Ineffective Altruists
love math, love foresight, don't love this
A piece I began last November, during the early days of the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, is up over at The Bulwark! You can read it here:
This adds to a few other longer, slightly more journalist-y articles I’ve done on ethical issues in the past year or two, including (yes I know) Dolly Parton’s generosity, not to mention the special case that neo-neo-Nazism poses for moral relativism.
It’s been good for me to spend more time thinking about the fine print of effective altruism. Given its utilitarian roots, and the affection I have for aristotelian philosophy + Beauvoir’s existential ethics, it was unlikely I would be a fan, as you will see. But it was interesting to try to figure out what draws people to EA, as a way of thinking about our more fundamental desires for what might turn out to be good. In teaching of ethical philosophy, I try to avoid being dogmatically a “virtue ethicist,” or truly, whatever is doctrinaire. But I’m continually thinking about what kind of emotions and longings we start off with, such that we end up in the zany ways that we do. So EA is an interesting case, although ultimately I think its appeal is fairly artificial.
The funny thing is, though, I neither started out intending to teach ethical philosophy, or indeed, to do much writing about it. I actually kind of considered the matter basically settled: Sartre’s abrupt and unhelpful advice that I quote in the article, “you are free so choose!” seemed pretty right to me, although I might have put it more like, “do the right thing, if you can!” Not that ethical philosophy, the good kind, has ever been uninteresting, but it’s been the kind of subject that, like the philosophy of music or art, I often just prefer to sing or do, and save my thinking for something else.
But I did end up teaching ethics, going on for about a decade now, and enjoying the ways the things that don’t make immediate sense to me seems to make sense to other people, and then figuring out what both of us are missing. This disconnect is partly personal, but partly also, I think, because of the nature of all the ways we try to talk about goodness and about what inevitably falls short.
Goodness is fractal in its nature, and really rather unpredictable: it pops out of our ratiocinative hands if we try to grab it too hard, like a weird soap bubble or a house fly or the bit of egg shell in the egg white you’re impatiently trying to cook with. (Iris Murdoch’s discussion of the phenomenology of the good in Sovereignty of Good is still the best description of this, I think.)
As a parallel, the sense of accident in my own philosophical attention to ethics as such has continued to be really valuable for me, even or especially being drawn into debates where I don’t necessarily have much of a professional stake. I usually write about ethics for non-academic places, so I can remain a more of a slightly perturbed human and, on occasion, mildly amoral gazer, rather than someone with a permanent, career-based conceptual dog in the fight. Writing about it however is getting to be something of a habit, however; an accident I’m starting to really enjoy.
Anyway, hope you all enjoy the piece! It is not a paean to Aristotle, or even Beauvoir, but an attempt to walk us right up to the moment where we see the difference between what we want, ethically, and what we can’t quite yet imagine. If EA doesn’t work, if it actually creates a desire to admire a kind of Kantian ineffectiveness, what on earth should we do differently, and whom should we admire instead? Holding onto this sense of a puzzle, with some urgency but also hesitation, a sense that larger things are at work than we are really going to be able to immediately grasp—this is my working sense of the ethos that I’m looking out for, just in case it might be out there to be found.
Been thinking for months about why I disagreed with the essay even though it was interesting, and I think it comes down to disagreeing with this point: "And any morality that prioritizes the distant, whether the distant poor or the distant future, is a theoretical-fanaticism, one that cares more about the coherence of its own ultimate intellectual triumph—and not getting its hands dirty—than about the fate of human beings..."
This contradicts my own view on the primary moral failing of people in general, something I call "proximity is a hell of a drug," where the distant count for less than those nearby and those nearby--who is nearer than the self?--get priority at the expense of those further away, whether physically or in terms of relatability. The distant future is theoretical, but the distant poor are emphatically real and the mosquito net that means they don't die of malaria that day is a real good even if not the sum of all goodness. The thing that is beautifully good to me--and I am not in any way an effective altruist or a Singer fan--is in the person who can admit and then live by the truth in the math--that when the seemingly cold and distant numbers represent premature deaths, those numbers matter much more than one's personal comforts. Math can be wonderfully egalitarian, and if every human life is equal, then quantity does matter. To me, a morality that prioritizes the proximate over the distant is at the root of many of humanity's problems, economic, political, or otherwise. Prioritizing the distant with imperfect knowledge of their circumstances has its own problems and in some cases has become distinctly cultlike and blinkered, but it can also be a powerful ethical corrective. The fraud is particularly horrific because it took advantage of money meant to prioritize others' needs and used that to feed Sam Bankman-Fried's grotesque and inflated wants instead. Where the EA's went wrong IMO was less in their goals than in their lack of attention to means--it does matter how you get the money, and working for a hedge fund and donating the money to save kids from malaria has its own repercussions, except due to distance/lack of proximity, those EA's may never see the lives their hedge fund hurt or destroyed.
The other thing being that not everyone's characteristic virtues are the same, morally, and so the "terrible temptation to do good" will take different forms for different people. I have learned to my cost there are some kinds of good I am bad at, and maybe that's a fear of getting my hands dirty, but it's also a fear of hurting others instead of helping.