Moral Imagination & Effective Altruism

Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.

As examples, he gives:

• Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
• St Gregory of Nyssa's argument (in 379 CE) that the entire institution of slavery was morally wrong.
• Joyce Roush's (1998 CE) idea that she should altruistically donate a kidney to help save the life of an unknown stranger. 

Nielsen acknowledges that any particular act of moral imagination often builds on earlier precursors, but that this shouldn't lessen our appreciation for these major steps forward.

One could think of moral imagination as a key part of making moral progress. Moral progress (moving towards better systems of morality) involves the creation of new approaches to morality, and the critiquing of what has been suggested. Through the iteration of creation and critique, we slowly make progress. Some of this process happens within moral philosophy (especially the critique), but much of it happens in the wider world.

I see moral imagination as a key part of the creation step — allowing us to make surprising new changes to how we see morality. It probably isn't the whole of the creation step, as one can also use more systematic approaches, such as looking for cases where our current practice is morally inconsistent.

In his essay, Nielsen mentions effective altruism by way of contrast:

The moral imagination viewpoint contrasts with a picture in which our goal is choosing the best possible action from an existing menu. Choose the right charity to donate to, the right career, the right cause. This is a common everyday view, with Effective Altruism an especially well-developed instance, often concentrating on choosing between existing ways of doing good – is it better to donate a dollar to cause A, B, C, or D, on the GiveWell list of recommended charities? That is a valuable project. But the intellectual focus is on selection from the existing menu, which fundamentally underrates imagination⁵. When we can expand what it means to be good, contribution may lie not only in selection but in imagination — a fundamental virtue, expanding the range of good actions available to be selected from. I find myself tantalized (and sometimes worried) by this: what notions of good have we not yet imagined? What will we one day judge as evil that today we do not?

I think this is correct as far as it goes, and I can see why choosing among a pre-existing list of moral options wouldn’t count as moral imagination. However,  effective altruism has created a surprising wealth of expansions of our moral concepts, self-conceptions, orientations to the world, techniques, and values. 

Nielsen doesn't necessarily disagree, for in a footnote he clarifies:

I am not saying Effective Altruism doesn't encourage and enable moral imagination. Rather it's not a primary focus (and is, I believe, underrated).

Moral imagination probably is underrated in effective altruism (as it is almost everywhere). Indeed, I think even within EA, people are unaware of many of the ways effective altruism has contributed new things to moral thought. So I want to draw out some of the most significant examples.

The idea of making a moral choice about where to donate based on the cost-effectiveness of the options is fairly obvious in retrospect. After all, if you are donating a particular amount of money and cost-effectiveness is the amount of benefit per unit of money, then choosing based on cost-effectiveness is really just choosing based on how much impact will be achieved. But this wasn’t being done and was resisted strongly by much of the philanthropy and ethics communities. Cost-effectiveness was seen as a tool for economists or for optimising one's personal spending. It wasn’t seen as something that morally serious people need concern themselves with. I think we challenged that quite successfully and thereby expanded the set of moral tools and considerations. 

This focus on cost-effectiveness also led to ideas such as that where you give can be even more important than whether you give (e.g. switching from the charity that will save 10 lives with your donations to the one that saves 100 is a bigger difference than whether you donate to the one that saves 10 lives in the first place). And many previous groups that had focused on the morality of personal donation were often too focused on the donor (e.g. a vow of poverty to rid yourself of the evils of money, or the focus on making sure to be anonymous in your giving). In contrast, we centred the recipients rather than the donor. This helped one see that whether someone ultimately saves 10 lives or 100 is a much bigger moral issue than whether they gave anonymously. After all, the potential recipients would care vastly more about the fact that 10 times as many of them would be saved than about whether the donation was anonymous.

The idea that we should apply the standards of scientific evidence to choosing a charity is also quite new. It is obvious in retrospect that when so many lives are at stake, we should apply humanity's best methods for determining what works, but people resisted this. In part I think this is because they felt that science and ethics are different magisteria (there was a similar reluctance, even revulsion, about using numbers in making moral choices). Of course, using scientific evidence to determine what to fund isn’t new from the perspective of the government departments doing international development work, but it wasn’t being used as a moral principle or part of individual choices. People found the idea that a morally good person should look at scientific evidence before donating (or seek the advice of others who have done so) to be surprising. 

Another new concept is cause-neutrality — the idea of just trying to do good (impartially considered) and being open to completely changing where you give or what you work on based on which approaches are shown to be more cost-effective. Most people form strong moral motivations through concrete specifics — they are viscerally moved by witnessing some injustice or tragedy and are then motivated to help fight that kind of injustice or prevent that kind of tragedy. Or they form a strong attachment to a person or group and then make great sacrifices to defend the rights and interests of that person or that group. Cause-neutrality is saying that when trying to do good, we should be more impartial, so that we are attentive to situations when we have the opportunity to achieve much more in a different field or for a different group than those we’ve formed a passion around.

Another new idea was that we should take seriously the fact that each of us can save hundreds people's lives with our donations, and that positive moral action was therefore a key part of our own lives (this built on Singer’s argument in 'Famine Affluence and Morality'). What we can do positively for others is often vastly more important than the intrinsic value of own lives and personal projects (because we can save hundreds of other people’s lives and personal projects…) and it is more important than many of the wrongs we commit in our day to day lives. 

I therefore argued that our charity has central moral importance in living a good life. Indeed I originally called effective altruism ‘positive ethics’ because I was amazed at how much good we can actively do in the world, while moral philosophers (and religious ethics) is almost entirely focused on avoiding wronging others or doing bad things. We can do startling amounts of good, but no-one was talking about it. They praise a saint, but people weren’t asking regular people why they weren’t saints when it would be so easy to do so (at least among those with middle class careers in rich countries). 

Moral uncertainty is also new. There was almost nothing written in moral philosophy about making decisions when you are uncertain about which moral theory is right (or are uncertain about the moral considerations that relate to the issue at hand). There was a lot on what to do when uncertain about descriptive facts, but not for when uncertain about morality, despite this being the puzzling situation we all find ourselves in. Will and I did a lot to explore the key similarities and differences with descriptive uncertainty. In the process, we became a lot more comfortable with our own moral uncertainty — acknowledging it and acting under it. This led to ideas like the value of moral information (which helps explain the value of doing moral philosophy), being aware of our moral ignorance and recommending we adopt a stance of moral humility.

And of course one of the most distinctive things about effective altruism is that one of the principal cause areas we work on is protecting humanity from existential risks. This wasn’t something that was conceptually available before the year 2000. While effective altruism didn’t invent the idea of extinction risk or existential risk, we saw its vast importance and did a great deal towards explicating the moral considerations of this grand new area of moral action — understanding why it would be such a great tragedy in ways that connect with many moral traditions, and helping to take saving the world from sounding like a science-fiction story (or comic book plot) to seeing safeguarding humanity’s future as a fundamentally wise course of action for any species that has become capable of destroying itself.

And connected to this is the idea of longtermism — that future generations matter deeply, and so since there could easily be tens of thousands more generations to come, ways of having lasting impact over all those generations are especially morally significant. Avoiding existential catastrophes is one obvious example, but avoiding other irrevocable losses counts too, as does doing good things that are very unlikely to be undone (such as ending slavery). Some of this had been seen by environmentalists (a similar argument explains why ecosystem destruction and species extinction are so bad) by economists (thinking about the power of economic growth over thousands of years) and others too. But the idea of seeing future generations as not just a little bit important, but deeply important — probably more important than all our own lives and projects — is a moral innovation.

So I think effective altruism has done quite a lot of moral innovation or moral creation. And I think some of these examples would count as moral imagination too. That said, I think Nielsen is probably right that moral imagination being undervalued by many EAs — despite it pervading many of the concepts and ideas of the movement.