8

One Among Many

Bernard Williams argued that human beings are not the kind of creatures who can take “the point of view of the universe”:

The difficulty is … that the moral dispositions, and indeed other loyalties and commitments, have a certain depth or thickness; they cannot simply be regarded, least of all by their possessor, just as devices for generating actions or states of affairs. Such dispositions and commitments will characteristically be what gives one’s life some meaning, and gives one some reason for living it. … There is simply no conceivable exercise that consists in stepping completely outside myself and from that point of view evaluating in toto the dispositions, projects and affections that constitute the substance of my own life.1

Effective altruists seem to have achieved what Williams thought cannot be done. They are able to detach themselves from more personal considerations that otherwise dominate the way in which we live. This detachment is not total, but it does make an important difference to how they live, and it is based on reasoning of a kind that comes close to evaluating how they are living from a point of view that is independent of their own “dispositions, projects and affections.” Here are some commonly expressed dispositions and affections that effective altruists would consider misguided grounds for giving:

•I give to breast cancer research because my wife died of breast cancer.

•I always wanted to be an artist but never had the opportunity, so now I direct my charitable contributions to organizations that provide opportunities for promising artists to develop their creative talents.

•I am passionate about photographing nature, so I donate to protect our wonderful national parks.

•Because I am an American, disadvantaged Americans have the first call on my charity.

•I love dogs so I give to my local animal shelter.

The influence that “the point of view of the universe” has on one’s behavior will vary from person to person. Perhaps it is significant that many effective altruists decided on their overall goal while they were still quite young, before they were too deeply embedded in more particular projects or, in some cases, close personal attachments to people who do not share their values. As infants we cannot reason, but we can and do have emotions about a wide range of things. When we begin to reason we are likely to use reason to generalize and draw inferences from those situations about which we already have an emotional attitude. Nevertheless, reason is no mere slave to the passions. By modifying and redirecting our passions, it can play a critical part in the process that leads us to act ethically.

The possibility that our capacity to reason can play a critical role in a decision to live ethically offers a solution to the perplexing problem that effective altruism would otherwise pose for evolutionary theory. There is no difficulty in explaining why evolution would select for a capacity to reason: that capacity enables us to solve a variety of problems, for example, to find food or suitable partners for reproduction or other forms of cooperative activity, to avoid predators, and to outwit our enemies. If our capacity to reason also enables us to see that the good of others is, from a more universal perspective, as important as our own good, then we have an explanation for why effective altruists act in accordance with such principles. Like our ability to do higher mathematics, this use of reason to recognize fundamental moral truths would be a by-product of another trait or ability that was selected for because it enhanced our reproductive fitness—something that in evolutionary theory is known as a spandrel.2

Further support for the hypothesis that reason can provide a crucial element of the motivation for altruism comes from what we can observe about effective altruists. When they talk about why they act as they do, they often use language that is more suggestive of a rational insight than of an emotional impulse. Zell Kravinsky, for example, told Ian Parker that the reason many people didn’t understand his desire to donate a kidney is that “they don’t understand math.” That’s not literally true, of course. What Kravinsky meant is that they did not understand that, because the risk of dying as a result of donating a kidney is only one in four thousand, not to donate a kidney to someone in need is to value one’s own life at four thousand times that of a stranger, a view Zell thought was wrong. The relevance of the remark is that Zell explained the failure of others to understand his motivation in terms of a deficiency in a cognitive capacity, not of the absence of a feeling or emotion. Toby Ord made a similar comment when he explained his shift to what we would now describe as effective altruism as the outcome of his calculation about how many people he could help if he lived modestly and donated everything above that to effective charities. It then seemed obvious to him that this was what he ought to do. Celso Vieira, the Brazilian effective altruist, said that he is “more moved by arguments than by empathy.” Rachel Maley, a Chicago-based pianist and multidisciplinary artist, wrote in a blog for The Life You Can Save, “Numbers turned me into an altruist. When I learned that I could spend my exorbitant monthly gym membership (I don’t even want to tell you how much it cost) on curing blindness instead, the only thought I had was, ‘Why haven’t I been doing this all along?’ That question changed my life forever. I rethought all my financial priorities. Because sentimentalism had ruled my charitable choices up to that point, Effective Altruism was like a beam of clarity.”3

The New York Times columnist David Brooks recognized the intellectual basis of effective altruism—and was clearly uncomfortable with it—when he was criticizing the idea of “earning to give”: “If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But not many people actually think this way. Not many people value abstract life perceived as a statistic as much as the actual child being fed, hugged, nurtured and played with.”⁴ Critics of effective altruism often suggest, as Brooks is doing here, that there is something odd or unnatural about being moved by the “strictly intellectual” understanding that a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child.⁵ But as I said in the preface, loving your own child does not mean you have to be so dazzled by your love that you are unable to see that there is a point of view from which other children matter just as much as your own or that this perspective is unable to have an impact on the way you live.

It is telling that effective altruists talk more about the number of people they are able to help than about helping particular individuals. This interest in numbers is reflected in their giving; they give to the organizations they have reason to believe will do the most good, which often means that the donation will help more people than it would if it were given to a less effective organization. Many people who give to help people in poor countries sponsor individual children, a practice that indicates their need to focus on a particular individual whom they can get to know in some way but is not likely to benefit as many people.

Consistent with the points just made, many of the most prominent effective altruists have backgrounds in or are particularly strong in areas that require abstract reasoning, like mathematics and computing. Zell Kravinsky drew on his math skills to become a successful real estate investor. Toby Ord was studying math and computer science before he went into philosophy. Matt Wage did well in math at Princeton before deciding to major in philosophy. Ian Ross studied math and computer science at MIT as an undergraduate. Jim Greenbaum’s numeracy skills were always at the top of his class. Philipp Gruissem’s outstanding success in poker tournaments is sufficient proof that he has a strong grasp of probabilities. Celso Vieira excels in tasks requiring analytic reasoning. My favorite example of the combination of effective altruism and numeracy is the website Counting Animals, which has the subtitle “A place for people who love animals and numbers” and a home page stating that “nerdism meets animal rights here!”

We can speculate that people with a high level of abstract reasoning ability are more likely to take the kind of approach to helping others that is characteristic of effective altruism. This speculation gains some support from research into how donors to a charity respond to information about the effectiveness of the charity. Dean Karlan and Daniel Wood worked with Freedom from Hunger, a U.S.-based charity, to vary their fund-raising letters. The standard letter included a description of an individual who had benefited by Freedom from Hunger’s work. Such descriptions, as we have seen, arouse an emotional response. To the letters sent to a random sample of donors Karlan and Wood added information giving scientific evidence of the effectiveness of Freedom from Hunger’s work. They found that this information increased the number of donations received from large donors, who had previously given $100 or more, but decreased the number of donations received from small donors. As we noticed earlier, small donors who give to many charities tend to be “warm glow” donors who are not really concerned to do the most good. As Karlan and Wood write, “Our finding that smaller prior donors respond to information on charitable effectiveness by donating less frequently and in smaller amounts is consistent with other research showing that emotional impulses for giving shut down in the presence of analytical information.”6 Effective altruists, on the other hand, are strongly influenced by analytical information, which suggests that their emotional impulses are not inhibited by such information. Instead, they use it to override those elements of their emotional impulses that lead other people to act less effectively.

The hypothesis that effective altruists tend, to a higher degree than many other people, to allow their reasoning abilities to override and redirect their emotions is consistent with more than a decade of psychological research on Joshua Greene’s suggestion that we use two distinct processes when we make moral judgments. Greene suggests that the way most people make moral judgments can be thought of as akin to taking photographs with a camera that is normally used in “point-and-shoot” mode but can be switched to a manual mode that overrides the automatic settings. When we are confronted with a situation calling for moral judgment, we usually have an instinctive gut reaction that tells us when something is wrong. Like a point-and-shoot camera, our intuitive responses are quick and easy to operate and in normal conditions yield good results; but in rare situations with special features, they can lead us astray. In that case we will do better if we switch to manual mode, in other words, put aside our instinctive reactions and think the issue through.7

Point-and-shoot cameras were designed to enable people who are not expert photographers to take good photographs in most circumstances. Our quick moral responses were not designed but evolved by natural selection. Given that for most of our evolutionary history we lived in small tribal groups, it is no surprise that we developed instinctive responses that led us to help our kin and those with whom we could form cooperative relationships but did not favor helping distant strangers or animals.

The most controversial aspect of this model is that it links moral judgments characteristically based on the idea that something is just wrong in itself, independently of its consequences, to the instinctive, emotionally based point-and-shoot mode of reaching a moral judgment and links characteristically utilitarian judgments to the manual mode, which draws on our conscious thought processes, or reasoning, as well as on emotional attitudes. An early piece of evidence for this view came from a study in which Greene and his colleagues asked people to make judgments about trolley problems and similar moral dilemmas while images were being taken of their brain activity. The study showed increased activity in brain areas associated with cognitive control before a subject made a utilitarian judgment but not before making a nonutilitarian judgment.⁸ This suggestive finding has since been supported by a wide variety of further evidence. For example, in another study some subjects were asked, before they were presented with the moral dilemma, to memorize a string of letters, digits, and special characters, such as n63#m1Q, before each dilemma. They were told they would be asked to repeat the sequence after the experiment was over. This is known as cognitive loading—it puts a load on the parts of the brain associated with reasoning. When these subjects were then presented with the moral dilemmas, they were more likely than similar subjects who were not cognitively loaded to make judgments suggesting that some acts are just wrong, irrespective of their consequences. Remembering the sequence made it more difficult for them to reason adequately, and so they gave a more intuitive response. Similarly, when subjects were shown a photo of the single individual who would be harmed if they did not choose to act so as to save the larger number of individuals, they were less likely to give a utilitarian response, presumably because the photo aroused their empathy with the victim. Other studies of cognitive loading have yielded similar results.9 Many other studies also support Greene’s dual-process theory of how we make moral judgments.¹⁰ These studies bolster as well the more specific claim that associates characteristically consequentialist judgments with greater use of conscious reasoning processes.

To avoid possible misunderstandings, I reiterate that I am not trying to paint effective altruists as coldly rational calculating machines. Holden Karnofsky, the cofounder of GiveWell, has blogged about what he sees as the misconception that effective altruists are, in order to act as rationally as possible, suppressing their passions. That, he insists, isn’t the case. Instead, he writes, “Effective altruism is what we are passionate about. We’re excited by the idea of making the most of our resources and helping others as much as possible. … I’d have trouble sustaining interest in a cause if I felt that I could do more good by switching to another. I’m not describing how I ‘should’ think or ‘try to’ think. I’m describing what excites me. … This excitement is what drove the all-nighters that started GiveWell, and I believe I couldn’t be as motivated or put in as much effort on any other project.”11 Comments on Holden’s blog divided between some with whom it resonated and others who thought he was giving too much ground to the critics and should be standing up for reason rather than accepting that there is something negative about the idea of following reason rather than passion. Uri Katz, a graduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, asked Holden what he would do if he were to wake up one morning and find he has a passion for working in a soup kitchen and little passion for his work at GiveWell. Would he go and work at the soup kitchen, even though he would do much more good if he continued to work at GiveWell? In response Holden said he found it difficult to engage with a hypothetical question that involved such a fundamental transformation, but added, “I would have a tough decision and would have a real chance of opting for the soup kitchen.” Why, though, is this even a tough decision? Why does Holden not say simply, “Yes, of course, then I would work at the soup kitchen”? Because, I suggest, reason is playing a role in his decision making, as it should.

We can see reason playing this role, in conjunction with emotion, in the work for animals undertaken by Harish Sethu, the founder of the “nerdism meets animal rights” website Counting Animals. Sethu said to me, “I find that videos of animal suffering always draw an intense emotional response in me. I am slightly embarrassed to say that they always make me cry. All the rational number crunching I do is ultimately motivated by this emotion (compassion, mercy, etc.). … I am moved by both emotion and reason.” For Sethu, the emotional response to suffering is the ultimate motivator, but he recognizes that the suffering he is seeing on a video is part of a much larger universe of animal suffering. That recognition does not dampen his emotional response, as it does in people who are told about a group of children in need rather than one child.12 Neither does he take his emotional response to a video of, say, an abused dog as a reason for trying to do something to help that dog or even to help dogs in general. Instead, as we shall see in chapter 13 when we consider what an effective altruist should do about animal suffering, he reasons about how he can make the biggest possible reduction in the suffering in that larger universe of suffering.

If a high level of abstract reasoning ability is conducive to effective altruism, we can ask why it has emerged as a movement only now. Have people’s abstract reasoning abilities suddenly improved? Several factors are likely to be involved. In affluent nations a sizable segment of the population lives very comfortably and does not have to worry about economic security. In these circumstances, the need to find meaning and fulfillment in life comes to the fore, and many people turn to effective altruism as a way of giving their lives a purpose it would not otherwise have. Moreover, substantial wealth is now coming to a new generation of people who work in areas that analyze data and evidence. They are likely to be more ready to embrace the idea of giving based on doing the most good as opposed to giving based on family traditions, social conventions, or personal feelings. Technological changes that make it possible for effective altruists to connect with each other via the Internet have been important. The establishment of GiveWell has eased the difficulty of knowing where best to give.

These developments might well be sufficient triggers for the emergence of effective altruism, even if our reasoning abilities had remained static. Surprisingly, however, these abilities really have improved measurably in the relatively short time span of the past century. The average IQ score is still 100, but that is only because IQ test scores are standardized to produce this result. The tests themselves are changed from time to time in order to bring the raw scores closer to the standardized scores. In every major industrialized nation, raw scores have risen by an average of about 3 points per decade. The phenomenon is known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, who published papers on it in 1984 and 1987.13 It has been estimated that by today’s standards the average IQ in the United States in 1932 was only 80.¹⁴

Several explanations have been put forward for this rise in IQ scores, ranging from better nutrition to a more stimulating environment that requires us to do more thinking. Better education may have played some part, but scores have risen most on those questions that test the ability to reason abstractly rather than on the sections that test vocabulary and math. Flynn later proposed that the spread throughout the population of scientific modes of reasoning about problems could contribute to an improvement in reasoning.¹⁵

Steven Pinker believes that the improvement in our reasoning abilities may have begun when the development of the printing press spread ideas and information to a much larger proportion of the population. He argues that better reasoning had a positive moral impact too. We became better able to take an impartial stance and detach ourselves from our personal and parochial perspectives. Pinker calls this a “moral Flynn effect.”¹⁶ If he is right, this effect could have led more people to the kind of ethical views that are characteristic of effective altruism. Who knows what changes the twenty-first century, with its enormous expansion of personal communications and thus of contacts with others both near and far, will bring to human nature, to our brains, and to our moral sense?