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An Option 3 (constructive response) submission to the Cluelessness Critiques Competition

Can thinking about virtues help impartial altruists deal with Anthony Di Giovanni’s cluelessness problem?

I’ll first briefly argue that some existing ways of thinking about virtues of compassion and beneficence don’t help in this context.

I’ll then suggest that some other virtues - virtues suggested by the cluelessness sequence itself -  indicate a range of projects that impartial altruists can engage with, despite cluelessness.

First attempt: Impartial virtues

I’m supposing here for the sake of argument that the unawareness argument is basically right: our current understanding of the long-term, cosmos-wide consequences of our actions is too coarse to compare actions using anything like expected value reasoning over those consequences.

Anthony himself notes that this seems to push us towards approaches to ethical decision-making that don’t depend on reasoning about long-term effects, like considering the virtue of compassion.

And you might think that the virtue of compassion gets you pretty far in supporting the kinds of things impartial altruists care about, like effectively reducing suffering.

Alternatively, you might think that impartial altruists could avoid the impacts of cluelessness by referring to the virtue of impartial beneficence: trying to help others as best we can, no matter how near or distant they are.

And it’s true that appealing to virtues in this way does mean that we don’t have to be consequentialists: we don’t have to say that being compassionate or beneficent is good because of their long-term consequences - which would lead to the cluelessness challenge.

Instead we can follow one of the standard lines of reasoning in Virtue Ethics, and say that such virtues are worth having because, for example, they represent an ideal or example we aspire to emulate, or because this reflects our considered intuitions about particular moral cases.

But if the aim is to retain the spirit of impartial altruism, the cluelessness problem just pops up in a different place, namely: in scenarios where we need to work out what would count as exhibiting one of these virtues.

If I want to be not only compassionate but impartially and effectively so, I should care about whether my virtuous behaviour is relieving not only nearby suffering but also far-future suffering.  And if I want to exhibit the virtue of impartial beneficence, it seems I’d need to know the very long-term consequences of my actions in order to know if I’m impartially helping others as best I can.

So it seems that if I’m clueless about those consequences, I could never know if I was being virtuous in these ways, and it would be impossible to learn such virtues through any kind of feedback.

Second attempt: Virtues of Cluelessness

But notice that appreciating how clueless we are is itself demonstrating a kind of virtue. Anthony notes that it seems epistemically virtuous to recognise that “I have no clue if my idealized self would favor working on AI risk” if you actually don’t have a clue.

He describes this in terms of the virtue of honesty - specifically, being honest with yourself - but it also seems like the virtue of humility: the metacognition regarding the limits of our knowledge which is arguably central to wisdom.

Humility and self-honesty of this kind can also involve another much-discussed virtue - that of courage: it takes courage to admit that the reasons you thought were good reasons were not good after all - especially if you’ve built a career in AI risk upon them.

It also requires curiosity and open-mindedness: the curiosity to keep questioning the reasons for a career choice well after actually making that choice  and the active open-mindedness you display in taking seriously hypotheses that are outside the range of those you’re incentivised to consider.

So the cluelessness sequence is among other things encouraging us to develop and display a range of virtues. And my suggestion is that these same virtues can not only lead us to cluelessness, they can help us to live with it as impartial altruists.

The clueless impartial altruist thinks cosmos-wide consequences matter, but does not have enough of a clue what they are to help guide their decisions. Here are some ways the virtues of cluelessness could nevertheless help guide an impartial altruist’s thinking and decision-making:

Humility and self-honesty about cluelessness: if we’re honest and humble we perhaps shouldn’t place too much weight on a single intellectual argument (for example, the cluelessness sequence itself) in shaping our life choices. Perhaps we adopt some kind of metaepistemic or metanormative stance towards it; or perhaps we just don’t give much credence to the conclusion of the argument, not because it’s a bad argument, but just because we shouldn’t give much credence to any single philosophical argument that has far-reaching (ambitious, potentially hubristic) implications for how to act.

Courage about cluelessness: it’s true that it takes courage to admit you were wrong. It’s also true that it takes courage to build a career on an unconventional ethical view about cosmos-wide consequences. Both kinds of courage are admirable in the right context. The courage to explore intellectual territory that is off the beaten track or questions that seem hopelessly difficult seems essential for scientific progress. So even if we don’t currently seem to understand the mechanisms behind the long-term consequences of our actions, intellectual courage could provide a reason for the impartial altruist to keep trying to understand them better (even with only a slim chance of success).

Curiosity and open-mindedness about cluelessness: even if we’re currently convinced of the cluelessness argument, we should remain curious and open-minded about alternative perspectives. For example, the curious impartial altruist should continue to explore the question of the extent to which we can predict or at least constrain the long-term cosmic effects of our actions, using ideas from fundamental physics, complexity science, decision-theory or evolutionary theory for instance. And since such big picture issues offer some of the most curiosity-inspiring questions one can imagine, it seems intellectually virtuous to explore them even independent of whether they might one-day guide action. In addition, it seems that pursuing such questions as an ongoing rigorous inquiry would help avoid being unconsciously guided in one’s decision-making by a grand cosmic narrative (for example, an optimistic sense that things will likely turn out for the best longer-term), while believing oneself free of such narratives.

A key point about the virtues I’ve just described is that (unlike the kinds of compassion and benevolence I discussed earlier) they don’t assume a good understanding of cosmos-wide consequences - and in that way escape being subject to the cluelessness problem.

This is also what distinguishes what I’m suggesting from the idea that ‘doing research’ is a solution to cluelessness. For that to work, as Anthony notes, we would need a good enough understanding of the long-term impact of doing research - which of course we don’t for the reasons set out in the sequence.

By contrast, the only assumption we have to make regarding long-term consequences, when we accept the normative force of the virtues of cluelessness, is something the sequence accepts: that developing a better understanding of cosmos-wide consequences to an action-guiding degree is “not vanishingly unlikely” (as Anthony puts it).

Clueless Impartial Altruism

In general, when discussing virtues, one can reasonably ask what it is that justifies thinking of them as morally normative at all. But we can leave those questions to one side here, because, like the cluelessness sequence itself, we’re assuming impartial altruism as a normative starting point. What I’m calling the virtues of cluelessness are the virtues that ought to be normative for those who already care about the long-term consequences of their actions, and accept something like Anthony’s ‘normative premise’.

Since impartial altruism in this sense is partly an intellectual matter - the normative premise concerns what we have reason to believe or ‘expect’ about the long-term future - I’ve focused on the way that these virtues are intellectual virtues: they’re traits that are constitutive of thinking well, as well as being morally good traits that have broader application in everyday life.

But the fact that these virtues are intellectual doesn’t mean that they can’t be action-guiding with respect to significant life choices. For instance, someone who really cares about being intellectually virtuous is more likely to choose a career or life project in which those virtues can be developed and exercised.

More specifically, the virtues of cluelessness I’ve discussed could motivate several kinds of life choices, for example:

• Choosing a career at a research organisation exploring possible mechanisms for understanding the long-term consequences of specific interventions
• Joining a community of people interested in the extent to which we can predict long-term cosmic effects of our actions
• Engaging in practices like critical discussion that serve to cultivate the virtues of cluelessness

This range of virtue-guided activity suggests that there’s quite a lot left for impartial altruists to get on with, even if cluelessness holds.

Thanks to @EuanMcLean for useful comments on an earlier draft