By John Halstead, Stefan Schubert, Joseph Millum, Mark Engelbert, Hayden Wilkinson, and James Snowden. Cross-posted from the Centre for Effective Altruism blog. A direct link to the article can be found here.
Abstract
In this paper, we discuss Iason Gabriel’s recent piece on criticisms of effective altruism. Many of the criticisms rest on the notion that effective altruism can roughly be equated with utilitarianism applied to global poverty and health interventions which are supported by randomised control trials and disability-adjusted life year estimates. We reject this characterisation and argue that effective altruism is much broader from the point of view of ethics, cause areas, and methodology. We then enter into a detailed discussion of the specific criticisms Gabriel discusses. Our argumentation mirrors Gabriel’s, dealing with the objections that the effective altruist community neglects considerations of justice, uses a flawed methodology, and is less effective than its proponents suggest. Several of the criticisms do not succeed, but we also concede that others involve issues which require significant further study. Our conclusion is thus twofold: the critique is weaker than suggested, but it is useful insofar as it initiates a philosophical discussion about effective altruism and highlights the importance of more research on how to do the most good.
Thanks for this. I have two comments. Firstly, I'm not sure he's making a point about justice and equality in the 'quantification bias' section. If his criticism of DALYs works, then it works on straightforward consequentialist grounds - DALYs are the wrong metric of welfare. (On this, see our footnote 41.)
Secondly, the claim about iteration effects is neither necessary nor sufficient to get to his conclusion. If the DALY metric inappropriately ignores hope, then it doesn't really matter whether a decision about healthcare resource distribution on the basis of DALYs is made once or is iterated. Either way, DALYs would ignore an important component of welfare.
Put this way I change my mind and agree it is unclear. However, to make your paper stronger, I would have included something akin to what you just wrote in the paper to make it clear why you think Gabriel's use of "iteration effects" is unclear and not the same as his usage in the 'priority' section.
I'm not sure how important clarifying something like this is for philosophical argumentation, but for me, this was the one nagging kink in what is otherwise fast becoming one of my favourite "EA-defense" papers.