The Schmotte-and-Bailey Fallacy

Sometimes the easily defended view is the one you really want

The most striking thing about effective altruism, dialectically, is that it’s a neglected truism:

Moral truisms may still be widely ignored. The moral truism underlying Effective Altruism is that we have strong reasons to do more good, and it’s worth adopting the efficient promotion of the impartial good as one among one’s many life projects.

Most people do not, in fact, adopt the efficient promotion of the impartial good as even one among their many life projects. That’s a shame! I think more people should try this, and I take encouraging this change to be a constitutive aim of the EA movement (along with helping those attempting this project to pursue it more effectively).

Those who don’t like this idea generally don’t reject it explicitly. Nobody says, “As one of the wealthiest people in history, I would really much prefer to keep over 90% of my income for personal consumption, get moral kudos for purely symbolic acts, and not have to think at all about the interests of emotionally unappealing moral patients like shrimp or distant future generations.” But nor will they endorse the moderate EA ask. Perhaps the only option left is to change the subject.

One way to do that is to set aside the EA truism (what I call beneficentrism) and engage with a more extreme—and hence reasonably disputable—alternative view instead. This is, as Bentham’s Bulldog explains, a common way to shut off your brain. The familiar reasoning goes something like, “All your talk of reasons of beneficence vaguely reminds me of utilitarianism, so let me ignore everything you said and instead start talking about why I don’t like utilitarianism!” A+ rhetorical move.

After my most recent attempt to correct this mistake on Twitter/X, I got a couple of responses accusing me (or EA more generally) of a motte-and-bailey: dishonestly retreating from the “real” view—one that allegedly “entails the disintegration of America”¹—to a more defensible but trivial view when pressed.

This is, I think, the exact opposite of what’s going on. EAs typically want to discuss, and get people on board with, moderate beneficentrism. That’s the ask — not anything like full-blown utilitarianism. (As I flag in the footnote, we’re only asking for a small portion of your “subagents” to be guided by impartial beneficence.) Critics avoid engaging with the ask by imaginatively inflating it into a more radical and disputable view to attack instead. It’s a schmotte-and-bailey fallacy: you take your interlocutor’s long-advocated view, pretend it is an uninteresting “motte”, and replace it with a straw “bailey” of your own invention.

In a motte-and-bailey, recall, the motte is supposed to be “dark and dank… the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats [only] when hard pressed.” I don’t think that’s an accurate description of EA attitudes towards beneficentrism. If more folks endorsed (and acted upon) beneficentrism, I’d be satisfied! Further, if you look at actual EA recommendations, it’s pretty clear that they don’t require anything like hegemonic impartiality governing your every life decision: preferring effective charities over less effective ones does not prevent you from caring for your kids or doing jury duty. So these seem like two good tests of whether the “motte-and-bailey” charge is really warranted: (1) Is the proponent satisfied if you join them in the motte? and (2) Do they need the bailey you’re attributing to them in order to meet the commitments of their view?

Now as it happens, I also like utilitarianism, so I’m happy to defend it against objections when that’s the topic of conversation. (For example, it’s worth noting that while utilitarianism is an impartial theory, even it does not recommend that we neglect our families or otherwise attempt to be impartial at all times, if that wouldn’t actually lead to better outcomes.) But for practical purposes, I don’t think it matters much whether utilitarianism or some more moderate alternative is ultimately correct. The important thing is that—on any reasonable moral view—we should want to see more rather than fewer efforts to effectively promote the impartial good on current margins. That’s the debate I care about, practically speaking. I think it’s important, so if people think they have good reasons to disagree with the moderate EA view then I want to hear them. “Boo utilitarianism” does not suffice.

1. Serious stuff! They characterize EA as holding that “every sentient being, across every place and time, holds the same moral claim on every other.” But not even utilitarian impartiality implies anything so extreme. For one thing, equal consideration doesn’t entail identical treatment: different beings may have different interests, hence different “moral claims” (very important when making tradeoffs between human and non-human animal lives). And one may plausibly hold that “the disintegration of America” would not, in fact, best promote overall well-being, so utilitarianism could not actually recommend anything that had this consequence. But the more basic problem is that EA is perfectly compatible with favoring “nation, family, religion, tradition” or whatever else you like in the overwhelming majority of your life. Inflating it to govern every life decision is a hallucination. The key point: EA is only asking for a modest subset of your “subagents”—far from all of them—to be guided by impartial beneficence.