Okay, effective altruism and shallow ponds, again. On Pettigrew's Criticism of Wenar (etc.)

In the wake of the sentencing of SBF last week there were two mighty takedowns of effective altruism: one (here) “The Deaths of Effective Altruism Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial” — described as a ‘firebombing’ by DailyNous — by Leif Wenar (Stanford) at Wired; the other and better written, “Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines” by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Paris) at his (here) Substack (Hinternet). Wenar’s was more personal and (more mud-slingy [I return to that below, promise]), and so was shared with more relish and more widely by my friends (looking at you my dear reader).

In response Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) wrote a rather sensible criticism, “Leif Wenar's criticisms of effective altruism” at his blog (Richard’s Substack). My co-blogger at CrookedTimber, Chris Bertram, shared it it on social media with a note that Wenar’s piece was shared widely without “a sober assessment of the merits of his arguments.”

Now, I am an avid reader of Pettigrew’s blog because more than anyone today, he makes on-going debates in formal epistemology and decision-theory available to wide audiences in a relatively fair and relatively accessible fashion. And like the very best blogs, he also shows the salience of different debates within some specialist area to other areas of philosophy (and the sciences/life). I also find Pettigrew rather judicious generally.

Now, the effect of Pettigrew’s piece (I will get to some of the details below) on Wenar’s argument is to offer a kind of rehabilitation of effective altruism as an imperfect and wiser tool (more attentive to practical, local knowledge) that allows one to do at least something about mitigating awful suffering. I quote Pettigrew’s take-home message before I step back from the debate (and then join it):

But to do that would be to abandon some of the people suffering most. Most of the world’s wealth is geographically concentrated far from most of the world’s poverty. To encourage a sort of localism about altruism is to entrench inequality and abandon those with the greatest need.

Lurking here is our collective susceptibility to the pull of Singer’s shallow pond thought experiment (which Pettigrew also draws on in his piece). (Wenar even calls it “the most famous argument in modern philosophy.”) And because of this susceptibility we (professional philosophers) find it so difficult to abandon effective altruism, and we often find the takedowns of it so crappy.

Pettigrew reconstructs Wenar’s argument as having two parts: one is about the negative externalities of our actions; and second is about the uncertainty of the effect of our actions:

first, while the activities of the charities GiveWell recommends have good consequences, they also have bad ones; second, there is uncertainty about which they will have and indeed in the past this has led charity evaluators to stop endorsing certain charities.

Pettigrew nicely shows that neither is sufficient to undermine continued commitment to effective altruism. He then also criticizes (quite rightly) Wenar’s own hyper-individualist proposed alternative. In fact, Pettigrew then adds, “too often, criticisms of the movement have found fault without offering a workable alternative that recognises the extreme suffering and hardship that exists as well as the enormous relative wealth of many people in countries like the UK, the US, and Europe.” Crucially, absent a better alternative effective altruism is left standing as an imperfect tool that allows one to do at least something about mitigating awful suffering.

Now, I suspect Pettigrew would grant that were effective altruism to make the world worse (did more harm than good) then critics would not be required to articulate a better alternative. My own uncalculated opinion is to stipulate that GiveWell is a net benefit to the world, but this is not obviously true of effective altruism as a movement (with key commitments to ‘earning-to-give’ and ‘long-termism’) which went all in on SBF and also seems to have been captured intellectually by the economic interests of Billionaires (and those with a PhD who need a research intensive positions). It is not implausible to worry that that the economic opportunities which one pursues in earning-to-give may itself generate net-harms to the world’s most suffering (either directly or as externalities).

In fact, I may be too charitable [ha!] to GiveWell. Pettigrew ignores an important element of Wenar’s argument. And this also points to an important further difference between saving a child in a shallow pond and what we might call long distance altruism. Wenar suggests it is utterly predictable that while the impact on those that suffer most is unclear such long distance altruism is (i) a net beneficiary to those who work for NGOs and make careers in aid agencies and their infrastructure [let’s stipulate for the noblest of motives] and (ii) distorts local incentives/power structures. (This is just one reason why critics of modern development-aid often describe it as neo-colonialism.)

As an aside, the point about (i) is also present in the mudslinging part of Wenar’s piece. Wenar goes after the movement’s leaders without restraint: “Where Ord was earnest, MacAskill was shameless…Let me give a sense of how bad MacAskill’s philosophizing is…Philosophers like MacAskill should publish complete accounts of all the money that has been spent on them...” I admit to finding it gratifying that influential philosophers are not yet willing to pretend it’s business as usual; part of my own disappointment with the movement’s intellectual leaders’ — Singer, Ord, MacAskill, etc. — response (recall) to the fall of SBF is the relentless downplaying, ‘spinning’ and damage control, of the significance of the movement’s intertwining with SBF’s projects. Pettigrew wisely ignores all of this mudslinging.

So, where are we? One may well think, as Pettigrew seems to imply, that the shallow pond thought experiment shows us that absent better alternatives effective altruism is the way forward, the only game in town as it were. Pettigrew can grant that the causal chain between donor and recipient is much longer; that intermediaries will capture some of the (ahh) rents; that it is predictable that there are unforeseeable (negative) effects and externalities of donations, and that long distance charity shifts incentives among recipients in ways that are undesirable. Such imperfections are part and parcel of ordinary agency. As I have hinted above, I myself see no reason to criticize folks who give to or work at GiveWell.

But I don’t think it’s true that there are no workable alternatives at all to reducing the extreme suffering and hardship over the medium and aggregate term. For example, South Korea was really a very poor country half a century ago. Within a generation it has become a very wealthy place (even though it was run by a corrupt and cruel dictatorship for part of this history and spent quite a bit of GDP on defense). Whatever the multiple causes of its development are I am fairly confident charitable giving by outsiders is not to be listed among the most significant. One can repeat that claim for many of the billions that have left extreme poverty behind in the past half century.

What I am hinting at is that while the shallow pond may be a good model to help us think about our immediate duties, it is a bad model to help us think about the relationship between would be donors and the suffering poor in the context of development. I have four important features in mind. The first three are familiar from the scholarly literature.

First, Wenar and Pettigrew both focus on distance/length of the causal chain between would-be-donor and recipient(s) in their arguments. But what neither mentions explicitly in their posts is that the distance involves borders and dramatic institutional and political differences. While donor and recipient live in one global world, their wealth differences are, at least in part, an effect (and a cause) of international and domestic rules/institutions (etc.) that structure their interactions and also generate unequal opportunities. In the case of Wenar this omission is a bit odd (as even a modest glance at the chapter titles of his Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World reveals).

Second, to change rules and institutions is generally out of any individual hands, but involves collective and political action. As I noted in my series of pieces (The first here; second here; third here; fourth here; fifth here; sixth here) on MacAskill’s What We Owe to the Future (and Population ethics) what’s been so odd about effective altruism is that the need for collective action is fully internalized in its DNA; it presents and understands itself as a world-historical ‘movement.’ But the collective action among effective altruism has not been generally oriented toward institutional, political, or regime change. (One can’t help wonder whether this isn’t an effect of being geared toward recruitment of those that benefit most from economic and educational status quo.)

Nineteenth century Benthamite-radicals saw this differently and promoted education, open borders, free trade, impartial justice systems, secure property rights, representative government, etc. Many of these are still worth pursuing globally. (One may well add to this list reducing the bargaining power of extractive industries, etc.) Given that even Pettigrew grants some of the harms of existing altruism, it is worth asking whether in many cases promoting better institutions and rules (and free trade/movement) may do better in the aggregate and over time than any direct charitable giving.

I don’t claim originality. Back in the day, in a famous article, Wenar himself noted that “citizens of affluent countries can abolish the disastrous “might makes right” rule by using their own institutions to enforce the basic principles of legal trade.” As Wenar notes many ordinary consumer transactions rely on the theft of property from the poorest people who are systematically denied the benefits from ‘their’ resources.

Third, the shallow pond doesn’t ask us to explore how the drowning child got in the situation in the first place. It would be unseemly to do so, after all. This is a feature and not a bug of any forward looking approach (like utilitarianism and the decision-theoretic approach focused on the expectation of good that Pettigrew himself promotes). Now, one might recoil from doing so from a noble desire to avoid victim blaming of the child or its care-givers. But the world’s most suffering may be suffering in virtue of not just bad existing rules/institutions, but also grave historical injustices and oppression (and subsequent lock-in). Effective altruism deliberately brackets history (for the cultural damage this does see also Justin Smith Rui), and, thereby, leaves, say, reparations off the table.

Let me put my cards on the table, and get to the fourth and final point. The philosophies of the past and the philosophy developed today is often inevitably intertwined with the exercise of power. What makes Benthamite-radicalism, warts and all (and I tend to emphasize the warts), so admirable intellectually in its historical incarnation was its willingness to recognize its own theorizing as itself a kind of (discursive) power in shaping the ends of ‘philanthropy’ (by which it meant individuals and governments), and its inevitable reliance on power to actualize its ends. (On Bentham’s own political realism I warmly recommend this piece by James Vitali.) And yet today when we model (with thought experiments like the shallow pond and, say, the out of control trolley) how to think of our agency, we deliberately bracket the complexities of power and politics entirely. Until we learn to see this as a category error, we are unlikely to exercise our agency in wiser ways.

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