Reading ‘Against Effective Altruism’

I recently read Against Effective Altruism by Alice Crary. I think the strongest part in the piece is in the following lines¹:

The point of the philosophical critique is not that EA’s abstract moral epistemology imposes integrity-threatening moral demands. The more telling charge is that an Archimedean view deprives us of the resources we need to recognise what matters morally, encouraging us to read into it features of whatever moral position we happen to favour.

The charge is that an endeavour to become objective is at the same time an endeavour to become inhuman, and humanity is the essentialy ingredient of morality. This is a serious point! It’s probably captured most straightforwardly in Lands “Capitalism and AI are teleologically identical.” That is to say, both are powerful intelligent nonhuman systems that are being assembled by an unwitting humanity which will inevitably end us. Peter Watts narrates this process in Blighsight/Echopraxia where literal Vampires are employed to run businesses and other critical operations– a nod to the ‘Want to get ahead in business? Hire a psycho.’ schtick.

In my personal life I have for a long time felt this tension. Between the human and the nonhuman. For the last 6 years I have been embedding myself deeper and deeper in nonhuman systems– culminating now in my role as a data engineer in the largest bank in the western world, an institution that could give more than half a million pounds to every individual in my nation of birth². And in the meantime I have felt my humanity slip away, replaced piecemeal by a set of heuristics and other tools.

What does it mean to be human, to have a human ethics? Alice Cracy suggests the following:

To adopt this stance is to see the weave of the world as endowed with values that reveal themselves only to a developed sensibility. To see things this way is to make room for an intuitively appealing conception of actions as right insofar as they exhibit just sensitivity to the worldly circumstances in question.

Indeed, that is intuitively appealing. Presumably I just have to cultivate the developed sensitivity and then I will be capable of right action. I do find this genuinly appealing. What other means can there be of acting rightly, other than by cultivating yourself as well as you can?

The problem with this is of course that it takes a long time, has no guarantee at terminating, and has no guarantee at reaching an agreeable conclusion even if it does terminate. To take Alvarros categories, you can fail to find the answer, or you can find the answer but discover it is also a punishment, or you can find the answer but die believing it is false.

The other option is to take a leap of faith and accept a dogma. This seems to be what Alice Crary is gesturing at:

That framing excludes views of social thought on which it is irretrievably perspectival – views associated with central strands of feminist theory, critical disability studies, critical race theory, and anti-colonial theory. Despite its signaling towards diversity of ideas, EA as it stands cannot make room for individuals who discover in these traditions the things they believe most need to be said.

As the word ‘discover’ there implies, a dogma is meant to be a shortcut to the end of the journey. These shortcuts are everywhere laid out around us, like so many snakes and ladders. How to choose between them? It’s an open question, always left in the last moment as an exercise for the reader. No-one can tell you when to leap.

In the final analysis I’m skeptical of the distinction between human and nonhuman. I’m skeptical that we can identify systems that are alien to us (xenosystems) and call them the enimies of humanity, while holding faith in other schools of thought and ethical worldviews. I’m probably going to look to xenohumanism for my next steps on the path.

Footnotes

1. There is a lot that is so weak as to not be worth rebutting, such as the criticism of animal welfare which concludes: “There is no reason to doubt that the welfare adjustments to the treatment of farmed animals that are favoured by EA-affiliated groups can lessen the pain of many such animals. It is even possible that in calling for these adjustments, effective altruists will hasten the demise of the industrial system that torments and kills billions of creatures annually. But it is also possible that the interventions of effective altruists will, because they affirm this system’s underlying principles, contribute to its perpetuation, perhaps even precipitating the arrival of a further, more horrific ‘agricultural revolution’.”
   
   ‘Your strategy XXX, which has some chance of succeeding in our shared goals, pales in comparison to my strategy ??? which is virtually guaranteed to succeed.’ seems to be about the weakest form of criticism imaginable, right below ‘your worldview gives me the ick and you have lots of money’.

2. For a rather loose definition of ‘could’; market cap / population of Scotland times USD-GBP exchange rate: \[4,090,700,000,000 / 5,490,000 * (1 / 1.29) = 577,611\].