Cross-posted from my blog.
You might hear stories of someone who influenced someone else to be vegan or to donate 100 dollars and then claimed to have caused X animal lives to be saved or $100 to be donated, which are very good things indeed. But the person who donated that $100 can also claim responsibility for donating that money, because they were an integral step in the outcome, without which the money wouldn’t have been donated.
But if both parties are claiming full responsibility for causing $100 to be donated, shouldn’t that imply that $200 was donated? So who can claim responsibility here? Are they both equally responsible? Is it reasonable to say that they were both fully responsible after all? Or is it, as many things are in the real world, much more complicated than that? This is important if we, as individuals and organisations interested in maximising impact, are going to be rigorous about measuring the impact of individuals.
A friend once told me a story that poses an ethical riddle. It goes like this:
A married woman had been growing bored. Her husband wasn’t paying her attention anymore, and had stopped treating her well. She started sneaking away at night to go and sleep with other men across the river from her house. There was a bridge but she took the ferry to reduce the risk of being seen. One night, she went across the river but the man whom she had arranged to sleep with didn’t show. She went back to the ferry, but the boat master had heard of what the woman was doing from a friend and didn’t want to ferry her anymore. The woman, desperate, went across the bridge, where a drunken man killed her in a fit of rage. Whose fault was it that the woman died?
Another, more complicated riddle is presented:
There were four men in a military camp in the middle of the desert. Three of them hated the fourth, John, and wanted to kill him, but they wanted it to look like an accident. One day, when it was John’s turn to go on patrol, one of the others took his chance and put poison in John’s water flask. A second soldier, not knowing what the first had done, poured out John’s water and replaced it with sand. The third then came and poked small holes in the bottle so its contents would slowly leak out. When John was halfway through his patrol and looked for a drink, he realised his flask was empty, and he died of thirst. Who killed John?
In safety, there is a concept known as the ‘root cause’. For example, take the Air France Flight 4590 in 2000 which involved a Concorde plane outside Charles de Gaulle International Airport in France. The plane crashed, killing all crew and passengers, and some bystanders on the ground. Was it the crew’s fault? No, because the plane’s engine had caught fire shortly before take-off. So was it the fault of the engine manufacturers?
No, as it was revealed that a tyre had ruptured during take-off which hit the fuel tank, which resulted in the flame. This in turn was caused by a piece of metal found on the runway, which had fallen off of another airplane that day. This led back to the operator who had replaced that particular piece of metal, who had incorrectly installed the piece. This was interpreted as the root and primary cause of the accident.
But even so we can go back further. Someone must have trained this operator – did they do a bad job? Is it the fault of the management of that company for not putting the correct practices in place to eliminate the occurrence of such events? Maybe someone had just upset the operator and he wasn’t thinking straight.
If we go back to our first example and apply the root cause logic, that suggests that the woman died because of her husband. But this is an uncomfortable result, as the one who is most at fault is surely the man who actually killed her. Some might argue that the root cause is really just the drunken man, but it has to be said that all individuals in that story played an integral part in the woman’s death.
It might even be argued that the man was not thinking straight. What if he was drugged through no fault of his own? To be clear here, I don’t mean to imply that each player in this chain of events should be held responsible, or indeed be ‘guilty’, but they did play an unknowing role.
Bringing this all back to the original question, I confess I don’t have an answer. But I’m convinced that the answer isn’t as simple as we think, and if we want to be rigorous about measuring the impact that individuals have through an action or over their life, we should consider this further. At the very least, we should define very clearly what we mean when we say “I/we caused $100 to be donated.”
Looking forward to hearing comments.
This feels like a "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is nearby, does it make a sound?" type debate. "Blame" and "credit" are social constructions, not objective features of reality discoverable through experiment, and in principle we could define them however we wanted.
I think the right perspective here is a behavioral psychology one. Blame & credit are useful constructions insofar as they reinforce (and, counterfactually, motivate) particular behaviors. For example, if Mary receives credit for donating $100, she will feel better about the donation and more motivated to donate in the future--to society's benefit. If Joe makes a good bet in a poker game, but ends up losing the round anyway, and his poker teammates blame him for the loss, he will feel punished for making what was fundamentally a good bet and not make bets like that one in the future--to his team's harm.
So ultimately the question of where to assign credit or blame is highly situation-dependent, and the most important input might be how others will see & learn from how the behavior is regarded. I might blame John's three comrades equally for his death, because they all made an effort to kill him and I want to discourage efforts to kill people equally regardless of whether they happen to work or not. I may even assign all 3 comrades the "full blame" for John's death, because blame, being a social construct, is not a conserved quantity.
Let's take the donating $100 example again. Let's say I can cause an additional $100 worth of donation to Givewell by donating $x to Giving What We Can. Say the EA community assigns me $100 worth of credit for achieving this. If I receive $100 worth of credit for either making or encouraging a donation of $100, then I will be motivated to encourage donation whenever x < 100, and make donations directly whenever x > 100.
This approach would be an efficient outcome for EA. Suppose x = $80; that is, donating $80 to Giving What We Can results in an additional $100 for Givewell. Thus the net effect from my $80 donation is that $100 gets donated to Givewell. But if x = $120 the movement would be better off had I donated $120 to Givewell directly instead of using it to purchase $100 worth of donation.
But there are complicated second-order effects. Suppose the person who donates $100 as a result of my $x donation to Giving What We Can notices that since x < 50, they are best off donating their $100 to Giving What We Can too. Done on a wide scale this has the potential to change the value of x in complicated ways--you could probably figure out the new value of x using some calculus, but it's getting late. There's also the effect of increasing the speed of movement growth, which might be a bad thing, or maybe the person I encourage to donate $100 later learns that I was purchasing credit more efficiently than they were and feels like a sucker. Or maybe people outside the movement notice this "credit inflation" aspect of EA and discount the movement because of this. (Similar to how we discount trophies from sports competitions if every player gets their own "participation trophy".) There's also time value of money--if my $80 donation to GWWC takes 20 years to manifest as $100 more for Givewell, then depending on the rate of return I'd get through investing the $80 I might be better off investing it and donating the resulting capital in 20 years. To decide between this option and direct donation I'd need to know Givewell's discount rate. Etc.
Some interesting points John, and I agree that blame can be manipulated to mean what we want it to mean for a purpose. But - this was more directed at the measurement of impact in EA meta-orgs and individuals. If some EA org claims to have directed $200,000 of donations to effective charities for a spend of $100,000, the cost-benefit ratio would be 1:2. But I'm not convinced that this is the whole picture, and if we're not measuring this type of thing correctly, we could be spending $100,000 to raise only $99,999 counterfactually and not realising it.
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