How to be a High Impact Philosopher
Philosophy is often impractical. That’s an understatement. It might therefore be surprising to think of a career as a philosopher as a potentially high impact ethical career – the sort of career that enables one to do a huge amount of good in the world. But I don’t think that philosophy’s impracticality is in the nature of the subject-matter. In fact, I think that research within certain areas of philosophy is among some of the most important and practical research that one can do. This shouldn’t be surprising when one considers that philosophy is the only subject that addresses directly the fundamental practical question: what ought I to do?
In this post I’ll focus in on normative ethics, practical ethics, and decision theory. Within these areas, I’m going to give a recipe for choosing research topics, if one wants to maximise the practical importance of one’s work as a philosopher. Here it goes:
An Argument in Favour of Eating Meat
The New York Times has just launched an intriguing competition.
Though debates on the ethics of eating meat normally center on whether it’s obligatory to be vegetarian or whether it’s permissible to eat meat, they are asking for 600 word entries on why it is positively ethical to eat meat. The judges panel is an all-star list comprising some of the most famous public intellectuals who have written on the ethics of eating meat, including Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
I’ve been vegetarian for six and a half years, and I think that on balance the arguments conclusively favour something approximating a vegetarian or vegan diet, at least for most people. But I also think that it’s important to question our moral beliefs, because it’s all too easy to become overconfident in them. So I thought I’d write an entry. Here it is.
An Argument in Favour of Eating Meat
Let’s suppose that all animals are of equal moral value. What follows for the ethics of eating meat? Well, here’s a general moral principle:
If one action makes some beings better off and none worse off than they would be if you performed a second action, then, morally, you ought to do the first action rather than the second.
This principle seems pretty plausible. The idea that an action could be wrong even though it doesn’t make anyone worse off reeks of puritanism.
However, this principle entails that you ought to eat meat over eating vegetarian. This might seem surprising: isn’t meat murder? But that’s an ambiguous phrase. Even if one believes that, when a farmer slaughters a cow, he is committing murder, it would be too quick to infer that you are similarly guilty of murder by eating beef. After all, the cow is already dead when you eat it.
What does happen when one eats meat, then? Well, in buying beef, for example, one increases the overall demand for beef. Supply increases to match demand, and so, in buying beef one starts a causal chain: on average, supermarkets respond to this increased demand by ordering more beef, and eventually farmers react to this, producing more cattle. So, in buying beef, one does have an effect: on average, one causes new cows to come into existence.
What’s wrong with bringing more cows into existence? Well, according to our principle above, there’s nothing wrong. If it were wrong, it would have to make some being worse off than they would otherwise have been. But it doesn’t make the consumers worse off – if they enjoy eating meat, they get a benefit. And of course it doesn’t make the supermarkets or farmers worse off, as they gain financially.
More importantly, it doesn’t make the cow worse off either. Though the cow might experience a variety of pain and suffering, it certainly still has a life worth living: we would not think that we could benefit the cow by euthanizing it. If cows could speak, they would say that they prefer to have lived and had some enjoyment in life, despite the pain, than never having been born. So, in eating meat one makes no beings worse off. Quite the contrary, one gives the gift of a moderately happy life to animals who would not have otherwise lived.
One might object: perhaps the lives of animals reared for consumption really are so horrific and full of pain that it would have been better for them never to have been born?
In response, we should acknowledge that this is almost certainly true for some animals. Factory farmed hens, chickens and pigs all live truly horrific lives: in the process from their births to their consumption, it seems to me that their death is the best thing that happens to them. If so, then we should not eat their meat, and so not thereby curse further factory farmed animals with such a wretched existence.
But the same is not true of animals that are not factory farmed, like sheep and cows. Their lives seem on balance happy: their lives are certainly better, for example, than those they would have had in the wild. So, unless you think that it would be of benefit to wild sheep and buffalo to euthanize them, then you should not think that farmed cows and sheep have lives not worth living. You benefit them by bringing them into existence, even if you have to eat their ancestors in order to do so.
The P-Factor
Electoral reform is an often-discussed topic. But the issues often concern minor modifications to the status quo. Here I suggest an entirely new approach to electing leaders of a country. It would have numerous benefits over the current system, including:
- Better voter turnout
- Better representation of the working classes among those who vote
- Better fulfillment of democratic values
- Producing a better informed electorate
- The election of more competent leaders
- The election of less deceitful leaders
- Greater social mobility from the working classes to the ruling class
The electoral system is principally modeled on three popular television shows: the X-Factor, Big Brother, and, to a lesser extent, Strictly Come Dancing. I call it ‘The P-Factor’.
In the first round, we would have open auditions from all around the country. This is modeled closely on the X-Factor. Candidates would have to audition in front of a studio audience and a panel of judges. They would have five or ten minutes or so to give the top few reasons why they would be excellent as a ruler of the country. (At this stage, we would use a regimented interview structure, which avoids many of the biases associated with unregimented interviews). Rather than a decision by judges, which would be undemocratic, the decision would be made by a studio audience of 100 people or so, randomly selected from the UK population.
This stage has the benefit that the opportunity to rule the country would be genuinely available to everyone in the country, rather than the tiny proportion of people who have had a sufficiently good education and the right contacts to enable them to run for parliament. It could thus be a powerful driver of social mobility: even someone with no home and little education could do extremely well. Moreover, insofar as the pool of potential candidates in this system would be vastly greater than the current pool of potential candidates, this system would be much better at filtering the population to discover undiscovered latent political talent, in much the same way as the X-Factor succeeds at discovering phenomenal vocal talent that would not otherwise be found.
Those that are particularly promising, at this stage, would make it through to the televised auditions round. The auditions would be similar to those at the first round. However, in order to make sure that the process was sufficiently entertaining so that the ratings stayed high – so that we would have a sufficiently informed and engaged electorate – we would require every candidate to also demonstrate their crowd-pleasing ‘special talent’, which would be akin to the skills displayed on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.
One might object that those candidates who would get voted through at this stage are those who would have the best ‘special talent’, like whoever could swallow the weirdest object. But it’s difficult to see how this objection can be made given the presupposition that the government should be elected in accordance with democratic values. If the current demos wishes to elect a leader based on their ability to make a dog dance, then that is what should happen. (Though I doubt that this is what would happen).
At this stage, there would be judges. Two independent political and economic experts, in order to point out aspects of the candidate’s performance that are particularly auspicious, qua political leader. But also Amanda Holden, as the voice of the people, and Simon Cowell, again to keep the ratings up. However, the judges would not be allowed to vote, as this would be undemocratic. The voting at this stage would be open to the public, with the judges only there to offer expert opinion.
The voting system would be modeled on Strictly Come Dancing, which uses range voting (ranking each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10). As even a cursory glance at the literature on voting theory will show, this is a far better voting system than the current first-past-the-post system, or the Alternative Vote system (which, incidentally, are among the worst voting systems ever seriously proposed: the former limits itself to the smallest possible amount of information from the voter; the latter violates conditions like monotonicity). Though the Strictly voting system is vulnerable to tactical voting, in the presence of tactical voting it collapses into Approval voting, which is another excellent voting system. (For those who are worried by this, we could alternatively use a sophisticated Condorcet method like the Schulze method.)
At this point, the 50 or so candidates with the greatest number of votes would enter a 2 month-long ‘boot camp’ phase, where the candidates undergo extensive training in how to lead a country – including personal presentation, debating skills, and education in economics and politics. This would give those from the working classes a better chance against those who have had a long and expensive education.
Each week, during the boot camp’phase, there would be a different test that the candidates would have to perform, such as debating, oration, political knowledge (perhaps in the style of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’), IQ tests, heuristics and biases in decision-making, and economic forecasting. Again, in order to keep the ratings up, and to make the conditions more realistic, these tests would have to be done in a variety of stressful conditions – such as while sleep deprived, or while being insulted in every possible way by journalists. Again, every week the voting would be open to the public, so they could use the additional information that came through the testing as they saw fit. Insofar as this system would employ assessment of the skills required for good political leadership, whereas the current system has almost no such assessment, we should expect the leaders produced by this method to be more competent.
Once the candidates were down to a small number – let’s say the final ten – then we enter the final, ‘Big Brother’ round, where all ten candidates have to live in a house together, under constant surveillance. A recurring complaint among the electorate is that politicians cannot be trusted: insofar as it would be almost impossible to dissimulate one’s personality for 24 hours a day, for ten weeks, using the Big Brother systems enables us to get a sense of the true character of all the potential candidates, and to develop something like a feeling of friendship and understanding towards the better candidates. Again, we would subject the candidates to a variety of tests. (I personally would favour Takeshi’s Castle-style challenges. But perhaps that’s just getting silly).
This would answer the problem that voter turnout is often disappointingly low: though the claim that Big Bother has a better voter turnout than general elections is unfounded, I would guess that this competition would be far more popular (and more entertaining) than the previous Big Brother shows, and would get overall a much larger vote. It would also ensure that turnout is better distributed in proportion with the range of the social spectrum, rather than being biased in favour of the middle and upper classes.
One final benefit of this approach is the cost. One might worry that this system would require a substantially larger infrastructure than the current voting system. However, it seems pretty plausible that the money could be made back and more through advertising during breaks.
So this electoral system seems to have an awful lot going for it. However, the point of this blog post is not to seriously suggest the above as a new way of electing the leaders of a country (though, I confess, in writing it, I find it remarkably convincing). The likelihood of my coming up with the optimal system of electing the leaders of a country over an hour-long coffee with my fiancé is vanishingly small. But I do want to suggest that, aside from the fact that people wouldn’t take it seriously, the system described above is far better than the current system of electing leaders, in the UK or the US. And I designed it as a joke.
Political debate can often take too much for granted; in its attempt to be ‘practical’, it can unthinkingly put great weight on the status quo. Philosophy allows us to take a step back and realise that, sometimes, what is needed is not a minor repair here and there, but rather to tear down an institution, completely redesign it, and start over.
Practical Ethics Given Moral Uncertainty
Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world. In order to make the advice practical, it typically takes empirical uncertainty into account. For example, we don’t currently know exactly to what extent the earth’s temperature will rise, if we are to continue to emit CO2 at the rate we have been emitting so far. The temperature rise might be small, in which case the consequences would not be dire. Or the temperature rise might be very great, in which case the consequences could be catastrophic. To what extent we ought to mitigate our CO2 emissions depends crucially on this factual question. But it’s of course not true that we are unable to offer any practical advice in absence of knowledge concerning this factual question. It’s just that our advice will concern what one ought to do in light of uncertainty about the facts.
But if practical ethics should take empirical uncertainty into account, surely it should take moral uncertainty into account as well. In many situations, we don’t know all the moral facts. I think it is fair to say, for example, that we don’t currently know exactly how to weigh the interests of future generations against the interests of current generations. But this issue is just as relevant to the question of how one ought to act in response to climate change as is the issue of expected temperature rise. If the ethics of climate change offers advice about how best to act given empirical uncertainty concerning global temperature rise, it should also offer advice about how best to act, given uncertainty concerning the value of future generations.
Cases such as the above aren’t rare. Given the existence of widespread disagreement within ethics, and given the difficulty of the subject-matter, we would be overconfident if we were to claim to be 100% certain in our favoured moral view, especially when it comes to the difficult issues that ethicists often discuss.
So we need to have an account of how one ought to act under moral uncertainty. The standard account of making decisions under uncertainty is that you ought to maximise expected value: look at all hypotheses in which you have some degree of belief, work out the likelihood of each hypothesis, work out how much value would be at stake if that hypothesis were true, and then trade off the probability of a hypothesis’ being true against how much would be at stake, if it were true. One implication of maximizing expected value is that sometimes one should refrain from a course of action, not on the basis that it will probably be a bad thing to do, but rather because there is a reasonable chance that it will be a bad thing to do, and that, if it’s bad thing to do, then it’s really bad. So, for example, you ought not to speed round blind corners: the reason why isn’t because it’s likely that you will run someone over if you do so. Rather, the reason is that there’s some chance that you will – and it would be seriously bad if you did.
With this on board, let’s think about the practical implications of maximising expected value under moral uncertainty. It seems that the implications are pretty clear in a number of cases. Here are a few.
1.
One might think it more likely than not that it’s not wrong to kill animals for food. But one shouldn’t be certain that it’s not wrong. And, if it is wrong, then it’s seriously wrong – in the same ballpark as murder. So, in killing an animal, one risks performing a major moral wrong, without any correspondingly great potential moral upside. This would be morally reckless. So one ought not to kill animals for food.
2.
One might think it more likely than not that it’s not wrong to have an abortion, for reasons of convenience. But one shouldn’t be certain that it’s not wrong. And, if it is wrong, then it’s seriously wrong – in the same ballpark as murder. So, in having an abortion for convenience, one risks performing a major moral wrong, without any correspondingly great potential moral upside. This would be morally reckless. So one ought not to have an abortion for reasons of convenience.
3.
One might think it more likely than not that it’s not wrong to spend money on luxuries, rather than giving it to fight extreme poverty. But one shouldn’t be certain that it’s not wrong. And, if it is wrong, then it’s seriously wrong – in the same ballpark as walking past a child drowning in a shallow pond. So, in spending money on luxuries, one risks performing a major moral wrong, without any correspondingly great potential moral upside. This would be morally reckless. So one ought not to spend money on luxuries rather than giving that money to fight poverty.
Giving isn’t demanding*
Christmas is about giving. But giving how much? £50 might seem like a lot for a Christmas present. But how about giving 50% of your annual wage?
There are now-familiar arguments that we in rich countries ought to give a lot more to the developed world than we typically do. In fact, Peter Singer and Peter Unger argue that we ought to give a lot. They don’t specify a figure, but let’s pick, just for the sake of having a nice round number, 50% of one’s annual wage.
The standard response to the views of Singer and Unger, in the philosophical literature, is that giving such extortionate sums is just too demanding for it to be plausible as a moral requirement.
But is giving this much really too demanding? I’ll suggest not, for two reasons.
First, you’re probably richer than you think. If you are earning £40 000/yr, you’re easily in the richest 1% of the world’s population; if you were to give half that, you’d still be in the richest 2%. If you’re earning £20 000 and were to give 50%, you’d still be in the richest 8%.
Imagine if, before you were born, when you didn’t know who you were going to be in society, you got told you were going to end up in the richest 10% of the world’s population. Would you be happy? You’d be over the moon! But if that’s true, how could we complain about merely living in the richest 10%?
You might think that, well, the money goes much further in poor countries – so having a lower wage isn’t so bad if you live there, and so the figures I’ve given are skewed. But those figures I’ve given are ‘purchasing power parity’ adjusted – that is, they’ve already taken into account the fact that money goes farther in poor countries. Some people are poor!
Second, the latest psychological research suggests that, despite what you may think, income level really doesn’t make much of a difference to your overall happiness. Once we’ve got the basics in life – food, water and shelter – then other things, like health and relationships, become much more important. In particular, it’s been found that ‘prosocial’ spending of money – for example, giving the money to people more in need – provides a ‘warm glow’ that can keep you happy for weeks.
In fact, rather than being insanely demanding, giving away large chunks of your income will actually have very little effect on your wellbeing, and may well be a net benefit.
So giving really isn’t demanding. This year, let’s put ethics into practice, and make the world a little better: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto/donate
Merry Christmas!
*More information on these and related topics can be found at www.givingwhatwecan.org
Banking as an ethical career
The High Pay Commission today published a report denigrating the salaries of executives in the city. This isn’t unusual: it’s common to see the high pay of bankers and other city workers is reviled in the media. But there’s a flip side to bankers’ earnings, which often gets neglected. Wealth, of course, can be spent on champagne and yachts and private jets. But it can also be spent on helping people. In fact, there are reasons for thinking that, if you spend your money wisely, you can do much more good by taking a lucrative career such as banking than by pursuing a conventional ‘ethical’ career such as charity work.
First, as a banker, you could earn well over £6million. By donating 50% of those earnings, you could pay for several charity workers. So you’d do several times as much good than if you were a charity worker yourself.
Second, if you decide not to be a charity worker, someone else will take your place, and so the benefit you provide would have happened anyway. In contrast, if you take a lucrative career and donate your earnings, your donations provide a benefit which would not have happened anyway.
Third, as a philanthropic banker, you can put your money anywhere. So you can fund only the very best causes. In contrast, as a charity worker, you are much more limited in your choice of where to work. Some causes are thousands of times more cost-effective than others, so this can be a big deal.
Between these three arguments, it seems pretty compelling that one can do far more to help others by taking a lucrative career and donating a substantial proportion of the proceeds, than by pursuing a more conventional ethical career.
Over 40 people, including many here at Oxford, have been convinced by these arguments and have formed a community called 80,000 Hours. Members of this community support each other in their pursuit of a high-impact ethical career, trying to use the 80,000 hours of their working life to help other people as much as they can. Members pursue careers in what we call ‘professional philanthropy’, careers in which they’ll have a big influence, and careers in which they can research highly important but neglected areas. Each member of 80,000 hours can expect to save over 10 000 lives in the course of their career.
We have a finite time on earth, but, if we’re willing to think hard about how to best use the hours of our working life, we have a tremendous ability to do good in the world.
For more information, my research is discussed today in a BBC news article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15820786) and I was today was interviewed for the Today program (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/radio/bbc_radio_four/20111122, 10 minutes from the end).
For more info on the organization, you can check out 80,000 Hours at: www.80000hours.org
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