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.
This is, IMO, a pretty unpersuasive argument. At least if you are willing, like me, to bite the bullet that SUFFICIENTLY many small gains in utility could make up for a few large gains. I don't even find this particularly difficult to swallow. Indeed, I can explain away our feeling that somehow this shouldn't be true by appealing to our inclination to (as a matter of practical life navigation) to round down sufficiently small hurts to zero.
Also I would suggest that many of the examples that seem problematic are delibrately rigged so the overt description (a world with many people with a small amount of positive utility) presents the situation one way while the flavor text is phrased so as to trigger our empathetic/whats it like response as if it it didn't satisfy the overt description. For instance if we remove the flavor about it being a very highly overpopulated world and simply said consider a universe with many many beings each with a small amount of utility then finding that superior no longer seems particularly troubling. It just states the principle allowing addition of utilities in the abstract. However, sneak in the flavor text that the world is very overcrowded and the temptation is to imagine a world which is ACTIVELY UNPLEASANT to be in, i.e., one in which people have negative utility.
More generally, I find these kind of considerations far more compelling at convincing me I have very poor intuitions for comparing the relative goodness/badness of some kinds of situations and that I better eschew any attempt to rely MORE on those intuitions and dive into the math. In particular, the worst response I can imagine is to say: huh, wow I guess I'm really bad at deciding which situations are better or worse in many circumstances, indeed, one can find cases where A seems better than B better than C better than A considered pairwise, guess I'll throw over this helpful formalism and just use my intuition directly to evaluate which states of affairs are preferable.