{"id":1314,"date":"2021-11-15T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/?p=1314"},"modified":"2021-11-13T16:44:04","modified_gmt":"2021-11-13T16:44:04","slug":"choosing-a-future-for-humanity-effective-altruism-and-longtermism-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/choosing-a-future-for-humanity-effective-altruism-and-longtermism-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Choosing a future for humanity: effective altruism and longtermism: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

At one time, not so long ago, it was the mosquito nets. If you wished to give to \u00a3100 to charity, and you wanted your donation to do as much good as it could, the researchers who investigate the effectiveness of different modes of philanthropy concluded that you should donate to the Against Malaria Foundation<\/a> (AMF), a London-based charity that distributes these nets for free in malarial regions of the world. And how did they come to this conclusion? Well, they treated the decision where to donate your money just as decision theorists in economists, philosophy, and psychology used to say we should treat every decision. That is, for each charity you might support, they calculated what decision theorists call the expected utility<\/a> of giving your money to that cause, and they ranked them in order from the donation with the greatest expected utility to the donation with the least.<\/p>\n

What is expected utility? In particular, what do we mean by the expected utility of giving \u00a3100 to AMF, say? Well, you begin by laying out all the possible outcomes of doing so. In one outcome, your money buys and distributes 20 nets and all the people who receive them are five year old children who would have contracted malaria and died from it without the net, but who will instead live until they\u2019re seventy; in another, the same kids get the nets, but only half of them would have contracted malaria and died from it; in another, none of them would have died without the nets; and so on for all the possibilities in between. Next, you ask what the utility of each of those outcomes would be. This is a measure of how good or how valuable they are. One crude but feasible way to do this is just to add up how many extra years of life are enjoyed in the outcome compared with the status quo and take that to be the utility of the outcome. So if the net saves the lives of 10 five year olds who will now go on to live to seventy, that outcome is valued at 650 years of life. So now you\u2019ve put a value on each of the outcomes. Next, you try to figure out how likely each outcome will be if you make the donation. Perhaps it\u2019s very unlikely that all twenty nets save lives (maybe the chance is 1%). Now, for each outcome, you take its utility (say, 650 life years), and you multiply it by how likely your donation is to bring it about (say, 1%) to give its probability-weighted utility (say, 650 x 0.01 = 6.5 life years). And finally, you add up all the probability-weighted utilities for all the possible outcomes of your donation, and that is its expected utility. You then do the same for the other charities you\u2019re considering, and you rank those charities from greatest expected value to least, and you pick the top!<\/p>\n

So, roughly speaking, that\u2019s the methodology of the charity evaluators. It\u2019s that methodology that led them to consistently recommend AMF in the past, and it\u2019s that methodology that has led them to change their mind abruptly and recommend something very different now. To understand what they now recommend and why, it helps to think about a question that the ethicist Derek Parfit <\/a>asks at the end of his 1984 book, Reasons and Persons<\/a>. Think of these scenarios:<\/p>\n