Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
April 28th, 2021
Professor Lichtenberg covers several important issues in her reply. I will focus on two key points.
First, she argues that effective altruism is in conflict with the view that nurses and doctors and teachers are doing something admirable and indispensable. I very much agree that the work of nurses and doctors and teachers is admirable and indispensable. Society couldn’t function without it. But I think that that view is compatible with effective altruism.
Effective altruism is about finding the most effective ways of doing good, and what’s most effective will partly depend on what others are already doing. If many good people are already addressing a social problem, you can often be more effective by addressing a more neglected problem. That’s why self-identified effective altruists often focus on problems that receive less attention, such as pandemic risk or neglected tropical diseases. But that doesn’t mean that people who do good work on other problems aren’t doing something that’s admirable and indispensable. They very much are.
The current effective altruist recommendations should be seen in the light of the movement’s comparatively small size. Since only relatively few people follow effective altruist recommendations, we need to focus our resources on some particularly pressing problems. Our recommendations would look very different if most people were following them.
Second, Professor Lichtenberg argues that effective altruist impartiality would make the world a worse place. It’s true that any well-intentioned approach could have negative consequences. But I think it helps to put this impartiality in historical context. Over the last centuries, there has been a movement toward greater impartiality in a range of moral and political contexts. For instance, we have expanded our circle of moral concern to include groups outside of our immediate social context. And in many countries, governments have become more impartial and less prone to clientelism.
So far, it seems that this movement toward greater impartiality has made the world a better place. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t led to an overall loss of love, compassion, or empathy. That gives us some reason to believe that continuing to move toward greater impartiality won’t be harmful.
My beliefs on this issue are informed by my experiences from the effective altruism community. In my view, self-identified effective altruists are as loving, compassionate, and empathetic as anyone else. That suggests that those emotions are compatible with effective altruist impartiality.
It is of course possible that too much impartiality could make the world a worse place. There are no doubt psychological limits to how impartial we could be. But self-identified effective altruists don’t try to be totally impartial. For instance, they certainly tend to help their family members more than strangers.
Exactly how impartial to be is a difficult question. But it’s useful to see that self-identified effective altruists are just choosing a point further away on a continuum. They’re not at the extreme end. Humanity has already moved along that continuum the last few centuries, and effective altruism suggests we continue moving.
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