(NYT, 2022)
You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.
Defective Altruism
In general, altruism is choosing and acting for inherently non-egoistic or non-self-interested—and especially unselfish—reasons; and it seems uncontrovertible that, other things being equal, altruism is a morally very good thing.
To be sure, excessive altruism is really possible, and can lead to the neglect of one’s loved ones, or to self-neglect, hence violating our not-so-universally-directed yet still very important moral duties to our family-&-friends and to ourselves (MacFarquhar, 2016)—but these are cases in which other things are not equal.
In any case, from the standpoint of a specifically broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory and sociopolitics, the real possibility of altruism is built into the very idea of choosing and acting autonomously for the sake of the strictly universal moral law, which morally requires always treating (or at least, always trying to treat) every rational human animal—i.e., every human person—with sufficient respect for their absolute, non-denumerable, intrinsic, objective moral worth or value, i.e., their dignity, and also further morally requires never treating (or at least, never trying to treat) them or oneself as mere means or mere things (Hanna, 2018a, 2018b).
Now, thinking more about altruism, what about the contemporary and increasingly popular ethical and sociopolitical program—especially among neoliberal centrists and left-liberal millennials, digital technology-driven corporations and financial services, and digital technology-driven billionaires—known as effective altruism?
Here’s how effective altruism is described in the Introduction to the Effective Altruism website:
Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.
It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.
This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.
This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.
Effective altruism was formalized by scholars at Oxford University, but has now spread around the world, and is being applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries.
People inspired by effective altruism have worked on projects that range from funding the distribution of 200 million malaria nets, to academic research on the future of AI, to campaigning for policies to prevent the next pandemic.
They’re not united by any particular solution to the world’s problems, but by a way of thinking. They try to find unusually good ways of helping, such that a given amount of effort goes an unusually long way. (Effective Altruism, 2022)
And here’s more information about effective altruism from a recent NYT article:
In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
“Advising billionaires on how to give away their money and encourage them to give more is definitely not where I saw my life going,” Mr. MacAskill, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, said in an interview. But he sees the utility in it, from the central effective altruist commandment of doing the most good possible.
“If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.
At its core, effective altruism is devoted to the question of how one can do as much good as possible with the money and time available to them. Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.
If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,”published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades, according to Julia Wise, community liaison at the Centre for Effective Altruism, an organization Mr. MacAskill helped found. (NYT, 2022)
And here’s William MacAskill’s own definition of effective altruism:
Effective altruism is:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and
(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.
(i) refers to effective altruism as an intellectual project (or ‘research field’); (ii) refers to effective altruism as a practical project (or ‘social movement’). (MacAskill, 2022: p. 14)
At first glance, this all seems entirely morally unobjectionable and indeed very good: what could better than, or in any way wrong about, helping needy, oppressed rational human animals—aka, people—and needy, oppressed non-rational, non-human animals?
Nevertheless, from the standpoint of broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory, I have three serious worries about the effective altruism program.
First, effective altruism is grounded on, although it’s by no means merely identical to, what I think is a false normative ethical theory—namely, utilitarianism—and therefore it’s open to all the classical objections to utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism, not only from the standpoint of broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory, but also from the standpoint of any other non-consequentialist moral theory (Smart and Williams, 1973; Hanna, 2018a, 2020: section V.2).
So, to put it somewhat bluntly, even if you hate or anyhow reject any version of Kantianism, there are still other forceful non-consequentialist moral objections to utilitarianism.
Second, effective altruism is committed to a false applied ethical theory—namely, that the interests, needs, and moral value of non-rational, non-human animals, i.e., of non-persons, are morally equal to or override the interests, needs, and dignity of rational human or non-human animals that are persons.
Notice particularly that the relevant denial of this moral thesis from the specific standpoint of broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory is not that the interests, needs, and moral value of non-rational, non-human, non-person animals are in any way insignificant or negligible.
On the contrary, from the standpoint of broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory, the interests, needs, and moral value of non-rational, non-human, non-person animals are indeed significant and salient, and must always be taken into account in our moral deliberations and decisions; it’s just that they don’t equal or override the interests, needs, and dignity of people and (if there are actually any) rational non-human animal persons (Hanna, 2018a: ch. 4).
Third, and now leaving behind the two fairly obvious and widely-shared worries I’ve just described, most seriously, effective altruism is inherently subject to the following paradox:
By effectively using the rationally unjustified and immoral global system of technocratic corporate capitalism, insofar as it’s fully in complicity with the equally rationally unjustified and immoral—because inherently coercive and authoritarian, violently gun-toting, and even violently nuclear-weapons-toting—global system of neoliberal (and often, nowadays, also neofascist) nation-States, in order to provide its primary source of altruistic giving and to mediate the spending of the money that’s been raised, effective altruism thereby effectively perpetuates the malign global mega-system whose coercion and authoritarianism, inequality, and oppression are the principal causes of the very moral and sociopolitical mega-problems that effective altruism is explicitly designed to ameliorate, reduce, and, ideally, solve.
Or otherwise and more simply put: the more effective effective altruism is from a money-raising and money-spending standpoint, the more it helps to create and sustain the very moral and sociopolitical adverse conditions and mega-problems it’s explicitly designed to fix.
Let’s call this the paradox of effectiveness.
So, the most serious worry about effective altruism is that, by virtue of the paradox of effectivness, effective altruism is inherently morally and sociopolitically defective.
Of course, as things currently are, the malign global mega-system of technocratic corporate capitalism and neoliberal nation-States is simply inescapable for everyone.
Nevertheless, it’s one thing to regard this profoundly messed-up situation as something that’s to be constantly grappled with and pushed-back-against, and, to the extent that this is really possible, even perhaps only using the “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 1985), try to do something to devolve contemporary destructive, deforming social institutions and systematically replace them with essentially better, constructive, enabling social institutions (Maiese and Hanna, 2019; Hanna and Paans, 2022; Maiese et al., 2022), even if it’s not very effective; but it’s something else altogether, to help to create and sustain those very same destructive, deforming social institutions, very effectively.
So, all things considered, which of the following do you think is the morally better scenario?
Scenario 1: You’re a 60-something independent philosopher with no income except for the paltry USD $60.00 a month you receive from 16 patrons on Patreon, and you write books and essays about broadly Kantian nonideal dignitarian moral theory and sociopolitics, especially including a runaway worst-seller about existential Kantian cosmopolitan neo-utopian anarcho-socialism; you and your partner are retired people receiving social security and pension income, living on roughly USD $70,000.00 per year, and you give away 5% of that total income to various organizations that help needy, oppressed people, including giving 66.6% of your paltry yearly income from Patreon to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
Scenario 2: You’re a 30-something professor of philosophy at Oxford, and you write books and essays about utilitarian moral theory and sociopolitics, and effective altruism, especially including a recent best-seller about what we owe to the future; you hobnob with Elon Musk and other wealthy technocratic corporate capitalists, and convince them to give millions or even billions of dollars per year to various organizations that help needy, oppressed people and needy, oppressed non-rational, non-human animals, so that Musk and his ilk can whitewash the malign global mega-system of technocratic corporate capitalism and neoliberal nation-States that been relentlessly making it more and more likely that ordinary humankind will actually have no real future on Earth—as opposed to billionaires and their ilk, who will escape the devastation of Earth on their custom-built spaceships and live in luxury and safety off-planet, while the rest of us burn or drown or starve, or shoot or bomb each other to death, or die from disease during some or another pandemic.
Now, even from a maximizing point of view, all things considered, isn’t it more optimific to do a little bit towards bringing about an essentially better world, than to do a lot towards perpetuating the very system that has completely messed up this one?
—To be sure, your little bit is less effective altruism, and it’s certainly not cool or popular; but at least it’s not morally and sociopolitically defective altruism.
REFERENCES
(Effective Altruism, 2022). Effective Altruism. Available online at URL = <https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism>.
(Hanna, 2018a). Hanna, R. Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy. THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 3. New York: Nova Science. Available online in preview HERE.
(Hanna, 2018b). Hanna, R., Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise. THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 4. New York: Nova Science. Available online in preview HERE.
(Hanna, 2020). Hanna, R. Morality and The Human Condition: A Short Book For Philosophically-Minded People. Unpublished MS. Available online HERE.
(Hanna and Paans, 2022). Hanna, R. and Paans, O. “Creative Piety and Neo-Utopianism: Cultivating Our Global Garden.” Cosmos & History 18, 1: 1-82. Available online at URL = <https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1017>.
(MacAskill, 2019). MacAskill, W. “The Definition of Effective Altruism.” In H. Greaves and T. Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Pp.10-28.
(MacFarquhar, 2016). MacFarquhar, L. Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. New York: Penguin Books.
(Maiese and Hanna, 2019). Maiese, M. and Hanna, R. The Mind-Body Politic. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Available online in preview HERE.
(Maiese et al., 2022). Maiese, M. et al. “The Shape of Lives to Come.” Frontiers in Psychology Research Topics. Available online at URL = <https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/25439/the-shape-of-lives-to-come>.
(NYT, 2022). Kulish, N. “How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk’s Number.” New York Times. 8 October. Available online at URL = <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/business/effective-altruism-elon-musk.html>.
(Scott, 1985). Scott, J.C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven CT: Yale Univ. Press.
(Smart and Williams, 1973). Smart, J.C. and Williams, B. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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