Effective Altruism’s Freedom Problem
On their site, Effective Altruism is defined as follows.
Our resources are limited, so we have to use them wisely. Effective altruism is the project of:
1. Using evidence and reason to find the most promising causes to work on.
2. Taking action, by using our time and money to do the most good we can.
In theory, I think this is wonderful, and generally how humans should behave. However, in practice, rule (2) generally becomes interpreted as “be as efficient as possible in order to do the most good we can.”
The issue is that helping people to be self-sufficient is not efficient.
People who donate money to causes supported by Effective Altruism oftentimes make arguments along the lines of “by donating to charities supported by Effective Altruism, I get the most bang for my buck — my money will do more to help people and do good in the world because they take the time and effort to do the research to find out what helps people the most.”
But there’s a key issue with this. If that second rule is interpreted as being efficient, rather than doing the most good, then I worry that Effective Altruism in practice runs the risk of falling into a pattern similar to a White Savior complex. Let me explain.
You’ve probably heard the expression “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Now, if you want to be the most efficient with your money, what do you do? Do you hire the most efficient fishing company in the world that can harvest more fish in an hour (at a very cheap price) than the man would be able to fish in his entire lifetime (even if you paid him the same amount)? Or do you waste time and money trying to teach this man how to fish? He’s going to mess it up the first few hundred times, and he certainly doesn’t have access to the infrastructure or economies of scale that the fishing company does.
So, if you were to judge where to put your money, is it on the long-term community-building solution of teaching the man how to fish so that he can teach his fellow villagers to fish and they can become self-sustaining? Or is it on paying a small amount of money to the fishing company so that they can feed him and his entire village for multiple generations?
Obviously, the fishing company is going to give you the most “bang for your buck”.
But the issue with this solution is that it makes the people in the village start relying on the fishing company. The villagers are not independent — they have lost some of their freedom. (While I have not read much of his work myself, I have a strong hunch that you can learn more about this idea from Amartya Sen’s writing, especially Development as Freedom.)
I believe that solutions like this eventually lead to people whose culture, heritage, and especially power are lost among generations of reliance. The pressure to adapt and assimilate is strong when you are relying on another culture to provide for you.
Giving to charities which swoop in and provide a solution to people who have minimal control of and no ability to reproduce the solution actually lessens those people’s freedom. The solution may provide resources which enable people to have more freedom in other aspects of their life. But, to the extent that the people are reliant on the charity to enjoy those freedoms, their autonomy is lessened.
So, when evaluating where to put your money to help the world, please don’t just give it to people who are focused on “doing the most good”. Give it to people who are focused on enabling others to do the most good.
Now, this piece has been fairly straightforward because persuasive writing needs to be clear and to the point, but there’s a lot of points that I don’t really address. Below is a list of some of the unaddressed questions, along with my quick thoughts as they currently stand.
- Does reliance on another culture really lead to a loss of one’s own culture? I believe that this is the case. If not, at the very least, I believe it causes one’s culture to adapt to please the culture that one is relying on.
- Is the loss of a culture actually a bad thing? Some people ascribe inherent value to a cultures and their practices. I tend not to. I ascribe value to history and knowledge of those cultures and practices and why and how they were eradicated, because I think that knowing the history helps inform future decisions. But I think that the actual practices of cultures can be judged on their own merits. Sometimes it’s a tragedy when a culture ceases to exist, and other times a culture can be so harmful that stopping the practices of that culture may be a positive event. Note: much of my thinking on this topic was informed by reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
- Do the problems caused by relying on other groups really outweigh the benefits of what is provided by the other groups? This is really situationally dependent. While above I make it sound like you should never lower someone’s autonomy, I think that sometimes continued existence or feeling better is more important than autonomy (depending on the culture), and that that should be taken into account. Also, as mentioned earlier, it may be that the loss of autonomy opens up new forms of autonomy that far outweigh that loss. As a classic example, a town may rely on a water well that was built by an external charity, but having the water well saves time and opens up new forms of freedom, so it’s worth it, even though they are unable to fix the water well if were to break.
- Does Effective Altruism really not take this into account? I don’t see the issue I’m concerned about addressed directly by Effective Altruism, but it seems like Effective Altruism is more focused on making sure that people don’t give money to charities that are just bad at their job. In this respect, I actually support Effective Altruism because I do think it is important to look at efficiency. If you have an option between a charity that uses expensive suppliers and pays its workers far more than what is reasonable versus a charity that did research to ensure that its suppliers are the most efficient (while remaining humane) and relies on volunteers so that more money can go towards the actual cause, I’d probably suggest donating to the latter.
- In practice, does donating to charities that give you “more bang for your buck” really mean that you’re giving to charities that reduce autonomy? I think most charities reduce autonomy by definition. A charity is a group of people deciding to give products and services to another group, and charity rarely, if ever, occurs if the group that’s receiving the products and services could have just made or provided them themselves. Almost always, the receiving group relies on the giving group for those products and services. And then the main part of my piece applies; the receiving group will be losing autonomy, and that loss of autonomy may have negative consequences. However, as touched on in the bulleted point above this, I think that decisions are usually made between two charities that both reduce freedom; one of them just does their job worse than the other. And in those cases, I think that trying to get “more bang for your buck” is the right call.
- Is your issue really with Effective Altruism, or is it more with impact-based charity funds? It’s more with impact-based charity funds. Effective Altruism is just an easy target for the piece because they’re big and well-known among high-paying investors, and their site also had some useful definitions that I could build my argument off of.
As always, I hope to improve my thinking by hearing thoughts on this topic from my readers. Please leave a comment down below if you have any thoughts on this piece or related ideas. I want to hear from you.
