Neither Master Nor Slave, But Utilitarian

Scott Alexander wrote a piece disagreeing with me about slave morality. Here's what I think about it and why Will MacAskill is the real ubermensch.

Scott Alexander has written an engaging and thoughtful reply to my piece criticizing the critics of slave morality (so he’s criticizing the critics of the critics of slave morality). In my original piece, I argued that when people talk about slave morality, they’re mostly just talking about the essential features of morality—opposition to callousness and cruelty, support for helping the weak even when doing so is inconvenient, and so on. Anyone who, say, criticizes veganism on the grounds that it’s slave morality is simply looking for a get out of jail free card, a slogan to ignore the dictates of morality.

Scott has a very different take on master morality. Scott sees slave morality as the kind of morality that’s pathologically opposed to risk, opposed to attempting grand projects, that sees morality as a set of prohibitions to adhere to rather than a general guide towards desirable conduct. The slave moralists are the ones who say that we can’t build malaria nets or cure kids’ blindness, because that would be white saviorism, who oppose earning to give (getting a bunch of money so you can give it away) because they think career success is immoral, who think Elon Musk has, despite facilitating enormous progress, been profoundly harmful to the world because of the problematic views he expresses.

Scott cites an article by Ozy Brennan titled The Life Goals of Dead People. Ozy notes that the goals of many people—don’t harm people, don’t upset people, don’t take up too much space—are best met by dead people. Dead people don’t harm anyone, nor take up space, nor excessively consume resources, nor cause global warming. Slave morality is the sort of morality that aspires to being a corpse—towards weakness and failing to affect the world, rather than shaking things up in a positive direction. Scott has another section on the same theme—the slave moralists are the ones who valorize the status quo, who think that billionaire founders of valuable tech startups do no more good than the typical janitor.

I entirely agree with what Scott says about this. While Scott’s piece is phrased as a reply to me, and it defends a version of master morality, it’s not really the version of master morality that I criticized. I criticized something more in line with the Bismarck version—that Scott also criticizes—that supports cruelty, has disdain for the weak, and opposes personal sacrifice in the name of morality on the grounds that it’s slave morality. I agree that the world needs a lot more of the Scott Alexander version of master morality.

Scott comes out concluding that we want something in the middle—neither fully master morality nor fully slave morality. We want something that valorizes strength and progress, that, like Matt Yglesias, believes that good things are good, but that doesn’t begin psychopathically endorsing the blending up of babies that is rampant in the meat industry on the grounds that if the baby chicks were really morally important, they’d fight their way out, rather than begging for a government handout.

More specifically, we want something utilitarianish.

Utilitarians are in a good position to explain the errors of both the master and slave moralist. The master moralist neglects the weak and vulnerable in favor of building giant skyscrapers. The slave moralist passes up efforts to genuinely better the world because they’re pathologically risk averse.

Utilitarians have no love of the status quo. The status quo is filled with corpses—corpses of kids, dead of malaria; corpses of animals, turned into meat; corpses of everyone over 110, dead of old age. Nature is cruel, progress has come when we’ve constructed grand projects to fight against the default natural state. Those who support inaction in the face of these profound tragedies are engaged in quite severe moral error.

Utilitarians also have no love of vitality for its own strength. When the Egyptians built pyramids off the backs of slaves (EDIT: this is apparently not true—the Egyptians didn’t do this), while the pyramids may have been cool, this was not a good thing. Progress is not an end in itself, but a means towards bettering the lives of conscious creatures.

Notably, I say utilitarianish rather than utilitarian, because the view doesn’t depend on utilitarianism at all. You can be a non-utilitarian and support all of these things—Michael Huemer and Philip Swenson, for example, mostly do. One who thinks that people have rights, and you shouldn’t violate them even for the greater good, need not disagree with any of this. The utilitarianish aren’t committed explicitly to utilitarianism, but to a very utilitarian vibe; a vibe that sees morality as a thing to be optimized and that cares, very widely, about many beings.

I think that most of the objections to effective altruism come from people being uncomfortable with the utilitarianish vibe. People are very worried about Singer’s notion that being a good person isn’t just about what you avoid, but about what you do. It’s not enough not to kill, you haver to give your wealth away. As Scott says, in a section explaining why effective altruism is master morality:

Everyone naturally disagrees with their critics - but as someone who gets criticized from lots of different angles, the EA critics boggle me the most. Not the ones who think some other charity is more effective; those guys are fine. I mean the ones who totally ignore where the charity goes and vomit twenty pages of the words “arrogant”, “billionaire”, and “white”. The reasons these people hate effective altruism never seem to connect at all with the reasons I find it valuable.

Full story here, in case you’ve forgotten.

My working model of these people’s psychology is something like: if you admit that charity is good, or that some charities are better than others, that’s an objective value. Any objective value lets you smuggle in the claim that some people are better than others. These people’s psychopolitics focus almost entirely on cutting down Tall Poppies, and on pre-emptively salting any soil that might one day allow a Tall Poppy to grow. An optimist might say this is because their first commitment is to the ultimate equality of humankind, beyond any commitment to short-term material welfare. A cynic might say they’re fallen so deep into Avoidance Of Judgment Hell that it’s impossible for them to parse any action or belief except as a hostile status claim - and that it’s impossible for them to treat the external world, whether starving people live or die, etc, as anything other than a prop in their internal status obfuscation pantomime. While a normal person might hear “Bill Gates led an amazing anti-malaria campaign that saved ten million people’s lives” and have some sort of emotion about the ten million lives being saved, these people only hear the word “led” and become obsessed with the need to cut Gates down a notch so people don’t think he’s cooler than they are.

People often object to effective altruism on the grounds that it’s explicitly utilitarian. This has the problem of being totally false; no part of the idea that one should try to use their time and money to do as much good as possible rests on utilitarianism, and non-utilitarians can and should endorse it (the EA charities do good by giving kids malaria nets, not by harvesting organs or engaging in the sorts of nefarious schemes that feature prominently in thought experiments raised as objections to utilitarianism). But it has a particularly utilitarian vibe—one that comes from taking morality seriously—and so people reject it.

Earning to give is largely ethically uncontroversial. If you take a high salary—of, say, 400,000 dollars a year—and give half of your money to charity, you’ll save around 40 lives a year. Maybe some jobs that pay a lot are a bit bad, but it’s hard to imagine a typical job like this being bad enough to make it not worth taking the job even if you save 40 people a year. If one is uncomfortable saying that those who earn and donate more do more good—if they’re too much of a slave moralist—they’ll object to earning to give. But if one is utilitarianish—seeing lives saved as being worth optimizing (saving 100 people is better than just saving 50, as the extra 50 people saved can attest)—they’ll support earning to give.

A while ago, at a conference of some sort, many people were hesitant to use the phrase “saving lives” to describe effective charitable giving, on the grounds that it is too self-aggrandizing. This is exactly the type of slave morality that the utilitarianish compromise is against—talking in vague, confusing, bureaucratise, saying sentences like “effective charities provide people the resources which enable opportunities to avert their death,” so as to avoid sounding like we’re taking too much credit for our action. One should aim at the good, rather than sounding humble. One who is advocating charitable donation shouldn’t aim to make it sound as bad as possible, to avoid the idea that they think they’re better than others, any more than an advertiser should make their product sound maximally unattractive! Effective charities do save lives—there are people who would be dead if not for them!

Scott mostly comes down in support of this idea. He thinks one should aim to do good and avoid pathological risk aversion and status quo bias. But he worries that focusing too much on just how much good one does—how ubermenschy one is—will result in valorizing people like Andrew Tate. Scott writes:

I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate.

In case you’ve been under a rock your whn successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial.

Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things.

Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this.

But I think a utilitarianish view gives us the resources to explain this. Now, even though Tate is fit and rich, given all the raping and hypocrisy, he has had a very negative effect on the world. The utilitarianish won’t approve of Tate anymore than they’d approve of the rich head of Tyson Foods.

But let’s steelman this a bit. Imagine a person with Tate’s ethics who dramatically bettered the world. Imagine, for example, that Stanislav Petrov, after saving the world, took up a life of sex trafficking. Do we have to admire Petrov?

No, obviously not! To evaluate the character of a person, we don’t just count up the number of utils they added to the world! Hitler’s grandmother wasn’t evil just because she birthed the person who birthed Hitler. Utilitarianism is a theory of right action, not a theory of character evaluation—we can still maintain a commonsensical method of character evaluation.

Now, the utilitarianish will generally say that this sex trafficking Petrov made the world a better place. But this is a totally reasonable judgment! Of course a person who saves the world made the world better, even if he’s a jerk who trafficks women. People can be personally vicious but still make the world a better place.

Scott thinks that Matt Yglesias is the ideal Nietzschian ubermensch, with his love of grand projects like making America have 1 billion people and simple support for good things. Matt Yglesias is on the left, but he’s a fan of progress, rather than the stifling risk aversion and problematization that much of the left focuses on obsessively.

I suggest that Will MacAskill is the ubermensch of the utilitarian compromise.

MacAskill doesn’t valorize weakness or inaction—he’s physically fit and founded one of the most influential movements of the last few decades. From listening to MacAskill in podcasts, he does seem, to a unique degree, to be optimizing for bringing about good things, and has been remarkably successful—becoming the youngest associate professor in the world.

But MacAskill, unlike Tate, isn’t fanatically optimizing for wealth or fame, but for the good. He founded a movement about optimizing for morality that’s saved hundreds of thousands of lives and he gives all his income above around 30,000 dollars away to effective charities. While the slave moralists throw stones at Will for associating with a movement that had a guy who did some bad stuff, Will just keeps trying to better the world. To quote Scott Alexander, in a very different context, “all of these human foibles rise up and ask “But can’t I just spend my money on – ” and effective altruism shouts “NO! BED NETS!” and thus a lot of terrible failure modes get avoided.”

The Nietzschian ubermensch acts in pursuit of his own goals—wealth, fame, influence, power. The utilitarianish ubermensch is similarly willing to aim for things, and not be paralyzed by fear. But the utilitarianish ubermensch is better, for he aims at the good.

(Those who talk about master and slave morality on the internet always like this meme, so I’ve repurposed it for good).