This was very fun and, I think, quite decisive. Reminds me of the old slightly more polemical philosophyetc days. If I just picture the type of human that I dislike the most who is not abjectly evil (E.g. not a nazi) it's the type of social justice activist who opposes doing things to benefit the world's poor because of vague word salad about promoting white supremacist institutions. The people who, as a result of their elite status at high-ranking university departments, devise cleverly worded jargon about systems of oppression, which they use in the service of opposing the things that most effectively benefit the worst off people. It would be like objecting to saving drowning children on the grounds that it fails to confront the structures that resulted in children drowning (without giving any reason to think that confronting those structures would be more effective, of course).
A very nice reminder to anti-anti-wokesters not to become too anti-anti-woke that they can't call out these sorts of excesses, even if anti-wokeness can be annoying and bad for freedom of expression! :)
More seriously, the mindset underlying this is something Marxist or Post-structuralist that basically just says you ought to mistrust or disbelieve lots of social science, especially economic analysis or political science analysis of what is feasible or useful.
I'm going to give what I think is the best possible version of this critique which doesn't literally claim helping people is wrong when it's not done in service of a particular ideology, since we may as well be charitable:
Basically stripped of the wordy theoretical baggage, the claim is that in fact these sorts of large-scale destructive radical reforms to seek justice and remake our economics and politics are way more likely to work and way more beneficial than what you'd conclude by looking at mainstream history, economics and social science research, because the assumptions behind all those disciplines are wrong and put there to justify the interests of the powerful, so it's best to just walk away from them and distrust their findings just like you'd be right to e.g. distrust the research funded by the food industry on sugar and obesity.
To the extent that you think this route to impact is much more beneficial and much more likely to work, than our best evidence would suggest, things that keep the existing status quo going but lower the chance of a revolution working are an opportunity cost and maybe the good done is outweighed by 'ethics washing' capitalism and liberal democracy, making the harms they cause more illegible to people who might otherwise oppose them, and making it less likely that they'll be replaced by something better.
So it's just very very different empirical and epistemological beliefs, so incredibly different that they look like a difference in moral beliefs: "If we can just get global social justice (which is not as hard as it looks), then all of these problems will melt away into nothing so it's actually easier to solve the world's problems by that route, but that can't be seen from within economics because you can't to an RCT to evaluate its likelihood and people within a white supremacist capitalist system will in the absence of evidence massively underrate how likely this is to work or how beneficial it would be."
And of course I don't believe any of this for a second! I think there's tons of historical, philosophical, economic etc. evidence against it. And it is a (not fundamental but widely held) belief in EA that you can trust mainstream economics and mainstream science to some extent to guide cost-benefit evaluations and don't have to reevaluate everything for possible influence by class/race interests and rebuild your understanding of economics and political science from scratch.
And it's totally fine to make that assumption because it can be justified, but we should be clear we're making it and just say that people who are globally skeptical of these fields are like moral skeptics or Cartesian-style skeptics and we're just not going to listen to them (even though particular critiques based on class or race considerations if justified are of course good).
Why would I be anti-anti-woke just because many anti-woke people are members of some other stupid and dangerous ideology? I'm anti-Catholic, and Dominionist Christians are also anti-Catholic, but that doesn't make us friends.
"In other words, Animal Charity Evaluators is too focused on helping animals, and objectionably view animal charities as instrumental to that end, instead of appreciating that the proper purpose of animal charities is to make their employees feel seen."
Could this be not so much employees BEING SEEN as employees BECOMING MORE RIGHTEOUS/VIRTUOUS? I don't understand the notion of virtue ethics, as in, I understand the words/ sentences/ semantics but I COMPLETELY fail to see any sense in it emotionally and intuitively and, morally, I don't understand the ultimate goal here as an *ethical* rather than "personal development" goal but maybe it's a genuine difference in ultimate values? Maybe they really think that there is a moral benefit to people feeling all those feelings that exceeds the benefits utilising the same people to reduce suffering of many more distant and not at all cute or friendly creatures would have?
Prof. Chappell's reading of the essays in this book, which I contributed to, is not merely ungenerous but tendentious--he rejects the authors' positions mainly because we reject the faulty epistemic and political terrain of EA itself, i.e. cost-benefit analysis. Of my own chapter ("Effective Altruism and the Reified Mind"), Chappell writes:
"Elsewhere, we’re informed that EA 'misidentifies the biggest problems today as global health, factory farming, and existential threats' when really 'the global poor suffer from adverse health outcomes because of capitalist social relations.'" (p. 218)
Nu? Prof. Chappell appears to disagree with me, but does not say so. Instead, he merely highlights the words "capitalist social relations," as though that were evidence of my public idiocy, rather than of his own ignorance of critical theory and sociology. He continues:
"For a moment, I wondered whether the low quality of this book might constitute positive evidence in support of effective altruism....Unfortunately, many of the authors seem so ideologically opposed to cost-effectiveness evaluation that I expect they would’ve written the same tripe even if there was strong evidence available that EA interventions really were worse in expectation."
Again, rather than grapple with my argument--which concerns reification--he simply dismisses it as "tripe." Well, perhaps it *is* tripe--far be it from me to deny it. But Prof. Chappell, alas, hasn't shown it. Here as in the rest of this lazy essay, Prof. Chappell shows he is less interested in exploring the positions than in circling the wagons around his own utilitarian cult. Like others in EA, he is unable to see past his own bad methodology, and his even worse ideology. I gasped when I read this: "What if billionaires and financiers could actually do more good than grass-roots activists and radicals? This thought is verboten." What is he talking about? No, it isn't verboten--on the contrary, it's the banal self-understanding of the bourgeoisie and therefore of society at large. In reality, billionaires and financiers are destroying the Earth and all of its life forms, but Prof. Chappell hasn't yet gotten the memo.
It is in fact apparent that Prof. Chappell has no "empirical" comprehension of the state, society, economics, or the nature of politics, and is blithely unaware of the fact. That too is a symptom of reification--the Effective Altruist's failure to heed the ancient dictum, "know thyself."
-- John Sanbonmatsu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Hmm. There's something very odd about the dialectic here. My blog post laments that an OUP-published book of "critical essays" contains no real arguments or evidence that EA is bad, just ideological posturing and unsupported assertions. I didn't notice anything new, informative, or challenging in the book. Just bare assertions, with no reasons to indicate why I should take them seriously. So, for one who doesn't share the authors' ideology, there's just not enough *substance* here to constitute a challenge or prompt constructive dialogue.
If you think I've overlooked a substantive, non-question-begging argument, you're welcome to take another stab at explaining what your argument is supposed to be. But simply throwing insults ("lazy", "cult", etc.) doesn't provide any *reason* to change my mind. Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with the book as a whole. All insults, no persuasion.
re: "verboten", I was talking about what is apparently unthinkable *to the book authors*. Merely calling something "bourgeoisie" doesn't show that it's false. Nor does merely asserting the contrary view, and pompously declaring that anyone who doesn't agree with you "hasn't yet gotten the memo."
> "we reject the faulty epistemic and political terrain of EA itself, i.e. cost-benefit analysis."
This point is worth dwelling on. How can you claim that EA is "bad" if you cannot show that its costs outweigh its benefits? Rejecting the very *idea* of cost-benefit analysis is incoherent. It's like rejecting the very idea of *rational argumentation*. It's going to be very hard for you to establish that anyone has any reason to take you seriously, if you do not even attempt to make rational arguments or to analyze costs vs benefits when offering practical prescriptions.
To be clear, my arguments about EA are in my chapter in the book--I made no attempt to repeat them here. I was merely pointing out that here you've ironically done what you accuse me of: viz., criticizing my argument without actually bothering to explain it or understand it. In any event, I am not rejecting all forms of consequentialist reasoning (which, indeed, I say in my piece), but taking issue with the positivistic, ahistorical, and ideologically-laden way that EA approaches social problems. In my opinion, EA has a childishly naive conception of the world--and that makes it dangerous. Or, if you prefer, its costs outweigh its benefits.
I've had a very quick skim of your article (apologies I'm short on time). I think it is useful to distinguish two criticisms of EA. 1) criticism of their objectives (normative), and 2) criticism of their strategies for pursuing those objectives (positive). Your passage below seems to fall within #2.
> "Today we find these same asocial assumptions embedded in EA discourse as well. MacAskill’s morally repugnant call for an increase in the number of sweatshops in the Third World (2016, 128–132) is merely the artifact of a utilitarian ideology incapable of recognizing exploitation as a moral or social problem."
You think that EA should add reducing exploitation to its list of objectives. You may also want them to give extra weight to avoiding actively supporting exploitation as opposed to simply failing to prevent it. So for example, if hypothetically, sweatshops would decrease exploitation in the long run, it might not be worth supporting them because of this doing/allowing distinction.
Can you recommend what you think is the best approximate conceptual analysis of exploitation or at least of aspects thereof? [I know John Roemer had an early book on this sort of thing; I hope to read it sometime.] I think some such analysis would be very useful when deciding how to best to allocation billions of dollars and thousands of people's careers towards the prevention of exploitation.
Do you also have criticisms along the lines of #2? I view 1 and 2 as totally separate; do you see them as more interlinked? I'm aware that those in the tradition of G.E.M. Anscombe often deny that there is a sharp distinction between positive and normative issues.
The problem with "movements", including woke-type movements, is that they must necessarily have an internal power structure, while at the same time pretending not to. Those who hold the power within "movements" are usually charismatic people and/or good at bullying. (Sometimes they are also cynics, but probably not very often - since you are usually more convincing to others if you believe you are who you pretend to be.) Since their power is not formalized, it cannot easily be challenged from inside the movement. But it can be challenged by outsiders - in particular if they are the ones who provide the funding. To leaders of movements, therefore, "outside" ideas about documented efficiency and transparency represent a threat. So their opposition to EA is rational.
Did you really go into a book by an evangelical cult that openly disavows honest reasoning, expecting valuable philosophy rather than statements of faith and accusations of witchcraft?
This was very fun and, I think, quite decisive. Reminds me of the old slightly more polemical philosophyetc days. If I just picture the type of human that I dislike the most who is not abjectly evil (E.g. not a nazi) it's the type of social justice activist who opposes doing things to benefit the world's poor because of vague word salad about promoting white supremacist institutions. The people who, as a result of their elite status at high-ranking university departments, devise cleverly worded jargon about systems of oppression, which they use in the service of opposing the things that most effectively benefit the worst off people. It would be like objecting to saving drowning children on the grounds that it fails to confront the structures that resulted in children drowning (without giving any reason to think that confronting those structures would be more effective, of course).
A very nice reminder to anti-anti-wokesters not to become too anti-anti-woke that they can't call out these sorts of excesses, even if anti-wokeness can be annoying and bad for freedom of expression! :)
More seriously, the mindset underlying this is something Marxist or Post-structuralist that basically just says you ought to mistrust or disbelieve lots of social science, especially economic analysis or political science analysis of what is feasible or useful.
I'm going to give what I think is the best possible version of this critique which doesn't literally claim helping people is wrong when it's not done in service of a particular ideology, since we may as well be charitable:
Basically stripped of the wordy theoretical baggage, the claim is that in fact these sorts of large-scale destructive radical reforms to seek justice and remake our economics and politics are way more likely to work and way more beneficial than what you'd conclude by looking at mainstream history, economics and social science research, because the assumptions behind all those disciplines are wrong and put there to justify the interests of the powerful, so it's best to just walk away from them and distrust their findings just like you'd be right to e.g. distrust the research funded by the food industry on sugar and obesity.
To the extent that you think this route to impact is much more beneficial and much more likely to work, than our best evidence would suggest, things that keep the existing status quo going but lower the chance of a revolution working are an opportunity cost and maybe the good done is outweighed by 'ethics washing' capitalism and liberal democracy, making the harms they cause more illegible to people who might otherwise oppose them, and making it less likely that they'll be replaced by something better.
So it's just very very different empirical and epistemological beliefs, so incredibly different that they look like a difference in moral beliefs: "If we can just get global social justice (which is not as hard as it looks), then all of these problems will melt away into nothing so it's actually easier to solve the world's problems by that route, but that can't be seen from within economics because you can't to an RCT to evaluate its likelihood and people within a white supremacist capitalist system will in the absence of evidence massively underrate how likely this is to work or how beneficial it would be."
And of course I don't believe any of this for a second! I think there's tons of historical, philosophical, economic etc. evidence against it. And it is a (not fundamental but widely held) belief in EA that you can trust mainstream economics and mainstream science to some extent to guide cost-benefit evaluations and don't have to reevaluate everything for possible influence by class/race interests and rebuild your understanding of economics and political science from scratch.
And it's totally fine to make that assumption because it can be justified, but we should be clear we're making it and just say that people who are globally skeptical of these fields are like moral skeptics or Cartesian-style skeptics and we're just not going to listen to them (even though particular critiques based on class or race considerations if justified are of course good).
I guess being anti-anti-anti-woke is the way to go!
Why would I be anti-anti-woke just because many anti-woke people are members of some other stupid and dangerous ideology? I'm anti-Catholic, and Dominionist Christians are also anti-Catholic, but that doesn't make us friends.
Today I wrote an article that was sort of about this phenomenon, though not entirely. https://controlledopposition.substack.com/p/degrees-of-freedom-and-jargon
"In other words, Animal Charity Evaluators is too focused on helping animals, and objectionably view animal charities as instrumental to that end, instead of appreciating that the proper purpose of animal charities is to make their employees feel seen."
Could this be not so much employees BEING SEEN as employees BECOMING MORE RIGHTEOUS/VIRTUOUS? I don't understand the notion of virtue ethics, as in, I understand the words/ sentences/ semantics but I COMPLETELY fail to see any sense in it emotionally and intuitively and, morally, I don't understand the ultimate goal here as an *ethical* rather than "personal development" goal but maybe it's a genuine difference in ultimate values? Maybe they really think that there is a moral benefit to people feeling all those feelings that exceeds the benefits utilising the same people to reduce suffering of many more distant and not at all cute or friendly creatures would have?
Prof. Chappell's reading of the essays in this book, which I contributed to, is not merely ungenerous but tendentious--he rejects the authors' positions mainly because we reject the faulty epistemic and political terrain of EA itself, i.e. cost-benefit analysis. Of my own chapter ("Effective Altruism and the Reified Mind"), Chappell writes:
"Elsewhere, we’re informed that EA 'misidentifies the biggest problems today as global health, factory farming, and existential threats' when really 'the global poor suffer from adverse health outcomes because of capitalist social relations.'" (p. 218)
Nu? Prof. Chappell appears to disagree with me, but does not say so. Instead, he merely highlights the words "capitalist social relations," as though that were evidence of my public idiocy, rather than of his own ignorance of critical theory and sociology. He continues:
"For a moment, I wondered whether the low quality of this book might constitute positive evidence in support of effective altruism....Unfortunately, many of the authors seem so ideologically opposed to cost-effectiveness evaluation that I expect they would’ve written the same tripe even if there was strong evidence available that EA interventions really were worse in expectation."
Again, rather than grapple with my argument--which concerns reification--he simply dismisses it as "tripe." Well, perhaps it *is* tripe--far be it from me to deny it. But Prof. Chappell, alas, hasn't shown it. Here as in the rest of this lazy essay, Prof. Chappell shows he is less interested in exploring the positions than in circling the wagons around his own utilitarian cult. Like others in EA, he is unable to see past his own bad methodology, and his even worse ideology. I gasped when I read this: "What if billionaires and financiers could actually do more good than grass-roots activists and radicals? This thought is verboten." What is he talking about? No, it isn't verboten--on the contrary, it's the banal self-understanding of the bourgeoisie and therefore of society at large. In reality, billionaires and financiers are destroying the Earth and all of its life forms, but Prof. Chappell hasn't yet gotten the memo.
It is in fact apparent that Prof. Chappell has no "empirical" comprehension of the state, society, economics, or the nature of politics, and is blithely unaware of the fact. That too is a symptom of reification--the Effective Altruist's failure to heed the ancient dictum, "know thyself."
-- John Sanbonmatsu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Hmm. There's something very odd about the dialectic here. My blog post laments that an OUP-published book of "critical essays" contains no real arguments or evidence that EA is bad, just ideological posturing and unsupported assertions. I didn't notice anything new, informative, or challenging in the book. Just bare assertions, with no reasons to indicate why I should take them seriously. So, for one who doesn't share the authors' ideology, there's just not enough *substance* here to constitute a challenge or prompt constructive dialogue.
If you think I've overlooked a substantive, non-question-begging argument, you're welcome to take another stab at explaining what your argument is supposed to be. But simply throwing insults ("lazy", "cult", etc.) doesn't provide any *reason* to change my mind. Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with the book as a whole. All insults, no persuasion.
re: "verboten", I was talking about what is apparently unthinkable *to the book authors*. Merely calling something "bourgeoisie" doesn't show that it's false. Nor does merely asserting the contrary view, and pompously declaring that anyone who doesn't agree with you "hasn't yet gotten the memo."
> "we reject the faulty epistemic and political terrain of EA itself, i.e. cost-benefit analysis."
This point is worth dwelling on. How can you claim that EA is "bad" if you cannot show that its costs outweigh its benefits? Rejecting the very *idea* of cost-benefit analysis is incoherent. It's like rejecting the very idea of *rational argumentation*. It's going to be very hard for you to establish that anyone has any reason to take you seriously, if you do not even attempt to make rational arguments or to analyze costs vs benefits when offering practical prescriptions.
To be clear, my arguments about EA are in my chapter in the book--I made no attempt to repeat them here. I was merely pointing out that here you've ironically done what you accuse me of: viz., criticizing my argument without actually bothering to explain it or understand it. In any event, I am not rejecting all forms of consequentialist reasoning (which, indeed, I say in my piece), but taking issue with the positivistic, ahistorical, and ideologically-laden way that EA approaches social problems. In my opinion, EA has a childishly naive conception of the world--and that makes it dangerous. Or, if you prefer, its costs outweigh its benefits.
Anyone interested in forming their own conclusions about my views on EA can find a PDF of my chapter on my website: https://www.johnsanbonmatsu.com/articles--essays.html.
Best,
JS
Professor Sanbonmatsu,
I've had a very quick skim of your article (apologies I'm short on time). I think it is useful to distinguish two criticisms of EA. 1) criticism of their objectives (normative), and 2) criticism of their strategies for pursuing those objectives (positive). Your passage below seems to fall within #2.
> "Today we find these same asocial assumptions embedded in EA discourse as well. MacAskill’s morally repugnant call for an increase in the number of sweatshops in the Third World (2016, 128–132) is merely the artifact of a utilitarian ideology incapable of recognizing exploitation as a moral or social problem."
You think that EA should add reducing exploitation to its list of objectives. You may also want them to give extra weight to avoiding actively supporting exploitation as opposed to simply failing to prevent it. So for example, if hypothetically, sweatshops would decrease exploitation in the long run, it might not be worth supporting them because of this doing/allowing distinction.
Can you recommend what you think is the best approximate conceptual analysis of exploitation or at least of aspects thereof? [I know John Roemer had an early book on this sort of thing; I hope to read it sometime.] I think some such analysis would be very useful when deciding how to best to allocation billions of dollars and thousands of people's careers towards the prevention of exploitation.
Do you also have criticisms along the lines of #2? I view 1 and 2 as totally separate; do you see them as more interlinked? I'm aware that those in the tradition of G.E.M. Anscombe often deny that there is a sharp distinction between positive and normative issues.
The problem with "movements", including woke-type movements, is that they must necessarily have an internal power structure, while at the same time pretending not to. Those who hold the power within "movements" are usually charismatic people and/or good at bullying. (Sometimes they are also cynics, but probably not very often - since you are usually more convincing to others if you believe you are who you pretend to be.) Since their power is not formalized, it cannot easily be challenged from inside the movement. But it can be challenged by outsiders - in particular if they are the ones who provide the funding. To leaders of movements, therefore, "outside" ideas about documented efficiency and transparency represent a threat. So their opposition to EA is rational.
Did you really go into a book by an evangelical cult that openly disavows honest reasoning, expecting valuable philosophy rather than statements of faith and accusations of witchcraft?
It is funny that it seems that 99% of people who talk about whiteness are white as snow.