The Myth of the 'Perfect Altruist'

By JoeJones @ 2024-06-30T12:57 (+10)

Also available on my blog.

I remember speaking to a fellow student at Oxford, someone who was a mentor to me, in the EA community. I got all sorts of models from him about how to deal with my problems. Granted, he couldn’t fix me - I’m still fixing myself. At the time, I railed against his advice to stop worrying about things, and now I see clearly the wisdom in what he said, and why he said it. Without his help, I think I’d have been a fair bit more stuck than I was. We’ll call him Bob, because that’s a name basically nobody actually has. Maximum anonymity.

I remember telling Bob once that I wanted my life to be ‘100% EA’, or something along those lines. And he said to me: what does that mean?

The idea was not meaningless to me. I’d met many people who I took to be 100% EA. This was in an intense phase of over-idolising EAs, and overestimating my own capacities.

When I was really caught up in over-idolising EA, some ways in which members of the community operated began to confuse me. For example, when people would thank one another for their contributions to some project, I would be confused. Weren’t we all working towards the same altruistic, selfless goals? What benefit was it to Person X if Person Y helped with a project? The project was nothing to do with Person X! It was to do with doing the most good! For Person X to thank Person Y, this would mean Person X derived some personal benefit from the project, which would surely be heresy!

I saw that this didn’t logically make sense, in that people should thank one another, and that this is a good norm and a decent way to be as a person. I understood that, but I was so anxious that I couldn’t erase the above sort of addled thought process from my mind. This was just the way my 18 year-old mind thought.

It’s the proudest achievement of my life to have taken that anxious teenager through 4 years of university and then to graduate. He was a pain. And the hardest pains to deal with in life are the ones that are part of your own identity.

By now, the wisdom of Bob’s question is clear to me. And I’d encapsulate that wisdom now in the following statement:

To be a good EA, in the sense that it is conceived of by most EAs, you must enjoy your life to some degree.

This is because living one’s life is rarely an exclusively moral decision.

This isn’t necessarily a statement of fact, but it is a conjecture. It’s not new, either, by any means. Others think similar things and have written similar things. There’s a large literature on self-care for EAs.

People are EAs because People Want Careers. They’re EAs because they want to ‘get on in life’, and this means prioritising the right things. They’re EAs because they are people, and therefore some part of them wants to enjoy life, and the best way for them to do that is to do it whilst doing good.

If you try to make living your life an exclusively moral decision, you’re likely to fail, in my view. There may be some who think they’re doing this, and they could be right, but I think there are at least similar numbers - and likely many more - who have tried it and failed. I’m one of them. And now my life’s kinda fucked (and my moral integrity certainly is) though I’m getting back on my feet, slowly.

And obviously, enjoying things is good, because you’re more likely to stick at them. You’re also more likely to progress and learn and be creative and do other good things besides. A wise man once said: detach the grim-o-meter.

I don’t think this applies just to EA, either. You could say that deeply devoted religious people live their lives in an exclusively moral framework, and that may be true, but the reason they can do so is that their religion is not overly demanding. Utilitarianism is the most demanding moral framework I’m aware of, in the modern world^[1].

The idea of the ‘Perfect Altruist’ is a myth. If you aim for that, you risk flying too close to the sun.

And then you will fall, and the fall will be painful, and you’ll be lucky to escape with any life at all.

Exempting perhaps some extremely demanding cults, or extremely demanding interpretations of existing moral doctrines (or individuals who have developed their own extremely demanding frameworks based on some other idea or neurosis).^[1]

1. ^{^}

   Exempting perhaps some extremely demanding cults, or extremely demanding interpretations of existing moral doctrines (or individuals who have developed their own extremely demanding frameworks based on some other idea or neurosis).