QB: How Important is Beneficence?

An excerpt from Questioning Beneficence

[#2 in my series on Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good.]

Beneficence consists in helping others, such as by saving and improving lives. How important or worthwhile is this, compared to other values we might either honor or promote through our actions?¹ My answer is that beneficence is, generally speaking, the most important value for guiding our moral lives. Other values are important when they help promote social coordination and thereby serve overall well-being.² But if we hold all else equal, their non-instrumental significance pales in comparison to the significance of saving and improving lives.

What Makes for a Better Cause?

People generally like the sound of beneficence. (Who could be opposed to saving and improving lives?) Giving to charity is sometimes thought to be the paradigm of ethical action. But it doesn’t rile up our emotions the way that fighting against injustice does. As political animals, we like to define ourselves in contrast to a perceived out-group. And denouncing our political enemies and their associated vices (racism! sexism! transphobia!) is ever so much more satisfying than simply saving lives. So, while we like the sound of beneficence, it’s rare to give it more than lip service. Too often, our hearts belong to the culture war. Or environmentalism. Or some other form of local social justice activism.³

I think this is a moral mistake. However important our local problems may be, they cannot compare to the importance of saving lives on a global scale. People are literally dying for want of a few thousand dollars invested in anti-malarial bednets and other cheap and simple interventions.⁴ There’s something very wrong with the fact that this takes up so little of our collective moral concern and attention.

Of course, one could always justify an alternative focus by arguing that one’s efforts there do even more good in expectation. I don’t mean to rule out this possibility: if you’ve truly found a cause that better serves overall well-being, that’s great! But we should be open to the possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that the most emotionally appealing causes are not actually the most morally important. To test our gut preferences, we can assess the relative moral importance of different permissible options by way of their expected impact on global well-being, impartially considered. We have strong moral reasons to want to save and improve more lives, and hence to focus our moral efforts on the (permissible) causes where we would have the greatest positive expected impact.⁵

What Makes for a Better Person?

A good moral agent will prioritize morally more important ends over less important ones. This suggests that we can assess how morally good a person is (to a first approximation) simply by looking at how much they (want to) do to improve global well-being.

We may split this assessment into two dimensions. How virtuous or well-meaning a person is depends on their desires, the expression of which depends on contingencies of their life situation. A billionaire who donates one million dollars to charity is much less generous, in disposition, than a poorer person who donates a large portion of her income and would give many millions were she as wealthy as the billionaire. But how morally beneficial a person is to the world simply depends on the net value of their contributions: in giving a million dollars, the stingy billionaire presumably does more good than most of the rest of us are able to.

Both dimensions of agential assessment can be approximately reduced to assessments of beneficence, just in different ways. One measures the strength of a person’s beneficent desires; the other, how much they actually contribute to promoting beneficent ends.

Either suggestion is apt to seem somewhat revisionary. We typically assess people’s moral characters in more interpersonal terms. Roughly: do they seem like a loyal and reliable ally? We like and approve of people who are good friends, spouses, parents, and colleagues. We may be more impressed by someone who comes across as warm, kind, and helpful in personal interactions, than by one who determinedly works extra hours to be able to donate more to charity.

This makes sense if our assessment is self-interested at heart: the former person may well make a better friend for you! But it’s puzzling if the assessment is meant to be a moral one. Why think that being lovely to be around is morally more important than saving others’ lives? (Maybe life wouldn’t be worth much if it weren’t for interpersonal warmth. But there’s no general lack of that. We can trust that the people whose lives would be saved would find themselves surrounded by loving friends and family. The value of interpersonal warmth may, like the value of health, be among those that are well promoted by general beneficence.)

It may be that a common explanation for our failure to recognize the central importance of impartial beneficence is simply that we, ourselves, are not sufficiently impartial or beneficent. We would sooner assess people in terms of how good they are likely to be to us. Such a focus may be instrumentally rational for many purposes. But we can see on reflection that moral assessment is different, and calls for a more impartial standard.

I should flag that my suggested exclusive focus on beneficence is just an approximation. We can imagine an evil billionaire who donates by day and tortures the oppressed by night. Even if the good done slightly outweighs the bad in aggregate, so they are (by stipulation) beneficial to the world on net, we needn’t consider such a monster virtuous. Delighting in harm to others reveals an unusually malicious character, after all.⁶ But such cases are surely rare. Most people presumably meet the minimal standards for not being evil; what’s left unsettled is just how good we’re going to be. Most will happily settle for being OK, and that’s OK (not great, but not terrible either). What I’m suggesting here is just that many of the things we typically associate with moral motivation or good character aren’t really going to make that much of a difference from this point. By far the greatest factor—beyond not being evil—is just how beneficent one is.

So if you want to be a better person, the place to focus is on trying to do more good, impartially considered. And that just is the project of effective altruism: trying to do good, effectively.

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In response to prodding from my co-authors, I end up defending the surprising view that I couldn’t reasonably complain about a vampiric billionaire devouring me, if that were truly a necessary means for securing greater benefits for others. But you’ll need to get your hands on the book to read that part.

1. We promote a value by bringing about more of it, in consequentialist fashion. We respect a value by constraining our actions so as to avoid violating the value ourselves, in non-consequentialist fashion. The two approaches may conflict in theory, for example, if we’re in a position to prevent five killings by means of killing one innocent person ourselves. Killing one to save five serves to promote the value of human life, but does not respect it (in the above sense). See Pettit 1991.

2. We should strive to be honest and trustworthy, for example, precisely because this helps to preserve the social conditions necessary for promoting overall well-being over the long run.

3. Perhaps an even larger number of people are morally apathetic, and aren’t especially trying to do any kind of good at all. But the suboptimality of moral apathy seems relatively trivial, so here I focus instead on those with strong—but possibly misdirected—apparent moral motivations.

4. See www.givewell.org.

5. I limit this claim to just permissible options and causes so as to remain compatible with non-consequentialist constraints on the pursuit of good outcomes. That makes no practical difference here—no EA organization that I’m aware of proposes that we kill innocent people to harvest their organs, or anything like that. On the contrary, EA causes are clearly permissible. A more practically significant point of contention instead concerns whether a permissible cause’s being impartially better means that it is also morally better than more parochial (but emotionally satisfying) forms of moral expression. Effective Altruism urges us to prioritize the impartially best of our permissible options, whereas its critics push back against this demand.

6. We may even think poorly of one who callously neglects those drowning on their doorstep while helping distant others, though whether such disapproval is warranted may depend on further details of the agent’s psychology. See Chappell and Yetter-Chappell 2016, and Chappell 2019b.