#66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, effective altruism, & how his moral views have changed

Show Notes

In 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory opinions about abortion. But the controversy stemmed from Practical Ethics — a book he’d actually released way back in 1979. It took a German translation ten years on for protests to kick off.

According to Singer, he honestly didn’t expect this view to be as provocative as it became, and he certainly wasn’t aiming to stir up trouble and get attention.

But after the protests and the increasing coverage of his work in German media, the previously flat sales of Practical Ethics shot up. And the negative attention he received ultimately led him to a weekly opinion column in The New York Times.

• Singer's book The Life You Can Save has just been re-released as a 10th anniversary edition, available as a free e-book and audiobook, read by a range of celebrities. Get it here.
• Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

Singer points out that as a result of this increased attention, many more people also read the rest of the book — which includes chapters with a real ability to do good, covering global poverty, animal ethics, and other important topics. So should people actively try to court controversy with one view, in order to gain attention for another more important one?

Perhaps sometimes, but controversy can also just have bad consequences. His critics may view him as someone who says whatever he thinks, hang the consequences, but Singer says that he gives public relations considerations plenty of thought.

One example is that Singer opposes efforts to advocate for open borders. Not because he thinks a world with freedom of movement is a bad idea per se, but rather because it may help elect leaders like Mr Trump.

Another is the focus of the effective altruism community. Singer certainly respects those who are focused on improving the long-term future of humanity, and thinks this is important work that should continue. But he’s troubled by the possibility of extinction risks becoming the public face of the movement.

He suspects there's a much narrower group of people who are likely to respond to that kind of appeal, compared to those who are drawn to work on global poverty or preventing animal suffering. And that to really transform philanthropy and culture more generally, the effective altruism community needs to focus on smaller donors with more conventional concerns.

Rob is joined in this interview by Arden Koehler, the newest addition to the 80,000 Hours team, both for the interview and a post-episode discussion. They only had an hour with Peter, but also cover:

• What does he think is the most plausible alternatives to consequentialism?
• Is it more humane to eat wild caught animals than farmed animals?
• The re-release of The Life You Can Save
• His most and least strategic career decisions
• Population ethics, and other arguments for and against prioritising the long-term future
• What led to his changing his mind on significant questions in moral philosophy?
• And more.

In the post-episode discussion, Rob and Arden continue talking about:

• The pros and cons of keeping EA as one big movement
• Singer’s thoughts on immigration
• And consequentialism with side constraints.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the linked transcript.

 Producer: Keiran Harris. 
 Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. 
 Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq. 
 Illustration of Singer: Matthias Seifarth.

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Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.

Robert Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is the 80,000 Hours Podcast, where each week we have an unusually in-depth conversation about one of the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve it. I’m Rob Wiblin, Director of Research at 80,000 Hours.

Peter Singer is one of the most influential philosophers of recent times, and one of the biggest influences on 80,000 Hours, so we’ve had to get him on at some point! We made it to 3 main topics — firstly, the strategy he has used to approach advocacy during his life, secondly, his views of the effective altruism community today, and what it’s doing right and wrong, and finally, where his philosophical positions have changed over the last ten years.

A few months ago philosopher Arden Koehler moved to London to join the 80,000 Hours research team. She joined me for this interview, and had a lot of thoughts about the topics we covered which we barely got to touch on, as we only had Peter for a bit over an hour.

So at the end of the episode we keep talking for another hour about how broad the effective altruism community ought to be, how demanding morality is, and what’s most counterintuitive about utilitarianism.

Before all that though, 3 quick things.

First, this is our second episode using chapters which allow you to skip between sections. Last time it seemed to work fine, but if you ever have a technical problem with the show, email [e-mail] or [e-mail] right away, and we’ll fix it as quickly as we can.

Secondly, my guest last time was Bonnie Jenkins, who I interviewed at Effective Altruism Global: London in October, where she was a speaker.

Applications for EA Global: San Francisco in 2020 just opened this week. It will be on a few months earlier this year, on the weekend of March 20-22. The deadline for early bird applications is December 18. You can apply to attend at eaglobal.org.

If you’re serious about changing your career in order to have a bigger impact, and have never been before, it’s a conference that’s well worth attending, at least so long as coming to San Francisco for a few days isn’t a big inconvenience.

Thirdly, as Peter says in this episode, the 10th anniversary edition of his classic The Life You Can Save has just been released as a free ebook and audiobook. You can access it at thelifeyoucansave.org or through the link in the show notes.

Alright, here’s Peter Singer.

Today’s guest is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, Peter Singer. Peter is an Australian moral philosopher known for developing the theory of utilitarianism, and is widely viewed as one of the most influential philosophers of modern times.

He is particularly famous for his 1975 book Animal Liberation in which he argued that animal agriculture was unconscionable, and his 1971 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in which he argued that middle-class people in rich countries have a moral obligation to donate to help the global poor or other important causes.

His writings have helped inspire the creation of the intellectual movement known as effective altruism, and in 2009 he helped found The Life You Can Save, an organisation which encourages people to donate to effective charities that reduce extreme poverty in the developing world.

And indeed I don’t think there’s much chance I’d be working at 80,000 Hours if not for his work.

So thanks for coming on the show Peter.

Peter Singer: Ah, very happy to be chatting with you both.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. And today, I’m also joined by my colleague, Arden Koehler, a researcher at 80,000 Hours who’s completing her PhD in philosophy at NYU.

Arden Koehler: I’m excited to be here.

Robert Wiblin: All right. So we hope to talk a bit about moral philosophy, a bit about your work doing advocacy, and then some more nuts and bolts questions. But first, what are you working on at the moment and why do you think it’s really important?

Peter Singer: Well, I’m in the midst of the Princeton teaching semester and it’s really hard for me to do much serious research and writing during that period. One thing that I do keep up is my monthly columns for Project Syndicate, and one has just gone up on the Project Syndicate website and it’s actually quite relevant to 80,000 Hours and effective altruism.

Because it’s about the ethics of randomized controlled trials in the antipoverty sector. This was triggered by the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, and that interestingly sparked some discussion online. And even Angus Deaton himself a Nobel Prize for Economics winner, and a Princeton colleague wrote something critical about randomized trials.

So together with Johannes Haushofer who’s done these trials, particularly trials of GiveDirectly in Africa and Arthur Baker, we coauthored a response to that and a defense of the use of randomized trials in the antipoverty sector.

Robert Wiblin: Nice. So obviously people have been requesting for you to come on the show, or at least were requesting that we interview you since it started about two and a half years ago.

But the reason we decided to do the interview this month is that you’re re-releasing the book, “The Life You Can Save”, which originally came out in 2009 and I think there’s actually going to be a free audio book and ebook download at “thelifeyoucansave.org”. What’s changed in the 10th anniversary edition and why re-release it?

Peter Singer: Okay, so why re-release it is, I mean, partly that things have changed and it needed some updating and I’ll get into that in a moment. But also that Charlie Bresler, who’s the Executive Director of the The Life You Can Save, had the idea of getting back the rights from the publishers and making it free. Putting it online so that more people would read it basically.

The book had a great influence on him. Led him to contact me and to volunteer to sort of take over The Life You Can Save. It existed as an organization, but it had some volunteers, students doing some work on it, but it wasn’t really very effective ’cause you can’t really run something like that without somebody full-time committed to it and Charlie volunteered to do that and has done it.

And the book influenced him to do that, and he thought more people should read this book. It’ll mean that more people will give to effective charities. So he did manage to get all of the English language rights back, and that’s why it will now be available online as you say, both as an ebook and as an audio book. And the audiobook incidentally has chapters read by a variety of celebrities, so we’re hoping for a big impact and a lot of people to read it.

Arden Koehler: What do you think out of the book, people haven’t appreciated as much as the other arguments? It seems like it’s been very popular, but is there anything in the book that’s underappreciated that you’d like to see people thinking about more?

Peter Singer: I want people to think more about giving effectively. That clearly was always the message of the book, but there’s always some pushback about people who have pet projects that they have some personal connection with, that they’re attached to. I was recently emailing with someone who spent time in Guatemala and got to know a poor family there and started helping them and they had a child who was ill and so she got medical help and then she started thinking, “Yeah, I’m actually putting a lot of money into this one family and one child. Is that the most effective thing to do?”

So she’s a good example of somebody, I mean, she was aware of the effective giving argument, but she was torn emotionally by the personal connection with the family. And you know, my view is that obviously what she was doing with the family was great, but she should be, as well as that saying, “Yes, this is something I want to do. This is something personal, but I do want to do something that is targeted at being as effective as possible, reaching and helping the most people in the most effective way”. And I think that’s a reasonable sort of compromise that most people can live with.

Robert Wiblin: All right. Let’s move on and talk a bit about your advocacy work over the years, which has had a pretty big impact. I guess, as many listeners will know, you’ve sometimes gone out and made kind of very provocative or controversial arguments, I guess, seemingly as a way of kind of getting attention for maybe other ideas that matter more.

Do you think moral advocates should in general kind of court more controversy than they do, or is that kind of just an approach that you think has worked for you in particular, or maybe it hasn’t worked out quite as you planned?

Peter Singer: So I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately set out to be provocative by saying something that I didn’t feel was right.

Robert Wiblin: Oh no. Yeah, I wouldn’t… But I guess there’s a lot of different arguments you can make and then sometimes, you choose the one that might get a lot of attention because it’s of greater interest to people.

Peter Singer: Yes. But I think you have to feel that it’s at least as strong as any other argument that you could be out there making that it’s at least as plausible.

And often, of course, the provocative arguments don’t get expressed because I think most people are somewhat timid about sticking their neck out for something that other people are likely to jump on. So I think that idea of putting out an argument for discussion, if it might be the right argument, and even if it has, I say, as good a chance of being the right view as any other view around in that area, just to give it a run and see what happens.

I think there’s, there’s value in that. Now, you know, has that worked for me? I think probably it has. Sometimes people say to me, people who, let’s say support my views about global poverty, or perhaps they support my views about animals, or maybe both, but they don’t support my views about euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants or allowing parents to opt for euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants is the view that I hold.

And they say, “Look, wouldn’t it have been better if you’d never said that? Because you get all this flack for that and some people think that you’re, you know, an evil person because of that.” So two things that I want to say. Firstly, this may sound surprising now, but when I wrote that, I didn’t really expect it to be as controversial or provocative as it has become.

And perhaps that’s because at the time there wasn’t really this disability movement in the sense of people with disabilities as a discriminated against minority. So, you know, I wrote that in, well, I guess I wrote the English edition of Practical Ethics, which certainly contains it. I think there were a couple of articles earlier, but that came out in English in 1979 and there wasn’t really, you know, serious protest against that for 10 years. And those protests then arose when I went to speak in Germany where the book had been translated into German. And by that time there was a strong disability movement in Germany, and they pulled some quotes out of the book and circulated leaflets and things, and that led to a lot of protests and that basically started it off.

But the fact that there weren’t these protests for 10 years suggests that I wasn’t really deliberately trying to, or knowingly trying to stir something up. So that’s the first point. The second point is, was that a bad thing or not? Well, if you look at the German sales of Practical Ethics, until 1989 when those protests occurred, it had been, I can’t remember, four or five years in German, the sales were tiny. They were really small and they were flat. They were not increasing. And then in 1989, because of those protests, suddenly there was a lot of media about me and my views. You know full page, front page of the kind of magazine section of the newspaper on each side. I was on TV with various other people. In Der Spiegel, which is the equivalent of Time or Newsweek in Germany and then the sales really shot up.

And the important point about this is not that therefore more people read about my views about people with disabilities, which you might say, well, that’s a small issue, you know, but, that Practical Ethics has chapters on the treatment of animals, it has a chapter on global poverty, has chapters on other important issues.

And so I think more people, and I know a lot of German students started reading Practical Ethics who probably would not have been reading it before. So that’s why I say I think it has probably helped rather than hindered.

Robert Wiblin: I guess it sounds like the outcome there might’ve been that more people found out about a bunch of your views and probably came to agree with them cause they hadn’t heard that perspective before, whereas another group of people kind of heard about them and maybe ended up kind of condemning all of them across the board because they’re all associated with ideas that they don’t like, which I guess is like, it’s a bit ambiguous whether that’s good or not, whether it’s good to polarize people in favor and against your views.

It depends on whether you want to produce a small core of people who are going to really act on them or do you want to get a broad acceptance across society?

Peter Singer: Yes, but I’m not sure that, you know, you’re suggesting that everybody took my views on block and I don’t think that’s true.

I think there were people who said, “Well, I read your views and I still disagree with you about euthanasia and those issues, but I agree with what you say about global poverty and support that”.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I guess, I’m in that group that kind of disagrees about that specific point, but then agrees with a lot of the other stuff.

But I do worry that people, maybe it’s like there’s a lot of kind of bleeding over, where it’s like if they think that you have like bad views on one issue, then they’re much less inclined to believe the other stuff. Or they, they might then condemn the underlying philosophy cause it has this like undesirable consequence they think and so then they’d be like, “Well utilitarianism must be wrong because of this implication it has about infanticide and so therefore like maybe I don’t have to give to the developing world”.

Peter Singer: Yeah, and there may be some people who say that. I don’t have a way of really saying whether that’s, you know, a lot of people or a small number of people who think that.

Arden Koehler: Related to this, when you’re thinking about making an argument or pursuing a certain research project, do you think a lot about basically the benefits that would happen if people are persuaded that you’re right? Do you think, “This is going to produce a certain amount of utility if everyone changes their views on euthanasia”, and that is the case for making this argument versus the case for making an argument on like global poverty. One might think there’s a lot more sort of utility at stake. Do you weigh up those sorts of considerations before making these kinds of arguments or not? Do just go with like “Say what’s true”?

Peter Singer: No, I am affected by the consequences of the projects that I work on, and interestingly, this goes right back to, I guess the first major public thing that I did which was writing Animal Liberation. And it’s interesting looking back on it now because I realized that I was affected by the idea of the neglectedness of that cause, which is something of course that effective altruists talk about, the neglectedness of an issue and is one of the major reasons for working on it.

So this was at the time of the Vietnam war. So that was an issue. You know, as a undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, I was involved, actively involved in opposition to the war and opposition to conscription for the war. So that was an ongoing issue. Later when, you know, the time we’re talking about now is when I was a graduate student at Oxford, it was also around the time I wrote Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

So I had gotten interested in that issue, and clearly I was interested in that issue because this is a big issue with potentially very good consequences. But when I became aware of the way animals are treated and started thinking about the lack of moral status that they have, and the idea that this is unjustifiable, that this is speciesism, which is a prejudice, so something like racism and sexism that leads us to disregard the interest of animals. And then I thought, well, should I do more with this? Should I make this one of my major research things? And I think the reason I chose to do that rather than to do more research on global poverty at the time, or for that matter, to do something about the war, I actually wrote my Oxford thesis on civil disobedience in the context of the war, so it wasn’t that I hadn’t done something about that. But would I go on with that? I thought, well, the people who are working on animal welfare issues at this time, which is the early 1970s, are not philosophers, basically, and they approach it in a rather sentimental way.

So you know, they put out leaflets with pictures of cute puppies and kittens and they say, “Stop animal experimentation”. And this obviously comes over to people like me as a rather sentimental approach. And then somebody else, some researcher will say, “Well, 90% of the animals used in research are not dogs or cats, but rats or mice or something of that sort”.

And then, a lot of people will say, “Oh, well then it doesn’t matter”. And I thought there’s a need for philosophers to put arguments here that this is not a matter of just loving animals and being sentimental about dogs or cats, but there is really something seriously wrong happening.

There is a lot of unnecessary suffering being inflicted for no good reason. And perhaps I can make that argument where, generally speaking, it’s not out there in the public domain. That kind of discussion is not really being had. So I did feel that not only was this a really important issue, because of course there are billions of animals suffering, but it was an issue where maybe I had some skills that would add significantly to the state of the debate.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So one reason that people might think it’s a good idea to just say things that you think are true on the basis of the philosophy, even if they’re very provocative to people, is that you might be able to have a very outsized impact that way. And kind of the model that Cass Sunstein has put forward on the show in a previous interview that you might’ve heard, is that you need first movers who are willing to just say the thing that people think is very objectionable in order to create cover for like other people to come out of the woodwork admitting that actually they kind of do agree, even though this is maybe a kind of slightly taboo opinion and then you kind of create this cascade of more and more people expressing this view that previously no one was advocating.

I guess, yeah, does that fit with your experience and does that, in part, motivate you to say things that otherwise other people might be unwilling to say?

Peter Singer: I think it has for, you know, at least some time in my career, maybe not early on, but once I had a tenured academic position and had some standing, then I felt I was safe, you know, or at least there was less risk for me; I wouldn’t say it was completely safe but, there was less risk for me in saying things that might lead to some reaction then for more junior academics who perhaps didn’t have tenure. So yeah, I think Cass Sunstein is right about that. There’s sometimes a need for people to get out there, and then other people may come through with agreement on those things.

Arden Koehler: You might think that this implies that, you know, we should be trying to make it easier for these sort of first-movers to express these unpopular opinions, but like probably most unpopular opinions are bad or are false. And so like, do you think overall we should be trying to make it easier for people to express these unpopular views or not?

Peter Singer: Yes, provided that they’re not only, you know, not just unpopular views, but are unpopular views that have good arguments or good evidence in support of them. So I don’t want to encourage any kind of crank or someone to say something that is unpopular where there’s nothing much to be said in support of it.

But if people have worked out arguments or reasons or evidence for believing something that is going to be unpopular, I think it’s in general, it’s probably good to get that out there. I’m sure you could think of exceptions where you wouldn’t want that, but in general, I’m a believer in freedom of speech and I think that’s a way to try to work out what are defensible, justifiable positions and which are not.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. An objection that people might raise is that you can’t really cherrypick and like just have people you know, express and get credit for good arguments because the general public maybe isn’t very good at evaluating what arguments are sound and which ones aren’t.

So if we loosen the taboos on what people can say, then that will allow kind of bad ideas potentially to spread. Ideas that appeal to maybe our baser instincts, even if they’re not well founded in philosophy. And so maybe it’s actually just like good in general to have strong speech taboos so that we don’t end up allowing really bad views to have a foothold.

Peter Singer: Well, the trouble with that is that if you do have these taboos and if they do appeal, as you say to our baser instincts, somebody is going to break those taboos anyway, and is going to take advantage of the fact that they are tabooed and is going to attack those who are trying to enforce that taboo.

And I think that’s exactly what’s happened in politics recently. I think the Trump phenomenon is an example of that. That Trump was prepared to say things that other people were not saying. And certainly they have encouraged white supremacists and racists and antisemites and so on to to be more open and I think there has been a rise in the incidence of those quite wrong and objectionable views. But I don’t think, you know, in a reasonably free society, I don’t think you can actually stop that. I think that to really try to enforce those taboos in some way, it would start to lead away from liberal democracy altogether to some more repressive society, and I’d be very reluctant to give up the freedoms that liberal democracies have at their core in order to achieve that.

Arden Koehler: You’ve been doing advocacy on the basis of moral philosophy for almost 50 years now. Are there any strategic mistakes that you’ve made that you can talk about that people could learn from? Do you have a sense of what some of the best strategic decisions that you made that weren’t obvious at the time?

Peter Singer: Obviously I do think that writing Animal Liberation was one of the best strategic decisions that I made because it has had a big impact and it was a strategic decision in terms of being a neglected but important area. In terms of mistakes that I’ve made, I’ve occasionally given my opponents, you know, more of a opportunity to attack me than I needed to.

Now, one of those we’ve already talked about: that’s the question about euthanasia for disabled infants. But in a way, that would have been hard for me to avoid if I was working in bioethics in general. For example, if I wanted to write about abortion as I did, again, in Practical Ethics, it obviously raises the question, “Well, what’s the dividing line”?

You know, you’re saying it’s okay to terminate the life of a fetus, where exactly does that stop? And then you have to think what’s the dividing line? And I don’t think dividing lines like, you know, viability or whatever are really very well grounded and you know, then what is it?

Well maybe it’s the development of some kind of awareness in the fetus and what kind of awareness and at least given, especially given the preference utilitarian position I was holding then, that would have been hard for me to avoid getting drawn into the idea of is birth, the crucial dividing line and if not, why not? But later on, somewhat more recently, though not that recently anymore, I was asked to review a book on bestiality, on sex with animals, which I did, and I ended up saying that obviously people who have sex with animals in ways that doesn’t respect the interest of the animals are doing something clearly wrong and should be prosecuted on standard anti cruelty grounds.

But there are a group of people who call themselves zoophiles, who have, you know, loving, but also sexual relations with an individual animal. And looking at that, I had to say, I couldn’t really see that that was something that ought to be criminal anyway, right? Maybe you were thinking there’s some sense in which that’s wrong or I don’t know.

I’m not even sure of that, but I do think that, I can’t see a reason why the criminal law should get involved if there’s no harm to the animal or to the person or to anyone else. So I wrote that in the review and that’s, even in a way, an even smaller issue than euthanasia for disabled newborns.

It’s not a totally insignificant issue, but it’s a very minor issue. And you know, I then got attacked for that and that continues to resound over the years. You know, maybe just reminding people of it now on your interviews is even not a good strategy, I don’t know. But I think it probably would have been wiser to turn down that invitation to review the book.

There’s one offsetting thing that I’ll just say there and that is that I have been contacted by some people. In fact, I was contacted by a psychotherapist who was working with people who are zoophiles and who are very troubled by this and are very conflicted over it. And it was bad for the man and he gave them my review and it helped some of them to get over this and to see that, well, maybe they shouldn’t be so depressed or even potentially suicidal because of the sexual attraction to nonhuman animals in a loving way. So, you know, it’s not that it hasn’t done any good, I think, but it’s probably done, at least me, it may have done more harm than good.

Robert Wiblin: So, yeah. In terms of philosophical arguments that really do matter, are there any, I mean, you’ve written tons of stuff over the years.

Is there anything that you think really was very important that in the end didn’t actually get that much attention?

Peter Singer: Oh, I’m pretty happy with the attention and, you know, the two most important areas are the animal liberation stuff and the global poverty issue, and they’ve had a lot of attention. The animal stuff from 1975 when the book was published, the global poverty issue didn’t get that much attention for quite a long time. Famine, Affluence, and Morality got anthologized in variety of readers. So quite a lot of philosophy students read it during courses in practical ethics, but it didn’t really get out in the general public until after I came to Princeton. And actually this is another interesting example of the benefits of the controversy about my views about euthanasia because when I was appointed to Princeton almost exactly 20 years ago now, there was a lot of controversy about that, and you know, the Right to Life people protested my appointment and came to Princeton and staged protests at Princeton.

Steve Forbes, who was running then for the Republican nomination for President and was a trustee at Princeton, protested about it and the New York times wrote it up and they said this is the most controversy over philosophy appointments since Bertrand Russell’s appointment to the City University of New York back in 1940s I think that was. So I’d got a lot of attention. And as a result of that attention, I got an invitation from an editor at the New York Times magazine, the thing that comes out on Sundays, to write something for them. And they said, you know, “We think more people should know what your views are”. And I chose not to write about what was making my appointment controversial. But you’re right about global poverty. And that was an article which they entitled, it wasn’t my title, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”.

That in a way started to bring my views on global poverty to the attention of a much wider audience. And I followed that up with another article for the New York Times a few years later called “How much should a billionaire give and how much should you?” And that in turn led to my writing The Life You Can Save. The responses to those articles led me to think that now there is an audience for all of this, a public audience, and the way to do that is to write a book, a trade book, not an academic book about it. So maybe that’s another example of where having said something that was controversial led me to get an audience that I wouldn’t have otherwise got.

And so now I think those two areas, to go back to your original question, those two areas have had the due attention that they should have. And I do think that they are the areas that are most important that I’ve worked on. Third area that’s obviously very important is climate change. But in a way, what I’ve said there is less distinctive.

That’s not been a neglected area, not even by philosophers, and so there are other good philosophers. My friend and colleague Dale Jamieson, who, if you’re at NYU I guess you would know has been working very well on that for a long time. So I think that probably the areas where I’ve had something distinctive to say and that are also important, have had adequate coverage.

Robert Wiblin: All right, let’s move on and talk about some specific things that people are doing to improve the world in hopefully a big way. I guess, obviously, you’ve been a big influence on the creation and direction of the effective altruism community, but I’m curious to know what do you think are the EA community’s kind of biggest mistakes in your view?

Peter Singer: So I think that the EA community has made mistakes in having too narrow a focus. There is this discussion in the EA community about should we just focus on a small number of very sophisticated, high net worth individuals, or should we try to go for a broader audience. And although I understand the reasons for going for the high net worth sophisticated individuals, I think that’s a mistake.

I think that EA has the potential to really transform philanthropy generally, and although there are certainly some high net worth individuals who give disproportionally a large amount of course, but still, when you look at philanthropy, say here in the United States or other countries too, the bulk of it is not just the huge donors.

It’s a lot of people who give modest amounts and then other people who give significant but not enormous, you know, not billionaire type amounts. And I think it’s important that the movement should go after them. And to do that, I think that the global poverty issue is, perhaps together with the animal issue, but I would say, you know, first and foremost, global poverty is the issue to attract more people into the movement, to get them seeing that yes, it’s a good thing to help people in extreme poverty.

Yes, you can be more effective by helping people in low income countries than by helping people in your own community. If you live in an affluent country, as most of these donors do, and yes, there is research which will show which organizations will make the best use of your money. I think those are really important things to do.

Obviously the organization, The Life You Can Save that I helped found is aiming at that, and I think that, you know, while I certainly respect those who are working on the long-term future, and existential risk and so on, and I think that is important work, it should continue. But, I’m troubled by the idea that that becomes or is close to becoming the public face of the EA movement.

Because I do think that there’s only this much narrower group of people who are likely to respond to that kind of appeal.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So there is this interesting strategic challenge for effective altruism where it seems like if you’re someone who wants to prioritize or thinks that work on global poverty or animal welfare is particularly effective, then it seems like you probably want a pretty broad based movement cause like many, many people can contribute in some useful way to that.

Whereas if you’re more like me, who’s focused on long-termism on reducing existential risks, then strategically it seems like you probably want to have a more narrow movement cause you want to focus on people who are going to be particularly influential in policy and like in international relations maybe on donors who are gonna, you know, do tons of research and be like very, very sophisticated in their actions.

And so you end up with like these different clusters of people who have different cause focuses and then want kind of a different style of movement. I think people can’t have it, but everyone can have their way and everyone’s position kind of is internally coherent. It all makes sense. And it makes me wonder like sometimes whether one of these groups should like use the term EA and the other group should maybe use something else?

Like perhaps the people who are focused on the long-term should mostly talk about themselves as long-termists, and then they can have the kind of the internal culture that makes sense given that focus.

Peter Singer: That’s a possibility. And that might help the other groups that you’re referring to make their views clear.

So that certainly could help. I do think that actually there’s benefits for the longtermists too in having a successful and broad EA movement. Because just as you know, I’ve seen this in the animal movement. I spoke earlier about how the animal welfare movement, when I first got into it was focused on cats and dogs and people who were attracted to that.

And I clearly criticized that, but at the same time, I have to recognize that there are people who come into the animal movement because of their concern for cats and dogs who later move on to understand that the number of farm animals suffering is vastly greater than the number of cats and dogs suffering and that typically the farm animals suffer more than the cats and dogs, and so they’ve added to the strength of the broader, and as I see more important, animal welfare organizations or animal rights organizations that are working for farm animals. So I think it’s possible that something similar can happen in the EA movement. That is that people can get attracted to EA through the idea of helping people in extreme poverty.

And then they’re part of a community that will hear arguments about long-termism. And maybe you’ll be able to recruit more talented people to do that research that needs to be done if there’s a broad and successful EA movement.

Arden Koehler: Yeah. So speaking of long-termism, we’ve had a couple of moral philosophers on the podcast give arguments for why focusing on the long-term future is really important.

Just very briefly, those are basically just because it has such enormous potential to be good or bad. So setting aside for a minute, strategic questions about the effective altruism movement or practical challenges about influencing the long-term future, what do you think about the arguments for and against long-termism?

Peter Singer: I think that there is a strong argument for long-termism taking in itself. How strong the argument is clearly does depend on this population issue question. So, how great a loss it is if you think that vast numbers of people will never be born and will never experience good lives because of an extinction event that occurs before they’re born. So if you hold the total view, which I’m sympathetic to in the sense that it’s a coherent and consistent view, and I don’t have a better alternative, then you do take account of that loss of good lives, at least good lives, again, we have to assume that life is or will continue to be or will become positive on the whole over this long-term future.

But I think that’s a reasonable assumption. So then you do have to take into account that this is a vast loss, not merely as the loss of the 7.7 billion people living on the planet now if an extinction event were to occur today, but the loss of these futures that will never be lived. And even if I’m somewhat uncertain about the total view as against some other view, I certainly think that this is one of those cases where I should take account of the idea that if I’m uncertain, and if I say no, let’s not worry so much about the long-termist view, because it might be the case that really it’s not such a bad thing if people who never come into existence don’t have good lives. I would have to say, yeah, but I’m, I’m quite uncertain about that, so I have to give it significant weight.

And of course, if you give it some weight really, then the number of lives that will be lived, assuming you know the species survives for a billion years is so vast that the expected utility becomes very great. So I accept that argument. I think that there are good reasons for thinking that long-term consequences are tremendously important and justify trying to make sure that there is a good long-term future.

Robert Wiblin: Okay. So it sounds like you think long-termism is kind of on strong philosophical grounds, but you’re also maybe worried that effective altruism, like too large a fraction of effective altruism or people associated with the community are now focused on long-termism. I guess so that’s on kind of strategic grounds cause you’re were worried that it could limit like the full potential of this kind of school of thought or maybe you have practical concerns about whether we can actually find things that are predictably good for the long-term future.

Peter Singer: Yeah, both of those. Yeah. And we’ve already talked about the first of them and its effect on the movement as a whole and even on getting new people to come into the movement. But I do have concerns about knowing what we can do to reduce extinction risk. And obviously those concerns vary with the nature of the risks.

So if you have quite a concrete risk, like asteroid collision, then I think we can, you know, we can estimate this risk. We can know what might reduce the risk. You know, NASA is already tracking large bodies that might collide with our planet and they should continue to do that. We should also develop technology that would be able to deflect an asteroid or comet if it was on course to collide with our planet.

That’s something where it’s, it’s pretty clear that there is some risk, even if it’s a very small one, and secondly that we could know what would help to reduce that risk. When you get to some of the other things, I think it’s much harder, and I think with the sort of superintelligent artificial general intelligence taking us over, I think that’s in that category.

That is, it’s hard to be confident that anything that we do now is really going to be effective in reducing that risk.

Robert Wiblin: Do you think, so for like specific individuals who are, let’s say, well placed to work on those issues, like let’s say that you’re at the cutting edge of machine learning research and, you could like focus a bit more on the robustness and reliability of those algorithms, or maybe you’re involved in kind of setting US nuclear policy or you’re involved in the Biological Weapons Convention, it seems like, at least for some people possibly involved in those areas, that there could be things that they could do that seem certainly better than 50-50 guesses at things that would make a catastrophe less likely.

Peter Singer: Yes, that’s certainly true. And again, it varies for some of those things. So the nuclear weapons stuff, that’s a risk. Also, you know, a bit like the asteroid one that is here and now and where I think we can have quite a good idea of what will reduce that risk. Maybe the pandemic one as well, with the person who’s at the cutting edge of machine learning.

Yes, so some of the people that I’ve talked to who are in that situation still think that artificial general intelligence is far off and so they themselves think that you know, if it’s going to take sort of another 50 years anyway, then we’ll know more about it and how likely it is and also how you could align the values of the general intelligence with ours, we’ll know more about that in 20 or 30 years when we have a better sense of how it’s going to come about than we do today.

Robert Wiblin: I guess it seems like the machine learning researchers at the frontier are kind of just all over the place in their forecasts. Like some of them think it might be 10 years, some of them think it might be a hundred years. So I guess I’m kind of, I’m keen to have at least like some people working on it now as kind of an insurance policy in case things do advance maybe faster than we think is the most likely scenario. And then I guess those people who think it’s coming soon also tend to have like more concrete ideas about what they can do to make it more safe now cause they like they have a particular vision for how things might play out in the nearer term.

Peter Singer: Yeah and certainly I’m definitely not in a position to say that they’re wrong about that, I’m only in a position to say that other people think that it’s, as you say, it’s much longer.

So yeah, I certainly don’t object at all to trying to get people in that area who think that it’s coming relatively sooner to do work on trying to avoid bad consequences coming from it. That seems perfectly reasonable. But, that’s a relatively modest kind of investment and I don’t think that should be kind of the public face of EA and that’s what worries me again for those strategic reasons.

Arden Koehler: What do you think would be sort of the appropriate share of the resources of the effective altruism community to go to basically long-termist focused causes.

Peter Singer: So if you’re including all long-termist causes, I think that could be quite significant.

I’d be happy for there to be significant resources going into the risks that are here and now. Asteroid collision and perhaps even more nuclear war and nuclear weapons and so on and pandemics. I’d be happy for quite a lot to go to those areas. I certainly think a lot should go into climate change, whether that’s actually an extinction risk or not is obviously controversial, but I do think that trying to mitigate climate change and help adaptation to it is very important for the global poverty side as well.

So insofar as that is an existential risk, I think a lot of resources should go into that. I’m not going to put a percentage figure on it, but I think it’s quite reasonable for those causes to have very significant proportion of resources.

Arden Koehler: You mentioned that you’re still writing columns for Project Syndicate. It seems like you have a lot going on. Do you have time for lots of original research these days, and if so, you know, what is it on?

Peter Singer: So when I’m at Princeton as I am this fall semester, I don’t really have time for significant amounts of original research. I’m teaching a big undergraduate course in practical ethics. I organize a visiting speaker seminar series, and I do some of this smaller pieces of writing usually for the general public. But I do have time for writing and research in the other semester because then I’m on leave from Princeton.

I go back to Australia where I’m originally from and where my children and grandchildren are, so my wife and I get to spend time with them. And although I have a kind of a loose attachment with the University of Melbourne, it’s not very demanding. I give some lectures in other people’s courses, but I don’t run a course myself and that gives me more time for research and writing.

There’s a couple of projects that are sort of moving along. One that’s been around for a while but hasn’t got very far, is looking at global population. Of course you and other listeners will be familiar with population issues in ethics that Derek Parfit pioneered and that have been very extensively discussed about whether it’s better to have a larger population with a lower average happiness, but a greater total amount of, of happiness or some other principal that doesn’t lead to that maximizing total.

Clearly that’s gotta be relevant in any discussion of population, but what I and the coauthor, or possibly it’ll be co authors we haven’t sorted that out quite yet want to talk about is much more the current question of, is there a population problem and if so, what is an ethical approach to it? And we’re particularly focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa as a place where population is growing fastest, and is growing fastest in some of the world’s poorest countries. And we’re looking at whether that is a problem, both in terms of reducing poverty overall, in terms of environmental questions as well obviously, and some of those related issues.

And we are discussing with, I probably shouldn’t mention names yet, we’re discussing with someone who comes from Nigeria, to be a coauthor of this because we don’t want to just have kind of Westerners talking about Africa from a distance.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah. So speaking of population ethics, it seems like over the last 10 or 15 years you’ve had some significant changes in your views on moral philosophy. You’ve moved from preference utilitarianism to being more interested in hedonistic utilitarianism. Maybe you’ve also like maybe shifted your view on population ethics from something that was somewhat more person effecting towards being more sympathetic to the total view.

Perhaps also a bit of a shift from moral antirealism to being more sympathetic to moral realism. Do want to lay out what you think those shifts are and maybe whether they were connected in some way and why are they related?

Peter Singer: You’re right about the first and the third of those. That is, I have moved from preference utilitarianism to hedonistic utilitarianism, and that’s related to the move from, well, you can call it antirealism to realism or, you know, when I was doing this, it was usually referred to as non-cognitivism to a form of cognitivist or objectivist moral theory. Let me talk about those in a moment. But I don’t think my position on population has really changed very much recently.

If you go way back, one of the first pieces I wrote for a book called Ethics and Population edited by Michael Bayles in the 70s was trying to defend something like a person affecting view anyway, definitely an alternative to the total view. That was subject to a devastating criticism from Derek Parfit in the same book and I really didn’t feel that I could adequately respond to that criticism. So I more or less dropped that. And from then on, I would say I’ve been just uncertain about this issue. I’m somewhat sympathetic to the total view. The total view has the great virtue of being a coherent and consistent position.

But of course, many people find its implication of what Parfit called The Repugnant Conclusion, to be just that, repugnant and therefore they don’t want to accept the total view. I’m somewhat inclined to say maybe we just have to swallow The Repugnant Conclusion and not trust our intuitions in these rather strange sorts of choices that we are forced to make.

But going back to the other point, I think the significant change there was the move away from what you could call an antirealist view anyway of you that was based originally on Hare’s universal prescriptivism. That is the idea that moral judgments prescriptions and prescriptions come out of the same language family as commands. So commands are not true or false. They’re prescriptions for action. And in that sense, this is a non-cognitivist theory.

But Hare was always interested in trying to get an element of reason into his prescriptivism. He disagreed with the standard emotivists like A.J. Ayer or C.L. Stevenson who thought that moral judgments are just expressions of emotions and there’s not really much basis for reasoning how bad moral judgements, you know, you just favor this or you don’t favor it, except of course, maybe in terms of understanding the consequences and implications of certain principles there’s role for reason there, but not in the fundamental moral judgments. And I tried to pursue that, and I tried for many years in various articles. I wrote about it to strengthen the basis for reason in that which, which for Hare was always linguistic. For Hare it was the fact that using moral language required you to universalize and universalizability brought an element of reason into your judgments.

But the problem with that was that somebody could always say, “Okay, so I’m just not going to use words like, ought or good”, which, you know, carry this universalizability. And you haven’t shown me that there’s anything irrational in acting on judgments that I don’t universalize. And I wanted to argue that there is, and I tried to do that in various ways within Hare’s model and eventually decided that that didn’t work.

It was maybe 15 years ago or something like that. I came to abandon that and that led me to shift towards some kind of moral realism, I suppose, influenced by again Derek Parfit in “On What Matters”. And to some extent by Tom Nagel who also talked about this and that shift, you know, so within Hare’s framework, more or less the preference utilitarianism fell out of the idea that you’re prescribing universally. That you have to put yourself in everyone’s positions.

And that means you have to take account of their preferences. And that means that the right thing to do, or the thing that you can prescribe universally is something that takes account of everybody’s preferences and sums them up and that leads you to a preference utilitarianism. Once you are not within that framework, you are much more open to think of things as objectively good, independently of whether people prefer them or not.

And that plus criticisms about preferences and you know, is it really good to satisfy preferences if they are somewhat crazy preferences? Those sorts of questions led me to think that maybe really preference utilitarianism wasn’t the most defensible position and that something like the classical utilitarianism view that pleasure or let’s say, states of consciousness, okay. Mental states, really where value lies, that if there were no conscious beings, there wouldn’t be value in the Universe. And so, given that we have conscious beings, then positive states of consciousness, pleasure, happiness, you know, whatever you want to call it, positive values and negative, pain, suffering, misery, are negative values.

And that, you know, I re-read Sidgwick and I’ve co-authored a book with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek called “The Point of View of the Universe” about Sidgwick and trying to restate Sedgwick in the most plausible way and taking into account modern discussions of ethics. And part of that process led me to say, “Look, I now do think that hedonistic utilitarianism is more defensible than preference utilitarianism”, which is not to say that I’m 100% convinced that it’s the truth, but I think it’s the most defensible, ethical, normative view that I see it as present.

Arden Koehler: Okay. Just to check to make sure that I understand what the relationship between these two shifts were for you. Are you saying like, so you were an antirealist or a non-cognitivist and then for various reasons decided that that couldn’t work and then that sort of just freed you up to like start considering anew what was good for people, whether it was the satisfaction of preferences or whether it was just sort of happiness, broadly construed. And then once you were sort of just considering that on the merits, you ended up going with the latter?

Peter Singer: Yeah, so I think that’s a good summary of the process that I went through.

Robert Wiblin: Is there some kind of connection maybe between thinking that conscious states are what really matters, which then leads people to think that, well, because like conscious states are some real thing about the universe, then maybe there’s some like naturalist foundation for ethics, which causes you to then be like more sympathetic to realism?

Peter Singer: No, I don’t think that’s quite right. Firstly, I don’t, I’m not a naturalist. I still accept the idea that there is this gap, as Hume said, between is and ought. That we can’t move from is statements to ought statements. So I’m a non-naturalist realist or non-naturalist objectivist, whichever of those terms you want to use.

And that’s I think also Sidgwick’s view, that the sense in which these are truths are somewhat similar to the sense in which mathematical truths are truths. So, you know, at least on one defensible view of the philosophy of mathematics, these are substantive truths that any rational being would come to and similarly, I think Sidgwick argued that he came up with three axioms of ethics. And arguedthat they are things which also, you know, if we’re thinking rationally, we should be able to agree on them. Of those, the most important is that the good of any being is equally important as the similar good of any other being.

So it’s a kind of equality although because it similar good, if there’s some beings who can experience great good, and other beings who aren’t capable of that, then you would give more weight to the interest of the beings who can experience greater good, or you would get more, you’d get more good out of that, more value out of that.

But you don’t discount it because that being is, you know, not you, not someone you know, someone distant from you, somebody living maybe in a future century. You can discount that for uncertainty of course, but not otherwise. Or a matter of another race or even a matter of another species.

Arden Koehler: All of these options that we’ve been discussing are sort of within the consequentialist framework. If you were to find out somehow that the right moral theory was not within consequentialism, what do you think would be the next most plausible view and how likely do you think it would be to be true?

Peter Singer: Ah, okay. So I find it hard to imagine that consequentialism is not true, or at least is not true to some extent, right? Put it this way. Suppose that I believe, came to believe that there are some rules that you should never violate. There’s some moral rules. You know, let’s, let’s say the rule might be, you should never torture an innocent human being.

Lots of people would say that’s an absolute rule. Yeah. As a consequentialist, I can imagine scenarios in which you would do that. So you know the ticking bomb scenario where the terrorist has planted this nuclear bomb, you’ve caught the terrorist, but the terrorist is, you know, even if you torture the terrorist, he won’t tell you.

But you also have the terrorist’s five year old daughter, and if you torture her, then the terrorist will tell you, you have some psychological profile that leads you to have confidence in this and then you’ll be able to save millions of people. So I would torture the five year old girl in those circumstances. But let’s assume that I were convinced that that was wrong and that that was a mistake.

I would still think that when you’re not violating that rule, you ought to do the most good you can. So, in that sense, I would be consequentialist for every case other than those that involve torturing innocent people, which fortunately in all of my years of life as a consequentialist, I’ve never had a situation where it would have produced good consequences to torture some innocent person.

So it wouldn’t really change my day-to-day living very much. And then I suppose you can imagine, well, suppose I became convinced of a lot of other rules that were absolute. It would reduce the scope of doing the most good you can, but I think any plausible view is going to have to say once you’re not violating any absolute moral rules, or once you’ve met all your duties, whatever they might be, right?

They might be specific, they might be the view that you have particular duties to your family or something like that. But once you’ve done all of that, then if you have the opportunity to do more good or not to do more good, to do less good, it’s better to do more good. So I can’t really imagine myself abandoning consequentialism even, you know, all of the way if you like and not thinking that that’s important.

Robert Wiblin: So it sounds like you think the most plausible alternative option is kind of consequentialism plus some kind of like side constraints, like around rights or autonomy or justice that you couldn’t violate.

Peter Singer: That’s right. I think that’s the only plausible option to me.

Arden Koehler: Okay. So if moral realism is true, then there are sort of facts of the matter about what’s right and wrong and people are making moral mistakes periodically. What do you think is the heart of making moral mistakes? Is it following your intuitions wherever they lead?

Is it resisting your intuitions in favor of following a theory down some sort of crazy path? Like how problematic do you think these different kinds of moral mistakes are?

Peter Singer: I think both of those are true actually. Both of those occur and it’s hard for me to say which are the more important ones.

I’ve certainly written more about people mistakenly following moral intuitions. And so for example, cause I’ve done a lot of work about ethics and animals, and people just intuitively think that animals don’t count. Clearly, I guess that’s something that is a sort of evolved response that we care about others and particularly others close to us, we don’t care about those who are more distant and animals are even more distant than other humans. But also the intuition that I don’t have obligations to help people who are in great need on the other side of the world. People I can’t see. Statistical lives, if you like, rather than an identifiable child that I can see.

I think our intuitions mislead us a lot in those cases. But there are some cases where you wish people had followed their intuitions. There’s a speech that Heinrich Himmler gave in Poznań to the SS in which, you know, I think they’ve just cleared out a ghetto of Jewish people or something, and they’ve all murdered them or sent them off to be murdered.

And he says something to them ,”What we’re doing today can never be written and recorded as history, but it’s an honorable thing to do despite the fact that any decent person must find some repulsion or some”… I don’t remember exactly what, but basically saying that this is repulsive to most decent people, but it’s the right thing to do because it purifies the Aryan race or whatever.

So you wish that Himmler had listened to that intuition that this is a repulsive thing to do, of course. So it does go both ways. There are cases where we have decent intuitions and ideologies lead us to ignore them. And there are other cases where we have intuitions that lead us astray.

Robert Wiblin: So I guess some people who are sympathetic to hedonistic or classical utilitarianism think that we should mostly ignore kind of our moral intuitions about specific cases and instead kind of go with this one intuition or this thing that they think we have direct access to, which is the kind of our personal experience of pleasure is good and our personal experience of like negative, you know, conscious states is bad. And yeah, how we apprehend like various different cases that people can give in thought experiments just like isn’t reliable evidence at all.

Do you have any reaction to that?

Peter Singer: Yeah. That’s a view that I’m strongly sympathetic to. So in the case of pleasure or pain, not even sure it’s quite right to call it an intuition. We have direct experience of pleasure and I think directly experiences it as something good in itself and pain as something bad.

Whereas I think the more specific intuitions about particular cases do get to be more subject to, in some cases, cultural influences. And in some cases, they’re evolved influences. Intuitions that helped us or our group to survive in other conditions, but are no longer relevant for today’s conditions.

Arden Koehler: So a lot of people that you know and that we know have taken an interest in the question of like, “Okay. What should we do when we are morally uncertain?” Not just uncertain about the facts in the world, but also about say whether consequentialism or some other moral theory is true or you know what, even just what variety of consequentialism is true, whether hedonistic utilitarianism or some other version is true.

How do you think we should go about approaching sort of moral questions in the real world when we’re uncertain about these things?

Peter Singer: I think that we should take that uncertainty into account and in some way, I don’t think we should be overly confident or overly dogmatic that we know what is right.

Clearly, we have, I guess, stronger convictions on some things than others as I just said earlier, I have a very strong conviction that consequentialism. is either the entirely right theory or that it’s with some side constraints, it’s the right theory. And if you like, I have a strong conviction, particular cases say that Kant was wrong when he said it was always wrong to tell a lie, no matter what the consequences would be.

So those things I find it really hard to imagine that I’m wrong about that, but still, I guess you can’t be 100% certain, and then there are other things as what you mentioned, as to whether hedonistic utilitarianism or some other form of consequentialism is right, where I certainly admit a much more significant degree of uncertainty.

And also we talked earlier about the population issue. I mean, I guess that’s not a terribly practical issue in terms of everyday decisions, but where it is relevant, then I agree there’s quite a substantial amount of uncertainty about whether the total view is the right view or there is some kind of theory X as Parfit called it and was always looking for, but never really came up with a satisfactory theory X that would be an alternative to the total view.

So I think we should try to take into account the possibility that we’re mistaken and people like Toby Ord and William MacAskill have written about this and say that you should take into account that possibility and maybe it should affect your choices so that you don’t do the thing that if you are wrong, will be much worse. That does seem to me to be relevant in some choices that we make.

Robert Wiblin: All right, let’s push on to some audience questions, yeah. So I said I was gonna interview on Twitter and Facebook and there was a couple of topics that came up just again and again from listeners. So the first one was, what are your kind of views on immigration?

I guess there’s a lot of people who think that potentially promoting freedom of people to move from very poor countries to rich countries could be among the very best things that we could do for global development, which is perhaps more a question for kind of economist and sociologist than a philosopher.

But yeah, do you have a view on whether that’s something that maybe people focused on global development should think about more.

Peter Singer: The answer to that is really no. Because even though in theory that might be true, you just have to look at the effect, not of open borders, but of small increases in immigration on the political situation in the United States.

In almost every country in Europe, it’s been a disaster, right? It’s led to the election of Donald Trump, which is not only bad for immigrants trying to get into the United States, it’s catastrophic for climate change efforts. It’s catastrophic for the whole landscape of politics in a myriad of ways.

You look at it in the UK where you are. Clearly the Brexit vote would not have passed without concern about immigration, even at the rather modest level that it was into the UK. And I think, you know, I’m very much opposed to Brexit. I think we have to support international institutions. And this is happening in so many other countries now.

So the Polish government was elected and now re-elected with support on the immigration issue. And you know, there are also pro-coal, so that’s also very bad for climate change. We’re getting these right wing parties in pretty much every European country now. So I think that to fail to take account of the political effect of advocating open borders is extremely naive.

Robert Wiblin: Yeah, I actually think that’s the top explanation or like people’s fears about migration probably is the single best explanation or the single biggest predictor for them supporting Trump or Brexit. But the interesting thing is that people’s fears about rates of migration are surprisingly like in the long-term seem surprisingly unrelated to the actual rate of legal migration. So I think actually that might’ve been more driven by the Syrian refugee crisis in the sense of kind of, there was like a breakdown of like lawful migration on borders and kind of maybe perceptions matter more than reality here.

Peter Singer: Well, it’s not numbers, I agree it’s not numbers. But it is the sense of losing control of the borders. I think that’s the common thing. And the Syrian refugee crisis has had an effect in Europe. It had no effect on the United States. It was minuscule numbers. And it wasn’t the focus. The focus there was people coming across the Mexican border, and that’s why Trump wants to build a wall, et cetera.

And it was the sense that we are losing control of our nation. And going back to a little earlier, Australia went through this as well with the boat people, the so called ‘asylum seekers’ coming across in small boats from Indonesia, which again helped to elect a conservative government in the 90s, the Howard government, rather than labor governments during that era, and maybe even contributed to the re-election of the Morrison government just recently which is also a very bad government on climate change.

So you’re right that it’s perceptions and the perceptions don’t depend on numbers, but they do depend on, do we have control of our borders, right? That’s the issue. And of course, if you really advocate open borders, you’re saying there should be no control of the borders, and that’s going to frighten people.

Arden Koehler: Some people have this sense that it is more humane to eat wild caught animals than farmed animals because they don’t suffer harms from factory farming.

Do you think that’s broadly right or wrong or are there differences depending on the animals and the circumstances that are worth highlighting.

Peter Singer: Clearly it does depend on the animals and circumstances, but broadly speaking, yes, it’s right. And I’ve written this too, that, you know, there’s a lot of people who oppose deer hunting, right?

Here I am in Princeton, where we’ve eliminated all the predators for deer, it used to be wolves and then it was indigenous Americans. They’re gone. The major predator of the deer at the moment is the motor vehicle because people hit them in their cars at night and you know, obviously they damage their car, they can injure themselves and they kill a deer.

So you know, should you be opposed to a hunter in Princeton who hunts deer and who’s a really good shot and takes care to make sure that he only shoots the deer when he knows that he can kill it with a single bullet? Well, you know, I mean, you can oppose it clearly, but I think compared to going down to the supermarket and buying a piece of pork that comes from a factory farmed pig, it’s doing negligible harm. So I certainly agree that if you take those comparisons, hunting is less something that’s worth opposing than factory farming.

Robert Wiblin: Does that extend to kind of fish caught in the open ocean?

Peter Singer: I mean, again, you know, it’s better to eat fish caught in the open ocean. I think than to eat fish that are farmed. And the main problem with that is that there isn’t the equivalent of dropping the deer with a single bullet.

There’s no real humane slaughter for fish. So they are going to suffocate and die slowly depending on how they’re caught. They might be hauled up in nets where they’re really compressed together in this net. If they’re deep sea fish, they might be dying of decompression as they come up from the depths, which would be a very painful death as well.

And the other question about fishing in the ocean is that there’s a sustainability question that we’re overfishing the oceans. But of course, buying fish from aquaculture doesn’t help if you’re buying carnivorous species of fish like salmon, because you have to get two kilos of other fish to feed the salmon to produce one kilo of salmon.

So yeah, to some extent it’s somewhat better. Let’s say you’re an angler and you go down and you throw your line in the ocean and you pull out fish, and as soon as you get them on the hook, you make sure that you kill them. That’s definitely better than buying either aquaculture fish or fish from a commercial trawler.

Robert Wiblin: I guess it seems like we would need to know how bad their death would be otherwise if they weren’t caught through fishing. Cause they might like die very gradually of old age or ill health or parasites or starve to death possibly or be caught by predators and then we don’t know how kind of how quickly they’d die in that situation. So we’ve got to kind of consider the counterfactual death as well.

Peter Singer: I suppose that’s true, although of course, yes, we’re killing them earlier than they would’ve otherwise been killed because they were alive when you killed them.

And so the number of fish deaths increases I guess. You get more young fish surviving because you’ve reduced the competition and then they get killed as well. It’s not an easy calculation to make, but yeah, you’re basically right.

Robert Wiblin: I guess maybe one final one might be, “What do you think is the biggest positive, practical impact you’ve had in your career that listeners might be able to learn from? I suppose is there anything other than writing Animal Liberation which I’m guessing might be the answer?

Peter Singer: I think writing Animal Liberation probably is the answer, but I’m hoping that the reaction we get to the new release of the updated version of The Life You Can Save, you know, making it free will mean that it gets a big readership and perhaps ultimately then the impact of my work on global poverty will come to equal the impact of my work on animals, if not surpass it.

Robert Wiblin: Maybe your biggest impacts are still ahead of you.

Peter Singer: That would be very fortunate.

Robert Wiblin: All right. Our guest today has been Peter Singer. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Peter.

Peter Singer: Thanks. Been great talking to you both.

Katy
Arden and Rob talk about the pros and cons of keeping EA as one big movement, Singer’s thoughts on immigration, and consequentialism and side constraints.

Arden Koehler: It was great to have you, Peter, and listeners, as always, we'll put up links so that you can learn much more about all the topics that we've discussed on our website, as well as a full transcript of the conversation. Until next time.

Robert Wiblin: All right, so we were under a bit of a time pressure in the interview because we only had a Peter for about an hour, but we raised a hell of a lot of issues, and I guess we had some thoughts to follow up with. Do you want to start?

Arden Koehler: One thing that we barely talked about, but which is super interesting, is the question of whether the EA movement should like what the face of the EA movement should be, whether it should be global poverty or something else. And also you brought up the possibility of the EA movement splitting into different movements. Maybe there's a global poverty focused one, or a global poverty and animal focused one, and then a more long termist one. So my reaction to that is just, I think that there are a lot of really good things about the EA movement being a lot of different causes together. So one thing is, like, you know, Peter said, maybe EA has the potential to really revolutionise philanthropy and doing good. And I sort of agree with that.

And I think one of the main ways it might do that is through basically promoting cause neutrality and the idea that you don't need to be sort of attached to a particular cause. And having all of these different causes over one umbrella seems like a really kind of amazing way to demonstrate that.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, that definitely seems like one of the biggest benefits is having a group of people who all share the same underlying philosophy, but then are willing to go in different directions just based on which problems they think are most important. But that's also one of the ways that EAA as a community or as an intellectual movement is very weird and almost unique. Maybe as a group trying to do good is to have people focused on such different object level issues, things that, as we're kind of pointing out, like sometimes don't really have that much overlap, or they use such different methods that there's not a lot of learning that you can do across them. There's not a lot of shared goals about concrete projects.

Arden Koehler: I guess maybe they look a little bit like political parties in some ways, which obviously potentially have very broad platforms or incorporate all kinds of different ideological groups within them, with some similar worldview sort of underlying it all. But then you add some premises here and supremacies there and you get the different things that people want to focus more on.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, but there's often electoral systems provide a very strong force in favour of people grouping, forming coalitions across different kind of factional groups that potentially don't have all that much in common. I mean, if you look in the US, the winner takes all system or the first past the post system makes it very hard to have anything other than two major parties. And so, yeah, if you're like a new group, you kind of have to choose a party to try to have influence on and then like, you know, lobby inside that group, because just starting a new party is just never really going to work because you're basically just not splitting the vote and hurting your cause.

Anyway, so we maybe look a little bit like a broad political party. But then I'm not sure that there is like as strong reasons for grouping and there's like lots of potential problems you could get where I guess people end up wanting to fund different things, wanting to prioritise different projects. And then this can potentially create frictions or just confusion, maybe also among the public. But what are you doing? So you're doing this AI stuff and the global poverty and the animals. It looks very strange, I think, if you're just encountering it in a very oblique way.

Arden Koehler:
Okay, that makes me think of a couple of things. So one, the fact that it's strange and different I think, is not necessarily a way. Now it does seem like the fact that this hasn't been done that many times before in the sort of outside of the sort of political party world might give us reason to think that it's a bad idea. But also I think it's something that attracts people to the EA movement. It's like, well, you don't need to be convinced that one thing is the most important thing to work on in order to be part of this community because like there's all this moving around that you can do within it.

And it's also kind of just demonstrating this fact that like, we're interested in like good per se and not like just this kind of good or that kind of good. But I do think, like, there's one way in which is especially strange to have a variety of different causes within EA because it's explicitly about prioritisation. It's explicitly about like, doing the most good. And so you know that these things are going to sort of necessarily compete for funding and attention with each other because everybody like, is trying to figure out where to put their next dollar. So that might make it actually even especially strange.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. You mean it's strange that there are so many different conclusions that are very different.

Arden Koehler:
No, I guess I don't think that's strange insofar as like, it's really hard to figure out what the best thing to do is and people are going to have different beliefs that lead them in different directions. I meant more like you could imagine a movement that didn't have as much focus on prioritisation having lots of different causes within it where they sit more peacefully together. People are happy to say, let's just do it all and not worry about what's more important than what yeah, that.

Robert Wiblin:
Makes sense, I guess. Yeah. Maybe years ago I thought that the main problem would be people bickering over where kind of people and money should be going, which caused us to prioritise, actually. It's incredible. There's been almost no fighting about that. People seem to get along very well in that way, I suppose. In the episode I was suggesting that the main problem is just with kind of messaging and the strategy for a group of people where these different problems kind of potentially demand like quite different ways of coordinating people or different sizes and kind of wanting to attract different people. And this creates like tensions that are like a little bit hard to resolve. And as much as you're a long termist, maybe you want to like attract particular kinds of people.

For example, you might be like particularly interested in policy, particular policy areas like national security or, you know, nuclear weapons and that just like, probably. You probably want a pretty different vibe for that than if you're doing, you know, animal activism.

Arden Koehler:
I don't know, I guess this doesn't really feel like it should be a problem in the way that competition for resources seems like there's just a really clear mechanism. And also, I don't know, you know, more about this than me, probably, but like, it seems like there's at least some sense of like, no, we think this is more important than you guys think it is and so you should like focus more on it and like, oh, these organisations should do more to promote this cause area because I think that this is like more important than the attention that it's getting and blah, blah. But like that's, that'll like, totally make sense.

Whereas it doesn't really seem like necessarily a problem to me to have different causes needing different types of people because why can't you just bring them all in and have this big tent? And of course maybe the national security people want to hang out more with a certain group and the animal people want to hang out more with a certain group. But it doesn't really seem like it should be a problem to have them all called EA and all sort of reading the same forum or whatever it means for it all to be one movement.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, well, I mean, inasmuch as you have people focus on different problems who just hang out amongst themselves and don't talk that much across different problems, then that's almost like, you know, half breaking it up in the first place.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, that seems right.

Robert Wiblin:
So it might just be that there's not that much collaboration that's possible between particular, like different causes, I guess so. In which case like, yeah, what are the synergies of combining them together? I guess it is this thing of like sticking out this claim that we're trying to do the most good per se and we're like open to switching from that we work on, which is especially distinctive.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Also, I mean, I guess, I think what's the downside of breaking up EA and what's the downside of keeping it together? If the downside of keeping it together is stuff like, well, maybe it creates some unnecessary faff and people have to sort through more posts about things they don't care about when they're trying to find stuff to read that doesn't seem that big of a downside, whereas it seems like the downside of breaking it up could be much bigger. So, like, at least insofar as we think that, like a lot of movements for doing good have had on sort of blinders have not communicated enough with like other groups, have not been open enough to changing their focus and so on and so forth. And we think that's been bad, which I guess, I think. I think that.

And it seems to be something that other people in the EA movement think that seems like a much more important kind of failure that like keeping everyone together seems like it could at least partially guard against.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. So I guess people are concerned about effective actress as a community kind of becoming too closed intellectually, which, yeah, I do think is a legitimate worry. But I suppose it would be even worse if you then break it down into just a subset of that. Like the people who are focused on this one problem, like taking a particular effective actua style lens on it, naturally they're going to be exposed to even fewer other ideas. So that does seem like a benefit, I guess. Yeah. To return to the problem that were identifying in the episode was that if you're focused on poverty, maybe you want to go for a branding or like an explanation of EA that makes sense to tens of millions of people.

Whereas if you're focused on kind of long termism and nuclear security or risks from emerging technologies, perhaps the way you would explain what EA is or you would explain what you're doing is very different because it's just like a very different crowd. You might want to attract people who are older, more senior perhaps, like, I don't know, would it be like more or less philosophy? I'm not sure, but yeah, in as much as you just kind of groups like independently going out and trying to attract different people, that maybe seems fine, but in as much as they end up with like conflicts where they're each like promoting different messages that then are maybe not only different but like conflicting, then that seems like challenging from a branding point of view.

Robert Wiblin:
Like one company that has different products that like have very different customers and then, you know, people like two different marketing departments each like promoting different idea of what, you know, Pepsi is.

Arden Koehler:
Well, people do get mad when they find out that, like coke owns like the, you know, healthy drink things. You hear people like these like conglomerates, like they own both the unhealthy thing and the healthy thing. I can't deal with this fact. No. But I guess are people like confused or is this already a phenomenon? Maybe I'm just not aware of it where like there are these different sort of branding techniques from different EA orgs that have different focuses and people are actually being like, well, I don't get it. Like, what is ea? Is it this or is it that? Is it. Is it into this more? I mean, we keep speaking in super generalities. Maybe we should say like more of a, well, no, I don't know how to actually. Don't know how to characterise this difference.

Robert Wiblin:
Well, it definitely is the case that, you know, people will encounter one project that some people involved in effective autism are working on and then they'll assume that is more or less what the whole thing is. So the classically people would think that effective altruism is like give. Well, so it's looking into for evidence based charities that help people end up developing well, okay. And then they're like very confused or don't believe you when you say that there's other aspects to it and that's not what effective altruism actually is.

But this happens too when they encounter the artificial intelligence safety research. Maybe they don't like that and they're like, wow, this effective altruism thing seems like garbage because they've encountered one aspect of it that they don't like and then because it is so abnormal to have a group of people who are focused on so many completely disparate projects.

Arden Koehler:
So then I feel like the question then is like, what happens when, okay, so they don't bel, let's take the case where they think effective altruism is give. Well, you say like, oh, also eas work on like AI risk stuff. And they say like, no, I mean, that's like, I must be a small part of it or that's like, that doesn't, I just don't buy that. That's one thing. What happens to their attitude to the, like, people who work on AI risk, are they like, oh, well, I don't consider this the same thing, but I'm still like. I think it's just as interesting as I would have if I encountered it as a like, named different movement.

In which case it seems fine and like, it makes no difference whether they consider it part of the same movement or a different movement or do they, is it somehow worse? Do they encounter in a worse way because of this initial idea that EA is givewell?

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I'm not sure whether it shifts their opinion of any of the other parts. I think the main thing is that the conversation just becomes very confused because people will express opinions about effective altruism as a whole that really only relate to one small aspect of. So you can imagine someone saying, oh, effective altruism is mistaken because in fact we shouldn't be using randomised controlled trials.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
And then you're like, well imagine that.

Arden Koehler:
In fact, right.

Robert Wiblin:
And then the response kind of comes, well, you know, only 20% of people are doing that. And so in fact it's just, there's not a lot of agreement on that. But it makes, I don't know, just has made the conversation about what effective altruism is and what its pros and cons are, I think like very confusing to watch because it's just so wide ranging in many different respects.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, okay.

Robert Wiblin:
I mean, I suppose that's not like, this doesn't sound like the worst downstream.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, right. Well, so it's a little confusing, but I don't know.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, but, okay, so maybe more starkly, imagine that you thought biosecurity was like the thing that we should focus on because it's just far and away the most important. That probably requires, you know, attracting very particular kinds of people in a very specialised labour in very particular countries. And then you're potentially just going to be frustrated when there's other people out there who care about other problems, who are out there kind of promoting related ideas and bringing people into this who, from your point of view, can't contribute to the problems that are most important. And likewise they're going to find your attempts to discourage them from promoting these ideas or from reaching other people who can't help with your project to just be frustrating.

I guess maybe ultimately the group that promotes things most widely just ends up dominating because they can just go out and do that. Or perhaps they get shut down by the other group. They get like told off and then I don't know. It seems very difficult.

Arden Koehler:
I don't know. I mean, so we're supposed to imagine in a scenario that like, the people who want to promote biorisk feel that it's actively harmful for the people who want to promote this other cause to like bring in people, new people into EA to work on that other cause. I mean, that just doesn't seem actively harmful to the biorisk people. It's not like unless they were creating more bioriska by doing so or something. But like, I.

Robert Wiblin:
No, but they're like distracting maybe from the thing that's more important and just. You don't want to then just invite like a thousand people who are not interested in what you think is most. Like, imagine you were having a biosecurity conference. Would you just invite along a thousand people focused on a completely different thing? You wouldn't, right. So it's distracting and these people are like not contributing to what you think matters.

Arden Koehler:
I guess. I agree. So I think for things like conferences, then I'm gonna be more sympathetic to the idea that there should be separate conferences for separate causes because, like, there really is just a sense of, like, you can't have a conference that's just like tonnes and tonnes of stuff or everything at the limit. And so that makes sense. But for a movement, I guess I just think, or like, where that just kind of means, like who wears the, like, the label and who, you know, kind of loose things about who. Lots of people have read and websites that people go to and like, social circles. I guess it just seems fine.

Especially if you think that, like, not that many people can contribute to biosecurity anyway, which like, I don't know if that's true, but, like, if it is true, then it's not like, oh no, all these people are coming into the movement and not doing anything on biosecurity. Like, they weren't going to anyway. So, like, it's great that they're working on this other thing that we also think is good.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, so a lot of this is going to hinge on whether you think there's like, multiple different. Like, the multiple different projects are similarly effective, or like, you're very happy to see people work on multiple ones, or whether if you think there's just like, one that stands head and shoulders or like, one, like, subset of it all that's way better than the rest. And then the others, other projects just like, don't have intrinsic value or like, don't, aren't adding very much in your mind, then you're much more likely to think, well, it's just like this best thing maybe should break away and just like promote its own. Yeah, I guess put itself in a more pure form.

Arden Koehler:
But I'm saying I don't think that's true.

Robert Wiblin:
Like if, because you think there's like, well, people like, might come in because they're interested in effective action as a whole and then like come to or like it grows the pie for everyone, right.

Arden Koehler:
Well, so, well, I'm not sure what you mean by the second thing, but like definitely the first thing. Which is what of course Peter said that like long termists and like sort of more esoteric causes or less mainstream causes do get talent from people coming in focused on global poverty or focused on animals at first. But I guess I'm just trying to say I'm not sure I see the harm from the people who are involved in biosecurity's perspective of having a, all these other people in EA. Even if there were no benefit, is it that they would be less interested in being part of EA because these other people are part of EA and they are not doing the thing they think are most important? I mean, that just seems like it's not obvious to me.

Robert Wiblin:
So here's one more thing. So imagine you can imagine that there's plenty of people out there who might be interested in long termism specifically interesting, like having effect on the very long term, but they don't like other aspects affects the effect of altruism. So that there's like if these two things are connected very tightly, then they maybe are less likely to get involved or less likely to buy into it because this kind of requires like more commitments. Perhaps you, like, you're interested in long termism, but you don't like effective altruism as a social scene. It's like you just don't seem to, you just don't gel with the people that well.

And it's kind of the more baggage or the more like things that you're bringing along, the more ideas that kind of people might be expected to buy into, the more kind of exclusive or restrictive it becomes. And maybe you just, you only really want to get people to buy into like the one thing that's necessary to work on or the small set of things that are necessary to work on, like the thing that you think is most important. So why then bring along all this other stuff and try to convince people of that as well if it doesn't really matter?

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Although, so there's something sort of initially surprising. I don't want to flag about the idea that it could be, like, more of a restrictive movement in the sense of turning more people off by having a greater variety of people in it. Do you know what I mean? Like, you're saying, like, well, if you have more people in the movement, then there's, like, more things that could turn somebody off. And that's, like, in some sense that's surprising just because, I mean, I see what you're saying, but there's also more things to, like, get people interested or, like, you would also sort of naively expected to be interesting to a greater variety of people, potentially more welcome, welcoming to a greater variety.

Robert Wiblin:
But, for example, you know, you more classically might have a soccer club, not a kind of soccer and cooking club, where people have to be both into soccer and into cooking in order to get involved. That would be, like, a little bit strange because now you're, like, adding, well, even if you're like, potentially you could be interested in only one. The fact that you, like, are only interested in one out of these two things and many people are interested in both might cause you to be less likely to get involved, even if, in a sense, there's, like, now there's something for a wider range of people. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not sure whether I'm super convinced by that argument, but maybe another concern is that it's like, culture is a little bit hard to create.

It's quite hard to shift, it's hard to define. But you might imagine that some cause areas like biosecurity, for example, might want to have, like, a very cautious culture because there's a lot of potential ways of making things worse accidentally, whereas other problem areas might want to have a move fast break things kind of attitude or be more reckless because there's less downside risk. So you just want to experiment. And then by integrating these two groups, it's very hard to develop the culture that's appropriate for that particular problem area.

Now, of course, we can solve this by having different social groups that only mix somewhat, so they might like them, might say, intellectually, I'm into effective actors, but then on a day to day basis, they mostly just spend time with other people who are focused on the problem that they also think is the. Is the best thing for them to work on. Yeah, but then we've kind of gone halfway towards, you know, dividing it into different groups anyway. We just think kind of, well, everyone, like, subscribes to this broader ideal of doing the most good, using kind of an effective outturist mindset. But for practical purposes we then like break up into different organisations or social scenes or cities around different.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I guess I feel like we're already sort of like part of the way toward the like thinking in terms of that, where it's like, look, what do we really care about is like how effectively broken up it is or like, that's the important question. We're already like partly there right now, right? So we're not like fully integrated, of course, and we're not fully broken up. And I guess it's like where should we be on that spectrum? Maybe closer to the like broken up side, but I don't think that much far that much more on that side of the spectrum. I do think that like the conference thing maybe like these, some of these things where like there's actually just like it's just kind of hard logistically to have all of these groups under one roof.

I could see like there being EA globals that are more focused on different cause areas but where they're all, like, they're all still EA.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, I guess think about it, with 80,000 Hours as an organisation, we could try to have grow 80,000 Hours to be much bigger and then have like much broader coverage of many different problem areas. But then I think you'd end up with like lots of clashes between kind of different culture of people who are focused on different problems. There'd be like a lot of tension with like, how do we market it? How do we explain what 80,000 hours is if we're both trying to appeal to someone who's working on nuclear security in DC and someone who wants to work on like poverty or urban design india? It's just this is, these are like not natural categories. Maybe that should be like all served by the same website and the same advice and the same people.

Maybe they should be like split up into different organisations that just cater to those different kind of customer groups.

Arden Koehler:
I feel like I have a possible underappreciation. Let me put it this way. It doesn't feel like there should be that big of differences in how we should market these ideas to me or like that there will be such big cultural differences between people focused on these different areas that like, we could like easily turn off some and while like appealing to others. But I think I might just like not have a great picture of this and like, you've like worked in this a lot longer than me, so maybe you have a better idea of, like, what kinds of things actually appeal to what groups.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, well, it sounds like I'm arguing that I do think that it should break up much more, but I'm just.

Arden Koehler:
Oh, yeah, sorry, we've assumed these positions. Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
For the sake of argument. I mean, I think across countries there would be. I think you'd want to make big differences if you wanted to kind of explain effective activism to people who had lived born india, like, had grown up india, there's going to be a whole different cultural context there. And you want to, like, potentially, you know, have a nip and a tuck of the ideas to make them make sense to people. I mean, yeah, I suppose, you know, transporting effective altruism from the UK to the Netherlands is like, doesn't necessarily involve many changes at all, but the further the cultural gap, the more you want to change it a little bit.

Arden Koehler:
And you think there could be something analogous with cause areas.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, you think, like, animal activism, like, attracts particular kinds of people. In general, it's like, you know, policy world attracts particular kinds of people. Probably people who, like, wouldn't ordinarily form organisations together because they, like, they just have a different personal style.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
And then of course, they don't. In fact, like, even if they will say, you know, they're supportive of effective altruism and they're, like, interested in reading about this, like, broader topic, doesn't mean they have to, like, work together and hang out together.

Arden Koehler:
And I guess it also seems like it's at least possible that, like, although it is true that different types of people will tend to have tended to gravitate toward these different causes, it would be, like, better if there was a little bit more of the, like, culture of people who are interested in animal stuff, like, sort of injected into the culture of people who tend to be more interested in security things because there are various great aspects of all of these subcultures and maybe mixing. I mean, it just seems like usually, it's usually just good and the best bits sort of rise to the surface and create this thing that is better than all of the things that went into it.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, there is also this problem that you bring in people who are very different and they're just more likely to have conflict, more likely to fight with another. Like, maybe their projects won't work for that reason. I think in practise there's just been remarkably little conflict, given the diversity of people who are attracted.

Arden Koehler:
So, yeah, have we just gotten lucky or is this actually I guess if.

Robert Wiblin:
I was being flattering, I might say people involved, people who've been attracted to effective autism are very interested in reflecting over things at great length and maybe not super impulsive. And so they may be less inclined to just get into fights with people, more likely to just intellectualise things. So maybe that is kind of a protective factor that has helped. I mean, there's also been a lot of active efforts to make sure that it seems, for example, that it's much easier for people to get into interpersonal conflict when they don't meet with one another. But then if they just actually hang out.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
And, you know, get. Get dinner, then suddenly they find that they get along a whole lot better than they did before.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. I mean, I wonder if, you know, you said there hasn't been as much conflict over, like, funding and other sorts of resources as one might expected. Maybe those conflicts would actually get bigger if, like, it wasn't as socially integrated.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, that's an interesting point. Yeah.

Arden Koehler:
Because, I mean, there'd still be a lot of funding sources that would end up, you know, being in common. Yeah. Being in common.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. I mean, another cynical explanation I've heard is that in general, effective autism has been becoming larger. There's kind of more funding available each year than the last year, typically, and more people getting involved. And so this means there isn't a need to, like, fight this much as kind of everyone's budgets can grow. But then what if, like, there was suddenly, you know, a major funder dropped out and there was a lot less resources to go around and maybe people would start getting a bit more. More frustrated with one another?

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, that seems plausible. That doesn't seem that cynical to me. That just seems like. Yeah, I mean, scarcity breeds conflict.

Robert Wiblin:
Like, we're making amazing sociological progress here.

Arden Koehler:
I guess, like, another option that I've heard people talk about is not so much splitting up by cause area, but splitting up by, like, different philosophical, you know, sort of views. So. Which I think I might be more sympathetic to because, like. So one of the things that attracted me to effective altruism was the idea of cause neutrality, but, like, not the idea of, you know, ethics neutrality or something like, that's not a thing. So philosophical. Theses, I feel like, are more. They strike me as more appropriate reasons to have, like, separate groups. Now, I'm not. I'm not totally sure about that, but, like, so, like, having a long termist, focused sort of group and a not long term as focused group makes more sense to me than splitting it up by cause where, like, any cause in principle would be like, could be part of the long termist group. It's just that, of course, some causes have more of a case for, like, making a difference in the long term than others.

Robert Wiblin:
I guess I kind of conceive of breaking off long termism as, to some extent, breaking people up by cause area because there are, like, there's a common group of causes that tend to go along with that. That also then happened to correlate with people's philosophical views as well.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, that feels really different to me just because. So one of the things that seems really valuable about keeping, like, people who have different focuses together is that they can argue about, like, no, what really is the best means to our shared goal? We have this shared goal and we want to figure out, like, what, like, things that we can do in the world are actually going to get us there. And that seems like something that can really benefit from bringing people together who have different opinions, but it's like less obvious at least, that it's better to bring people together who have different goals. So if one goal is like, I want to maximise the good over, like, all of the universe's history, so.

And the other goal is like, I want to maximise the good in the next, like, you know, 400 years or something like that, those are different goals. And so you're not going to. That have quite the same character of conversation.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I suppose it is sometimes remarkable how much people have pretty different philosophical views, end up agreeing on what concretely should be done, which is a way that you can end up with people who have very different view, I suppose, than what most people involved in effective actress and what have. Who nonetheless think, oh, absolutely, I want to fund the same projects. But then I suppose that's always liable to potentially break down, that they could then end up really disagreeing for a reason that no one else would accept to say.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I guess I think, like, it seems like more of an issue with long termism versus not long termism than it does with like, utilitarianism, like straight utilitarianism versus like maybe a mixed view, like the one that singer was talking about where it's like, oh, you're sort of like a utilitarian part of the time, but you also have some rules that you don't break. It feels like those, like, people converge more often on what you should do because we're like, very seldom in the kinds of situations that break the views apart, whereas it doesn't seem like that's true with long termism versus not locked hermism.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, that's probably right. Okay, so you're saying if you had a group that broke apart, which is like, we're just going to do straight utilitarianism, none of this, like, effective altruism, watered down stuff, then you think they might end up just like reinventing the same projects, basically, or like doing the same work. Like, it'd be a variety of views. I guess you're saying, like, if long term us broke away, then they would probably be doing something that was quite distinctive from what? Like other people involved in effective altruism currently doing. And consistently so.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I think that's. That seems right to me.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, that does seem probably like the most natural split.

Arden Koehler:
So another very related question is, even if we accepted that we want to have a really broad movement that can have tonnes of people in it, like Peter Singer was saying, you know, why does that mean that global poverty should be the face of the movement? So I feel like I hear these kind of things sort of tied together a lot, but, like, it seems like there's some implicit argument going on there. So one thing might be, well, maybe global poverty responds more to funding increases and, like, having a bigger movement is just always going to better. Or maybe not always, but, like, almost always better for, like, having more funding. Or maybe it's that just a lot more people can contribute. I think that those are the two main things. Does that sound right to you?

Robert Wiblin:
I guess I would have thought that the main thing was that it's like, it's a much shorter step from where most people are currently to, like, more intuitive. It's more intuitive, yeah. So many people already do think that maybe like, a large fraction of people trying to do good already do think that one of the best things to do would be to help people in extreme poverty in the developing world. And even among those who don't say, who are focused on, you know, poverty in their local area or in their country, it's not a huge step philosophically to say, well, there's people in even more dire poverty, you know, a few hundred miles away, so maybe. And actually we should prioritise them.

It doesn't involve these, like, then further steps to say, oh, and like, animal consciousness is really important, or, you know, we should be thinking about, like, people in thousands of years time. These all like, involve, like multiple. You don't think so?

Arden Koehler:
Well, no, sorry, I think you're. I think this is like 90% true. I just. It also seems like there are pretty intuitive elements to other cause areas, like especially x risk. I mean, like end of the world is bad. Like, it's hard to get more intuitive than that in some sense.

Robert Wiblin:
I mean, you can tie it into climate change as well. Yeah, many people are...

Arden Koehler:
People seem to have sympathy for the idea that it would be bad if like extreme climate change ended here. Human civilization.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, many people are on board with that. So, yeah, it's true.

Arden Koehler:
Okay, so, but maybe overall, compared to like all the other cause areas, with maybe the exception of x risk, global poverty is more intuitive. I would buy that. But so I thought that maybe it was the idea that, like more people can contribute. And I feel like at least sometimes people think that more people can contribute to global poverty. And, yeah, so I guess that does seem true now. But I was wondering, like, should we expect that to be true for a long time? Because we might think that there just isn't a lot of infrastructure around, like explicitly long termist causes. And so that's why it's like really hard basically to like do stuff in the longtermist world because there just aren't like a bunch of jobs, there's not like set procedures, we just don't know how to do it. And so you have to do all this, like figuring out how and field building and that's really hard. And maybe not that many people can do it, but like maybe in 50 years it won't be the case.

And there could be like tonnes of ways of contributing to longtermist causes and like maybe if x risk is still like the main thing that people focus on in the long termist domain, then, like, that would be really. I think that could be really intuitive, in which case it could just be like, here's an intuitive and like very accessible sort of moral movement and with long term extras reduction as the face.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I have to admit I haven't thought about that one that much. You're imagining that maybe if we were in 1950, it would be hard for people to figure out how they could contribute to ending global poverty because not that much research had to be done, there wasn't the infrastructure for doing it.

Arden Koehler:
He'd have to be this really innovative scientist.

Robert Wiblin:
I'm going to go to one of these countries and figure out how to cure these diseases that are currently seem very intractable to cure. And so maybe we're at that kind of stage with long termism, but it will gradually become much more apparent what things should obviously be funded and what it'll be organised career tracks that people can just get on. Yeah, it's interesting, I suppose Will MacAskill, who I think we've got an interview with, that will come out after this one. I think his vision now is to have long termism be a very broad movement that can hopefully get a very large fraction of the population on board.

Arden Koehler:
I'm so glad to hear that. I didn't know that was something he was thinking about.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. And I think that's maybe partly because he is less focused on these weird existential risks and more just thinks that you want to shape the future as a whole through like, you know, improving people's values, building better governmental institutions, having more coordination between countries is much more like having just society be like wiser as a whole, where it seems much more obvious that you just need like a lot of people chipping away at these problems in like many different small ways.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. I mean, even if you stayed focused on x risk, if you thought that it was like x risks that were going to continue to come up over the next like thousand years, or there was, you know, trying to keep those risks down over the long term, then it could still play into that kind of broad movement. I guess the picture where you aren't in favour of that is where you think there are these x risks that are here really soon. And we just need people to work on those as much as possible and not worry too much about what we're going to do in 50 or 100 years because we really just need to make it through this.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, that makes sense, I suppose. Another thing is, at the moment, people studying what government policies do we want to reduce existential risk. Risks don't really have that long a menu of policies that they feel very confident about, but they might well be different in ten or 50 or 100 years time. There might just be lots of obviously specific things that people should do and that they can run campaigns on and people can run for government advocating these things just the way that they do policies that would reduce domestic or international poverty or reduce climate change, for that matter.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
Okay.

Robert Wiblin:
I'm somewhat convinced.

Arden Koehler:
Great. Yeah. So another very related thing is that. So Peter said that he thought it sounded good to try to encourage people to be working on things like AI safety or other x risk reduction, but that, like, he saw that as kind of a modest investment of the EA community. So, like that was consistent with thinking that we should be spending a sort of lower fraction of our resources on those kinds of issues. But, yeah, it's not obvious to me that is a modest investment. It seems like it actually just takes so much to like get people into. So of course I'm focused on like getting people into these roles because like here we are at 80,000 hours, but also just to like build these fields that don't really exist.

Like it would be a modest investment to like do this kind of thing in a field that already was established, but in one that isn't already established, it feels like it actually takes a lot of resources. And so maybe like if you think that's good, then you're going to want like pretty substantial investment from that. The effective altruism community.

Robert Wiblin:
Interesting.

Robert Wiblin:
So the idea is that if you're trying to kind of build a field of intellectual inquiry from scratch, then, you know, you probably need like $100 million and like maybe hopefully hundreds of people to get it off the ground and get it legitimacy. You can't just throw a few people at it because then they just can't accomplish anything.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Or like even getting a few. Yeah, getting a few people who are going to be effective is like hard and like takes a lot. So that like if we thought, well, we want EA to be like establishing these fields that really is going to compete with the idea that we want to spend a majority of our resources on these other cause areas because that might just be a majority of our resources.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. I think the bigger tension that I see here is that what would be a modest investment from a global point of view, putting maybe a couple of hundred people on, working on the robustness and reliability of AI. That doesn't seem like that extreme given the potential importance of ML for the future of humanity as a whole, just based on common sense ideas and people's, the range of forecasts that people.

Arden Koehler:
Have even given a bunch of uncertainty.

Robert Wiblin:
Right. I mean, there's like tens of thousands of people working on improving AI and applying it to different problems. So why not have 100, 200 people working on making it, reducing the downside risks? That ends up being potentially a very large fraction of effective altruism because it's a relatively small group at the moment. As effective altruism becomes bigger, there's more people involved, you'd expect that there'll be a greater diversity of projects. And I think that is happening and does seem pretty desirable. I mean, you're kind of alluding to this idea that it's kind of increasing returns and focusing on a single problem.

So like one person kind of can't accomplish a 10th, as much as ten people can and those ten people can't accomplish a 10th, as much as 100 people can because, like, you want to, there's some, like, basic work that has to be done before you can even begin to make progress on something. And so it's kind of, if you want to have one person, well, you may as well maybe have 100 people, and then at that point, maybe you hit declining returns and then you should move on to a new. A new issue. Yeah, but this does mean that, like, initially at least, probably going to have some clumping or some like, agglomeration where a whole bunch, like, people pile into the same problem so that they can actually get something done. So there's kind of a critical mass to get off the ground.

Arden Koehler:
Right.

Robert Wiblin:
But then that makes you seem like, peculiarly narrow, perhaps in the focus that you have, because it's kind of like three projects that people have piled into a lot and you're like, is it obviously that only these three things should be getting attention, but until you get bigger, you kind of can't potentially do more than three things? Seriously. Yeah. Speaking of, I guess, communications and pr issues, what did you think of Singer's reaction to the question about immigration? It was interesting. Well, I didn't necessarily guess that he was going to say, well, you shouldn't necessarily talk about immigration because of the perverse political effects that they might have.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting, too, and kind of like, I guess it was surprising because it seems like so often in Singer's career it's paid off to just be like, just advocate for the thing that you think is morally right and not worry too much about people's reactions, as were talking about throughout some of the rest of the podcast. So, yeah, I thought that was kind of interestingly conservative or something. Not conservative in the political sense, but just worrying about these ramifications.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, it is interesting.

Robert Wiblin:
I guess I feel like you have to, in your mind, maintain two balance sheets here. So people ask me, like, what policy do you favour? And I kind of always try to say, well, I personally prefer, like, policy x, but like, given the political reality of, like, how other people respond, then I, in fact, don't think that we should advocate for it. But I guess sometimes people get a little bit confused between these two and they'll say that they're against the idea just because, like, other people are against it. And then you, like, never actually get to find out what their real view is.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
So I guess, like, here, like, Singer probably is in favour of more immigration. Like, you know, if you're a dictator and there was, like, no one else whose, like, concerns and reactions you'd have to care about. But then, like, yeah, given the reality things that it's not a good thing to promote. So perhaps just the political backlash on this issue is particularly salient at the moment. So that's why that seems like kind of the first issue to consider or the biggest downside to consider. I guess. I wonder what, wonder whether there's other policy issues that you could make similar arguments about. I mean, maybe people don't, like, in some countries, people hate the idea of aid money going overseas. That's kind of offensive to them, I guess.

You were saying earlier that you thought there might be backlash about if you could actually get to a point where people were considering outlawing animal agriculture. So you had massive progress on factory farming, then you could imagine a huge backlash from people who think that's massively overbearing and unreasonable.

Arden Koehler:
I mean, God, can you imagine? Can you imagine if there was, it became a semi mainstream sort of left policy issue to be like, let's outlaw factory farming, let's say before clean meat is on the market, there'd be an absolutely enormous backlash. And, like, I could easily see that leading to, like, a sort of Trump phenomenon insofar as, you know, singer is right, that, like, the sort of immigration backlash was a big part of Trump getting elected. Something like that seems like it could easily happen with animal agriculture, but that hasn't been a reason for him not to advocate for that. I mean, you could think that it's just that, like, well, at this point, there isn't going to be a backlash because it's just not mainstream.

And, like, maybe, you know, if it were to become more mainstream, then we should back up, which is kind of interesting.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, that is. So I suppose is the argument that, well, I suppose you could find something where there won't be a backlash, but it seems like with almost everything, there kind of is some backlash, at least.

Arden Koehler:
With everything that we're doing, like, really wrong at the time. Right. Because, like, the reason we're doing it, right, really wrong, is that, like, lots of people don't. Yeah. Think that it's.

Robert Wiblin:
So maybe the argument has to be that you have to go, like, slow enough to bring enough people on board by the time you're actually going to be able to, like, implement policy. Maybe that's in a very broad scale. So it's a question of timing. But it does seem like in as much as you think, it's like a massive injustice that people can't cross borders. Then maybe you do have to start pushing on this now, like, making that argument, I suppose. Maybe you don't want to implement policy or maybe you want to stay out of actually suggesting, well, we're going to increase campaigning to actually increase the amount of immigration, because that might freak people out more than just the philosophical argument. But at some point, you have to start persuading people. You'll never get over the backlash stage.

Arden Koehler:
Right. It would seem bad if, like, every time there was gonna potentially be a really bad backlash, we, like, backed off on every moral issue.

Robert Wiblin:
There's a backlash to women's suffrage, backlash to anti racism, backlash to try and abolish slavery. But, yeah, a lot of these things are really important. Like, sometimes you just have to. Have to pay the price.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I mean, I guess you could think that, like, if you were just, like, politically omniscient and you just knew when, like, the especially backlashy moments were then, like, yeah, maybe like, pause for a year and then, like, come back to it. But it just seems really hard to tell beforehand.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I guess to Steelman Singer's view, perhaps you would think immigration currently is pretty low. It's just not going to be possible to increase it that much. So even though it would be very nice to increase it a lot, in fact, the gains that we can realistically get anytime soon are really small, and yet the backlash is so out of proportion to any of the actual numbers that you bring in. So you could bring in a thousand refugees from somewhere, and this allows right wing media or anti immigration media to make a huge fuss and persuade lots of people to vote differently, even though you've, like, helped only a very tiny number of people?

Arden Koehler:
So how does this not generalise, though, to, like, every sort of controversial moral thing? Is it that in some cases, even though there would be a huge backlash, there would also be a huge upside to being able to change some policy? So, like, taking the animal issue as, like, analogy here, what's the analogue of open borders? It's like, abolishing all animal actions, agriculture or something. But, like, probably you'll only, you know, when you campaign on this, in this, like, imagined world where it's approximately as mainstream as immigration reform, you're campaigning to, like, basically increase welfare standards a little bit or increase some tax here or blah, blah, blah, and, like, probably you're not gonna get huge welfare gains if that goes through, but you might incite a really big backlash. And still, I think you should probably press on I guess is my instinct.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. Well, it is interesting that, you know, even many people who, you guess, based on their, like, state of philosophical views, would think that we should abolish animal agriculture. Like, usually don't campaign on that line. They usually do take a different angle, like, I guess like welfare, you know, welfare for farm animals or something like that. I guess so, yeah. What about global poverty? I suppose seems like, yeah, this definitely is sometimes a line used by political parties that we're not. We're gonna stop sending money overseas, stop wasting money overseas. But it doesn't seem to be quite as potent as some of these other issues. There's like some people who are, like, drawn in by that message, but I think fewer people are concerned about aid spending than about immigration.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. For whatever reason. It's actually really interesting because it does feel like somewhat analogous. It's like helping people who are not already. So I'm thinking of this from the US centric perspective. Helping people who are not already US citizens so are not in the present US citizens with, like, resources that would otherwise go to us citizens. Of course, in the immigration case, like, a lot of people argue that actually, like, more immigration grows the pie and you'd have more resources for US citizens as well. But, like, putting that aside, people imagine that it's like, well, I'm either gonna get this, like, job or it's going to go to an immigrant. And so it seems like really similar. It's actually really surprising that there's such a different reaction. Why do you think that is?

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I suppose it feels like, you know, having open borders would change people's lives a lot more than sending even five or 10% of their income overseas, potentially. I mean, like, obviously foreign aid in reality is tiny. So maybe that, like, helps to explain why in reality people don't. It's like what I think in the US, like, 0.3% of GDP factor, negligible sum. Although they maybe like think they think it's way more. Yeah, like, most. Most people in survey think it's much more, but even so. Yeah, it just feels like, yeah. Losing some percentage of your income feels like less fundamental than maybe. I guess they would say, like then having the culture of the place that you live change massively in a way that you're opposed to.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I guess so.

Robert Wiblin:
I guess it maybe, like, brings out more of like a racist thing as well.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, that's probably the elephant in this conversation. Yeah, I guess there's also the issue that, like, there's such thing as illegal immigration. There's no such thing as the government illicitly taking your money and sending it overseas.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I suppose there is a benefit to doing things that are not politically controversial because you can just make more progress. You don't have groups who are actively organised against you.

Arden Koehler:
It's disturbing the idea that maybe some issues could get to a point where then it would be a bad idea to work further on them.

Robert Wiblin:
I think in general, societies, things have been getting better and there's been lots of controversial campaigns that people have run that were at least controversial at the time. And there was a backlash. I think it was good that they did it and overall, in the long term, things are made better. So I think inasmuch as promoting immigration is a bad idea because of the backlash effect, I think it kind of must be an exception to the more general rule that in general, it's good to push for things that are good, because if they're, like, right, then most of the time, eventually you win and there's a backlash temporarily, but then you get the benefit forever after once you've really convinced people.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Okay, well, I hope that's right.

Robert Wiblin:
Well, I suppose if inasmuch as promoting good things is actually bad because of the backlash, maybe we should promote bad.

Arden Koehler:
Things because we have such a big backlash. If we just promote obviously bad things. Well, mobilise the people.

Robert Wiblin:
Well, there is. There is a school of thought that thinks this, that is like, it's bad to make the world better in, like, small ways, because then you prevent the revolution that will make things much better.

Arden Koehler:
Oh, yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
So this is like the worst, the better philosophy, where, in fact, we should, like, make things worse now. So there'll be like a massive change. And so, as you do see, for example, after Trump was elected, trade and immigration became more popular than they'd ever been in surveys in the US because it kind of radicalised people against the views that he was expressing. So, like, maybe people who were opposed to Trump, but maybe had more ambivalent views about immigration and trade, but before Trump, now they side against everything that he's against. So I see there's a backlash to things that you might think are bad.

Arden Koehler:
But if Trump only got elected because of the backlash, then really it's the better. Because if you did these good things and there was a backlash against that, which then there was a backlash against the backlash, which now is promoting the good things again.

Robert Wiblin:
It's true. So we should promote immigration to get Trump elected so that then finally we can have broadest.

Arden Koehler:
Okay, let's move on. So another thing I thought was interesting and a little bit surprising was that Peter Singer thought that consequentialism with side constraints or, like, rules that you're not allowed to break was the most plausible moral view besides consequentialism. Like, you know, consequentialism has all of these distinctive features, and one of them is that there's no absolute rules, but another is that, like, it says that the only thing that is right is the thing that is best, or that promotes, you know, makes for the best consequences. And I at least, like, intuitively find that second thing the more sort of difficult aspect of consequentialism. So I. It's like he went for giving up on no absolute rules over giving up this other feature that says that, like, you always have to do the thing that's best. And I thought that was kind of interesting.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I think I probably share singer's intuition there that I find it, like, yeah, I don't find the demandingness nearly as troubling as the idea that you can just, like, trample over people's autonomy or freedom or rights. Yeah, that seems like much more disturbing consequence to me. Maybe it's just that, you know, of course we don't want to think that morality is extremely demanding and, like, could impose on our lives to that extent, but that feels like that's explained by our, like, kind of natural selfishness or, you know, our prudential interests that we, like, you know, we're not perfectly moral beings. Right. So it's like, there's things that we want to do. Utilitarianism says you can't do because you have, like, these other duties, but then it just feels like, much more of a moral issue.

It's like, so you're just gonna, like, you could just, you know, imprison an innocent person even though they've done nothing wrong, because that would, like, have good consequences in some diffuse way that feels, like, morally offensive.

Arden Koehler:
Right, yeah, I see what you're saying.

Robert Wiblin:
I think it's. It's interesting that maybe effective altruism as a school of thought has kind of adopted, like, parts of both of this. So both, I think, like, moral side constraints is, like, built into effective altruism philosophically. And, like, as a community saying that's, like, yeah, you can't, like, violate other people's rights, like, even if the consequences would be very good. And also that while we, like, want people to focus more on doing the most good, we don't want them to, like, focus on just the exclusion of everything else. They're both like nice compromises that make it, like, better politically and like much less risky and much more capable of fitting into people's lives in an ordinary way. And I think you don't have to make huge compromises there for it to a much more practical way of living in the world.

Arden Koehler:
That seems right. It seems like the motivation, though, for saying that don't violate people's rights, in effect, of altruism is more coming from moral uncertainty than political palatability. I don't know.

Robert Wiblin:
I mean, it's in a sense, over determined. There's a lot of reasons why it's good. One is that if you tell people that it's okay to like, violate people's rights, if we'll have good consequences, then they're just going to constantly mess up and violate people's rights. And where's that? And there's moral uncertainty.

Then there's like, well, if you're the kind of group that goes around violating people's rights, you're gonna get like shut down very quickly kind of regardless. And then I guess, like, there's also just like disgust, I think that people have, like, even setting aside, like fundamental, like, we're thinking that it's wrong. It's like people also just think it's like kind of appalling on some, like gut level, even setting aside, I think, like, moral argument. You know what I mean? I was like, I would want to be involved in it with a group that like, violated people's rights like that. Like, even if I thought on like some like purely philosophical level that it was like, acceptable, okay?

Arden Koehler:
And you weren't like, so you weren't like politically opposed. It's not like, so this is supposed to be a different point than the like, political palatability thing. It's like people wouldn't say that it's wrong and they wouldn't fight against it, but they would just not get involved because it would be too, like personally hard for them.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, personally hard. Just revolting. I don't know. I guess the political thing I was suggesting was that it's like the group just like, won't be able, it won't be able to continue because it will get shut down by other groups. Because it's like we have, like, as a society, we have tried to outlaw any group that's willing to do things like this. And I think rightly so. But then, yeah, I think also just like, you wouldn't be able to build a group because, like most people wouldn't have. Yeah, they wouldn't have the stomach for it.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Okay.

Robert Wiblin:
And I think that's, like, also to the good. Right. So there's like, reasons why we have these intuitions that, like, violating rights and autonomy is no good. It's like it. Because it, like, would. If people like, I think, didn't have that, then I think society would function.

Arden Koehler:
Much, much less well, definitely, or, well, sorry, I should say I agree, probably. Okay. And then the, like, reason that eas are usually wanting to say things like, well, you know, your whole life doesn't have to be about doing good. You don't have to think about doing good in every possible decision is more just, we want people to be part of this movement. We think it's like good overall when people are able to do something for, you know, their own happiness because then they're more likely to get involved or something like that.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. I mean, again, I think there's like, multiple different reasons and people kind of, like, coupled together. They're like their own justification. I suppose one is that it's like, psychologically a lot easier to say, well, I'm gonna put in, like, x. I'm gonna put in, you know, 10% of my money or like 30% of my time into doing good. And then, like, that's gonna be the limit. And I'm not gonna constantly worry about, like, whether I should do 31% and like, 11%, things like that.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
There's also just people who think that, in fact, morality isn't that demanding. Like, maybe. Probably most people think that. So, in fact, they don't feel like it's obligatory to, like, spend all of their spare time doing good, then there's also, you know, even if you thought that it was obligatory, then it's going to be a lot easier to get a lot more people involved if your ask is much more reasonable.

Arden Koehler:
I feel like that was just, that's the first point again, like, it's easier to do it. That's why it's easier to get people involved.

Robert Wiblin:
But then there's like, okay, yeah. So they're like two different angles, two different benefits, I think. So one is like, people will be able to stick around for longer because they're not going to burn out, they're not going to harm themselves. And then there's also what people will. If people look at a group of people and notice that they're all, like, burning out and, like, miserable, then they're not going to get involved.

So just like, make a reasonable ask of people. And then, like, many people can follow through on this and many people can participate. Whereas if you ask for perfection, then almost no one will, like, few people will get involved in the first place and then they won't be able to stay involved either because, like, no one. No one is capable of doing that.

Yeah, I guess some people might also think that, you know, overworking yourself or trying too hard actually leads to you to accomplish less, potentially, especially in as much as you think what really matters is what people accomplish over, you know, many decades, then it's like important to encourage them to do something that's sustainable in the long term. So I think it's like an extra reason.

Are there any others that we've missed? It's interesting that, like both of these have like so many different justifications that I feel they're on like pretty robust grounds. Although there's always a question of, like, you know, exactly how much.

Arden Koehler:
Yes, I think it's especially. Well, there's a question for that. For the demandingness one. There isn't really a question for that. Because, like, nature is, to be pretty precise.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, you know, most people, I guess, accept that, you know, under like, really unusual circumstances, you can violate people's rights. Yeah, I guess, like. Yeah, I guess Peter brought up the example of like, torturing innocent person to prevent, you know, a nuclear weapon going off in a city. Yeah, I guess I haven't had actually seen a survey on this, but I expect that most people would accept that even though that's like, you know, appalling and they would struggle to do it and maybe wouldn't in fact do it, that they can understand the force of the moral argument there. I guess people have this. There's kind of a morality that comes along with like wartime circumstances or something like that where it's like the stakes are so extreme that, like.

Robert Wiblin:
Anyway, it's like most people, I guess, accept that, like, some rights can be like, broken sometimes. Maybe the question is just like, where did. Wherever is the line drawn?

Arden Koehler:
Yeah, I guess also, like another way in which there's a matters degree. So the thing I said before is false is that I think people reasonably feel that some rights are more invaluable than others. So, like, maybe you have a right to know stuff about, like, a right for people not to hide certain kinds of information from you or something. But, like, that's much less important than your right life.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, like an everyday kind of right violation that we accept just on practical grounds is that we incarcerate people before they've had their trial and, like, sometimes don't allow them out on bail, which probably we do too much, I guess. Yeah. I've recently seen evidence if you let people out without any bail, then they show up almost at the same rates as when they do have bail. But, like, sometimes you suspect that someone's dangerous to the community, but you haven't yet proven that beyond reasonable doubt, having had a trial, but you need to hold them for months before trial. And I guess probably, you know, sometimes that does just have to be the way that things are.

Arden Koehler:
You know, actually, is it even clear that most people think that it's not a rights violation to keep people in prison after they've been convicted? So, like, you might think because there's two different models of this, one is like, yeah, you're violating their rights, but, like, you need to, for x, y, and z reasons, like, one is to protect the public, blah, blah, maybe rehabilitation, maybe. Maybe punishment, deterrence, so on and so forth. And that's just, like, outweighing the fact that it's a rights violation. The other view is that they actually lose their rights to freedom. And it's, like, actually not clear to me that most people think the second thing.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I'm not sure. Do you want to save a thought about that question? I suppose, depending on your philosophy of, like, where rights come from, perhaps.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Or like, what? Yeah. Whether these are human rights or whether they are civil rights, which maybe can be, like, waived if they're, like, what? Legally, you know, under the right. Like, legal circumstances.

Robert Wiblin:
Right. Yeah.

Arden Koehler:
So I guess, like, one reason that I was surprised that Peter thought that the most plausible moral view after consequentialism was consequentialism plus moral prohibitions, as opposed to, like, a less demanding form of consequentialism is that he said this thing about pet projects. You know, he felt like this woman that he was talking about, she had this project that he thought was good, but maybe not the thing that was the most effective. And he said, well, here's a good compromise. Like, she should still do that, but, like, devote some resources to what does the most good. And, like, that is a good sort of, like, way of compromising. And that feels like a thing that you say when you're thinking, well, maybe morality doesn't need to be that demanding.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I guess maybe the way of squaring the circle there is that he thinks in principle it is really demanding. But, you know, for practical reasons, we should, like, ask people for only a reasonable amount of their resources or their money. And then he's thinking, well, for this pet project that can come out of their personal budget, out of the resources that we think it's okay for them to spend on the things that they like themselves personally, so that you have your budget for doing things that are the most effective things and then everything else, all of your other preference, satisfaction, all the things you want in your life, which might include helping other people because it's something that you personally care about a lot.

Arden Koehler:
It seems like insofar as we're trying to make things more doable for people or make things more practical or more attractive to a wider range of people, it seems like one good way of doing that would be to say, well, from your altruism budget, you can, like, sometimes support things that you think are, that are really special to you. It's like interesting that we don't go that route, that we say, no, you use that from your personal budget. But like, with your altruism budget, you have to be as effective as possible. Or, you know, sorry, we don't say it that way, but it seems like that would be one way to go.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I think that would make sense if you thought that. So there might be a project that was like half as good as the very best project from an altruistic point of view, but, like, you were way more passionate about, and then you do some kind of like, middle ground thing where it's like, yeah, you do something that's like, maybe not the thing that's like the thing you're most passionate about and maybe not the thing that's the most effective. But then, like, in combination, it's like it's best to just like give all your money to this middle ground thing.

I guess, like in practice in as much as you think that there's like, relatively small number of things that are way more effective than others, and then there's like, other things you're really passionate about and most things you're not, then it's better just to give half of the resources to optimise one thing and half of the resources to optimise another thing that's going to turn out to be much more optimal than doing some middle ground compromise.

Arden Koehler:
One way of going for making this stuff less demanding would be this thing of, well, why don't you just work on the thing that you're most passionate about? Or is the sort of triangulated best thing from that perspective plus the perspective of effectiveness? But another would go, look, take your budget of how much you think you want to spend on helping others and spend 70% of it on things that are the most effective and 30% of it on things that give you a lot of warm fuzzies. And then you have your personal budgets completely untouched. And that would be one way of making this stuff less demanding. But it doesn't seem like that's usually discussed. Usually we discuss demanding this, making things less demanding by saying, well, we just shrink the budget for like altruistic stuff to allow for more stuff for yourself.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I guess people are conceptualising the warm fuzzies as part of the selfish budget because it's like donor focused altruism. Or like give a focused altruism because the reason you're doing it is because of the experience that you have of doing good. But then maybe that's like something that's more intuitive to people who are really involved in effective altruism than others. Because other people are going to conceptualise it as altruism first.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah. Right.

Robert Wiblin:
Like helping others first. Yeah.

Arden Koehler:
So insofar as like a lot of the reason to sort of like present a less demanding view is that we like sort of want to attract people and like keep people from burning out and blah, blah, blah, then, like, this seems like a. Like a somewhat good way of doing that.

Robert Wiblin:
I see. Right. So you're saying it's like. It's very motivating to people. So like.

Arden Koehler:
Yeah.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah. That's interesting. So it keeps them. Keeps them involved in doing good because they find it, like more fulfilling. And so that's a good actual reason to do it, even like setting aside any selfish benefit.

Arden Koehler:
Okay. There's so much more to talk about here, but I actually have to go because I have to go to dinner.

Robert Wiblin:
Yeah, I'm getting actually pretty hungry as well, so we should probably wrap up.

Arden Koehler:
All right, well, this was really fun.

Robert Wiblin: Just a reminder that if you want to get a text or audio copy of The Life You Can Save you can do that at thelifeyoucansave.org or via the link in the show notes.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris. Audio mastering by Ben Cordell, and transcriptions by Zakee Ulhaq.

Thanks for joining, talk to you in a week or two.