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Stop the Robot Apocalypse Amia Srinivasan View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UCL Discovery Stop the Robot Apocalypse Amia Srinivasan Doing Good Better: Effective AltruiSm and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference by William MacAskill. Guardian Faber, 325 pp., £14.99, August, 978 1 78335 049 0 hilosophy, Wittgenstein said, lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students ‘leaves everything as it is’. It sounds MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord commit­ Plike a complaint, but actually it was a ted themselves to donate most of their fut­ recommendation. Philosophy at its best, ure earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case Wittgenstein thought, resists the scientific anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), impulse to treat the world as a theoretical and set themselves the task of figuring out construct. It is not a view shared in the how to make best use of the money they main by contemporary philosophers. What had pledged. The result was Giving What is philosophy supposed to do if not theor­ We Can, a charity that encourages people ise? At the same time most philosophers to hand over at least 10 per cent of their are happy to leave everything as it is in a future incomes for philanthropic purposes, more prosaic sense: that is, by not really and advises them on how to get the most changing anything. Philosophers may talk out of their money. Since the charity was about justice or rights, but they don’t often founded in 2009 it has received more than try to reshape the world according to their $400 million in pledges, much of it from ideals. Maybe that’s for the best. Philo­ young philosophers. In 2011, MacAskill set sophers have a tendency to slip from sense up 80,000 Hours (the name refers to the into seeming absurdity: a defence of abort­ number of hours the average person works ion ends up defending infanticide; an argu­ over a lifetime), a charity that helps people ment for vegetarianism turns into a call make career choices with the aim of maxi­ for the extermination of wild carnivores. mising social benefit; it raised eyebrows A new generation of moral philosophers early on by advising graduates to become is determined to break with this tradition philanthropic bankers rather than NGO of ineffectuality. The goal of the ‘effective workers. The two organisations are incorp­ altruists’ is not only to theorise the world, orated as the Centre for Effective Altruism, but to use their theories to leave the world based in Oxford, and are in the van of a a better place than they found it. Their global movement, encompassing groups leader is William MacAskill, a 28­year­old such as GiveWell (founded by two hedge­ 1 16 September 2015 fund managers at around the same time as who don’t need dialysis. Maybe this is be­ MacAskill and Ord started their work), The cause dialysis isn’t as bad as we think. Or Life You Can Save (founded by the philoso­ maybe it’s because dialysis is so awful that pher Peter Singer), Good Ventures (found­ you forget just how much better your life ed by the Facebook cofounder Dustin Mos k­ was without it.) To calculate whether, given ovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who have the choice, it would be better to cure the pledged to give away most of their money), blind person or improve the life of the Aids Animal Charity Evaluators (an 80,000 Hours patient, you must take into account the in­ spin­off ) and the Open Philanthropy Pro­ crease in both life quality and life expectancy ject (a collaboration between GiveWell and that would be caused by the intervention. Good Ventures). Giving a 40­year­old Aids patient antiretro­ In Doing Good Better, MacAskill sets out virals would give her a 40 per cent jump in the thinking behind effective altruism. His life quality (from 50 per cent to 90 per cent) main claim, familiar from the utilitarian trad­ for five years, and also would give her an ad­ ition out of which the movement emerges, ditional five years of life at 90 per cent, for is that we should seek not only to do good, a total of 6.5 Qalys ((0.4 x 5) + (0.9 x 5) = but to do the most good we can. To do that 6.5). Curing a blind 20­year­old, assuming we need empirical research – research his he lives to be 70, would increase his quality organisations provide – into the amount of of life from 40 per cent to 100 per cent for good created by various different charities, 50 years, for a total of 30 Qalys. So curing types of consumption, careers and so on. the blind person is more valuable, in terms MacAskill proposes that ‘good’, here, can be of Qalys, than giving drugs to the Aids pat­ understood roughly in terms of quality­ ient. Thinking in terms of Qalys makes it adjusted life­years (Qalys), a unit that allows possible to compare that which seemingly welfare economists to compare benefits of cannot be compared: blindness with Aids; very different sorts. One Qaly is a single increases in life expectancy with increases year of life lived at 100 per cent health. Ac­ in life quality. Qalys free us from the spec­ cording to a standardised scale, a year as an ificity of people’s lives, giving us a universal Aids patient not on antiretrovirals is worth currency for misery. 0.5 Qalys; a year with Aids lived on anti­ However, when deciding what to do – retrovirals is worth 0.9 Qalys. A year of life what job to get, which charity to donate to, for a blind person is worth 0.4 Qalys; a year whether to buy Fairtrade or not – it isn’t of life as a non­blind, otherwise healthy enough, according to MacAskill, to think in person is worth 1 Qaly. (These numbers are terms of Qalys. We must also think both based on self­reporting by Aids patients and marginally and counterfactually. The idea blind people, which raises some obvious that value should be measured on the worries. For example, dialysis patients rate margin is familiar from economics; it’s what their lives at 0.56 Qalys – significantly high­ explains the fact that, say, heating repair­ er than the 0.39 Qalys predicted by people men make more money than childcare work­ 2 16 September 2015 ers. Presumably childcare workers produce doctor in the developing world you’d save more total value than heating repairmen, the equivalent of 300 lives (or 10,950 Qalys, but because the supply of childcare work­ at an average 36.5 Qalys per life) over a 40­ ers is greater than the supply of good repair­ year career. Yet if you didn’t take that job, men, we will pay more for an additional re­ someone else probably would; they may pairman than an additional childcare work­ not save quite as many lives as you, but they er. The average value of a childcare worker would save most of them. Meanwhile you might be higher than the average value of could quit medicine, take a high­paying a repairman, but the repairman has the finance job and donate most of your salary greater marginal value. (Another way of put­ each year to the most effective charities. ting this: coffee might be really important MacAskill estimates that you can expect to to you, but if you’ve already had three cups save a life with $3400 by donating to the you’re probably not going to care as much Against Malaria Foundation, which pro­ about a fourth.) Similarly, MacAskill reas­ vides insecticide­coated bed nets to poor ons, when giving money to charity or de­ families. A financier who worked for 40 years, ciding, say, whether to become a doctor, donating $50,000 a year to the Against we should focus on marginal rather than Malaria Foundation, could expect to save average value. The average doctor in the de­ around 580 lives – lives, significantly, that veloped world helps save a lot of lives, but would not have been saved otherwise. Qaly the marginal doctor – because the supply of thinking frees us from considering the doctors is large, and most of the life­saving specificity of whom we are helping; marg­ work is already covered – doesn’t. The marg­ inal and counterfactual thinking frees us inal doctor in the developing world has from the specificity of ourselves. What greater value, since the supply of doctors is matters isn’t who does the good, only that lower there. MacAskill estimates that a good is done. doctor practising in a very poor country But don’t many lucrative careers have adds about a hundred times as much marg­ bad social effects? Up until recently Mac­ inal value (measured in Qalys) as a doctor Askill argued that such effects were moral­ practising in the UK. (In general, MacAskill ly irrelevant, again by counterfactual reas­ says, a pound spent in a poor country can oning: if you didn’t take the banking job do one hundred times more good than it someone else would, so the harm would be can in a rich one, a heuristic he calls the done anyway. (In an academic paper pub­ ‘100x Multiplier’.) lished last year, he compares a philanthrop­ But before signing up for a medical ic banker to Oskar Schindler, who provided career in sub­Saharan Africa you should be munitions to the Nazis as a means of saving careful, MacAskill warns, to evaluate the the lives of 1200 Jews; if Schindler hadn’t counterfactual.
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