Gianfranco Pellegrino has written an interesting essay arguing that effective altruism leads to what he calls the Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion. In this post, I will provide a brief version of his argument and then note one possible response.
The Argument
Pellegrino beings by identifying the following as the core tenet of effective altruism:
"Effective Altruist Maximization (AM): We ought to do the most good we can, maximizing the impact of donating to charities on the margin and counterfactually —which means that among the available charities, the one that is most effective on the margin should be chosen" (2).
He next argues that this core tenet can best be articulated as the following principle:
"Doing the most good amounts to bringing about the greatest benefit to the greatest number" with "gains in diffusion compensat[ing] for losses in size, and vice versa" (7, 9).
He then poses a hypothetical in which an altruist is offered a choice.* The altruist can:
"[1] provide consistent, full nutrition and health care to 100 people, such . . . that instead of growing up malnourished they spend their 40-years long lives relatively healthy; [or]
[2] prevent[] one case of relatively mild non-fatal malaria [say, a fever that lasts a few days] for [each of] 1 billion people, without having a significant impact on the rest of their lives" (14).
Pellegrino argues that choosing the second option (the Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion) is a "necessary consequence" of the principle from above, but that "[b]ringing about very tiny, but immensely diffused, benefits instead [of] less diffused, but more substantial, benefits is seriously wrong" (15).
Based on this, he claims that "either effective altruists should accept [the Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion], thereby swallowing its repugnance, or they should give up their core tenet [of Effective Altruist Maximization]" (20-21).
You can read Pellegrino's full essay here.
A Possible Response
As Pellegrino acknowledges, "EA has often been the target of criticisms historically pressed against standard Utilitarianism[,] [and his] paper [is] no exception" (21). In light of this, one way to respond to his argument is to borrow from responses to other critiques of effective altruism that are premised on effective altruism accepting utilitarianism.
Specifically, one could argue that "[Pellegrino's] arguments appeal only to hypothetical (rather than actual) cases in which there is a supposed conflict between effective altruist recommendations and [intuition] and thus fail to show that effective altruist recommendations actually do [lead to a repugnant conclusion]."
Feel free to share other responses to Pellegrino's argument.
*Pellegrino's hypothetical is based on a similar hypothetical posed by Holden Karnofsky. In both Karnofsky's hypothetical and Pellegrino's hypothetical, there are three options. I have limited the hypothetical to two options for the sake of simplicity.
I don't agree with the response suggested (recognising that it cites an article I co-authored). The DALY and QALY metrics imply the ARC. It seems reasonable that these metrics or ones similar are in some sense definitive of EA in global poverty and health.
Then the question is whether it is correct to aggregate small benefits. It's fair to say there is philosophical disagreement about this, but nevertheless (in my view) a strong case to be made that the fully aggregative view is correct. One way to approach this, probably the dominant way in moral philosophy, is to figure out the implications of philosophical views and then to choose between the various counterintuitive implications these have. e.g. you could say that the badness of minor ailments does not aggregate. Then you choose between the counterintuitive implications of this vs the aggregative view. This seems to be a bad way to go about it because it starts at the wrong level.
What we should do is assess at the level of rationales. The aggregative view has a rationale, viz (crudely) more of a good thing is better, Clearly, it's better to cure lots of mild ailments that it is to cure one. The goodness of doing so does not diminish: curing one additional person is always as valuable no matter how many other people you have cured. If so, it follows that curing enough mild ailments must eventually be better than curing one really bad ailment. A response to this needs to criticise this rationale not merely point out that it has a weird seeming implication. Lots of things have weird seeming implications, including e.g. quantum physics, evolution. Pointing out that quantum physics has counterintuitive implications should not be the primary level at which we debate the truth of quantum physics.
See this - http://spot.colorado.edu/~norcross/Comparingharms.pdf
Thanks for the link, Halstead. A very good article, but it doesn't totally cure my unease with aggregating across individuals. But I don't expect to ever find anything that is fully in line with intuitions, as I think intuitions are contradictory. :-)