Crook Slanders EA

The pun was just to good not to make

It happens enough to be deeply tedious. Some journalist writes a very vicious hitpiece on effective altruism that involves flagrant misrepresentations, sneering instead of arguing, and proceeds to ignore every response EAs have ever given. This response will be littered with risible misrepresentations, combined with criticisms of random things tangentially related to EA, such as quotes from the Ph.D dissertation of one EA, but will be totally light on arguments against the core of EA. Then, after this extensive and bizarre exercise in cherry-picking, which will consist largely of merely sneering at controversial things some EAs say or believe, the journalist will declare victory—claiming that EA is a scam or a fraud or misguided in some other way. Conveniently, these EAs are so bad that those of us who are among the most affluent people to ever live don’t have to lift a finger to help the plight of children who starve and die because of our indifference; doing anything in the face of this extreme and avertable suffering would be objectionable, or so the writer claims.

It’s not particularly surprising that a cottage industry for these ridiculous hitpieces has arisen; lots of people feel some nagging guilt about spending on expensive vacations when that same money could have saved a child’s life. As a consequence, there’s extensive demand for people to be told that those weird nerds who actually do something about this extreme suffering as effectively as they can are the real villains.

The most recent instantiation of this trend came from a deeply terrible hitpiece by a person named Clive Crook. Using his expertise on crooks (the jokes write themselves), the author in a Bloomberg editorial declares EA “bankrupt” and “a scam.” It’s worth getting clear on the core claim of EA; namely, that people should generally make doing good effectively a core part of their lives. One can quibble over the details, disagreeing with longtermism, for example, while sharing this core commitment. Even if everything EAs have ever done other than donating to the Against Malaria Foundation is terrible, the core claim would still be true; if there’s even one effective intervention, we should do that.

Crook declares that EA is inextricably linked with the exorbitant fraud of people like Sam Bankman Fried and that this discredits the movement. Why? Well:

Ef­fec­tive Al­tru­ism is a form of util­i­tar­i­an­ism. Util­i­tar­i­ans judge acts by com­par­ing their ef­fects on the global sum of hap­pi­ness, and the mor­ally right course is the one you ex­pect to achieve the most hap­pi­ness. Other moral con­sid­er­ations — like ob­li­ga­tions to be hon­est, to be just, to be loyal, to re­spect prop­erty rights — count only to the ex­tent that they help in cal­cu­lat­ing hap­pi­ness.

Ef­fec­tive Al­tru­ists are there­fore obliged to say: Yes, steal­ing to give to the poor might be good. The poor would prob­a­bly gain more in hap­pi­ness than the not-poor would lose. It de­pends on the num­bers.

I wasn’t aware that one could flagrantly lie in Bloomberg pieces while getting published and widely acclaimed, but apparently they can. Effective altruism is not a “form of utilitarianism,” as one would know if they had anything beyond a cursory familiarity with effective altruism. The only claim one needs to be an effective altruist is the more modest Beneficentrist claim that helping others more is better than helping them less, and we should try to help people considerably.

If one googles effective altruism, the first thing that comes up is this helpful definition:

Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.

No part of this requires being a utilitarian. Only about three quarters of EAs are utilitarians at all, which would be odd if it were a “form of utilitarianism.” One of my professors, for instance, is wholly on board with EA, and thinks we have an obligation to give much of our money effectively, even though he’s a deontologist. Even the founders of the movement, MacAskill and Ord are not utilitarians—I remember MacAskill saying that he has only about 50% credence in utilitarianism. The EA forum’s response to frequently asked questions notes:

Utilitarians are usually enthusiastic about effective altruism. But many effective altruists are not utilitarians and care intrinsically about things other than welfare, such as violation of rights, freedom, inequality, personal virtue and more. In practice, most people give some weight to a range of different ethical theories.

The only ethical position necessary for effective altruism is believing that helping others is important. Unlike utilitarianism, effective altruism doesn’t necessarily say that doing everything possible to help others is obligatory, and doesn’t advocate for violating people’s rights even if doing so would lead to the best consequences.

Richard helpfully explains:

It's worth distinguishing three features of utilitarianism (only the weakest of which is shared by Effective Altruism):

(1) No constraints.  You should do whatever it takes to maximize the good -- no matter the harms done along the way.

(2) Unlimited demands of beneficence: Putting aside any intrinsically immoral acts, between the remaining options you should do whatever would maximize the good -- no matter the cost to yourself.

(3) Efficient benevolence: Putting aside any intrinsically immoral acts, and at whatever magnitude of self-imposed burdens you are willing to countenance: you should direct your selected resources (time, effort, money) that are allocated for benevolent ends in whatever way would do the most good.

EA is only committed to feature (3), not (1) or (2).  And it's worth emphasizing how incredibly weak claim (3) is.  (Try completing the phrase "no matter..." for this one.  What exactly is the cost of avoiding inefficiency?  "No matter whether you would rather support a different cause that did less good?" Cue the world's tiniest violin.)

EAs write tons of articles explaining this, breaking down in detail the differences between utilitarianism and effective altruism, before supposed journalists, tasked with informing people, proceed to ignore all of this and brazenly declare that EA is inherently utilitarian, with no argument.

You might wonder why I’m spending so much time on this. The answer is that it is the only argument in the article. Every other point in the article relies on this crucial assumption. The author even admits that doing altruism effectively is all very well, but then falsely claims EA is committed to the view one has no more reason to help their loved ones than distant strangers. Many of these involve bog-standard objections to utilitarianism that I’ve addressed at length elsewhere, so I won’t repeat my replies here. But some of the claims in the article are downright bizarre:

You can see why Ef­fec­tive Al­tru­ism also ap­peals to peo­ple with per­son­al­ity dis­or­ders. It blends the in­trac­ta­ble com­plex­ity of these cal­cu­la­tions with what most might see as so­cio­pathic sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. Com­put­able eth­ics strips out all un­help­ful moral cri­te­ria, that is, moral judg­ment as most peo­ple un­der­stand it.

Source??? If you’re claiming that EA appeals to people with personality disorders, you should have evidence for that claim. EA does not oversimplify—in fact, EAs spend a lot more time agonizing over which charity does the most good than other people who give to whichever charity floats their fancy.

Ac­cord­ing to hard-core util­i­tar­i­ans, em­pa­thy is a prob­lem, be­cause it makes the in­ter­ests of fam­ily, friends, neigh­bors and fel­low cit­i­zens seem more press­ing than those of strang­ers, for­eign­ers and peo­ple who might or might not be born mil­len­nia from now. One day, with suf­fi­cient fund­ing and ade­quate com­put­ing power, rea­son will over­come this moral id­i­ocy.

I’m about as hard-core of a utilitarian as they come, and have hung out with many hard-core utilitarians. I have never made that claim, nor have I literally ever heard anyone make that claim. EAs say that problem is not that we have too much empathy for those close enough, but that we don’t have enough empathy for those far away. We need to expand our empathy, not shrink it.

Of course, even if one is a utilitarian, they should be very opposed to what SBF did. There is a world of difference between thinking that in theory one can justify rights violations for the greater good and thinking that one should ignore valuable decision-making procedures in myopic pursuit of what they think to be the greater good. For more on this distinction, see Richard’s valuable pieces (plural). Even if one could in theory justify severe rights violation, a real-world decision maker with limited knowledge should follow common sense guidance because that almost always has better outcomes. So even if Crook were right that EA was utilitarian, nothing he had to say would be correct. The last paragraph of Crook provides a nice encapsulation of his core error:

The move­ment was al­ready strug­gling with this im­pos­ture be­fore the FTX scan­dal broke. In Sep­tem­ber 2022, MacAskill told an in­ter­viewer he was an­noyed by the way peo­ple he talked to al­ways wanted to push his ar­gu­ments to their log­i­cal con­clu­sion. Ap­par­ently, that’s too much to ask of a moral phi­los­o­pher.

It’s not that MacAskill is incapable of talking about ethics. It’s that he’s advocating for a very minor thesis. If your thesis is that one should help others effectively, then talking about one’s ultimate normative is just changing the subject—it’s adding controversy when the real issue is very simple and straightforward. If all one needs to prove a conclusion is modest premises, there’s no reason to discuss extreme and dramatic premises. To secure the truth of effective altruism, one just needs the utterly obvious notion that one should do good when they can at minimal personal cost. Nothing Crook says gives us the slightest reason to abandon that core conviction because it’s not about that core conviction—it’s about a broader philosophy that entails, but is not entailed by, the core conviction. As such, utilitarianism could be as bad as Crook says it is, and one wouldn’t have the slightest reason to abandon effective altruism.