I have this idea which I haven't fully fleshed out yet, but I'm looking to get some feedback. To simplify this, I'll embody the idea in a single, hypothetical Effective Altruist called Alex. I'll assume silly things like no inflation for simplicity. I also use 'lives saved' as a proxy for 'good done'; although this is grossly oversimplified it doesn't affect the argument.
Alex is earning to give, and estimates that they will be able to give $1 million over their lifetime. They have thought a lot about existential risk, and agree that reducing existential risk would be a good thing, and also agree that the problem is at least partially tractable. Alex also accepts things like the notion that future lives are equally as valuable as lives today. However, Alex is somewhat risk averse.
After careful modelling, Alex estimates that they could save a life for $4,000, and thus could save 250 lives over their own lifetime. Alex also thinks that their $1 million might slightly reduce the risk of some catastrophic event, but it probably won't. On expected value terms, they estimate that donating to an X-risk organisation is about ten times as good as donating to a poverty charity (they estimate 'saving' 2,500 lives on average).
However, all things considered, Alex still decides to donate to the poverty organisation, because they are risk averse, and the chances of them making a difference by donating to the X-risk organisation are very low indeed.
This seems to embody the attitude of many EAs I know. However, the question I'd like to pose is: is this selfish?
It seems like some kind of moral narcissism to say that one would prefer to increase their chances of their personal actions making a difference at the expense of overall wellbeing in expectation. If a world where everyone gave to X-risk meant a meaningful reduction in the probability of a catastrophe, shouldn't we all be working towards that instead of trying to maximise the chances that our personal dollars make a difference?
As I said, I'm still thinking this through, and don't mean to imply that anyone donating to a poverty charity instead of an X-risk organisation is selfish. I'm very keen on criticism and feedback here.
Things that would imply I'm wrong include existential risk reduction not being tractable or not being good, some argument for risk aversion that I'm overlooking, an argument for discounting future life, or something that doesn't assume a hardline classical hedonistic utilitarian take on ethics (or anything else I've overlooked).
For what it's worth, my donations to date have been overwhelmingly to poverty charities, so to date at least, I am Alex.
In normative decision theory, risk aversion means a very specific thing. It means using a different aggregating function from expected utility maximisation to combine the value of disjunctive states.
Rather than multiplying the realised utility in each state by the probability of that state occurring, these models apply a non-linear weighting to each of the states which depends on the global properties of the lottery, not just what happens in that state.
Most philosophers and economists agree risk aversion over utilities is irrational because it violates the independence axiom / sure-thing principle which is one of the foundations of objective / subjective expected utility theory.
One way a person could rationally have seemingly risk averse preferences is by placing a higher value on the first bit of good they do than on the second bit of good they do, perhaps because doing some good makes you feel better. This would technically be selfish.
But I'm pretty sure this isn't what most people who justify donating to global poverty out of risk aversion actually mean. They generally mean something like "we should place a lot of weight on evidence because we aren't actually very good at abstract reasoning". This would mean their subjective probability that an x-risk intervention is effective is very low. So it's not technically risk aversion. It's just having a different subjective probability. This may be an epistemic failure. But there's nothing selfish about it.
I wrote a paper on this a while back in the context of risk aversion justifying donating to multiple charities. This is a shameless plug. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CHAjFzTRJZ054KanYj5thWuYPdp8b3WJJb8Z4fIaaR0/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
I just want to push back against your statement that "economists believe that risk aversion is irrational". In development economics in particular, risk aversion is often seen as a perfectly rational approach to life, especially in cases where the risk is irreversible.
To explain this, I just want to quickly point out that, from an economic standpoint, there's no correct formal way of measuring risk aversion among utils. Utility is an ordinal, not cardinal, measure. Risk aversion is something that is applied to real measures, like crop yields, in... (read more)