Effective altruism

Effective Altruism

I’ve for a while sat just outside the fringe of the effective altrusim movement. Many of my friends are strongly involved; a number of them helped set it up. For those unaware of the term, the basic idea is in trying to optimise one’s altruistic behaviour; if I want to do good in the world, where should I focus my attention to ensure that I’m doing the most good for my effort? More specifically talking about charity, if I have £500 to donate and I want to save the most lives with that £500, where should I donate it?

I’ve never become involved myself, for what I’ve come to realise is probably a quite unflattering reason; their core motivation, that of trying to do good in the world, doesn’t actually interest me that much. So I find the methodology and thinking behind the movement interesting and exciting, but fail to find the same enthusiasm for the actual implementation. Still, that having been said, it’s a great idea which deserves all the attention it’s getting.

A lot of that attention, however, seems to be curiously negative. Partially, this seems to be because of a strong opposition to the idea of criticising charity: if I’ve given money to charity, why should I be judged on what that charity achieved? How can you criticise a group that exists to make dying children smile? There’s also an undercurrent of something else, though, which I find quite interesting. Recently I was pointed to a rather long diatribe (which I shall not link to, since it was mostly vitriol) against the movement, including a somewhat personal (and misognyistic) attack on a close friend of mine. Again, it was mostly nonsense, but there seemed to be an unexpressed motivator behind some of the vitriol. I’d like to posit what I think is the driver behind some of this, as well as some ideas for trying to alleviate it.

Comparing Charities

The idea of comparing charities is nothing new. For years people have expressed, for example, the idea that giving money to animal charities when there are starving children is wrong. Or that one shouldn’t send money overseas when there are so many needy cases in one’s own country. The idea of comparing causes isn’t new; the innovation of effective altruism is on comparing the effects. What’s more, to do so in a reasoned way that tries to quantify those effects.

However, before one gets to the stage of comparing the effects of a charity, there is an implicit first stage cutdown. For example, the website of Giving What We Can comes rapidly to the conclusion that “Our research on this so far has consistently shown health interventions to be the most effective at improving people’s lives. As a result, although we still investigate other areas, health interventions are our primary focus.”¹ What’s more, they tend to look at charities in the developing world, since they often offer a much lower price per life saved (or QALY - quality adjusted life year) due to the presence of easily curable diseases.

Part of this cutdown is required to get to the point where sensible comparisons can be made. It’s much more difficult to compare the effects of research charities, say, and even more difficult to compare a research charity to a health charity. The effective altruism community is not blasé about these difficulties; how to reason about and compare more uncertain fields and different types of intervention are, as I understand it, major topics of research (and this research itself may count as a sensible form of altrusism). However, there is another assumption which is less explicit; the moral calculus used to assess the value of ‘good’. To quote William MacAskill, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement, on a recent blog post:

All people have an equal right to a happy, flourishing life[…] ²

The effective altruism movement has quite a strong utilitarian background behind it, and it takes as a given a very encompassing and non-discriminatory ethical basis; that each person has the same right to a happy life. It’s a statement that most people would instinctively agree with. ³ However, it’s also at total odds with how most of us behave. Every country is set up along lines which are almost the antithesis of this principle. We individually will tend to value people close to us much more highly than we have those we’ve never met. Certain people react strongly against the idea of charities providing help to groups such as paedophiles, whereas charities providing money to wounded soldiers attract very strong support. Whilst many would espouse the idea the we should all be equal, few actually internalise it.

Effective altruists, in my experience, come much closer than most people in terms of internalising and living such a principle. Perhaps because of that, though, the moral context tends to remain unspoken. Reading (and listening to) some of the criticism of effective altruism, I think this is the underlying source of much of the vitriol. Comparing causes is fine; they are nice and fluffy, one can easily have a disagreement without having to conclude that one cause is better than the other, merely that one has different preferences. Effective altruism, on the other hand, comes along with numbers making claims (good claims!) that one type of giving is better than another; they have imposed a partial order! Yet the context, without which these claims are meaningless, is often unstated.

The proponent of another context may be rightly annoyed at the effective altruist with their claims of ‘better’, when in fact all they have is another difference of opinion. And to the group who claim to share the moral context but act completely out of accordance with it, the more rigorous examination forces them to address the inconsistency in their own thinking, which they have previously been content to ignore.

Optimising along multiple axes

The thing is, assuming you are interested in altruism for its effects, the methods of effective altruism should appeal to you regardless of your moral context. For now, you might be unable to use them (if, say, you have an overwhelming predisposition towards research based charities), but the idea is still sound. I might want to focus on supporting down-on-their-luck upper class gentlemen, but in that case I should still care about whether I can provide only a single manservant or ten for the same amount of money. To use a slightly more realistic example, many people might have a strong personal attachment to certain causes; cancer, say. They may react badly to the idea that they should instead be donating to the cause of curing malaria. Yet there is still benefit in learning that one cancer research charity has supported 10 high impact papers in the past two years whilst the other has achieved very little.

What we are really trying to do is rank the space of charities according to some `goodness’ metric. To this point, effective altruism groups have defined this metric and bundled it with their rankings, and there are good reasons for doing so. They have a strong belief in their metric (namely, QALY/$) and it chimes well with the majority of their members. What I think would be interesting in the long run, however, is to allow people to define their own metrics for comparison. ⁴ Certain charities may be incomparable (a metric including QALYs, say, may exclude research or economic development charities, for now), but many wouldn’t be. It should be perfectly possible to compare health charities in the US to those in sub-Saharan Africa, say. For those whose moral context does place value (explicitly or not) on locality, then, this would provide a way to ensure that the local giving is still done in as effective a way as possible. What’s more, it would enable quantification of that preference; how much value does one have to put on saving lives locally to get the same ‘goodness’ for a charity in the developed world compared to one in the developing?