What is Goodness?

Descriptions of Effective Altruism often emphasize what makes EA distinctive – namely its emphasis on scope sensitivity, trade-offs, and expected value. Basically all moral schools of thought do this: define the good as what makes that particular school distinct. But neglected in this is the idea of goodness itself as something fundamental, laudable, and to-be-elevated; the not-explicitly-defined thing by which we judge how strong a particular school of moral thought is. Maybe this is because it’s obvious and not much needs to be said. But when I look around, I don’t see any really compelling descriptions of goodness in the most general sense. It seems people would rather talk about the contours of the thing or competing perspectives on it than spend time dwelling on its common core. I find great value in dwelling on that common core and think it’s actually a more compelling pointer to the core ideas of Effective Altruism than the ITN framework or various facts about the world that feed into that framework.

So what is goodness then? Confronting the question, it quickly feels almost too big to pin down. Altruism, sure, but also honesty, humility, fairness, virtue. Sometimes people throw in love, beauty, and knowledge. Anachronistic conceptions included things like excellence and mastery, but I think we’ve mostly confined those to a separate category and we mean something more purely-moral when we talk about “goodness” now. For me, it’s almost like an emotion: a calm state where I can reflect on the things that would matter to me if I had no fear of failure or fear of coming to harm myself. In that situation, it wouldn’t occur to me to lie or sneer or hoard resources for myself, nor would I suppress my awareness of the pain and needs of others. Likewise, I wouldn’t care about cheap indulgences like loud music, TV, porn, or ice cream.

We all want to be free from harm and fear and material-emotional needs. These personal insecurities claw at our minds with varying intensity across people, but they never fully go away and consistently drive a lot of what we choose to do. There are moments where we can imagine ourselves without them though. In those moments, we can ask ourselves what “really” matters and “who do I want to be?”

For me, the first thing I feel doesn’t have anything to do with scale, tractability, or neglectedness, nor any specific problem the world is facing. It’s actually the distinct absence of the stressful emotions and impulses I associate with protecting myself and getting through the day. I notice their absence so acutely, it stops making sense to me why I feel these things at other times. I start to catch a glimpse of my aspirational self: calm, patient, open, other-oriented, with a low hum of energy that could carry me through a long, challenging task or difficult conversation with levity.

I then want to take this energy and put it towards something – in my case, connecting with people, specifically in a way that makes them feel cared-for and looked-after. If something goes wrong, Matt will be there with the energy and presence of mind to make it go right – reliably, every time, always. For better or worse, this feels paternal to me. I want to know people will be okay no matter what. I want the strength and wisdom to create that security wherever it's needed.

Beyond just righting wrongs and providing security, I want to be a source of energy for others. To see their interests and curiosity and again to be there; to stimulate and support them as they explore new questions and pursue passion projects. Here, I want to be able to really add to someone’s life – to make them feel understood and celebrated for the best and most-important-to-them parts of themselves.

More than energy though, there’s also inspiration. To be the kind of person who others can look at and see the common features of all of our best-selves: the patience, the honesty, the thoughtfulness. Of course people do and will disagree about what’s laudable in practice, but I believe there’s a process to acting the world that almost anyone can recognize as “ah, he’s coming from the right place (even if he’s drawing the wrong conclusion).”^[1]

Spreading Joy

Despite the paternalistic overtones of my vision of the good, I think it’s abstract enough to be reasonably libertarian in practice – people each have their own quite-distinct interests and personalities, they just have good people securing and supporting them in ways that they welcome. Again, some kind of mutual understanding feels very central.

All the same, I feel my preoccupation with goodness flows from a desire for a singular concept that everyone can recognize, find resonance in, and ultimately harmonize around, even if it’s only composed of ideas as abstract as “peace,” “security,” “support,” and “understanding.”

Thinking about the good is also in large-part thinking about evil and wishing for its absence. While I think genuine evil-for-evil’s-sake does exist, I think it’s quite rare.^[2] I think most ways that people do harm come from mistrust and insecurity. “Don’t get taken advantage of;” “defect on others before they defect on you,” etc, etc. At my most optimistic – when I think everyone can actually be persuaded to pursue the good as we’d all recognize it.

The real ambition is not only for everyone to be free from fear, harm, and (the desire for) selfish, defecting behavior, but for the world to be a place where every creature born into it deeply trusts that everyone else is looking out for it – ready to be a mother, father, sibling, close friend or lover the moment you need them to be.

I’m tempted to think the intellectual case for that world revolves around the role of trust in coordination problems. There’s a sense in which life would be enormously better – materially and emotionally – if we could deeply trust everyone not to defect on basic cooperative social norms. It would probably mean a lot more willingness to tolerate perceived unfairness in negotiated outcomes because of your own deep unwillingness to go to the mattress (though hypothetically your counter-party would share this sentiment), but the benefit would be no war, no locks on doors, comparatively tiny police, military, and private security forces, far fewer lawyers and probably myriad defensive systems I’m not thinking of. All that labor and ingenuity and material could be repurposed towards directly joy-bringing products, spaces, and experiences. This paragraph feels almost embarrassingly naïve to write, but you know this is true on the margin: we can just trust more and do less to guard against particular kinds of defection and dedicate more energy towards nice things:

Mere cooperation, though is usually a case of mutual selfish advantage. It’s better for all participants (in many cases) if they each act to grow the collective pie, but only if they can trust that other participants will do the same. Even extreme cases like global security – from asteroids for example – are a more indirect cooperative dilemma. Even though defecting is the winning selfish strategy here,^[3] you only need a tiny bit of altruism to overcome the undesirable equilibrium: someone to say “I’ll protect this place even though I’ll lose relatively more for doing so.”

More goodness-for-goodness’s-sake means more problems like that get solved. We trust that we actually will benefit from doing the right thing – even though we have no way of collecting a direct reward for it – because we know that worlds where ~everyone does the right thing are the only worlds where those benefits exist and everyone includes us.^[4]

So while game theory stuff about cooperation feels like it logically gets you to altruism, you can still contort it into rationally-self-interested behavior.^[5] Genuine goodness – the kind that goes beyond mere coordination and gets you to the world like the one I want – I think only comes to life when we consider our relationship to those who truly can’t give us anything back.

Animals

I’ve been watching these Youtube videos with titles of the form “why it sucks to be born a [insert literally any wild animal here].” What the videos evoke with dead-pan humor(?) is that life for animals whether they’re praying mantises, dolphins, or penguins, is brutally malthusian. Almost every animal is both predator and prey, living against a backdrop of constant scarcity and threat, whether it's from disease, predators, and very often their own species’ brutal social dynamics. There are constant fights and skirmishes with other creatures all battling it out for scarce, digestible energy, which most often comes from the bodies of other freshly killed animals. Wounds are frequent and often don’t fully heal and animals fall behind in their relevant social pecking orders and are abandoned to starve if they’re not eaten first long before they experience anything like growing old.

The natural world birthed this endless war of all against all where each time a species adapted to accumulate energy literally stored in its flesh, the incentive for another creature to adapt to kill and feed on it quickly arose. By our lights, these existences are painful and terrifying throughout. Indeed, animals live in a circumstance not unlike the one we faced not so long ago – disease of course, but also human and non-human predators alike. Brutal and large-scale intra-human social repression is, as we are often reminded, still with us despite a natural gratitude we might feel for its greatly reduced scale in the last century.

I have little doubt that huge numbers of non-human animals are experiencers of lives in a sense we would recognize. They came from the same place we did and they are our cousins in a literal sense. From our own selfish perspective though, their volition is of no use to us. We cannot trade with ants. We can’t trust or strike deals (including implicit ones) with virtually any other non-human species. Concerning ourselves with their interests, security, or welfare will never help us achieve our goals or make our lives selfishly better. Reducing their insecurity or fear or terror or, most realistically, pain – is the purview of altruism alone.

In my last essay, I alluded to the fact that “we all know the vegans are the good guys.” This is the kind of goodness I had in mind: genuinely wishing others well and acting on that wish with firmness and honor independent of your own stake in the matter.

It isn’t the kind of thing I can justify to a skeptic. Sure, there are analogies and calls for consistency, and maybe especially tortured veil of ignorance-type arguments, but none of those are my reason for caring about this. I just think it's beautiful. It’s what I want when I feel like my best self. I like to think others can call up the same sentiments in the same state, but I can only speculate.

I happen to be sort of grandiose and I like to reflect on what I want the totality of existence to look like and push myself to push the world in that direction. Others might just feel the pull to let the fly out the window instead of swatting it or be especially warm with a cashier, but I think they’re seeing what I see – and whatever it is, it is precious. I want more people to spend more time dwelling on it too.

Why it’s so hard to get there

Again, reflecting on our evolutionary history, it’s easy to see we didn’t start with the ability to see goodness of any kind and surely not to rejoice in selflessly loving the helpless. At some not-so-far back point, we were the helpless, even as to each other. Like other animals, we had to take what energy we could from the environment even if that meant causing great suffering.

This only became unnecessary for some humans an evolutionary blink of an eye ago. Minor deceptions and defections in cooperation games of course still abound even among the wealthiest and most enlightened humans.

Genuine self-sacrifice is a pretty niche adaptation to the extent it exists and so it’s quite rare and novel. But we’ve just gotten to a place where we can see the usefulness of deploying so much more of it, and to perhaps go further and break the wheel of inclusive genetic fitness altogether, reaching a point where we can instead think consciously about the world we want to build, unconstrained by the fear and insecurity that drives evil behavior.

Investing in greater goodness is of course a risk. If greater trust and cooperation weren’t vulnerable to being defeated by other strategies, we might already be in my ideal world. And again, I only say “greater” rather than “total” or “complete” because some of these limits are obvious. Gandhi supposedly wanted to negotiate with the Nazis to his last hypothetical breath in the scenario where Hitler conquered India. I don’t think that’s the way to a flourishing world. Given our recent encounter with material abundance though, it seems clear there is so much more we can afford to risk than we could before.

Right now, I think the Effective Altruists are the ones taking this most seriously. Maybe it’s a product of how I think or what happens to intellectually appeal to me, but I think if you reflect on goodness, you feel a certain urgency to understand what’s happening in the world. If you really just care directly about all the actual and potential experiencers of lives you could help and care for, you put aside just-so stories derived from politics or personal narratives about what work might be “your passion” (to the extent you can) and you just try hard to understand the situation these creatures are in. In this frame, you don’t shy away from ideas because they’re strange if they have implications for what it means to make a good world. And of course you’re sensitive to the whole of it: everyone and everything alive today, and all the lives you might affect in the future. Real goodness means being good to all. Not hurting some to help others without staring that decision in the face and feeling the full stakes for the others.

One reason I think EA is so small ties back into the evolutionary tune I’ve been humming. We evolved to live intensely local lives; to care about our immediate kin and maybe tribe and virtually nothing else. Certainly not the non-human animals we subsisted on or the distant generations living in futures we couldn’t imagine. Technology and material abundance have just snapped into human reality. The possibility of goodness in this more expansive sense has only just become possible to see and you would have to care an awful lot about goodness to squint hard enough to notice it and start reflecting on its implications already.

On a concrete level, I see EAs forswearing high (take-home) salaries or more widely celebrated careers to write checks and take up relatively thankless jobs directed to niche issues that have the largest social returns. But again, this might only be possible because of the social abundance humans have already created. EAs are doing less well than they selfishly could, but they’re still comfortable, able to raise children, and arguably the excitement of contributing to a great moral project might leave them selfishly better off on balance.

And therein lies one final rub. Maybe not even many of the EAs are “truly” altruistic. They might just be playing the most attractive social game they think they can win. I initially got into EA myself because I was trying to impress a girl.

But – with the minor caveat of the risk EAs become misguided in what they pursue because they follow these social signals rather than the true call of the good – this is fine. Self-sacrifice and thanklessness are not the ultimate goods, the trust and security and understanding I wrote about above are. There are so few people seeing those and caring for what they see that we shouldn’t be precious about motives or intellectual histories.

There’s something small and fragile here all the same and it’s worth protecting.

1. ^{^}

   This is one of the things that most stood our to me in Scott Alexander’s writing when I discovered it in 2014. It was just very hard to tell a cynical story about how Scott was going about forming or expressing his views. It gave me pause and was probably *the* thing that moved me away from a more reactive, tribal libertarianism I embodied before.

2. ^{^}

   Here, I'm thinking only of moral evil, i.e. ill intent. Natural evil (the capacity-for and experience-of suffering in any being) seems tragically abundant.

3. ^{^}

   don’t contribute to global security, benefit when someone else does

^{^}

I will not detour into evidential decision theory. I will not detour into evidential decision theory. I will not detour into evidential decision theory. I will not detour into evidential decision theory.

^{^}

I will not detour into evidential decision theory. I will not detour into evidential decision theory. I will not detour into evidential decision theory. I will not detour into evidential decision theory.

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