Review: The Most Good You Can Do

I originally wrote this review in June 2015 for what was intended to be a collection of reviews of books with interesting and/or provocative these. Unfortunately, the person who was organising the collection did not manage to publish it before they left the ASI; I was reminded of this book by another discussion, and so am making the review generally available. This is the review as I submitted it, without any changes.

Peter Singer achieved prominence as a moral philosopher in the 1970s with a series of books and articles arguing for controversial positions in impeccably logical fashion. One article in particular, Famine, Affluence and Morality (1972) argued that as members of rich, developed nations, we have strong duties of rescue to people living in less developed countries. This line of thinking has spawned the Effective Altruism movement, a set of groups whose members are pledged to ending poverty, saving the world, and in general averting suffering wherever they see it. Effective altruists, due to their focus upon concrete impact, think and act very differently from members of other charitable movements. The Most Good You Can Do functions as an introduction to this movement, presenting an introduction to and defence of its main beliefs and practices.

The opening chapters give a brief description of the movement and of how it came about. This includes some of the controversial claims to which effective altruists tend to subscribe – notably, that one is unlikely to achieve a great deal of good by working for a typical charity. When one is employed by a charity, this is likely to fill a role in the charity which could equally well have been done by any other volunteer. If one instead finds a well-paid job and donates money to the charity, the net positive impact of one’s career is likely to be far greater. This has led to some effective altruists seeking out employment in financial trading, despite the rather poor reputations held by financial firms regarding the morality of their practices.

The second section of the book deals with some of the specific actions taken by effective altruists. These include reducing one’s consumption in order to give more, seeking high-earning jobs, and donating organs. The chapter on earning to give contains the first seriously philosophical sections of the book, a response to objections made by David Brooks and by the ghost of Bernard Williams. In response to the idea that earning to give sacrifices one’s integrity and alienates a person from their personal goals and projects, Singer claims (without much in the way of argument) that merely “doing good” is a perfectly adequate goal for one’s life – in which case earning to give, far from representing the subjugation of one’s aims to an imperative to maximise global utility, can be the ultimate expression of authenticity.

In response to the idea that going into finance upholds and strengthens the system of capitalism which impoverishes many and drives inequality, Singer engages in a brief defence of capitalism, pointing to the fact that it has “lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty”. Finally he considers the idea that going into finance harms people, and that ‘do not harm’ ought to be prior to ‘do the most good’ as a principle of morality. Singer questions this priority with an example drawn from the London Blitz, but seems to devote more attention to attacking the account of harm upon which the objection rests. It is unclear that Singer needs to defend earning to give against these specific objections – while finance is one career path for someone who earns to give, there are after all a range of alternatives including law, consultancy, and entrepreneurship.

In addition to these, Singer discusses a range of other careers in which one’s impact might be directly through the work – among others effective altruist advocacy, jobs in aid organisations, and medical research. Finally, he discusses the good one can achieve by donating parts of one’s body. Since many people are unwilling to donate kidneys except in exchange for kidneys to save the lives of their own friends and family, someone who is willing to donate a kidney without attaching conditions can start a “kidney chain” of multiple donations, perhaps saving five or six lives through a single donation. Unfortunately the number of such donors is currently small (117 in the UK in 2013; the US figure, adjusted for population, is worse), not helped by the fact that until 2006 such donations were in fact illegal in the UK.

The third section of the book discusses the factors which motivate effective altruists to undertake apparently sacrificial actions purely in order to help others. Singer suggests that the emergence of effective altruism represents a triumph of reasoning over emotion, and presents a range of evidence to show that members of the wider population are usually moved to act altruistically more out of instinct than out of reasoned consideration. He also argues that we tend to overestimate how much happiness we will lose out on by giving away money and to fail to recognise the sense of purpose and self-esteem which many people gain from helping others.

The final section of the book presents perhaps the most controversial claims which effective altruists universally take for granted: that some charities and causes are simply better than others. Singer observes that, while poverty and suffering exist the whole world round, it is generally a lot easier to relieve them in the third world than in the first world. Singer compares a program of Rubella vaccination by philanthropist Ted Turner, estimated to have prevented around 13.8 million deaths between 2000-2012 at an average cost of $80 per life saved, with a 2007 operation which separated two conjoined twins from Costa Rica at a cost running into millions of dollars.

After sharply criticising the practice of spending megabucks on improving museums while there are starving children in Africa, Singer turns to some issues which are not universally accepted even by effective altruists. The first is animal rights; the second, the perhaps less familiar subject of existential risk. Given that (hopefully) the vast majority of humans have yet to exist, one of the biggest threats to the sum of human wellbeing is the risk of becoming extinct. Efforts to reduce the risks of nuclear war, asteroid impacts, and unfriendly artificial intelligence, then, could be a remarkably effective form of charitable giving.

All in all, The Most Good You Can Do is very readable and serves well as an introduction to the effective altruist movement. Even as someone who has been involved with effective altruism for almost two years, I learned things from reading it. Since the book is more a summary of existing arguments than an attempt to break new ground, the arguments made are perhaps not as strong as one might expect, with an often unnecessary reliance upon utilitarianism.

A (Relatively) Brief Note on Animal Suffering

Despite discussing animal welfare, Singer doesn't really go into wild animal suffering much in Practical Ethics, so I didn't really go into it in yesterday's review. However, in the EA memes group it is one of the main topics of discussion, and it's potentially a genuinely very important consideration in how we ought to behave towards the natural environment. While writing this, it occurred to me that much of it probably applies to domesticated animals as well.

There is a long tradition of people arguing that human life is universally terrible. The most famous person to have argued this is probably Arthur Schopenhauer, although David Benatar has also made an argument of this sort as part of his general case against child-bearing. (At some point I will write a post going into detail on why Benatar is wrong, for he is and it's quite obvious that he is once you see the problem. But enough about my MA dissertation...)

Sometimes they appeal to the great sufferings that we endure in life. Sometimes they start with an axiological approach to "what the good life consists in" and argue that it is rarely met. Either way, the fact is that plenty of people have made these arguments, and yet the fact is that the vast majority of us are glad to be living.

I think a large problem with these kinds of arguments is that while they may allow us to come up with a rough ordinal ranking of lives, there is no cardinal value of a life - and therefore no objective "zero point" at which one should be indifferent between existing and not existing. That's not to say there is no such point, indeed I think there clearly is: rather, it is to say that where this point lies is a subjective issue. A life which I consider worth living may not be one that anyone else would consider worth living, even if there is no disagreement either upon what that life involves or on the value of the life and its components.

(The obvious response to this claim is to ask whether it is really plausible that one could rationally prefer an existence of utter misery to non-existence? I would say two things in response: first, I would be inclined to revise to the slightly weaker claim that the extent to which pleasure balances out pain is subjective, hence a life must include at least some pleasure to outweigh the inevitable sufferings. Second, quoth Hume: "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the wntire world to the scratching of my finger. 'Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. 'Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter." - A Treatise of Human Nature, book II, part iii, section 3. To say someone ought not to consider a life of almost complete suffering to non-existence is to accuse them of irrationality, but rationality is at least primarily, if not entirely, concerned not with what one takes as goals but rather how one seeks to achieve them. Such a preference ranking would be strange, but not irrational).

Arguments for the importance of animal suffering tend to presuppose a roughly hedonic view of the good life - which is fair enough, given that most animals lack the requisite cognitive resources to have a conception of whether their lives are happy overall, rather than merely whether they are happy in any given moment. They then proceed to detail the many sufferings undergone by animals: cold, starvation, being eaten alive, etc. What we have, then, are two challenges to this kind of argument:

(1) it is impossible to simply compare pleasure with pain. These two phenomena may occur in the same subject, but unless that subject is sufficiently advanced to see itself as persisting over time and have opinions on this, there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether the pleasure outweighs the pain or vice versa. Hence while we might think that the improvement of animal conditions is a morally good thing, and the worsening of their conditions a morally bad thing, one cannot say that an animal life containing both pleasure and pain is either good or bad as a whole.

(2) philosophers have tended to make a particular kind of argument to the effect that humans generally suffer by existing, yet we know empirically that these philosophers are wrong. We should therefore be highly skeptical of such arguments when made in relation to animals.

How to be Practically Perfect in Every Way

Practical Ethics (3rd Edition)
Peter Singer

There is a great danger when reviewing a book on a contentious subject that one ends up concluding "the bits I agreed with were good, the bits I disagreed with were bad". This review won't quite say that, but comes closer to this sentiment than I am really comfortable with.

I came to Practical Ethics with mixed expectations. On the one hand, it came highly recommended by people whose opinions I take very seriously, and after all there's a reason why Peter Singer is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of our time. That said, I've been disappointed by some of his writings in the past, and had kind of got the impression that while he has great and original ideas his attention to detail was not always the greatest.

Well, that's a highly unfair characterisation of him. The first half of Practical Ethics, at least, is a masterpiece of clarity. He discusses the possibility of racial differences in cognitive abilities dispassionately, demonstrating that belief in it is utterly consistent with a liberal worldview. I didn't really learn much from that discussion, having thought about it plenty beforehand, but it was remarkable to see it discussed with such courage by an important, politically-left-of-centre public intellectual.

Similarly, his discussion of abortion demonstrates the problems with the main arguments advanced by both sides of the debate. Ultimately I disagree with Singer - he really ought to give moral weight to benefits enjoyed by individuals whose existence is dependent upon the decision we make - but he demolishes thinkers regardless of which side they are, and while the position he arrives at (support for post-natal abortions) ought to be a reductio of his premises we are left in no doubt either of his sincerity in advocating it, nor of his understanding the issue on a very deep level. (Personally, I'm in favour of something slightly stricter than the UK system - abortions being available on demand up to about 20 weeks of pregnancy, and after that in cases of medical emergency only).

One passage I found particularly illuminating of his discussion of what is particularly wrong with murder. Prior to reading Practical Ethics I had a vague sense that we ought to take the interests of non-human beings into account (i.e. concern for animal welfare) but that actually holding rights was something to do with being human and a full agent. I'm now much more persuaded by Singer's view, which is similar but attributes the possession of rights to those beings which conceive of themselves as existing through time. I can't say I'm 100% convinced, but Singer acknowledges the weak points of his view - e.g. the implication that murder is not so much a wrong to the person murdered but rather to the other people around - and, unlike many philosophers who paper over the holes in their arguments and hope we won't notice, draws attention to this problem.

With all that said in defence of the book, it's worth noting some issues I had. The first is in his discussion of equality: Singer defends his utilitarianism as "equal consideration of interests". That's one form of equality, to be sure, and it sounds a lot nobler than "equal marginal utility of consumption" (as Amartya Sen amusingly describes utilitarianism). But does it really come close to our ordinary notions of a worthwhile conception of equality? Utility monsters are one problem for this view - Singer ends up committed to the view that we really ought to give them all of our resources and debase ourselves before them - but more fundamentally, equality talk is at least somewhat about grabbing. It's about preventing one member or group within society from coming to dominate the rest of us. The union gangmen may not represent an admirable form of "equality", with their happiness (for example) to beat up anyone who dares vote against the party line, but ultimately that's what our equality instinct developed to achieve. Singer should either accept this, or he should find a genuinely noble ideal (like pure happiness! It's not difficult) upon which to base his utilitarianism.

Second, his discussion of the social discount rate - while drawing attention to a severely neglected issue, and not so far from the truth on the issue - failed to mention the absolutely crucial difference between what Tyler Cowen calls the "pure preference rate" and differences in the marginal utility of consumption across time. One cannot simply compare £50 now to £1000 in 100 years, observe that the one is a much greater number, and conclude from this that it is to be preferred. If we replace pounds with utils, then of course such a comparison is appropriate - but this is not what Singer did, and his chapter on the environment suffers in clarity for it. (My discussion here is much less exact than I would like, relying upon vague memories of a Cass Sunstein paper that my google-fu skills have failed to turn up).

Overall, though, the book is very much worth reading - both as an introduction to the subject of applied ethics, and as a contribution to the ongoing debate. I note also that there are several sections which are very much of use to my thoughts, but which (unlike e.g. his argument for post-natal abortions) I would not have picked up just from reading reviews. So this is at least one data point in favour of reading whole books rather than just review of them, even on relatively-easily-summarised subjects such as philosophy.

Effective Altruists need not be Moral Saints

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy about how demanding our moral obligations can be. One of the most popular objections to utilitarianism (roughly, the view that we ought always to maximise the sum of happiness, regardless of whatever else this entails) is that it is impossible to live up to.

Philosophy Bro has summaries of two of the most important writings on this subject, which I highly recommend reading even if you have no prior understanding of philosophy: Peter Singer's Drowning Child Argument and Susan Wolf's Moral Saints.

Singer argues, very convincingly, that we have almost unlimited duties to help the poor of the third world. Wolf argues that a life which is 100% dedicated to doing good is in fact a rather unappealing idea, and that this kind of existence misses out on many valuable pieces of life.

I actually lean towards agreeing with Wolf here. This means that I reject Singer's ultimate conclusion. But I still think his argument goes a lot further than most people would be comfortable with. For people who (a) can donate money to combating third world poverty while maintaining a minimally decent standard of living and (b) are aware that effective third-world charities exist, I think there is a duty to give at least some of your income to effective charities.

This kind of donation should not ruin your life. No effective altruist that I know devotes themselves 100% to helping people. Indeed, if we're honest I suspect that being involved in effective altruism represents a form of consumption for many members. You meet all kinds of intelligent and interesting people, leapfrog a great deal of inferential distance, and get to hang out with high-status people.

There are a number of different claims that you could make regarding the demandingness of our positive obligations:
(1) We must maximise the amount we give; that is, giving all that we can without damaging our ability to give in future.
(2) We must give all we can above what is necessary for a minimally decent lifestyle.
(3) We must give enough that, if everyone else were to give the same amount (or the same proportion of their income), every single person would have a minimally decent lifestyle.
(4) We must give a modest proportion of our income above what we need.
(5) We must give everything that we are legally obliged to give.
(6) We have no positive obligations.

All of these, with the exception of (5), are statements which I consider plausibly true. My own intention is to give more than is implied by (3) or (4), but less than that which is implied by (2). Living according to (1) seems quite simply impossible.