The Threat Response to Effective Altruism

Framing EA as an obligation doesn't meet people where they're at

The most foundational moral belief of the vast majority of people is that they, personally, are good. Maybe not great, certainly not the best, but good. A straightforward implication of this fact is that the obligation framing of Effective Altruism is counterproductive and arguably self-defeating.

I recently re-watched Ajeya Cotra’s classic Intro to Effective Altruism talk. It’s fantastic, even if guilt-oriented in a way my version of that talk wouldn’t be. Early on, she drops the line “I couldn’t just do nothing” as her response to witnessing suffering up close.

One of the YouTube comments on the talk echoed things I often heard in my EA street preaching days in law school. “I may not have your fancy system for figuring out what to do, but I’m kind to those around me and that’s good enough in my book.”

I think it’s something the obligation framing brings out in people. It’s natural to think of morality as a threshold we need to get over, something that provides a strictly binary answer to the question: “am I a Good Person?” EAs don’t think of ethics in terms of this Good Person “bar,” but failing to account for it means people will interpret you as saying EA is required to be a Good Person, since that’s what moral arguments are supposed to be about. If your aim is to help people understand the EA project and eventually do more good, it’s important to head off this reaction from the start.

Good Person Status as Relief

People live in a constructed reality of intense social judgment and competition. How attractive you are, how well you dress, where you live, how important your job is, etc, etc. Most people implicitly accept the competition framing in these areas.

Morality, by contrast, offers an escape from all that. You can be poor, ugly, and have a crappy job, but at least you’re an honest person who’s nice and doesn’t hurt anyone. Those other shortcomings are okay because you know right from wrong and do what you can. You’re good.

Consider the contrast in ambition between jobs, money, fashion, etc. and just doing right by your neighbor. The latter isn’t ambitious. It doesn’t require you to be a genius or move mountains. The other items on the list are ambitious. You’ve got to get ahead otherwise you’ll fall behind, miss out on a good partner, and be held in low regard. It’s stressful. That’s what makes being a Good Person feel like a respite.

Along comes EA. “You know being good requires ambition too.”

And of course, the EA saying that will be a young, energetic, asks-the-best-questions-in-class Ivy-Leaguer. It’s not helping you recover the comfort you took in being a Good Person.

That’s my sympathetic view of the situation, though it feels incomplete without getting less sympathetic.

Regardless of whether they frame morality as I suggested above, one of people’s most unassailable beliefs is that they, individually, are a good person. They’re in the right. Their actions have always been justified and at least sometimes praiseworthy.

Suggesting they change their mind or take some action they had never heard of before and that it might be required to be a good person is running headlong at a core belief of theirs. “You think you know what a good person is? Well I certainly do and I’m it, buddy!”

People then do a little reflection and reconstruct what I outline above. If I’m definitely a good person but haven’t taken any of these ambitious actions to help people at scale, what is it that makes me a good person? Thinking, thinking… right! I’m NICE. So nice, to everyone I talk to, all the time. I even do people FAVORS—for no money! That’s what makes a good person, not this bed net stuff. Someone should get the memo to these people. This is how everyone thinks about doing good.

Flippancy aside, I don’t think this is wholly inaccurate. You can sense the defensiveness coming from people who make this objection. And in their defense, they did just hear you calling them a bad person, which is quite aggressive on your part, Ms. Cotra.

Again, I don’t think Ajeya and others intend to trigger this response or even consciously choose to present the obligation framing that produces it. It’s just what people hear by default if you don’t take active steps to defuse their intuitive reaction here.

The Opportunity Framing

For my part, I introduce EA at arm’s length. It’s something I and some other people do that’s on the table for you to evaluate. I don’t assume you’re on board or get too overwrought about the intensity and urgency of suffering that we might be responsible for. I’ll bring that up if people express skepticism that their decisions matter very much, but it’s not my opening salvo precisely because people are very sensitive about the suggestion that they’re not doing right by their neighbor.

Another more controversial take of mine is that you should avoid and deemphasize the words “doing good” especially “how to” do good. This really triggers people’s “content of my obligations” alarms. I present EA as a hobby: “we try to figure out how to best improve the balance of suffering and happiness in the world and then do that.” “The balance of happiness and suffering” is merely a subset of the broader “good” that people are sensitive about, so this invites them to imagine that, up until now, they’ve just been exchanging some progress on happiness/suffering for being honest, doing favors, and the like. “The EAs do it the other way, I wonder what that’s about.”

The drawback to this is that not everyone is going to think your hobby is cool. To that I’ll just say that not everyone was bowled over by your (implicit) arguments about their moral obligations either. I would guess that the set of people who don’t think the hobby is cool, but would buy the obligation case is much closer to null than the inverse.

In fact, I think most EAs are non-realists who think the opportunity framing better tracks reality. We do Excited Altruism here. As above, I think the main reason the obligation stuff bleeds through is that once you start giving reasons for something in a moral context, people’s minds harken back to church or philosophy class, where obligations are the coin of the realm.

The obligation framing also bleeds through because it is the framing that initially worked for the most committed EAs, who are often the ones giving these talks. Moral realists like Singer or Parfit got to them and they were that rare breed who were able to push through their own shame and defensiveness to figure out what was important.

I deeply suspect, though, that that ability to push through the natural reaction came from finding the ideas intellectually stimulating. So on some level, the opportunity framing was doing the work for them too, even if they also happen to buy the obligation arguments.

Accordingly, I don’t think you have any, ahem, obligation to start with the framing that felt strongest for you. If something like cluster thinking is right, you should lead with the framings that will be most helpful for the listener. People don’t have to believe things for your reasons, especially if you’re unclear on what your reasons actually are.

The real virtue of the arm’s-length-hobby approach is that it puts people into the right frame of mind to consider ideas. You’re explicitly making it easy for them to take or leave the ideas: “this is something me and some other people find valuable, what do you think?” passes the onion test, even if you personally feel the weight of obligation under the surface.

By contrast, hurling people into guilt and reckoning—even unintentionally—makes it harder for them to assess the content of ideas. It is neither nice nor conducive to truth-seeking. Maybe one person’s manipulation is another person’s making it emotionally possible to have an honest discussion. I also wonder whether the obligation framing’s “non-manipulation” is just an indulgent kind of self-expression. “I saw that I was a sinner and had to toil through the guilt of my sins, so you do too.”