Responding to Chappell's Defense of Effective Altruism

Against Effective Altruism: Excavating Assumptions

Richard Chappell defends Effective Altruism here

Here is our response…happy new year:

Against Effective Altruism: Excavating Assumptions

Chappell when defending effective altruism makes a passionate case, arguing EA principles are “clearly good” with “no principled reason why not” to get behind doing the best possible. However, analyzing the intellectual roots of effective altruism in “disruption theory” reveals a more complex story behind EA's seemingly common-sense claims. By importing failings from this dubious business philosophy into the moral domain, effective altruism ends up subtly perpetuating harms rather than impartially optimizing for good.

Disruption Theory: Origins and Impacts

To understand effective altruism, we must start with “disruption theory” - an approach to economics and innovation popularized in Clayton Christensen’s influential 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen described how smaller startups can use new technologies to undercut established firms through cheaper business models. He glorified these entrepreneurs as economic heroes, disrupting ossified industries.

However, historians like Jill Lepore have argued disruption theory is riddled with flaws. The startups Christensen claimed would triumph often failed; incumbents endured by strategically adapting. Celebrating “disruption” implicitly lionizes business practices exacerbating precarity and inequality. Uber’s regulatory arbitrage and labor exploitation epitomizes this - enriching founders more than drivers or riders. As Lepore writes: “Disruption serves a criticize swashbuckling tech founders while ignoring their complicity in concentration of corporate power. Disruption focuses on innovating business models over improving human welfare.

Effective altruism emerged from this Silicon Valley ecosystem - where disruption theory suffused industry thinking. EA founder Peter Singer studied concepts like efficient charity, asking: How can we best optimize donations to help others based on clear metrics? This seems positive, but its excessive focus on quantification, scalability, and wealth accumulation mirrors the mindset of disruptive startups chasing hockey-stick growth above all else. This is no coincidence.

Effective Altruism's Disruption DNA

Effective altruism applies the logic of Silicon Valley not just to business, but to ethics itself. It privileges easily measured interventions over reforms targeting injustice roots. EA celebration of “earning to give” and billionaire saviors mirrors disruption theory’s singular reverence for wealth accumulation. Both assume existing structures as immutable constraints rather than sites for conscious change.

In The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer praises giving as "like venture capital"—we should fund ideas with the biggest "upside", as "if only a few of them work out" the total impact will be greater. Here the parallel is clear: effective altruism internalizes disruption theory’s focus on scalability and speculative return on investment rather than questioning systemic causes of harm. This ideological basis shapes many of EA’s policy stances.

For instance, as Benjamin Snyder contends, framing billionaires as potential saviors ignores that “their wealth emerges from systems that produce both winners like themselves and losers left behind.” Effective altruism papers over how current arrangements centrally economic and political power in the first place - then centers billionaire perspectives in determining solutions over beneficiaries.

Will MacAskill's declaration that “Billionaires should not exist. But they do...So rather than criticize them...” acquiesces to the status quo - parallel to how disruption theory venerates moguls like Elon Musk as untouchable economic deities. Likewise "earning to give” risks further legitimizing extractive systems by directing top talent towards accumulating rather than redistributing wealth. Effective altruism defaults to changing individuals over reforming institutions because institutions seem too complex to cleanly quantify. Again, disruption theology restricts vision to what current metrics make legible.

Countering EA's Defenses

With this context, we can re-examine the author’s specific defenses of effective altruism more critically. First, the author cites EA's “commitment to explicit cause prioritization”—using evidence to determine the best we can do—as a key innovation. But without questioning its assumptions, EA's consequentialism becomes myopia. Over-reliance on quantification fails to account for complex systemic interdependencies and roots of harm. Utilitarian logic pointedly does not capture all valuable moral considerations.

The author further claims there is “no coherent objection” to systemic change as a priority within EA principles. This strains credulity. Mainstream EA thinking categorically privileges individual donation impact and technical interventions over structural reforms. Appointing billionaires as solicited saviors epitomizes this bias. EA methodology structurally omits political engagement assessed via less quantifiable rubrics. The author’s breezy defense of EA’s impartiality crumbles upon examining its theoretical scaffolding.

Likewise "earning to give” and billionaire philanthropy—are defended as focused on growing resources for reform. But again, this ignores the indirect harms of accumulating funds via extractive systems or needlessly maintaining those systems by directing potential toward optimizing rather than transforming them. If EA is truly cause-agnostic, why do its leading voices almost universally emphasize donations over politics or labor organizing? Framing systemic efforts as an open possibility within EA just distracts from addressing its inherited constraints.

Accountability Over Applause

None of this indicts effective altruism’s sincere intent, only the teetering assumptions upon which it rests. As with many philosophies arising from positions of power and privilege, pattern recognition inclined its theorists to prize measurable outcomes over grappling with root injustices that resist tidy evaluation.

We must interrogate these unexamined premises hidden beneath EA’s benign first principles. Surface engagement on policy details without excavating intellectual history risks further entrenching biases. Before debating long-term or other proposals, establishing shared standards for conceptual soundness and acknowledgment of history matters more.

The author's defenses of effective altruism falter because they ignore how EA imports unexamined assumptions from disruption theory rather than emerging from the ideological vacuum. This matters not to definitively indict EA, but to advance dialogue. Insisting these limitations reflect mere implementation quibbles rings hollow. We must question foundations before details.

If effective altruism aims to optimize not self-interest but humanity’s welfare, confronting its inherited constraints offers an opportunity for growth. Rather than a threat, situating EA within broader histories and power structures provides indispensable context to refine its model.

References

Christensen, C. M. (1997). The innovator's dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard Business Review Press.

Lepore, J. (2014). The disruption machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. The New Yorker, 23.

MacAskill, W. (2015). Doing good better: How effective altruism can help you make a difference. Penguin.

Snyder, B. (2021). The deleterious assumptions at the heart of effective altruism. INET Oxford. https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-deleterious-assumptions-at-the-heart-of-effective-altruism/

Hickel, J. (2017). The divide: A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions. Random House.