Last issue, if you recall, we talked about a thought problem that philosopher Peter Singer likes to ask people.
The basic gist of it is: if we’re willing to jump into a muddy puddle to save a child, perhaps ruining out fancy $100 shoes in the process, why aren’t we willing to spend $100 to help feed a poor child elsewhere in the world? We don’t even have to get muddy doing it.
The underlying idea behind this is a concept called altruism.
Altruism is basically being concerned for the welfare of others and acting to benefit others with no expectation or reward or reciprocity. Indeed, sometimes acting for the benefit of others might put one in harm’s way.
While the concept of altruism is at the root of many religious beliefs, it is not a religious idea. Indeed, many popular altruistic social groups (like Tumbler Ridge’s own Lions Club) are areligious. The motto of the Lions Club is “We Serve”, and the organization is “non-sectarian, non-political, and non-denominational organization.”
While Lions Clubs encourage community service, they do not promote or endorse any specific religion or religious practices.
More than a religious imperative, then altruism seems to be something fundamental to the human make-up.
In 2011, the idea of altruism morphed into the idea of “effective altruism.”
Advocates of effective altruism impartially calculate benefits and prioritize causes to provide the greatest good. “Empathy with evidence,” as one person has put it.
In our previous example, we talked about donating money to feed hungry children.
But if we look at a chart of the leading causes of death in low-income countries (there’s one on the World Health Organization’s website), starvation doesn’t place amongst the top ten.
But Malaria? Malaria is the fourth leading cause of death. And while Chloroquine—the most common anti-malarial drug—only costs ten cents US to administer, there is no immunity offered to the disease after getting it.
So, while it might seem to be “effective” to provide funding for people to receive Chloroquine, an Effective Altruist will look at the broader issues and say “it would be more cost effective to prevent people from getting the disease than in treating it.
And so, instead of spending $0.10 on drugs, an Effective Altruist might spend $10 on mosquito netting treated with repellent. While the initial cost is higher, the overall cost, when you look at the entire life of the person, is actually lower.
According to the website givewell.com, one of the foundational sites for the movement, the cost effectiveness of giving medication is $4500 per life saved, but the cost effectiveness of mosquito netting is $5500.
Which is all well and good. But as you keep going down this path, things start to shift.
Let’s say you’re a young person, about to embark on your career.
You want to do good, and were thinking about becoming a doctor.
Then you stumble across the Effective Altruism website 80,000 Hours, which is a career guide for effective altruists, and you read this: “when we started 80,000 Hours—with the aim of helping people do good with their careers—one of the first questions we asked was, “How much difference can one person really make?”
“We learned,” the website goes on, “that while many common ways to do good (such as becoming a doctor) have less impact than you might first think, others have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact.”
According to their research, that after about 150 doctors per 100,000 people, the impact on people’s lives (measured in Disability-Adjusted Life Years, or DALYs, which measures how many years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death) is basically nil. In Canada, there are about 243 physicians per 100,000 people.
“So if you become a doctor in a rich country…you may well do more good than you would in many other jobs, and if you are an exceptional doctor, then you’ll have a bigger impact than these averages. But it probably won’t be a huge impact,” says the website.
But, says the website, you can make a bigger difference by finding the most lucrative job you can find, and donating 10 percent of what you earn to effective organizations (like the mosquito netting group, earlier).
So, instead of being a doctor, become a bitcoin bro, make gobs of money, and donate to causes? In a nutshell.
But wait, he says, there’s more! While we’ve crested the eight billion mark in population, over the next 100 years, that population will be replaced. And again in the next 100 years and so on and so on. Maybe the most effective use of our donations is not to save one child in Africa today, but to save billions in the future.
How do we do that? By finding solutions to existential threats, like our killer AI overlord (no joke; this is the number on threat listed at 80,000 hours); from engineered pandemics and out of control conflicts that could spark a nuclear war.
So instead of helping the kid in a low-income country with food or medicine or even mosquito netting, many Effective Altruists are donating to conferences on how to keep AI from taking over the world. Sure, the chances of success are small, but the impact, if achieved, would be enormous.
Never mind that those kids are still dying of malaria, we are saving the future. Because what’s a few million dead now if we save trillions in the future? Which brings us back to the neighbour question, and if it’s okay to ignore the ones living here and now in favour of all the people who might be living in the future? Because if we ignore the people around us now, it seems our altruism has become ineffective.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
