Last week, Leif Wenar, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, wrote a critique of effective altruism in Wired magazine. One of his complaints is that the charity evaluator websites, such as GiveWell, which sit at the heart of the movement’s efforts to encourage the world’s wealthy to donate a substantial proportion of their money and to donate it to those organizations that the available evidence suggests will do most good in expectation, do not explicitly advertise the unintended bad consequences of the activities undertaken by the charities they endorse; and, surely worse, they don’t include those consequences in their calculations of the charities’ benefits. Wenar writes that the bed nets treated with insecticide that are distributed by the
Wenar's argument is reminiscent of the way advocates of continued reliance on coal, oil and gas suddenly start worrying about the environmental consequences of wind turbines and lithium mining.
I infer that Wenar doesn't like EA for non-consequentialist reasons, but can't articulate a broadly convincing argument along these lines. So, he throws a bunch of bad consequences against the wall, in the hope that something will stick.
I don't know anything about him, but consequentialists (i am one) often have views that arise from non-consequentalist reasons. There's always a temptation to defend such views in consequentialist terms, but on the basis of motivated reasoning rather than an unbiased assessment.
If I understand correctly, I agree. Consequentialism has some counterintuitive implications, which some of its adherents naively believe can all be explained away. That doesn't mean C is wrong; it just means that accepting it requires a certain amount of bullet-biting, as with any view.
Sure. I'm happy to bite most of the bullets. And lots of anti-consequentialist arguments apply to EA. For example, as I (no doubt unfairly) interpret virtue ethics, the right way to help other people is the way that most successful makes you feel virtuous. Plenty of bullet-biting needed there too. Wenar seems to be drifting this way, without ever biting the necessary bullets.
This is an excellent response to Wenar's article. It's frustrating to see how many philosophers pointed to it as some sort of knockdown argument against EA.
"As far as I can tell, Wenar doesn’t think that, after taking these bad consequences into account, the charity evaluators would end up changing their recommendations."
On reading the entire piece, it seems to me that Wenar is saying that and even more: that aid of all kinds is worse than useless. This is based, AFAICT, on casual conversations with burned-out aid workers. I could get the same kind of evidence on just about anything: school and university education, police services, health care and so on. Just find someone in the field who's had the inevitable bad experience, and turn their gripes into a social science model.
These types of criticisms of EA frustrate me because they don't distinguish positive from normative. However, the idea that those two are inextricably linked seems central to some parts of the non-consequentialist tradition (e.g. Anscombe's "On Brute Facts"), so maybe guess they'd say that's ok.
On another note, maybe part of what Wenar is saying is this: how much weight a person should get in our personal moral utility function depends on how much of a connection (of some kind) they have to us at any given time.
The interesting question with that sort of view is dynamic consistency. How do we live life knowing that every time we strengthen connections with a person, we gain greater obligations to care about them? For one thing, be careful about getting to know too many poor people, because then you'll gain obligations to help them.
I think you read Wenar's argument in a very naive way. Effectively (no pun) you're suggesting that the two alternatives on the table are (1) EA and GiveWell should continue to operate as they currently do, with no further thoughts or improvement, or (2) both movements should be discarded and replaced with some unspecified alternative. By addressing the argument this way, you can easily dismiss Wenar's points: after all, if there's no concrete alternative the of course (1) will always win.
I read Wenar's argument as a proposal for a set of changes that would optimize GiveWell and the movement in general. In particular, he points out a number of weaknesses in the charity's evaluation metrics: they could easily look into ways to improve these. He also raises the possibility that donors should apply more skepticism to these metrics, and to their own (currently very simplistic) heuristics for giving. Every one of these criticisms, if internalized, could lead to dramatic improvements in both GiveWell and the movement. But the key is a willingness to internalize them: to accept criticism as a motivation for improvement and introspection, rather than as something to be rebutted and ignored. The current post disappoints me because it feels the response of this community is going to be rebuttal and dismissal rather than reform. I think that is a critical error that will ultimately harm many people who might otherwise be helped.
Wenar's argument is reminiscent of the way advocates of continued reliance on coal, oil and gas suddenly start worrying about the environmental consequences of wind turbines and lithium mining.
I infer that Wenar doesn't like EA for non-consequentialist reasons, but can't articulate a broadly convincing argument along these lines. So, he throws a bunch of bad consequences against the wall, in the hope that something will stick.
Wenar is a consequentialist.
Really? My impression was he was more of a deontologist / political philosopher in the tradition of Rawls but with more of a focus on global justice.
I don't know anything about him, but consequentialists (i am one) often have views that arise from non-consequentalist reasons. There's always a temptation to defend such views in consequentialist terms, but on the basis of motivated reasoning rather than an unbiased assessment.
If I understand correctly, I agree. Consequentialism has some counterintuitive implications, which some of its adherents naively believe can all be explained away. That doesn't mean C is wrong; it just means that accepting it requires a certain amount of bullet-biting, as with any view.
Sure. I'm happy to bite most of the bullets. And lots of anti-consequentialist arguments apply to EA. For example, as I (no doubt unfairly) interpret virtue ethics, the right way to help other people is the way that most successful makes you feel virtuous. Plenty of bullet-biting needed there too. Wenar seems to be drifting this way, without ever biting the necessary bullets.
Great response! One point to add.
Premise: Giving your money away reduces your power.
Premise: Causing someone to not die increases their power.
Conclusion: Donating to the AMF is a way of transferring your power to others.
This is an excellent response to Wenar's article. It's frustrating to see how many philosophers pointed to it as some sort of knockdown argument against EA.
"As far as I can tell, Wenar doesn’t think that, after taking these bad consequences into account, the charity evaluators would end up changing their recommendations."
On reading the entire piece, it seems to me that Wenar is saying that and even more: that aid of all kinds is worse than useless. This is based, AFAICT, on casual conversations with burned-out aid workers. I could get the same kind of evidence on just about anything: school and university education, police services, health care and so on. Just find someone in the field who's had the inevitable bad experience, and turn their gripes into a social science model.
These types of criticisms of EA frustrate me because they don't distinguish positive from normative. However, the idea that those two are inextricably linked seems central to some parts of the non-consequentialist tradition (e.g. Anscombe's "On Brute Facts"), so maybe guess they'd say that's ok.
On another note, maybe part of what Wenar is saying is this: how much weight a person should get in our personal moral utility function depends on how much of a connection (of some kind) they have to us at any given time.
The interesting question with that sort of view is dynamic consistency. How do we live life knowing that every time we strengthen connections with a person, we gain greater obligations to care about them? For one thing, be careful about getting to know too many poor people, because then you'll gain obligations to help them.
I think you read Wenar's argument in a very naive way. Effectively (no pun) you're suggesting that the two alternatives on the table are (1) EA and GiveWell should continue to operate as they currently do, with no further thoughts or improvement, or (2) both movements should be discarded and replaced with some unspecified alternative. By addressing the argument this way, you can easily dismiss Wenar's points: after all, if there's no concrete alternative the of course (1) will always win.
I read Wenar's argument as a proposal for a set of changes that would optimize GiveWell and the movement in general. In particular, he points out a number of weaknesses in the charity's evaluation metrics: they could easily look into ways to improve these. He also raises the possibility that donors should apply more skepticism to these metrics, and to their own (currently very simplistic) heuristics for giving. Every one of these criticisms, if internalized, could lead to dramatic improvements in both GiveWell and the movement. But the key is a willingness to internalize them: to accept criticism as a motivation for improvement and introspection, rather than as something to be rebutted and ignored. The current post disappoints me because it feels the response of this community is going to be rebuttal and dismissal rather than reform. I think that is a critical error that will ultimately harm many people who might otherwise be helped.