QB: Business and Beneficence

On doing well from doing good

[#6 in my series of excerpts from Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good. This is my response to one of Jason Brennan’s essays, which asks whether we can exercise beneficence through business.]

I wholeheartedly agree with Brennan that we can do good via all sorts of means, including many ordinary jobs and marketplace exchanges, and even in the absence of any altruistic motivation. That said, it would be an incredibly convenient coincidence if our self-interest perfectly aligned with our reasons of beneficence. So I also agree that we can’t just assume that ordinary consumer spending is the best that we can do. I’ll further argue that past moral convenience may increase what can subsequently be asked of us.

The Value of Aid

First, a worry: Brennan’s invocation of East Asian development could be misleading. The growth of these economies since 1950 is indeed one of the great success stories of human history. We should hope for more developing countries to follow in their footsteps. And the potential for global trade to alleviate poverty in this way provides strong reasons to oppose illiberal economic policies, like tariffs, that could slow or stall such development.

But the suggestion that poverty was alleviated “precisely because people ignored Singer’s advice [to donate money instead of purchasing luxuries]” implies that less good would have been achieved had Westerners instead directed all their excess wealth to effective charities. And there seems no basis for that counterfactual claim.

Brennan notes that “we have no record of charity solving the problem of extreme need.” But total donations to effective charities are measured in the mere millions of dollars annually.¹ (And before GiveWell was founded in 2007, there was basically no serious evaluation of charity effectiveness.) Global trade, by contrast, is measured in the trillions of dollars each year. We have no record of anything—including trade—“solving the problem of extreme need” with mere millions of dollars. Effective charities have nonetheless achieved a remarkable amount, including the eradication of smallpox—which alone amounts to millions of deaths averted every year.² If our society were to deliberately direct trillions of dollars annually to the very best causes we could find, it beggars belief to think that this could not achieve even more good than spending all that money on consumer electronics.³

There are trade-offs to consider between near-term and longer-term impact. If investing in research & development would save more future lives than funding famine-relief today, then I would prioritize the former. But not all investment is equal. Again, it would be a remarkable coincidence if investments intended to optimize for profit (in an unequal world) were also the most socially beneficial investments. There’s more profit to be made in curing male pattern baldness than malaria, after all, since the wealthy are vastly more likely to suffer from the former than the latter. But we should presumably expect the latter efforts to do more long-term good.

Brennan offers some systematic reasons to be skeptical of charities, including the epistemic difficulty of measuring value, and the misaligned incentives that stem from the intended beneficiaries not being the ones who hold the purse strings. Brennan’s solution is “social businesses” that cater to the world’s needy. But the fundamental problem of poverty is precisely that the poor cannot afford to purchase all that they need (let alone all that would be of genuine value to them). Treating payment as the measure of value, while leaving existing inequalities untouched, blatantly undervalues the interests of the poor.

A crucial prior step, I would think, is redistribution of wealth via direct cash transfers (as offered by the charity GiveDirectly), so that the global poor have the resources to buy what they value. There’s no epistemic difficulty to the question of whether transferring wealth from the rich to the poor adds or destroys value.⁴ We all know that $100 is worth more to the poor than to the rich (including the average citizens of wealthy nations like the United States). And there are no misaligned incentives either: GiveDirectly beneficiaries end up holding the purse strings, and can make informed purchasing decisions based upon their personal needs and desires.

That said, we shouldn’t exaggerate the problems Brennan raises for other charities. GiveWell seems fairly confident that they’re able to reliably identify charities that are many times more cost-effective than cash transfers—their “bar” for recommending funding, as of July 2022, was cost-effectiveness in excess of “10x cash”—so the difficulties must not be insurmountable. But I’d certainly recommend cash transfers over an average or randomly selected charity, partly for the reasons Brennan points out.

Counting Costless Beneficence

Finally, I want to consider the significance of Brennan’s observation that “While earning to give can be noble, most of us already give by earning.” I’m very open to the suggestion that “regular work does far more good for others than it gets credit for.” But how far that goes towards discharging our duties of beneficence depends on how much better we could do.

I’ve elsewhere defended the view that we ought to do (at least) the most good we can without suffering undue burden. I formulate the relevant sense of “burden” in terms of an individualized effort ceiling (how much effort it would take you to be a decent person, roughly speaking), but you could stick to traditional welfare costs if you prefer.

This moral principle allows us to secure two plausible thoughts about unintentional beneficence:

(1) It’s better to do more good unintentionally rather than less good intentionally. You should never deliberately choose or prefer to do less good, merely to make it more intentional.

(2) Good side-effects from doing what you self-interestedly prefer doesn’t get you off the hook for doing more good when the opportunity arises.

We secure the first thought, because between the options described, the greater good can be achieved at no cost to yourself. So it is the most good you can do (between those options) without undue burden.

We secure the second thought because you haven’t yet taken on any moral burden at all. So you can hardly complain if morality asks you to do a bit more. “Look how much good I already did while simply pursuing my self-interest!” is not a compelling excuse to refrain from trying a little in order to do even better. It’s excusable to do less than the best when the best would be an undue burden. But having previously done good inadvertently is not the mark of suffering under an undue burden. Quite the opposite.

So yes, a wide range of (even ordinary) actions can have beneficent effects, and be well worth doing. But benevolent motives may still be relevant by helping to determine how much beneficence may be demanded of us, since it’s hardly unreasonable to ask for some minimal moral effort (to secure even better results) on top of whatever you can achieve with no moral effort at all. The low-hanging fruit of convenient beneficence is good as far as it goes. But however far it goes, this gives us no reason, and no excuse, not to do even better when the opportunity arises.

1. See, e.g., <https://www.givewell.org/about/impact>: before 2015, the most “money moved” by GiveWell recommendations to effective charities in a single year was $35 million. [No doubt there have been effective interventions besides those identified by GiveWell—I mention smallpox eradication below—but this at least gives one a sense of the limited scale of global concern for explicitly effective philanthropy.]

2. W. MacAskill (2015). Doing Good Better. New York: Penguin Random House, p. 46.

3. For more on what could be achieved with just $3.5 trillion, see the Longview Philanthropy report, What if the 1% gave 10%? <https://longview.org/what-if-the-1-gave-10/>.

4. At least when only considering direct effects, as is also the case in Brennan’s profit-based accounting. A full moral accounting would need to consider the risk of unpriced negative externalities, such as the harm to non-human animals from increased meat consumption.