QB: Effective Altruism and Meaning in Life

How the former could contribute to the latter

[The final entry in my series of excerpts from Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good. This is my response to one of Ryan Davis’s essays, which asks whether effective altruism is compatible with living a meaningful life.]

Our personal projects and deep concerns help to make our lives feel meaningful. But they may fail to track our intellectual judgments about what is most objectively important. Mismatches between objective evaluation and subjective commitment raise interesting questions.  For example:

(1) How should we prioritize between objective and subjective importance?

Davis suggests that the subjective perspective trumps: “if someone else doesn’t care about [saving lives], then it doesn’t make sense to say that they are wrong about what’s important.”

That seems too strong to me. I think it depends on the details. Commonsense grants us wide-ranging, but not absolute, personal prerogatives. It can seem reasonable to prioritize being a good parent over saving a small number of strangers (when you cannot do both). But if you sufficiently lower the value of the personal project and/or raise the impersonal stakes, I think we will eventually find that our optionality is limited.  Someone who cares more about the scratching of their finger than the destruction of the whole world is simply unreasonable, and truly mistaken about the comparative importance of these two ends.

The idea that desires, and not just beliefs, can be mistaken or unreasonable may seem a surprising one. But consider Parfit’s Future-Tuesday Indifferent agent, who “would choose a painful operation on the following Tuesday rather than a much less painful operation on the following Wednesday.” The imagined agent knows he will subsequently regret it, but simply doesn’t care—about either his future agony or the associated regret. Such an agent seems less than perfectly rational. Many of us would probably describe such a pattern of concern as “senseless” or even “crazy”. As Parfit sums up his case: “Preferring the worse of two pains, for no reason, is irrational.” Less extreme cases of misguided priorities may also be less than perfectly rational.

We (plausibly) have some reason to care especially about our own children, and many other of our personal projects—even baseball. But we have more reason to care about our children than to care about baseball. So it isn’t true that any time we could prioritize our children over an impersonal good, we could just as reasonably prioritize baseball over it. Not all personal projects are equal: some yield stronger reasons than others.

If we could always reasonably prioritize our subjective concerns over what’s objectively important, that would provide an easy answer to our first question. But I do not think it has such an easy answer.

We may make further progress on a distinct (yet related) question:

(2) In selecting personal projects, do we have more reason to develop concern for what’s objectively important?

Our first question took for granted that our subjective concerns were already settled. But this is not always the case. Sometimes we develop new interests, and new concerns. And this is not just something that happens to us, like a robot passively awaiting programming. We can reflect on our values, and on how we live our lives, and act in ways that bring the two into closer alignment. We can influence our (future) subjective commitments through our choices of what to attend to, who we engage with, and what we sign up for.

You could develop a new hobby by signing up for a class, reading books on the subject, and making friends with others who already have the interest in question. You could probably develop an interest in Effective Altruism by similar means: reading Doing Good Better, engaging on the EA Forum, starting or joining an EA student group at your university, or signing up for a trial pledge with Giving What We Can.

If you’re not antecedently committed to either, which do you have more reason to develop an interest in: baseball, or Effective Altruism? The latter is obviously favored by the objective perspective, and there’s not yet any subjective reason against it. If you commit to baseball, that will generate a conflict between the objective and subjective perspectives. But, as we’re imagining things, there’s no conflict yet. So why create one?

There seems something normatively ideal—a kind of deep integrity—to aligning one’s subjective perspective with what (one recognizes) objectively matters.¹ Given the human condition, this goal is not perfectly attainable: we will inevitably find ourselves with self-centered concerns that aren’t impartially justifiable. But we can at least take steps to mitigate the size of the gulf between our values and our lived reality. Giving some non-trivial weight to effectively helping others in practice seems a crucial means to advancing our moral integrity.

A popular alternative would be to self-deceive yourself about what objectively matters. You could bury your head in the sand, refusing to recognize all the preventable suffering in the world. You could deny that foreigners, or non-human animals, or future generations matter. Plenty of people make such claims; you’d be in good company—or company, at any rate.

But is that really the sort of person you want to be? Isn’t there something to be said for confronting reality head-on, without comforting illusions? Even though there are limits to how much you’re willing to do to address the world’s problems (as there are for us all), couldn’t you justifiably feel that your life was more meaningful if you were seriously contributing to making the world a better place? It needn’t be an all-consuming project: you can likely find room in your life for baseball too, if you want. But if you do both, it isn’t hard to predict which one you’ll ultimately find to be most meaningful.

1. See Railton (1984, sec. ix) on the costs of alienation from morality itself.