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Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism

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Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism Michael Plant St Cross College University of Oxford August 2019 Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Word count: 68,425 1 Abstract Suppose you want to do as much good as possible. What should you do? According to members of the effective altruism movement—which has produced much of the thinking on this issue and counts several moral philosophers as its key protagonists—we should prioritise among the world’s problems by assessing their scale, solvability, and neglectedness. Once we’ve done this, the three top priorities, not necessarily in this order, are (1) aiding the world’s poorest people by providing life-saving medical treatments or alleviating poverty itself, (2) preventing global catastrophic risks, such as those posed by nuclear war or rogue artificial intelligence, and (3) ending factory farming. These claims are both plausible and striking. If correct, they should prompt a stark revision of how we approach our altruistic activities. However, the project of determining how to do the most good—as opposed to say, whether we should do the most good—has only recently, within the last ten years, become the subject of serious academic attention. Many key claims have not yet been carefully scrutinised. This is a cause for concern: are effective altruists doing good badly? In this thesis, I critique and develop some of the latest claims about how individuals can do the most good. I do this in three areas: the value of saving lives (preventing premature deaths), how best to improve lives (making people happier during their lives), and cause prioritisation methodology (frameworks for determining which problems are the highest priorities). In each case, I raise novel theoretical considerations that, when incorporated, change the analysis. Roughly speaking, my main conclusions are (1) saving lives is not as straightforwardly good we tend to suppose, may not be good at all, and is not clearly a priority; (2) happiness can be measured through self-reports and, based on the self-reported evidence, treating mental health stands out as an overlooked problem that may be an even more cost-effective way to improve lives than alleviating poverty; (3) the cause prioritisation methodology proposed by effective altruists needs to be moderately reconceptualised and, when it is, it turns out it is not as illuminating a tool as we might have thought and hoped. 2 Acknowledgements Although none of the following people were kind enough to write the thesis for me, I am nevertheless hugely grateful to them for their help in helping me to write it. This thesis was primarily supervised by Hilary Greaves and Peter Singer and, for two periods when Hilary was on maternity leave, Frank Arzentius and William MacAskill. They have all contributed enormously to improving my work and thinking. It has been an honour to learn from them. I particularly want to thank Hilary for her determined (although usually in vain) attempts to improve the rigour of my work and Peter for supervising me even though, not being part of the Oxford Philosophy Department, he only had a moral, and not an institutional, obligation to do so. For their comments on or help with various aspects of this work, I thank: Simon Beard, Joe Bowen, Tom Douglas, Tommy Francis, Paul Frijters, John Gustafsson, Alex Heape, Michelle Hutchinson, William James, Guy Kahane, Caspar Kaiser, Todd Karhu, James Kirkpatrick, Christian Krekel, Kacper Kowalcyzk, Richard Layard, Jeff McMahan, Michael Masny, Andreas Mogensen, Aidan Penn, Theron Pummer, Gary O’Brien, Karl Overdick, William Rooney, Korbinian Ruger, Julian Savulescu, Rhys Southan, members of the Effective Altruism community too numerous to name, and those I have carelessly forgotten but do not deserve to be forgotten. I am thankful to the audiences of the Applied Ethics Graduate Discussion Group, the Cumberland Lodge Colloquium on Population Ethics, Effective Altruism Global (and other, similar events), the Ockham Society, the International Society of Utilitarian Studies, the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying, and those who mistakenly wandered into my lecture series Philosophical Issues Related to Maximising Happiness in Michaelmas term 2018, which previewed much of what follows. I thank my parents, William and Penny, and brother, Edward, for their love and support. It has made my questionable choice of career possible. For many years, my parents, rightly concerned about my employment prospects, would ask, “Michael, what are you going to do with a degree in philosophy?” After nearly three philosophy degrees, I still do not have a good answer to that question (or any other, for that matter). I thank my friends, whose refusal to take either me or my research seriously 3 has kept me going. I thank my girlfriend, Hayley Capp, for her encouragement throughout; I can only apologise for the number of times I have insisted on talking at her when I was stuck on a problem. Finally, I would like to thank Patrick Kaczmarek, who read and then discussed nearly every part of this thesis with me, typically over a pint and often in The Rusty Bicycle. All remaining errors are his. 4 Table of contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... 3 Table of contents ......................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 7 Chapter 1: The Meat Eater Problem ........................................................................ 17 0. Abstract .............................................................................................................. 17 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 17 2. If the Weak Carnism Thesis is true, how plausible is the Strong Carnist Thesis? ................................................................................................................... 22 3. Is NRAGE the problem? ................................................................................... 35 4. Can we save the Principle of Easy Rescue? .....................................................40 5. Further implications ......................................................................................... 41 6. Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 42 Chapter 2: Saving lives, averting lives, and population size ................................. 43 0. Abstract .............................................................................................................. 43 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 44 2. Factors affecting the overall value of life......................................................... 48 3. Relating optimum population to saving and averting lives ........................... 50 4. Examining the Intuitive View .......................................................................... 57 5. Five ways to increase the value of saving/averting lives, given the Intuitive View ........................................................................................................................ 64 6. PAV and the Intuitive View .............................................................................. 71 7. Optimum population and population ethics ................................................... 75 8. Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 3: Are you sure saving lives is the most good you can do?...................... 85 0. Abstract .............................................................................................................. 85 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 85 2. Totalist Deprivationism (TD) ........................................................................... 89 3. Person-affecting deprivationism ..................................................................... 92 4. The Person-Affecting Time-Relative Interest Account (PATRIA) ................ 99 5. Person-Affecting Epicureanism ..................................................................... 104 6. Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 106 5 Chapter 4: Happiness for moral philosophers ..................................................... 107 0. Abstract ............................................................................................................ 107 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 107 2. Happiness, subjective well-being, and measurement ................................... 114 3. Measuring happiness ....................................................................................... 119 4. Comparing happiness ..................................................................................... 135 5. Increasing happiness ......................................................................................
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