Unit 6: Choosing, and what you can do
6.3 Doing good without losing your head
3 minutes
Much of this course has been about doing more good: choosing the more effective option, taking large numbers seriously. That raises a fair worry. Taken too far, "do the most good" can justify almost anything.
Holden Karnofsky made this point from inside effective altruism in September 2022. Maximising something means putting everything else aside for it, he argued. That is especially risky when the thing being maximised, "the good", is vague and contested. He listed the dangers: people convincing themselves that dishonesty is justified, communities splitting into camps with incompatible goals, and social pressure towards extreme self-sacrifice.
His recommendation was moderation and pluralism: hold several moral views at once, respect common-sense ethics, and be suspicious of reasoning that ends somewhere most decent people would refuse to go.
Two months later, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been the most prominent donor associated with effective altruism. He was convicted of fraud in 2023. Many in the community, and many outside it, saw this as the danger Karnofsky described. Week 1 of the EA Fellowship discusses what effective altruism has learned from it.
Julia Wise offers a more everyday version of the same idea.
When you make a decision, be clear with yourself about which goals you’re pursuing. You don’t have to argue that your choice is the best way of improving the world if that isn’t actually the goal. It’s fine to support your local arts organization because their work gives you joy, because you want to be active in your community, or because they helped you and you want to reciprocate. If you also have a goal of improving the world as much as you can, decide how much time and money you want to allocate to that goal, and try to use those resources as effectively as you can.
She describes keeping separate "pots" for different goals. One pot is for doing as much good as she can, and gets the full scrutiny of cost-effectiveness. Others are for family, friends, community and her own life, and don't need to. Sponsoring a friend's charity run comes out of a different pot from her effective giving, and that's fine. The point is to be clear with yourself about which goal each choice serves.
You can take doing good seriously without making it your only goal.
- Julia Wise, You have more than one goal, and that's fine (6 min; EA Handbook chapter 8).
- Holden Karnofsky, EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous (2022).
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