Effective Altruism

Josh Landy
How much should we give to other people?

Ray Briggs
Should we care more about far-away strangers than those in our own community?

Josh Landy
Is there such a thing as being too giving?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Effective Altruism.

Josh Landy
Effective Altruism… So that’s Peter Singer’s idea, right, you should do the most good you can. And you should figure out what that is by doing your homework and choosing the best way to give.

Ray Briggs
Right, the idea is that you shouldn’t just go and give some random person $10—you should go online and figure out how many people you can help with that money. And then you should give it to the ones who can help most

Josh Landy
Right, and not not just that—you should probably give more than $10, right? More like 10% of your entire annual income. I mean, if you’re a good utilitarian, you think everyone counts the same. That includes you. So there’s no real reason you should be out there drinking $5 lattes, when someone else is dying of thirst. Singer’s slogan is “Give til it hurts.”

Ray Briggs
Well, I really like this idea that people should be giving more. But you know, there’s something kind of a weird about having to do that much homework first. If I see a homeless person on the street who needs help, why shouldn’t I just give them a bit of money?

Josh Landy
Because you can use that same money to help 10 times as many people in the developing world. If you could improve 10 lives instead of just one, why wouldn’t you do that?

Ray Briggs
Well don’t you think there’s something inhuman about it? We’re not robots. When I see a person in need, I feel compassion for them. I don’t go and get out my calculator. Don’t you want people to feel compassion for those around them?

Josh Landy
Well, it’s the “around them” thing that’s the problem, right? It’s a little parochial, isn’t it, to care more about someone because they happen to be near us. Why should we think that some person in Mozambique is less deserving of help than someone in Mountain View?

Ray Briggs
All right, smart guy. So imagine this: there’s two houses on fire on your block, and one of them is the neighbor’s house, which has two strangers in it. And one of them is your house, and it has your family member in it. Are you really telling me you’re gonna go save the neighbors because there’s two of them? I mean, your view seems to say that saving two people is always better than saving one.

Josh Landy
Okay, you got me, Ray—I’m gonna save my family member, I admit it. But, but maybe I’m wrong to do that. Maybe I’m just being selfish.

Ray Briggs
No, I think it’s really right to do that. I mean, community ties are important. But what if we were all effective altruists? Sure, we’d feed starving peoples and countries that are far away. But we’d never get around to feeding our own starving people. It just wouldn’t be cost effective enough.

Josh Landy
I think it would, ultimately. But even if it wasn’t, the reasonable thing to do, right, is to prioritize the people who need it the most.

Ray Briggs
Oh, the “reasonable” thing to do. Ugh, you can’t just go around making ethical decisions based on cold calculations like that. You have to feel something for your fellow human beings. If you’re struggling to walk past a starving person in your own neighborhood, how are you ever going to be motivated to help people who are further away?

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, I totally agree that you need compassion to get you going. I think that’s probably what makes effective altruists give 10% of their income to the needy in the first place. But once that motivation’s there, you’ve got to set your emotion aside and figure out the best way to help the most people.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s the other thing. How do you even know what’s the best way to help the most people?

Josh Landy
Well, the effective altruists have some ideas like instead of going into nursing, how about you get a job on Wall Street, earn zillions of dollars, give it all away? Boom, hunger solved.

Ray Briggs
Oh my god, that’s terrible advice, Josh. Fetting a job on Wall Street is a way of extracting wealth from ordinary people. You’d be just like Robin Hood, except instead you’d be stealing money from the poor to give it back to the poor. Sounds pretty effective, huh?

Josh Landy
I think you got me again, Ray. Luckily for me, though, we have a guest today, who’s a big fan of Effective Altruism—maybe he can answer your question.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, it’s Theron Pummer, author of “The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance and Effective Altruism.”

Josh Landy
But first, we wanted to find out what happens when people practice altruism in their daily lives. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shareen Adel, to talk to some folks who are trying to do the most good they can she files this report.

Newscast 1
Gun violence is surging across the U.S.

Newscast 2
The Red Cross is declaring a blood crisis.

Newscast 3
and let’s talk the homeless crisis right now.

Billy Bragg
A lot of people want to do good, but with so much going on in the world for you Hearing out where to start can feel pretty overwhelming. It

Newscast 4
It seems almost every day that we’re seeing new attacks directed at women and their ability to control their own health care choices.

Newscast 5
Nearly half the population of Ethiopia’s Tigray region is going hungry.

Billy Bragg
One way to go about it is to ask how much of a difference can I make using my particular skills or resources. If you have a high income, you might donate money to a good cause. Or if you have extra time on your hands, you might volunteer with an organization you believe in. Or you might give a very specific resource if you have enough to spare

Greg Watkins
Every 8-10 weeks, I’m donating blood, and I recently passed the 100-donation bar.

Billy Bragg
That’s Greg Watkins, a lecturer at Stanford University. Greg’s blood type is O-negative.

Greg Watkins
That’s considered the universal donor. So anybody can use my blood.

Billy Bragg
Greg has been donating blood for over 20 years, and every time he gives about a pint.

Greg Watkins
Once you’re in the blood donor system, you know, they let you know when there’s a need. And it’s pretty amazing that the need always seems to be at the critical level.

Billy Bragg
Millions of people in the US need transfusions every year. According to the American Red Cross, each transfusion takes on average around three pints.

Greg Watkins
Knowing that somebody really needs this, and it’s not that hard for me to go and do it, makes it easy.

Billy Bragg
If you do the math, Greg could be helping one person every third time he donates. But remember, he’s donated blood at least 100 times. Altogether that’s around 13 gallons. It’s possible that Greg has helped as many as two dozen people in a critical time of need.

Greg Watkins
The ratio of ease for me to payoff for other people is just a really good one, it seems.

Billy Bragg
But for some people, making a meaningful difference doesn’t mean helping as many people as possible. It can mean helping in a way that has a long term impact in just one person’s life.

Teresa Bruce
A Court Appointed Special Advocate’s job is to have a one on one relationship with a foster youth to advocate for their needs.

Billy Bragg
Teresa Bruce is a paralegal. Outside of her day job, she volunteers her time as a court appointed special advocate, or CASA for short. And it’s that dedicated time with just one young person that makes being a CASA so special to her

Teresa Bruce
Because their attorney has a huge caseload, their social workers have huge caseloads, and often their voice gets muted in the process.

Billy Bragg
Teresa’s work can be slow—two steps forward, one step back. But, she says…

Teresa Bruce
I know that I’m making a difference in a young person’s life to get them off of the street to prevent them from being exploited.

Billy Bragg
Her official role is to represent her foster youth’s needs at school (she’s the one who signs all the forms). But to be an effective representative, they actually needed to get to know each other.

Teresa Bruce
Which is hard to do when you’re first meeting is a roomful of 12 other adults and we’re talking about boring things to her.

Billy Bragg
Over the course of three years, Teresa and her foster youth spent two to three hours a week together. And it was in their one on one time that they were able to build trust.

Teresa Bruce
It’s those moments, those tiny moments of just being there listening and seeing what their world is like, where they can hear themselves talk and figure out their values and beliefs.

Billy Bragg
A lot of doing good is about your values and beliefs and having role models. Remember Greg Watkins? Well, he had a student in his class at Stanford who donated a kidney.

Greg Watkins
In some weird psychological way that up the stakes to have your one of your own students take that step.

Billy Bragg
So after years of regular blood donation, Greg went through the rigorous process of trying to donate his kidney. Ultimately, he learned he couldn’t. And it can be hard to find out the limits of what you can give.

Greg Watkins
There was a possibility of having a really big impact. And so that just kind of felt almost sickening and feel so close to that.

Billy Bragg
Doing the most good can be tricky—whether it’s donating 100 pints of blood, or providing support for a young person that could last their whole life. When you dedicate resources to doing good, it’s about asking the question: is this the best I can do? For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shereen Adel.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that really inspiring report, Shereen. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re thinking about Effective Altruism.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Theron Pummer. He’s a philosophy professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and author of a forthcoming book titled “The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism.” Theron, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Theron Pummer
Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Landy
So Theron, you just wrote a book on Effective Altruism, but I know it isn’t just a theoretical matter for you. How do you practice it in your own life?

Theron Pummer
Well, in 2010, when I was a grad student, I came across this organization called Giving What We Can. And the organization provided these profiles of people who’ve taken a pledge to give 10% of their lifetime income to whatever causes they think would help others the most. And I was just super inspired by this. And I was also inspired by some of the cost effectiveness figures that they provided, like that you could give up 50 cents to deworm a child for a year. And I was especially impressed with the fact that I could save one or 10 people with the same amount of money. So since I encountered this website, cost effectiveness really stood out to me as a crucial consideration when providing aid. And it motivated me not just to take this pledge, but in 2011, start up a local chapter of Giving What We Can at UC San Diego. And then I also started up another local EA group in 2015, when I joined the University of St. Andrews.

Ray Briggs
So Theron, it sounds like you’re really serious about Effective Altruism. Ccan you give us your best elevator pitch for people who are considering becoming effective altruists themselves?

Theron Pummer
Yeah, so suppose a boulder is about to crush a child to death, and you can save them only by like throwing your TV in front of the bowl. In cases like this, it sure seems wrong not to save the child. So I think this shows we’re required, at least sometimes, to incur significant costs to help others. But now suppose there are two boulders—there’s one headed toward one child, and there’s another boulder headed toward five children. And again, at the cost of your TV, you can save either the one child or you can save the five. Well, in cases like this, it seems wrong to save the one rather than the five, at least other things being equal. This is enough to show that at least sometimes we’re morally required to help others cost effectively. Since it’s Effective Altruism just is the project of using resources to help others the most, we ought to make Effective Altruism a significant part of our lives.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so we have to give up a lot of luxury to help others. And we have to do it effectively. So I can imagine somebody saying, Sure, we should give up a lot of luxuries to help other people. But as long as you’re doing something, you know, why does it matter to be the most efficient you can be?

Theron Pummer
Yeah, so I think there’s some plausibility to that, and like you mentioned in the in the opening discussion with Josh, there are going to be special connections that you have to particular people in the in your example, it was your family members. And I would agree with you in that case, that actually you’re at least permitted, if not required to save your family members. And there are going to be similar special connections that you have to certain charitable causes that in a range of cases, can give you permission to help less cost effectively, what I think is just that there’s significant moral reason or moral pressure, to save the greater number, help more people help people to a greater extent and so on. And it needs to be overwritten or defeated by some other kinds of consideration.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I remember reading somewhere, Peter Singer saying that effective altruists don’t give to whatever cause tugs strongest at their heartstrings. And I sort of get it from a rational point of view, but at the same time, you know, I have my sentimental attachments to certain charities because of family members of mine and went through certain issues, you know, and it’s, I don’t know, their feel it’s some feels something still sad about it a little, I don’t know what it sort of takes the humanity out of this out of giving, at least for me.

Theron Pummer
Yeah, I mean, I think if you are a kind of utilitarian, then you are going to be committed to the claim that these special partial connections don’t intrinsically matter. But I’m not a utilitarian and a lot of effective altruists project utilitarianism. What they agree on is that there’s strong moral reason to make Effective Altruism a significant part of your life, but not necessarily the only project that you adopt in your life. So I essentially agree, but I want to flag that, you know, there are going to be limits on the extent to which you can kind of deviate from what’s optimal like you couldn’t just give to a less cost effective charity on a whim. It needs to be a serious personal reason, a serious cost to you that could serve to justify that.

Josh Landy
That seems reasonable. Yeah, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Effective Altruism with Theron Pummer from the University of St. Andrews.

Ray Briggs
How much do you give to charity? How do you decide which causes to support? And how do you know if it’s doing any good?

Josh Landy
When doing good goes bad—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Billy Bragg
I am the milkman of human kindness, I will eave an extra pint.

Josh Landy
If the milkman of human kindness were an effective altruist, how many pints would he leave on your doorstep? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Effective Altruism with Theron Pummer from the University of St. Andrews, author of “The Rules of Rescue.”

Josh Landy
We’re pre-recording this episode so unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG, or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you could do something altruistic and become a subscriber.

Ray Briggs
So Theron, you gave us your pitch for motivating Effective Altruism. But how do you figure out if what you’re doing is actually making the difference you want it to make?

Theron Pummer
Well, this is a really difficult question, I think first, you need to figure out what sort of difference you’re trying to make. It needs to be something at least roughly quantifiable like saving lives or reducing the number of days of suffering that an animal might experience, or reducing the risk of an existential catastrophe or something like this. And once we have this roughly quantifiable aim, then we need to work out how much we can advance this aim, per unit of resources. We spend, like how many lives we would save per dollar donated. And coming up with cost effectiveness assessments like this life saving per dollar donated requires a lot of work and expertise. And on the one hand being it can involve processing loads of information and evidence, sometimes that’s conflicting, and having to weigh it all up. On the other hand, it can involve trying to determine how confident you should be that an activity will be successful in the absence of really any hard evidence at all. So well, there’s lots of data about what works in the context of global health interventions. There’s little hard evidence, if any, to go along when dealing with unprecedented existential catastrophes.

Ray Briggs
So I’m actually curious about the first part of your answer, where I pick something that is my goal and being an effective altruists, like, what are the moral constraints? Like, how do I even go about figuring out what my goal in charitable giving should be? Should I pick something that’s easy to measure?

Theron Pummer
I’m not necessarily, I think you should try to work out what will help others the most. And that’s a difficult philosophical question. And then it gets into issues about what well being consists in and how we might be able to aggregate it or compare it across the lives of different individuals, whether to count non human animals as well. So I think there are a lot of very difficult philosophical questions that need to be addressed. To get at the fundamental question you’re raising, you know, what should my aim be?

Ray Briggs
Okay, so you mentioned saving lives, is that a good place to start?

Theron Pummer
I think that’s a reasonable starting point. If you’re trying to help other people, usually people have a serious interest in continuing to live their lives. And it’s kind of a big, big benefit as well, an extra 30 years, say, of healthy life. And you can count up the number of lives that you save. So I think it’s not perfect, because, you know, different people have different qualities of life, and they will live for different amounts of time. And there are all kinds of differences, but it’s still something to work with as a rough proxy.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, it’s got to be pretty tricky if you’re actually trying to calculate, because imagine a scenario where lots and lots and lots of people are just about surviving. But their quality of life is terrible. So how do you weigh that against a situation in which slightly fewer people survive, but their lives are great. Like, I don’t know how you do that kind of calculation?

Theron Pummer
Well, there are different approaches to this. Some people like total utilitarians that’s the kind of jargon in the literature, they say, just look at the quality of life multiplied by the duration of life. And the product of that is how good it is to save the person’s life. I think that gets the wrong answer. In a lot of cases, it will get the wrong answer when dealing with really slight benefits and comparing those with huge benefits to other people. So it’ll imply for example, that we should cure billions of headaches rather than save one person’s life. But to your to your question. My own sense is that look, if somebody’s life, or their the remaining life that they would live if they were saved, if that’s above some decent threshold, then I think that differences in quality shouldn’t be counted ethically.

Josh Landy
You also mentioned so I mean, I, you know, this always is really interesting, and it’s doing incredible work. But since we’re philosophers, we’re going to nitpick at you. One of the things you mentioned is not just, you know, efforts to sort of save people in the here and now but also to ward off potential catastrophes in the future. And that sounds like Like a good thing, but again, if you if you start checks that are calculated out, you might end up with some strange results because, you know, the, the number of potential future human beings is very, very, very high. And so that, you know, the sum of happiness of every possible future human being could end up sort of swamping all of the concerns of the paltry, you know, eight or so billion that we have today. So, so how are effective altruists sort of squaring that circle? Well,

Theron Pummer
there’s disagreement within the effective altruists community and within philosophy about this sort of issue. And I think the disagreement comes down to disagreements in population ethics. So this is the branch of ethics that has to do with the moral status of merely potential persons. So these are people that don’t exist, and whose existence depends on what we choose now. So some people think that they basically don’t count. Or if they do count, it’s only if they live miserable lives. But we don’t have reason to create people, just because they will live happy lives. That’s one view that people take. Another view that people take in population ethics is that they count just as much their happiness counts just the same way that my happiness counts. So saving my life and extending it for 30. Happy years, is just as good as creating somebody who would exist for 30 years at the same level of happiness. And so then the other kind of big axis along which people disagree here is in decision theory. So this is the part of ethics that deals with how to decide what to do when we’re uncertain about what the outcomes of our actions will be. And some people think that basically, you can have some incredibly tiny probability of bringing about an outcome, that would be better this, taking this lottery would be better than having a 100% chance of, you know, saving a billion lives, as long as the goodness of this outcome is sufficiently high. So rather than, you know, save a billion people with certainty, we should bring about point 000000 1% chance of saving, you know, quintillions, essentially. So I think those two theoretical debates are what drive the philosophical disagreement about the relative importance of reducing existential risks, relative to say, helping people in extreme poverty.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Effective Altruism with Darren Palmer from the University of St. Andrews. And we’ve got an email from Mary in Richmond, California, Mary says that when it comes to Effective Altruism, philosophy cannot be the final arbiter for our choices. Altruism must be practiced for it’s a skill. And it gets more familiar, the more it’s done, emotional intelligence and processing of one’s emotional weight must also take place for altruism to manifest. So what do you think there? And is philosophy enough? Are our beliefs enough to guide effective altruists?

Theron Pummer
No, no, probably not. I think you you would need to be motivated, as well as have correct beliefs. So you’d need to care about, you know, if not doing the right thing, or promoting the good, you know, more or less abstract things like other people, you know, that would be a nice starting point. And I think that’s probably how most effective altruists, you know, start out as a matter of fact, they start out caring about people near them, you know, friends, family members, and then their circle of concern, as it were expands over time. And their empathy gets combined with these abstract rational thoughts. Like, you know, it doesn’t matter how close someone is, it doesn’t matter whether someone looks like me, it doesn’t matter whether I’ve met someone, and they can kind of extend that motivational drive to help others to basically, you know, everyone, but that’s

Josh Landy
a curiosity. I have I mean, I love this question from married because it you know, it raises a an old and beautiful question about what is required for people to be good or people to be fully good or maximally Good. Are beliefs enough? Do you need a motion? Do you need a certain kind of skill and a sense of practice? Habit? i The curiosity I have with Effective Altruism is on the one hand, it seems to ask us to set aside our emotions. We were talking about this a little moment ago. Don’t be too irrational. Don’t sort of spend your money on the first person you see who seems like they’re in need. You know, the the thing that sort of is tugging at your heartstrings in singers words might not be the best use of your money, on the other hand, seems like surely as you were saying a moment ago, emotion is that absolutely essential for us to be altruists in the first place. So how do you strike the right balance?

Theron Pummer
That’s a very hard question. I’m not really sure. To be honest. I mean, I guess I’ll say that I would agree that having the right dispositions is important to being a good person. And having the right affective states is as well, I think having the right beliefs is definitely not sufficient to be a good person. So, you know, I think we’re on the same page as far as that goes. But as far as striking the balance goes, I’m not really sure. I mean, I think some people talk about, you know, as I was suggesting, like this idea of abstract sympathy. So the idea is, you start out with empathy and sympathy for people that you can see. And that’s natural enough, but then the thought is, well, it’s arbitrary to stop with what just what you can see or what happens to move you shouldn’t it be that, you know, lots of stuff really should move you. So it’s not that you should stop caring about the kid drowning right in front of you. But you should also care about the kids that are drowning way far away.

Ray Briggs
I have a question about something you said a while earlier, which is that you’re not a utilitarian. So you don’t believe that we are obligated to do the greatest good for the greatest number. And that’s not what it takes to be a good person. So it sounds like you think that’s not required to motivate Effective Altruism. So how much is required? Like what moral commitments do you need to get it off the ground?

Theron Pummer
I think they’re very, very minimal. So I think what you need is moral reason with, you know, any kind of requiring strength. So the kind of moral reason that could make it the case that you’re morally required to perform an action, you just need a requiring reason to help others, and to help more rather than less. And I guess it needs to be like, you know, a significant moral reason, it can’t just be It can’t just have tie breaking weight, you know, it needs to actually be able, in practice to outweigh other considerations that it would come up against. And I mean, I think that what it takes to be an effective altruists, is to make the project of Effective Altruism a significant part of your life. And you know, that’s vague, of course, what counts is a significant part of your life. Presumably, it doesn’t have to be your only project for it to be a significant part of your life. But also, it can’t just be that you donate, you know, one time, that’s not enough. I think that if you are donating 10% of your time and money to the things that you think are going to help others the most. That’s that’s sufficient to be an effective altruist even if you know the rest of the time, you’re spending the money on yourself and your own personal projects. So I think yeah, to answer your question, I think it doesn’t take a whole lot in terms of moral theory to support being an effective altruist. I think those reasons I talked about to help others and help more rather than less. They’re really compatible with a wide range of non utilitarian moral views, like deontology, virtue ethics, do different versions of deontology, or rossington, Kantian, and so forth. You’ve said this

Ray Briggs
thing about personal projects and wanting to have Effective Altruism be one of them. And I’m sort of wondering how you integrate it into your life, and what the role is of having a community of other effective altruists? Because it sounds like you’ve spent a lot of effort building community. Do you think like, you need other people to be with you to succeed at this project? Long term?

Theron Pummer
Now? Great question. Um, I mean, I think some people probably do, yes, I think some people need to see other people doing this other people taking, like, you know, an impartial point of view or a general point of view, people that are motivated just for the sake of helping strangers. And there are real life, people flesh and blood people doing this. And it’s not just an abstract idea. I think some people are startled by the idea of helping someone that you have no special connection to. I mean, I think it’s kind of weird. Like, if you just wanted to donate a kidney anonymously, a lot of people think there must be something wrong with you if you just donate the money without any expectation of getting anything back. And so I think having people to look up to and talk to about this kind of culture of giving is incredibly important for people. I mean, I found it important when I was starting out, and as I said, what really pushed me over the line was seeing and giving what we can website and the stories from people like Toby Ord, who pledged to give so much of their money and time to effective causes.

Josh Landy
I feel the same way I look. I think, you know, we heard earlier from Greg I think that this this impulse to donate a kidney not to a family member or friend but just to donate a kidney to whoever needs it next. That’s that’s really heroic. I totally agree with you, but but let me raise a little worry I have related to something Toby ord said. He said look, I You know, the pressure of reason basically convinced me, I’m not going to give to anybody in the developed world, because my money is going to go much further and save more people in the developing world, I totally get that. But here’s the worry I have, you know, the famous or starting point of all this is Peter singers, brilliant argument that you know, you you see a small child drowning in a pond? Surely you go into the pond, even if it ruins your expensive suit and you save that life? Well, he says, Let me tell you something for the price of your suit, you can save five people in the developing world 10 People who knows how many people? So surely, you should do that. So here’s the irony that I see is that at the end of the day, you end up not saving the baby in the pond. Right? Because, you know, Toby ord says, I’m not gonna give any money to anyone around here. And I see the logic, but I also kind of worry, well, wait, didn’t we start from you save the baby in the pond? That’s like, right there next you Why shouldn’t we devote any of our money to folks around here?

Theron Pummer
Oh, yeah, great question. So this is this is known in the literature as the callousness objection. So the thought is that it would be quite callous, to just let the child drown in order to keep your soup, so you could sell it, sell the suit, and then give the money to save two kids instead. So my own view on this is that we know there are differences between the two scenarios, the child’s in front of you, their need is salient, and you’re having a direct encounter with them, you know, they can see you, and you can see them and so on. But I think a lot of these differences actually don’t matter. And I argue this at length in my book, that for half the half the factors that you’d be tempted to list and differentiate the drowning child and the distant ones, they really don’t matter at all. But I do think, nonetheless, that there are differences in the cost to you, between helping the drowning child and donating the money that can in some cases, make it permissible to save the drowning child. So, you know, maybe you’ve helped so much over the course of your life, that you’re now permitted to take a break from charitable giving. And when you’re taking a break, you encounter a child drowning? Well, I think there, you wouldn’t be required to incur the further cost of switching yourself back onto this ongoing charitable donation situation, but you’re already psychologically forced to encounter the child’s situation. So I think there’s going to be a difference in the level of cost to you, that could actually explain why in some cases, it would be morally okay for you to save the drowning child.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Effective Altruism with Theron Pummer, author of “The Rules of Rescue.”

Ray Briggs
Do you want to be more effective in your giving? How do you strike a balance between giving to others and taking care of yourself? Would you ever take a high earning job just so you could give more to charity?

Josh Landy
Help us help you help other people—plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

If you had a million dollars, would you give it away now? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Theron Pummer from the University of St. Andrews and we’re thinking about Effective Altruism.

Josh Landy
So Theron, I know we’ve got plenty of listeners who are already effective altruists, and more you might be on the verge of joining the movement. So what advice would you have for someone starting out?

Theron Pummer
Well, if you’re not already familiar with Effective Altruism, I think the first thing to do is go to effectivealtruism.org and make yourself a cup of coffee or tea and do some reading and watch some of the lovely YouTube videos and TED talks that they have about Effective Altruism. I think this website will provide lots and lots of helpful links for people and data on charity effectiveness and things that people can do with their time in addition to their money, so you could join the local chapter, local Effective Altruism group or you could start one up or you could devote some of your your research time if you’re a student or if you’re in academia or some other kind of research field to to research that would inform cost effectiveness assessments. So the organization 80,000 hours they provide free expert advice to people who are looking to make a positive difference with their career. And another organization called Effective Thesis help students, masters and doctoral studies. and identify high priority thesis topics. But if you’re just looking for advice on where to donate, then I would recommend going to givewell.org and givingwhatwecan.org. Those websites focus on global health and extreme poverty. If you’re interested in animals, reducing animal suffering, then I would recommend going to animal charity evaluators. You can also check out EA funds for a wider range of excellent donation opportunities, including those that are aimed at improving the long term future.

Ray Briggs
So this is very useful advice. I have a kind of big picture question about Effective Altruism. Like, it’s usually motivated by this like analogy of like, what if you have this child drowning in this pond? And it sort of makes me worry about like, why are all these children continuously drowning in these ponds? And why are we trying to triage this problem? So drain these ponds? Yeah. So giving to a charity that rescues children from ponds? Or does the analogous thing is like better than not doing that. But there’s something really exhausting about a world that keeps throwing people into crisis. And so how do you like balance the short term rescue with the long term structural change?

Theron Pummer
Yeah, exactly. Great question. I mean, I think that if there were charities that spelled out what the like, you know, what the odds were, you know, effective altruists could find some way of quantifying how likely it would be if they they could bring about social change by giving the Oxfam, then it would probably make it somewhere in the, you know, the obvious list of effective altruist charities, but I think these sorts of social change charities are they’re difficult to kind of work into the quantitative apparatus, or at least they’re, they’re harder to do than the more immediate humanitarian aid interventions. So I mean, I myself think that yeah, there could very well be some social change charities that are just as worth giving to as an immediate humanitarian aid, charity, at least, you know, when you kind of like look at them from the standpoint of uncertainty, it can be at least as worth doing.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I worry about the apparatus of charity, as a way of doing this even even while I think like deciding where to devote your time and energy and resources is worthwhile. One of the things that a charity has to do is kind of perpetuate its own existence. And so well, I like I believe that Oxfam is doing more good than harm and addressing, you know, world hunger, for instance, I sort of worry sometimes about the the limits of having a social structure that is set up partly to solve a problem and partly to preserve itself. And I sort of wonder if that’s like not a deeper problem that can be solved by more charities and more numbers.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, one example might be look by Facebook, which allegedly got sort of recruited in, you know, genocide in Myanmar, which is pretty horrifying. And maybe you can imagine sort of creative solutions for using people’s money and time, that aren’t just a matter of giving. It doesn’t mean people should stop giving to charity, obviously. But is that the only thing we can do to make the world a better place?

Theron Pummer
Well, I mean, I think as individuals, we’re, you know, we’re not groups, we’re individuals, but individuals don’t just have charity as their only tool, they can also try to get groups to do things. And I think, you know, that’s a great idea. So, you know, to the extent that we could get governments more interested in helping the extreme poor people in extreme poverty, and fixing social and justices, that would be that would be great. So I think that that’s an opportunity that effective altruists have identified. As I was saying, though, it’s just it’s tricky to work out how to compare those sorts of opportunities with, like, the immediate humanitarian ones, but I certainly would agree that like, it’s not just about charity, you can also volunteer your time. And you could also go into politics. I mean, interestingly, 80,000 hours, the career advice, organization, they don’t primarily recommend people going into like burning to give anymore I think they say only, you know, a very small proportion of people should actually consider that. And instead, they say, people should go into politics and policy and things like this instead, high value research. So so the idea is, you know, here a bunch of like non charitable uses of individuals time instead.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s really be encouraging because you know, where he would be telling him to become a banker. So you can give more and well, that’s just sort of keeping the system in place. But if you’re encouraging folks to go into politics and make change that way, I think that’s a, that I think that’s really encouraging. It is a different category I have as a literature person, you know, Peter Singer, says they don’t give to the arts. And I understand that, you know, I guess the arts could just about survive without people’s donations. But the philosopher Susan Wolf, you know, raised a worry and paper called Moral saints, where she said, Look, if you were really completely focused on doing the most good you can, for the most people, you could never justify writing a great novel, making a great movie, painting a great artwork, you could really never justified and I, I sort of worry about this side of things a little bit what what happens to the arts under Effective Altruism.

Theron Pummer
I mean, it’s definitely not going to be at the top of the list of recommended. So I think it will probably fall into the category of, you know, personal spending or, you know, effective altruists, least if they’re not utilitarians that allow for discretion and spending. So it’s not the case that everything has to go to the most cost effective, you know, from an impartial point of view, charity. So I think the arts would at least be covered in that kind of personal discretion category. But maybe, maybe you’re thinking that that’s not enough and that there will need to be

Josh Landy
Glad to hear it’s okay for people to spend some of their time reading the great American novel.

Ray Briggs
I have another kind of outside question about doing the most good for the most people and measuring the good you’re doing so. So this is like comes back to my worry about about how you measure like squishy things. So some ways of measuring good seem clearly like they make sense. Like under most circumstances, it’s better to be alive for a while rather than dead sooner. And, you know, it’s it’s better to not live in a war zone than to live in a war zone. But they’re sort of other kind of quality of life determiner is where I worry that people make systematic errors. So if you look at how, like people in health policy measure sort of quality of life, a lot of it involves asking someone to speculate about how good or bad it would be to live with a disability they don’t have. And this seems like it kind of systematically undervalues like the lives of people with disabilities. So I’m wondering, like, do you have thoughts about how to adjust for those kinds of biases?

Theron Pummer
Yeah, that’s, I mean, I’m not exactly sure how to adjust. But I mean, one proposal would be to give greater weight to the preferences or the descriptions of people that have the disabilities in question, you know, I mean, you couldn’t give no way to people that don’t have the disability because they don’t have like the relevant kind of competence. Or, you know, they have biases about what it might be like to be blind, for example. But yeah, so I think, yeah, that would be one kind of fix. But I’m not really I’m not an expert on this. So I’m just giving you my best kind of guests on the car off the cuff.

Josh Landy
So Theron, we’ve got about 30 seconds left, what’s the most surprising thing that you learned or came up with about Effective Altruism?

Theron Pummer
Well, I think it’s the in some cases, it can be impermissible to give money to a less cost effective charity rather than a more cost effective charity, even though it’s permissible for you not to give at all. That’s a very surprising claim that I’ve defended. But I think it’s plausible if we look at similar cases of nearby rescue.

Josh Landy
Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a—you’ve been very generous and effective.

Theron Pummer
Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. The questions were excellent.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been Theron Pummer, professor of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and author of the forthcoming book “The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m thinking that Theron makes a really good case for becoming an effective altruist. And I’m really excited that like, there, there are Effective Altruism groups near me that I can just connect with so that I don’t have to sort of feel like I’m doing everything by myself, which is never a very, like effective way of motivating myself, but like having a whole community and all these resources for being an Effective Altruism is really helpful.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I agree. Because, you know, it can seem a little isolating because it’s just me and my wallet. But actually, no, it’s a community of like minded folks. And this is a great example of philosophy actually making a real world difference. People often say philosophy is just people sitting in rooms that thinking about things. But this makes real contact with the world and has produced really tangible, important results. So we’re going to put links to, to give well, and these groups and everything else we mentioned today on our website, philosophy, takedown, or G, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library with more than 550 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man who always takes the most effective route from point A to point B—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. In recent years, we’ve seen an input of philosophy into cultural directions. Of course some of that’s just plain old cracker barrel philosophy. It led to the Tea Party, trickle down economics, neo-liberalism, blockchains in unlikely places, ditto metaverses, and even Trumpism, which apparently is a thing that may someday be studied in universities, once the tar and feathers have been safely removed. Effective altruism is another one of those things. You can see the appeal, it’s a new spin on utilitarianism, a kind of a libertarian approach to helping others. It’s thrifty. You can care about others with one eye, and keep an eye on the spreadsheet with the other. The idea being that teaching a man to fish is better than giving a man a fish. It’s more practical to endow a hospital than to bribe a doctor. Better to invest in bulk mosquito netting than buy Costco bug spray in bulk. The point being that altruism was ripe for disruption just like everything else in post modern capitalism. Taxis got disrupted by Uber. Magazines and newspapers got disrupted by news feeds. Moviegoing got disrupted by streaming. Electricity disrupting fuel. Democracy got interrupted by whatever the hell is going on right now. To the point, an actual organization has sprung up, a non profit of course called the Centre for Effective Altruism. Near as I can tell, it began as a think tank, advising politicians and NGOS on policies and procedures for best practice to mitigate disease, disasters, and the other things that harsh our human mellow. Also which crisis to choose? A conversation starter at many of these conferences is “Your numbers are wrong,” which can lead to sex, or a pledge to tithe half your money for a worthy cause chosen by the board. Many conferences are devoted to wrangling the trolley problem, as an ice breaker, which is a very handy tool to make yourself feel bad about throwing people on trolley tracks or feeling good that you stopped a runaway trolley, or sometimes both! In a nutshell, this thought experiment teaches us how to be more Spock and less Captain Kirk, measuring our heart’s social output in terms of triage, Quality Adjusted Life Year Studies and other things that merge expansive moral sensibilities with an analytical frame of mind. The trouble being, as it turns out, overthinking. Too much thinking on trolley problems means no funding for trolleys. All ted talk, no ted. And it has led to a kind of big bang theory of altruism- a quest for the number one disaster umbrella granddaddy, what came to be called in EA circles, Long Termism. End of world scenarios, famine, war, et cetera. Forget your water treatment plants, and underwater grain silos, prepare for the ways we can end ourselves. Well, one of the EA founders met a rich guy in college, who became even richer through a complicated bitcoin scheme. He started throwing money at EA. And suddenly EA became another ride in the latter day capitalist playground. You know the scene. Elon Musk. That guy from WeWork. Artfully shaved heads. Black turtlenecks. Billionaires in tee shirts, walking barefoot in Manhattan, making noises about emigrating to Alpha Centauri, living in a closet in San Francisco with five guys hired to be his roommates, taking cat naps on a beanbag chair, waking up only for zoom meetings and calls to the board. This particular EA billionaire, whom I will not name, when not throwing money at EA, is throwing money at U.S. politicians, trying to get them to regulate bitcoin trading. Well, in a way that benefits him, leading either to everybody involved with him making billions, or everybody involved losing everything. Either way, problem solved I guess! World saved! And billionaire helped! Bitcoin, of course, is the King of Crypto. Many otherwise secular people seem to think it has mystical properties that will not only save the global economy, if everybody uses it of course, but save the planet itself, once we get everything on the blockchain. In other words, move on to the next level. Teach a man to fish? Hell of a lot of good that will do after all the lakes dry up. And look there, in the bottom of the dried up lake? Hundreds of them. Rusted out trolleys. Well, we could change trolley problem to rocket ship problem, I guess, but jeeze, it’ll be a kajillion bucks just to ride coach. And some guy doing a thought experiment might just ram the spaceship into five guys for no reason, and you’ll never get to Mars. Is that the future we want? I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Yiqi Shi, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot ORG, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 550 episodes. I’m Josh Landy,

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Seinfeld
Elaine, you should admire me—I’m aspiring to date a giving person. But you’re a taking person. That’s why I should date giving person. If I date a taking person, everyone’s taking, taking, taking, no one’s giving—it’s bedlam.