Why Not EA? [paper draft]

On page 27, you clarify that many concepts in the article are not core to EA, but are "specific ideas contingently associated with EA, such as earning to give and life-affirming longtermism" that could be rejected "while still embracing the core of effective altruism." I think it would be helpful to distinguish core commitments from non-core issues early on the article.

I would also consider toning down some of the strong rhetorical claims, like "every decent person." You'd need much more space to cover every potential objection to EA's philosophical underpinnings and potentially be able to substantiate this claim to that level of confidence. Moreover, the reader knows they are reading a journal volume on philosophical issues in EA, which implies that the journal editors at least think there are plausible philosophical criticisms. Likely the reader knows that other contributors have identified what they think are substantial philosophical problems, and some EA principles do not align with the assumptions a reader new to EA likely has. 

All that is to say that I think a tone of "core concepts are obviously right, and no decent person would argue otherwise" would lead most neutral readers to conclude (1) that you're setting up strawmen, or (2) that you're defining the "core ideas" broadly enough to almost be truisms, leaving a lot of the heavy lifting to be done by unclearly-defined "details of implementation."

I think this paper is weak from the outset in similar ways to the entire philosophical project of EA overall. You start with the definition of EA as "the project of trying to find the best ways of helping others, and putting them into practice". In that definition "the best" means "the most effective", which is one of the ways in which EA arguments rhetorically load the dice. If I don't agree that the most effective way to help people (under EA definitions) is always and necessarily the best way to help people, then the whole paper is weakened. Essentially, one ends up preaching to the choir - which is fine if that's what one wants to do, of course.

I take issue with a number of the arguments in the paper, but I have no desire to respond to the entire thing. However I will focus on the part of the Moral Prioritisation section that quotes Mark Goldring of Oxfam - not because I'm a fan of him or Oxfam, which I am not, but because your misinterpretation of his position is quite illustrative. You claim that "Goldring seems to be implying that so long as we help some children in each country, it does not matter how many children we end up abandoning", but this is not the argument or an implication of the argument.

First, Goldring is referring to Oxfam's country portfolio rather than a specific group of children, and he obviously believed that applying EA principles to Oxfam's portfolio would require the organisation simply to cease working in South Sudan because the cost of getting children into education is higher in South Sudan than e.g. Bangladesh. It seems to me that his belief was correct, and that it is morally unjustifiable to abandon the people of South Sudan because somebody sitting in a comfortable office somewhere has done some calculations and decided that those people are not worth it.

You may object to my characterisation of EA in this way, but as far as I can tell that is the fundamental argument. Oxfam claims to, tries to and perhaps even does operate on the basis of need, and the need of children in South Sudan is at least equal to the need of children in Bangladesh. In fact it might be greater, since as Goldring points out, the barriers to school attendance are high in South Sudan compared to Bangladesh. This also highlights (to me, at least) that these situations are sufficiently complex that the type of utilitarian calculus applied by EA is largely self-defeating in many real-world attempts to help people.

Anticipating the downvotes, hoping for discussion.

Any chance we can have a google doc version to read/comment on?

"Unless critics seriously want billionaires to deliberately try to do less good rather than more, it's hard to make sense of their opposing EA principles on the basis of how they apply to billionaires."

I don't think the only alternative to wanting billionaires to actively try to do good is that you would be arguing for the obviously foolish idea that they should be trying to do less good. There might be many reasons you would not want to promote the ideas of billionaires 'doing more good'. E.g., you believe they have an inordinate amount of power and in actively trying to do good they will ultimately do harm, either by misalignment or mistakes in EA's ideas of what would do good, even if the person remains aligned (a particular problem when people have certain magnitudes of money/influence that is not such an issue when people have less power/influence, where the damage will be less). You may also just not want to draw such powerful people's attention to the orders of magnitude more influence they could have.

I think in your statement you are arguing that the possible effect on billionaires is not an argument against EA principles per se and on that I'd agree, but in my view that reasonable side of the argument loses force when paired with what seems like a silly statement, that people would be arguing something that no person would argue.

Actually, on reading the passage you quote Goldring again I think you have been uncharitable to him. The passage says 'Goldring says it would be wrong to apply the EA philosophy to all of Oxfam’s programmes because it could mean excluding people who most need the charity’s help.'

That could be read as expressing not the idea that more people in total get abandoned on EA views, which is indeed confused, but rather the (fairly philosophically mainstream!) prioritarian idea that all things being equal it is better to help people the worse off they currently are. That is the claim is "don't abandon the worst off to help more in all cases, because the worst off have priority', not some confused claim that you help more people by distributing help more evenly across countries. 

I think the claim that your view doesn't license replaceability because it prioritizes currently existing people is a bit misleading. Unless the priority is infinite, there is presumably some level of well-being at which you swap (i.e. kill) all current people for a population with higher well-being at the same size. 'Oh, but not if they're just a little higher' doesn't seem that comforting. Of course, as you say in a footnote, you can appeal to side constraints here, but if you think side constraints can be overridden when the stakes are high enough (i.e. for example, it's right to kill 1 innocent to save a billion) then again, that just pushes up how well the people replacing us have to be doing before replacement becomes mandatory, rather than getting ride of replaceability altogether. 

Thanks for writing this! My sense from talking to non-EAs about longtermism is that most buy into asymmetric views of population ethics. I'm not sure what you say here will be very reassuring to them:

"Longtermism is a big tent, and includes room for “asymmetric” views of population ethics on which additional miserable lives are bad, but additional happy lives are not good but merely neutral. Such views still imply that we should be concerned about the risk of dystopian futures containing immense suffering (or “S-risks”). If there is a non-trivial chance of such S-risks eventuating, reducing these risks should plausibly be a key moral priority: astronomical suffering is not something to be viewed lightly, on any account."

If you only care about S-risks, not X-risks, and still want to get longtermism, you need to think that the level of suffering in the future could be much greater than the level of suffering at present, such that our diminished ability to prevent future suffering is offset by the scale of that suffering. In other words, if you think that there is already astronomical suffering in the world, due to, e.g., the tens of billions of factory-farmed animals living lives full of suffering, then you have to think that there is a "non-trivial" chance of a far more dystopian future in order to be a longtermist. It's pretty understandable to me why these people would think that we should work on fixing the dystopia we're already in rather than working to prevent a theoretically worse dystopia. I would probably tweak the language in the above paragraph to acknowledge that.

Separately, I didn't read the whole paper, so maybe you say this somewhere, but it might be worth mentioning that you don't need longtermism to think that many of the "longtermist" things EAs are working on (e.g., preventing pandemics; reducing AI risk) are worth working on.

Thanks again for writing this!

In this paper, I’ve argued that there are no good intellectual critiques of effective altruist principles. We should all agree that the latter are straightforwardly correct. But it’s always possible that true claims might be used to ill effect in the world. Many objections to effective altruism, such as the charge that it provides “moral cover” to the wealthy, may best be understood in these political terms.

I don’t think philosophers have any special expertise in adjudicating such empirical disagreements, so will not attempt to do so here. I’ll just note two general reasons for being wary of such politicized objections to moral claims.

First, I think we should have a strong default presumption in favour of truth and transparency. While it’s always conceivable that esotericism or “noble lies” could be justified, we should generally be very skeptical that lying about morality would actually be for the best. In this particular case, it seems especially implausible that discouraging people from trying to do good effectively is a good idea. I can’t rule it out—it’s a logical possibility—but it sure would be surprising. So there’s a high bar for allowing political judgments to override intellectual ones.

This is pretty uncharitable. Someone somewhere has probably sincerely argued for claiming helping people is bad on the grounds that doing so helps people, but "political" critics of EA are critics of EA, the particular subculture/professional network/cluster of organizations that exists right now, not "EA principles". This is somewhat obscured by the fact that the loudest and best-networked ones come from "low decoupling" intellectual cultures, and often don't take talk of principles qua principles seriously enough to bother indicating that they're talking about something else - but it's not obscure to them, and they're not going to give you any partial credit here. 

Hey Richard!

Big fan of Good Thoughts :)

I'd love to edit/help! Is there a rough date that you'd want edits by?

~ Saul Munn