Trade-off Denialism

When, exactly, should we prioritize the arts over saving lives?

One of the things I find most annoying is when people—especially those who should know better—refuse to acknowledge or grapple with the reality of tradeoffs. (Silas has a neat post on this, and why this psychological tendency may lead some people to feel hostile towards Effective Altruism.)

In her Washington Post review of David Edmonds’ excellent book Death in a Shallow Pond, Becca Rothfeld writes:

If Edmonds grasps the letter of the impassioned distaste for EA, he is baffled by its spirit. He confesses that he is puzzled as to why “effective altruists arouse such ire and scorn” and determines that “the animosity is psychological. Approaching the intractable problem of extreme poverty with spreadsheets makes effective altruists seem like extraterrestrials.” But this is not merely a bias to be overcome, as Edmonds seems to suggest; it is a sentiment that reflects a more principled aversion.

For one thing, there are many goods to which utilitarians in general — and effective altruists in particular — seem oblivious, perhaps because they have gone to such lengths to “live the life of the universe,” in Santayana’s memorable phrasing. They never seem to have much patience for the impractical delights that arguably redeem the whole human enterprise. No one is dying of not reading Proust, but many people are leading hollower and shallower lives because the arts are so inaccessible. Should we merely try to save as many lives as possible, or should we also try to enrich those lives?

(Of course, many EA charities also seek to “enrich lives”, e.g. by directly giving the global poor money to pursue whatever they most value. Rothfeld evidently has a more perfectionist notion of “enrichment” in mind, where she gets to tell other people that their lives are too “shallow” and “hollow” to be worth saving until they’ve read her favorite books. But putting that objection aside…)

Rothfeld’s rhetorical question is conveniently ambiguous about whether “also try[ing] to enrich those lives” would come at any cost to saving lives. “Merely… or also” makes it sound like the extra bonus comes along for free, in which case who would ever turn it down? But of course that isn’t the reality. Resources are limited.

“No soup for you, ‘till the book redeems us!”

If Rothfeld wants to redirect funds away from the Against Malaria Foundation (which currently saves children’s lives for ~$5000 each) and towards the arts, she should explicitly own up to the fact that she endorses abandoning more children to die. To be clear: I do too, in some circumstances! For example, while I have donated to both, I now think it’s even more important to invest in systemic x-risk reduction efforts than in individual life-saving efforts. (Rothfeld apparently views this as “outlandish” and “corrupt”, though no supporting reasons are given—she may be relying on her readers sharing her vibe bias.) But I’ve literally never seen a critic of Effective Altruism truthfully own up to the very obvious costs of what they are advocating, nor explain how their preferred priorities could plausibly be more important than saving lives.

In The Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism, I explored how an Effective Aesthetics (EÆ) movement would look different from EA, and what might be appealing (and not) about this alternative approach. But Rothfeld doesn’t suggest any such systematic alternative. One gets the sense that she wouldn’t consider EÆ to be a huge improvement over EA, since it still prevents one from indulging in pure vibes.¹

I can respect people who optimize differently, even if I think their values are ultimately misguided. The vibe ethicists, by contrast, are so lacking in substance that they’re not even wrong. There’s just… nothing there.

1. She continues:

There is another argument, though, for regarding effective altruists as extraterrestrials. Utilitarian or not, EA requires us to adopt the third-person perspective when the first-person perspective is the one from which morality is intelligible and meaningful in the first place. As the philosopher Bernard Williams wrote, “Each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do.” To view our own moral feelings as “happenings outside one’s moral self,” as the EA framework demands, is “to lose a sense of one’s moral identity.”

In other words: ethics should be a form of self-indulgence, and this is threatened by frameworks like EA that instead make it about helping others.

I’m reminded of the critics who objected that Animal Charity Evaluators is too focused on helping animals, and objectionably view animal charities as instrumental to that end, instead of appreciating that the proper purpose of animal charities is to make their employees feel seen.