Catholics: Do the Hard Thing
Catholics could learn a lot from Effective Altruism about the major problems in the world today.
I spent eight weeks this year in a class on effective altruism1. Below is my first post for the effective altruism forum. Mostly, this is a summary of the movement through effective altruism’s core message2. It also ends in criticism of the movement, and because this is an institution of humans, the criticism would probably transfer well beyond Effective Altruism. I posted this on the EA Forum not that long ago.
A short preface: Effective Altruism is a new religion.3 It isn’t the first secular religion, but it is one that has been able to successfully build institutions and convert people in Europe and the US. The share of total Catholics in the US is declining. The percentage of Christians in the US more broadly has dropped considerably in the past few decades. If you think of EA as a religion, then it is a growing religion unlike the faith I was baptized in.
Effective Altruism is a growing religion that has been able to answer some questions of how to live a good life for those in a powerful society in a better way than Christendom has in my lifetime4. Especially in terms of defining major problems and priorities in society. Maybe Catholics could learn that the Dodgers giving a small charity an award maybe isn’t that important, for example. Another reason it’s worth thinking of Effective Altruism as an organized religion is because it becomes not at all surprising when it turns out Effective Altruism has the same stupid problems other organized religions have when they gain power and convert stupid people.
Effective Altruism: Do the Hard Thing
Effective Altruism’s central message can be summarized as the moral imperative to do the most good you can.
Moral Imperative
Most people already believe we ought to try to do good or live a good life. This is moral imperative, and what effective altruism has to offer beyond just having something to say about the metaphysical world5. Effective Altruists consider themselves driving force for shaping the world to how it ought to be.
Do
We have power as moral agents and can do good. So we should, through charity, vocation, or evangelization. We can see that we as a species have power because of the massive victories we as a species have achieved, like the eradication of small-pox.
The Most
We should pay attention to scope-insensitivity, biases, trade-offs, and try to maximize impact when we can. This is where the effectiveness mindset comes into play6. The idea that we are all equal, there is a lot of inequality, and there are many ways to spend time and money outside of just ourselves means that there are massive opportunities to spend time and money not just doing a little more good, but a lot more good. One of the especially clearest and most powerful messages of effective altruism turns out to flow from this insight in evaluating charities that try to save lives. It turns out helping those most in need in the poorest parts of the world is far more useful than helping those in the richest parts of the world.
Good
What is a good life? Expansion of our moral circle and moral reasoning to include those outside our inner circle to those who we don't meet or may have less power or influence is a compelling imperative as well. Once again, the call to send money to those in the most need despite never being able to interact with them is a challenging call. The recognition of the power that wealth has can be humbling. Giving consideration to the even less powerful, sentient creatures beyond humanity and beyond our short time on earth can help to cultivate a thoughtfulness in living as well. Recognizing that there might be something we are wrong about can be an important call to action.
Can
Effective Altruism is most compelling in illuminating the insight that can implies ought, especially to the most powerful in the world. Giving a framework for those of us in rich and powerful countries that we can do a lot of good in the world, and so we must try to do as much good as we can.
But ought also implies can. And Effective Altruism has no answer, or very few, for when people have no power. Effective altruism has little answer for recognizing lack of power, and how to live a good life in that lack of power. It has no answer for when people are broken, and unable to do the most good they can. This means EA has very little to offer or include for the least powerful.
And in not inviting in or grappling with answers for the less powerful, EA is in danger of institutional value drift and not calling the powerful to support the least powerful in the most effective ways. From someone outside looking into EA AI safety or earning to give looks much more like "warm fuzzies" than "utilons." Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems convenient to justify becoming a powerful person as the recipe for morally upright living.
“Do the hard thing” is a thing my spouse says to herself a lot. This mantra is a reminder that it is often easy to find some justification that the easy thing to do is also the right thing to do. It would be convenient if it just so happened that a lot of very smart people discovered the way to do the most good is to become more powerful people through work in AI or earning to give. And powerful people just so happen to be able to do a lot of good while also enjoying comfortable lives without interacting with suffering or poor people.
But this is not at all the hard thing. This is an easy thing that allows Effective Altruism to become a network of rich, powerful people that don’t need to talk to the poor and huddled masses.
I believe in the moral imperative to do the most good you can. But in order to do that, you might just have to do the hard thing.
I jokingly and earnestly referred to this as the Rite of Effective Altruism Initiation for Adults. Because EA is a religion
Or, the EA creed, because EA is a religion. And honestly, a lot is just copy and paste what I wrote in the course review they had us take after finishing the class. You know how most good classes have course reviews to make sure they are doing a good job? Yeah, effective altruists do that too, they’re just like everyone else.
Maybe I’ll make this argument more explicitly in the future. If I do, I’ll try to update this footnote to link to it. Or more likely I’ll forget. So if you are reading this in the future just do a quick search. Or, better yet, google it, someone else probably has written that argument already.
And questions of “why are we alive?” and “what is a good life?” are usually questions answered by religion.
Which would make it a science, but it’s not a science, it’s a religion
Getting into the right mindset to spiritually connect to others and the world. Much like a religion. Ok, I’ll stop it with these footnotes.