Effective altruism. Identifying the world’s most pressing problems and their best solutions, through cost-effectiveness analysis and the ITN framework, which looks at the scale, solvability, and leverage around the problem. But is there any space in this framework for our own personal values?
On the face of it, pure cost-effectiveness analysis can feel quite bare-boned. Can all the hopes and joys and sorrows of life be quantified by a number? £4000 to save a life? Initially, one can get the impression that you should try to improve as many lives as possible, and make as big an impact as possible – which makes sense. Hard to argue otherwise… but isn’t that a bit simplistic? A little utilitarian and quite brutal? Some things cannot be so easily quantified, and these may be the ones which your values would distinguish.
Holly Elmore however cheerily makes the great and devastating point that letting our personal biases interfere with resource allocation could result in greater suffering. Well, to be exact, she says: ‘There should be great shame in letting more people suffer and die than you need to because you can’t look past your own feelings’. Ouch. [1]
Does that still apply if you care much more about supporting RPID (very rare disease) over climate change because your grandma died from RPID...?
But what if the hypothetical you can do much more for RPID than you can for climate change? I suppose in that case you would just have to weigh up your personal fit and how much good that can do. What if you absolutely despise engineering sea ice restoration, but love working on DNA mutations? Are you selfless enough to put aside your abject misery for the greater good? Again, that’s a question answerable only by – ironically – your own values and virtues.
In real life, however, it’s likely that causes may be similarly beneficial (or less drastically different), in which case the relative difference in good you could do between them would be minimised. It could be, like Norman Borlaug, that whatever you choose to work in and why, if it has enough potential, and if you’re good enough at it, you will do significant good. Some causes may just be easier to do good in than others.
Values help in making decisions of all kinds. Business and health workers have specific metrics which they care most about (including the $ needed) are the values which they judge problems on. This could then extend to you – you use those values, plus the consideration of personal fit, to decide what you want to do.
Philip Pullman hasn’t aligned himself with effective altruism as far as I'm aware, but I think this passage from Lyra at the end of His Dark Materials links beautifully to some of the themes:
“But then we wouldn't have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build…”
“…The Republic of Heaven.”
References:
[1] https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/we-are-in-triage-every-second-of-every-day/
[2] The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman, last page