Effective altruism

Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed.6 The watershed moment came in 1984 with the publication of Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons.
Population ethics is crucial for longtermism because it greatly affects how we should evaluate the end of civilisation.–William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 168.

This is the fourth post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here; the third here.) MacAskill’s note 6 refers to the Mohists, who are not treated as population ethicists because “they did not discuss the intrinsic and instrumentalist benefits and costs of increasing population.” (307) Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that such an economic analysis (costs/benefits) is intrinsic to population ethics.

It’s unclear why we should exclude non-secular population ethicists (starting with Plato, but not least Berkeley, Malthus, and Nassau Senior all of whom shaped the early utilitarians), although (recall) Parfit has soft-Nietzschean reasons for doing so, but it is left unclear whether MacAskill endorses these. Even so, MacAskill’s historical claim is odd. Some of the most important innovations in early twentieth century social and biological sciences and statistical technique (associated with names like Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Edgeworth, and Haldane)* are intertwined with population ethics (and eugenics). I am almost inclined to joke that in their age we even developed a fallacy, ‘the naturalistic’ one so as to avoid tainting doctrines with their sordid origins.

While undoubtedly some early utilitarians were pioneering population ethicists, it seems unfair to ignore the pre-utilitarian population ethicists of imperialists political arithmeticians like William Petty (seventeenth century), who put the art of managing populations by modern states on a more scientific footing while terrorizing the Irish. The managing of the size and quality of populations was an intrinsic part of the (quite ‘secular’) art of government in the reason of state tradition of the sixteenth century, too. In fact, civilizations (including feudal orders) that emphasize ‘good breeding’ (a phrase that had a positive connotation until quite recently) are generally self-consciously engaged in population ethics (even if their cost-benefit analysis deviates from MacAskill’s).

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To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout….The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful or deformed, or the glass could shatter altogether, depending on what happens while the glass is still hot. William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 6

This is the third post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here.)

A key strain of MacAskill’s argument rests on three contentious claims: (i) that currently society is relatively plastic; (ii) that the future values of society can be shaped; (iii) that in history there is a  dynamic of “early plasticity, later rigidity” (p. 43). Such rigidity is also called “lock-in” by MacAskill, and he is especially interested in (iv) “value lock-in.”

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This is the second post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here; it lists some qualities about the book that I admire.)

Two ground-rules about what follows:

1. I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It’s mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
2. I ignore MacAskill’s association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.

• Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?

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The effect of such extreme climate change is difficult to predict. We just do not know what the world would be like if it were more than seven degrees warmer; most research has focused on the impact of less than five degrees. Warming of seven to ten degrees would do enormous harm to countries in the tropics, with many poor agrarian countries being hit by severe heat stress and drought. Since these countries have contributed the least to climate change, this would be a colossal injustice.
But it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse. For example, one pressing concern about climate change is the effect it might have on agriculture. Although climate change would be bad for agriculture in the tropics, there is scope for adaptation, temperate regions would not be as badly damaged, and frozen land would be freed up at higher latitudes. There is a similar picture for heat stress. Outdoor labour would become increasingly difficult in the tropics because of heat stress, which would be disastrous for hotter and poorer countries with limited adaptive capacity. But richer countries would be able to adapt, and temperate regions would emerge relatively unscathed.–William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, “chapter 6: collapse” p 136.

Two ground-rules about what follows:

1. I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It’s mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
2. I ignore MacAskill’s association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.

• Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?

Anyway, after my post on MacAskill’s twitter thread (here) and my post on the concluding pages of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (here), I was told by numerous people that I ought to read MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. And while I am going to be rather critical in what follows (and subsequent posts), I want to note a few important caveats: first, MacAskill is asking very interesting social questions, and draws on a wide range of examples (also historically far apart). I am happy this is a possible future for philosophy today. Second, he is an engaging writer. Third, What We Owe the Future is — as the first and last chapter make clear — quite explicitly intended as a contribution to movement building, and that means that the standards of evaluation cannot be (say) identical to what one might expect in a journal article. In a future post, I’ll have something to say about the relationship between public philosophy and movement building, but in this post I will be silent on it. Fourth, if you are looking for a philosophically stimulating review of What We Owe the Future, I warmly recommend Peter Wolfendale’s essay here for a general overview (here). If you are especially interested in objections to the axiology, I warmly recommend Kierin Setiya’s piece in Boston Review (here). It’s also worth re-reading Amia Srinivasan’s high profile, prescient critique of MacAskill’s earlier work (here).*

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