Ecologically Effective Altruism: how to give best at this time

 

 

 

 

Because of its emphasis on the importance of consequences, the movement has been described as a form of applied consequentialism. There are now tens of thousands of effective altruists who funnel hundreds of millions of pounds to charities recommended by a community of charity effectiveness evaluators. They point out that some charities prevent far more death, disease, and debilitation than rivals with similar budgets. Consequently, they recommend diverting our resources to the former organisations and avoiding the latter.

 

Much has been written (including by me) about how effective altruism (EA) as a movement fails to live up to its ambitions of maximising good in the world. Critics have pointed out that EA’s poverty-busting aspirations are themselves guided by an impoverished view of what morality requires. For instance, like its utilitarian forefathers, the movement ignores special moral obligations that arise from the uniqueness of the standpoints which we occupy. Writers have also pointed out that EA’s emphasis on empirically measurable outcomes means that it systematically overvalues measurable benefits and harms, while severely undervaluing harder to measure outcomes. This is especially true of the structural harms that EA often tacitly supports by diverting intellectual and financial resources away from structural critique and activism and into highly specific and depoliticised harm reduction projects. The economistic impulse to measure every outcome means that attempts of structural reform are often seen as too wishy-washy for proponents of EA to endorse as cost-effective. Alice Crary has called this the institutional critique of EA. I have also argued that EA fails dramatically to take existential threats seriously. This is because the view is committed to evidence-based analysis that it fails to take seriously the need to apply the precautionary principle in cases of uncertainty. This is perhaps why, despite some strands of EA being more concerned with such threats than others, influential proponents of the movement still severely downplay the likelihood and harm of climate breakdown.

 

It is against this background that I want to invite readers who, like me, believe that that climate breakdown is the single greatest threat to our civilisation to consider how we should respond to proposals from EA. While I think that EA lacks the intellectual resources to deal with incipient climate breakdown, I do nevertheless think that we ought to take up the challenge to think carefully about where we give our money to. Recently, some members of the EA community have begun to critique EA’s neglect of the power of activism, movements, collective action. For instance, in a powerful and important article a few years’ back, James Ozden argued that effective protest movements deliver far more change than some of the long-established campaigning NGOs. His analysis found that Extinction Rebellion scored particularly highly in measurable outcomes when compared to some of the big household name campaigning NGOs. Such activist projects are likely to have significantly more immeasurable benefits than measurable outcomes (for instance, the harm prevented by setting back the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, and the incubation of new climate leaders and activists).

 

Time has passed since Ozden’s analysis, and the recent, current and forthcoming work of the Social Change Lab shows declining effectiveness of radical flank activities and in fact some counter-productiveness to some of the best-known, in recent years. It is time to look toward a far more genuinely inclusive more-than-climate more-than-movement. A new wave of action that includes millions who will never be ‘activists’.

 

With this in mind, I have below a very specific recommendation for what is most likely at this time to be a particularly ecologically effective way to give money.

I have set out my reasoning below briefly, but have avoided doing so in an overly economistic and scientistic fashion. This is because I believe that the value of actions is not solely shaped by their measurable outcomes.

 

Some of the most important things in life (and in politics, and in ecology) are not measurable. Some of the most important decisions one makes really are ventures into the unknown.

EA argues that one ought to make the most effective decision ‘at the margin’ as to how to use any bit of money (or time, or anything) that one has to the best effect. This is the thinking typical of consequentialism and of economics. It is a good way to maximise the efficiency of one’s spending all other things being equal. BUT all other things often aren’t equal. And if we assume that all other things will remain equal, we are cutting off the chance to be as effective as we can be.

What do I mean here? Sometimes it is necessary to have hope that other things will not remain equal. Let me give an example.

 

In the mid-late 1990s, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was being negotiated. This Agreement would have represented a massive increase in the rights of corporations at the expense of citizens. When the secrecy around the Agreement was broken, a campaign began to try to defeat it. I considered joining this campaign. But I decided not to; I made a marginalist decision. I decided that my participation would likely not make much difference to the campaign, and (more importantly) that I couldn’t see the campaign having any realistic chance of success. I devoted my time to other things. I think that people make such marginalist decisions all the time, often in the manner that I did: they decide that something is not worth bothering, not worth trying.

 

I was wrong. The campaign against the MAI, remarkably, did succeed. Self-evidently, then, it didn’t require my participation in order to work…BUT, equally evidently, it did require lots of other people to have participated; and thank goodness that most of those people, presumably, made no such economistic calculation as I did, before deciding to do so. They did it simply, I would presume, because it was the right thing to do.

 

If all we ever do is to make marginalist decisions where we take everything and everyone else as fixed, then we will very rarely make bold decisions, steps into the unknown. Sometimes, it is necessary to have hope that other people will try something like one is thinking of trying too, even if the cause at first seems hopeless. Sometimes it is necessary to leap, to wager; to try something bold.

I think we are most definitely in one such moment. Most things that people are giving their money too right now will be swept away, if we don’t mitigate boldly and adapt transformatively to climate breakdown.

 

I’d urge you, if you have money to give, not to give it thinking only at the margin. But give it rather in a spirit of potentially co-creating something astonishing, even seemingly impossible. We badly need such vision, such boldness, now, if what I have set out in Why Climate Breakdown Matters is anything like right.

 

 

While there are lots of great organisations out there, I feel comfortable recommending just one – the Climate Majority Project, of which I am co-director. I make no apology for this specific and seemingly ‘self-interested’ recommendation. My whole life has been building up to the creation of the CMp, which is our best hope for an enabling vehicle for the vast wave of distributed post-progressive post-activist action that we now need, if we are to get through what is coming together. The CMp has been precisely DESIGNED so as to meet the criteria set out above. It is a hugely ambitious project, based strongly on evidence, on careful thinking, and on starkly bold ambition. The CMp aims to do what could turn out to be enough. Anything less is not really worth really trying.

 

 

(If you want to support my own work directly, please go to https://rupertread.net/why-i-accept-donations.)