When is Philosophy Worth Funding?

By Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-11-11T21:48 (+30)

Though I've no idea what the raw numbers are, my sense is that a non-trivial amount of EA funding supports academic philosophy research. It seems an interesting and underexplored question when we should expect such funding to be "worth it". In this post, I especially want to explore two dimensions of variation: (1) what entities (individuals or institutes) to support, and (2) what kind of work (broad or targeted) to support. My sense is that EA funders have a preference for institutes over individuals, and targeted/specialist projects over broad/generalist ones. So one question I'm interested in is whether generalist work from individual academics might be comparatively neglected under current approaches.

COI warning: I'm an individual academic who does (what I would call) "generalist" EA-aligned work. So I'm implicitly—and at some points explicitly—making the case for why I think the sort of work I do may be under-valued. Feel free to discount accordingly. :-)

How Academic Funding Can Be Used

Research Institutes

With many millions of dollars, one could support a full-blown Research Institute where many academics collaborate on a shared project or loose research theme. (Examples I’m familiar with—and think highly of—include GPI or the (sadly ended) FHI at Oxford; PWI at UT Austin; and Rethink Priorities, which seems to be an independent organization that maybe employs some academics part-time, alongside independent researchers? (I’m not exactly sure how RP works, but they certainly seem to have some good people. Maybe someone involved can say more about how it's set up, esp. in relation to the affiliated academics?)

I see three main advantages to research institutes:

(1) Mission alignment: unlike in an academic department where individual faculty can work on whatever they like, I assume that in a research institute there’s a strong expectation (at least in hiring, and likely on a more ongoing basis, depending on the local culture) that the research it supports should be relevant to the institute’s mission.

(2) Improving the career pipeline for aligned researchers. Due to the abysmal job market in philosophy, even excellent young philosophers can very easily fall through the gaps and fail to get a tenure-track position. By funding postdocs and other “stepping stone” positions, research institutes can provide an extra chance to junior researchers who do promising work on especially important topics to remain in academia and (hopefully!) eventually break through to a permanent job. (Or, some funding might be used to create new permanent positions within the institute?)

(3) Agglomeration effects from having broadly aligned (yet diverse) academics closely interacting, sharing ideas, etc., maybe even co-authoring work together, all of which could (one hopes) prove more fruitful than working in isolation.^[1]

Fancy Endowed Chairs

This is something I discussed a bit in my reflections on Peter Singer’s career: it seems like good things could come from reserving space at the most prestigious universities for global priorities research or other impartially valuable philosophy. But I assume a lot depends on how easily such a position could be “captured” by the local powers to continue their preferred business-as-usual—in which case the funding^[2] may merely serve to boost the University’s endowment (if they end up hiring whoever they would have done anyway, just using the philanthropist’s funds rather than their own).

Support (e.g. course buyouts) for specific researchers

Research institutes will (I gather) typically use a bunch of their funds to buy out the teaching obligations of their senior researchers. But one could also do this for researchers in ordinary academic departments, if you think they do especially good work and would like them to have the time to do more.

I’ve personally had some luck with this—I couldn’t have written so much for utilitarianism.net without the time provided by grants from the Forethought Foundation and Longview Philanthropy in previous years. But my sense is that it's harder for an individual academic to get ongoing funding support compared to an institute-funded pure research position. (I'm still teaching three out of four courses this academic year, for example, and expect to have less time for public philosophy next semester as a result.)

A quick argument for supporting individual academics

Lots of great work comes out of EA research institutes. But ask which you would expect to do better: the marginal hire at an institute with several researchers, or the best of the (aligned & interested) researchers you can find in all the rest of academia. Seems like you should expect the best people outside of an institute to do more valuable work than the worst people inside of it! So that's a very quick argument for thinking that more marginal funding should go to support work by individual academics outside of EA research institutes.

(I don't mean to suggest that this quick argument is decisive or anything. Feel free to share considerations that point more in the opposite direction in the comments! One obvious one: university-employed individual academics are already employed, and so can pursue their research—albeit at a slower pace—even without any external support.^[3])

What kinds of (EA-aligned) philosophy are worth funding?

My sense is that EA funders are most keen to support philosophical work that is either (i) public-facing "outreach" like utilitarianism.net or (ii) original research on a relatively specific, and preferably applied, cause area or problem of interest (e.g. AI safety, digital minds, animal welfare weights, maybe population ethics in some cases).

In my (possibly biased!) opinion, this risks undervaluing the potential significance of original research in general ethical theory (of a broadly beneficentric bent). I think it's not a coincidence that so many EAs are utilitarians or utilitarian-adjacent. The moral lens through which we view things, as represented by our ethical theories, can have a big influence on how salient we find the importance of helping others in a scope-sensitive way. So I expect that it could do a lot of good to find new and better (more intuitive and broadly appealing) ways of conceptualizing utilitarian motivations and moral theories. ^[4] I also expect there are other general research projects that could be similarly valuable, but would struggle to find support in the current funding environment.

How to support specific academics?

OllieBase recently wrote to Consider donating to whoever helped you get more into EA or have more impact. This might not make so much sense if your target is an academic, however: we already have a salary through our university employer. In order to secure more time for research projects, the main available means is through grants for teaching buy-outs, where the money goes to our university, not to us personally. I'm not even sure whether my university would allow grant funding to come from an individual rather than an institutional funder, and the lump sum required is non-trivial.^[5] So I'm guessing that a better route for small donors to support academic work may be to donate to EAIF (or similar), and let them know the kind of work you'd be especially excited to see them use the funds to support. (They remain free to disregard your opinion, of course.)

In my own case, to (hopefully) improve my chances at future grant applications, I'm trying to track my philosophical impact by collecting anecdata from anyone who has found themselves significantly influenced by my work to date. If my writing has led you to feel more positively about EA, to think more clearly about relevant important issues, or to be more motivated to pursue beneficent projects, please leave a brief comment on that post to share the details. (Thanks in advance!)

Conclusion

I've raised two broad questions about the funding of academic work (esp. philosophy) within the EA landscape. One concerns the balance of support for research institutes vs individual academics; the second concerns the case for supporting foundational work (of a broadly beneficentric bent) in general ethical theory. My personal impression is that individual work of this general sort might be undervalued. But then, I would think that—it's precisely the sort of work that I do! So I welcome pushback from those who view the current balance here as well-calibrated, as well as inviting any other thoughts on the general topic.

1. ^{^}

   Having visited both GPI and PWI, I definitely felt that I learned a lot just from being in those intellectual environments.

2. ^{^}

   Typically $2 - 5 million, I gather, depending on the institution. Likely on the higher end for private universities.

3. ^{^}

   If you think this reason is weighty, it would presumably also apply within institutes--e.g. as a reason to prioritize additional postdoc funding over teaching buyouts for senior faculty. By contrast, I expect it will often make sense to prioritize the research time of the senior researchers in a major institute, when they do especially important work.

4. ^{^}

   See Beyond Right and Wrong for an overview of my current research project to this end. Fwiw, I'm very excited about the potential value of this project. But I haven't had much luck in eliciting interest from grant funders to support it.

   [I do currently have one course release this semester, partly funded by EAIF (who were, thankfully, willing to provide the "top-up" funding necessary to make the course release possible, even though they would not have funded the full cost of any course releases for me to pursue this project this year). The bulk of the funding comes from a university prize that would otherwise have provided me with summer salary. So I'm actually taking a bit of a financial hit by instead using the prize for this purpose.]

   It's obviously very hard to predict how much good a foundational research project of this sort will do, but I'd think the "hits-based" EV case would be pretty strong. Funders may simply judge the matter differently, which is of course fine. But I figured I'd share my thoughts here for a broader range of people to consider.

5. ^{^}

   But if anyone's keen to give it a shot, shoot me a DM and I'll happily look into the possibility. (Last I checked, my university would charge around $17k to buy me out from one course, but that will increase slightly with my base salary each year.)