Against Tautological Motivations

By Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-06-02T19:03 (+62)

This is a linkpost to https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/against-tautological-motivations

tl;dr: Just as not everyone is selfish, not everyone cares about the impartial good in a scope-sensitive way. Claims that effective altruism is "trivial" are silly in a way that's comparable to the error in tautological egoism.
 

Human motivations vary widely (at least on the margins; “human nature” may provide a fairly common core). Some people are more selfish than others. Some more altruistic. Among the broadly altruistic, I think there is significant variation along at least two dimensions: (i) the breadth of one’s “moral circle” of concern, and (ii) the extent to which one’s altruism is goal-directed and guided by instrumental rationality, for example seriously considering tradeoffs and opportunity costs in search of moral optimality.

I think some kinds of altruism—some points along these two dimensions—are morally much better than others. Something I really like about effective altruism is that it highlights these important differences. Not all altruism is equal, and EA encourages us to try to develop our moral concerns in the best possible ways. That can be challenging, but I think it’s a good kind of challenge to engage with.

As I wrote in Doing Good Effectively is Unusual:

We all have various “rooted” concerns, linked to particular communities, individuals, or causes to which we have a social or emotional connection. That’s all good. Those motivations are an appropriate response to real goods in the world. But we all know there are lots of other goods in the world that we don’t so easily or naturally perceive, and that could plausibly outweigh the goods that are more personally salient to us. The really distinctive thing about effective altruism is that it seriously attempts to take all those neglected interests into account.…

Few people who give to charity make any serious effort to do the most good they can with the donation. Few people who engage in political activism are seriously trying to do they most good they can with their activism. Few people pursuing an “ethical career” are trying to do the most good they can with their career. And that’s all fine—plenty of good can still be done from more partial and less optimizing motives (and even EAs only pursue the EA project in part of their life). But the claim that the moral perspective underlying EA is “trivial” or already “shared by literally everyone” is clearly false.

So I find it annoyingly stupid when people dismiss effective altruism (or the underlying principles of beneficentrism) as “trivial”. I think it involves a similar sleight-of-hand to that of tautological egoists, who claim that everyone is “by definition” selfish (because they pursue what they most want, according to their “revealed preferences”). The tautological altruist instead claims that everyone is “by definition” an effective altruist (because they pursue what they deem best, according to their “revealed values”).

Either form of tautological attribution is obviously silly. The extent to which you are selfish depends upon the content of what you want (that is, the extent to which you care non-instrumentally about other people’s interests). Likewise, the extent to which you have scope-sensitive beneficentric concern depends upon contingent details of your values and moral psychology. Innumerate (“numbers don’t count”) moral views are commonplace, and even explicitly defended by some philosophers. Much moral behavior, like much voting, is more “expressive” than goal-directed. To urge people to be more instrumentally rational in pursuit of the impartial good is a very substantive, non-trivial ask.

I think that most people’s moral motivations are very different from the scope-sensitive beneficentrism that underlies effective altruism. (I suspect the latter is actually extremely rare, though various approximations may be more common.) I also think that most people’s explicit moral beliefs make it hard for them to deny that scope-sensitive beneficentrism is more virtuous/ideal than their unreflective moral habits. So my hope is that prompting greater reflection on this disconnect could help to shift people in a more beneficentric direction. (Some may instead double-down on explicitly endorsing worse values, alas. One can but try.)

As with the “everyone is really selfish” move, I suspect that appeals to tautological altruism tend to reflect motivated reasoning from people who don’t want to endure the cognitive dissonance of confronting the disconnect between their everyday moral reasoning and the abstract moral claims they appreciate are undeniable. I think that’s super lame, and people who are opposed to the EA conception of beneficence should stop eliding the differences, grow a spine, and actually argue against it (and for some concrete, coherent alternative).