Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
He is also a best-selling author of over a dozen books, including How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and most recently Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.
The transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You have called effective altruism, and I quote, one of the great new ideas of the 21st century. Could you briefly introduce our readers to the core philosophy of the effective altruism movement and explain why you think the movement can be a big deal?
Steven Pinker: The idea behind effective altruism is to channel charitable giving and other philanthropic activities to where they will do the most good, where they would lead to the greatest increase in human flourishing. And the reason that it’s needed is that we are all altruistic. It is part of human nature. On the other hand, we have a large set of motives for why we’re altruistic and some of them are ulterior — such as appearing beneficent and generous, or earning friends and cooperation partners. Some of them may result in conspicuous sacrifices that indicate that we are generous and trustworthy people to our peers but don’t necessarily do anyone any good. And so the idea behind effective altruism is to determine where your activities actually save lives, increase health, reduce poverty, and at the very least provide people opportunities to channel their philanthropy where it will do the most good. And, of course, also to encourage people to do that. So part of it is just informing people if that is their goal and telling them that these are the ways to do it. And the other is to spread the value that that’s where philanthropy ought to be directed.
HPR: As you just touched upon, effective altruism has many different cause areas, including alleviating global poverty, reducing animal suffering and even combating global catastrophic risks. Which of these cause areas do you think needs to be addressed most urgently?
SP: I would say global public health simply because that’s where a dollar can go the furthest in terms of doing what we all want to do, namely making people better off, saving lives, improving health, reducing both poverty and early mortality. And they tend to go together. Wealthy countries tend to be healthier and vice versa because if everyone is sick or dropping like flies, they’re not going to be very productive workers. Conversely, a wealthier country can afford better healthcare, both public health and medicine. Some of the other causes that are certainly worthwhile in terms of enhancing human well being are probably not so suited for philanthropy. For example, climate change is a pressing problem and it could affect the well being of billions, but I don’t think donations to charities or volunteer work are an effective way of addressing the problem. I think the most effective way will be the development of technologies that provide funding to clean energy so that people will just naturally opt for the cheapest source and doing so will reduce emissions, together with policy prescriptions such as carbon pricing. But it’s not an arena in which individual sacrifices will make much of a difference. Indeed, I think that was probably one of the messages of effective altruism ought to be: don’t just engage in activities that make you feel good, that make you feel like you are making a difference, but where we actually do the most good.
I’m also skeptical of the attention drawn within effective altruism to alleviating risk from runaway artificial intelligence. I think a lot of that is misconceived, but in any case, the planning for the far future is compromised by the fact that our ignorance increases exponentially the farther out we go. Anything you do will have a set of consequences and anything you do in response to those consequences will have consequences — there’s a garden of forking paths with an exponential number of possibilities, and the chances that we could anticipate what will do good stretching out into the future beyond a decade or two are minimal, except for obvious things like climate change where the physics is pretty straightforward. Or nuclear weapons, which by their very design, are engineered to destroy and kill on a massive scale. And so you don’t have to extrapolate very far to know that those are potential dangers, but — and this is where I probably demur from some of the folks in the effective altruism community — I don’t particularly think that combating artificial intelligence risk is an effective form of altruism. But that is perhaps a different emphasis within the bigger tent that we ought to try as best we can to anticipate the consequences of our actions and devote our philanthropy accordingly.
HPR: In addition to minimizing human suffering, effective altruism also advocates for ending animal cruelty and suffering. To what extent do you think humanity should expand its moral sphere to include animals?
SP: I think that it ought to because we have a scientific understanding of consciousness that tells us in no uncertain terms that other animals are conscious, that they can suffer. It would be mystical or dualistic or irrational to believe otherwise because we know that other animals have what makes us conscious — what leads to pain in humans — namely certain circuits in the brain, and therefore we know with certainty that other animals can suffer. Suffering is bad, and therefore animal suffering is certainly a worthy target, the limitations being that at some point we actually are ignorant as to how simple a nervous system supports what we think of as consciousness: do oysters feel pain, do cockroaches? Since we couldn’t possibly treat suffering in the natural world the way we treat human suffering, that is, if a person were in mortal danger anywhere in the world, we consider our duty to to rescue them, while on the other hand, we can’t save every squirrel that’s torn apart by a hawk and every deer that’s eaten by a wolf. And we have a moral conundrum of how we ought to deal with the natural suffering in the world although it’s morally dubious to say that’s the way nature works, and therefore it is acceptable. The alternative that maybe we ought to treat every consciousness as equally worthy and equally deserving of our efforts is also incoherent. So there may be limits on how rationally, we can address certain moral conundrums, just as I suspect there are limits as to how rationally we can address any problem.
HPR: Effective altruism also emphasizes choosing a career that has the potential of the greatest impact. Peter Singer, for instance, has argued in favor of taking Wall Street jobs in order to donate large sums of money to altruistic causes. What advice do you have for undergraduates who wish to maximize the impact in the world through their careers?
SP: I don’t think it’s a bad argument although you wouldn’t want to pick just any lucrative position in order to give it away to an effective charity. I think there are professional activities that one might not want to contribute to, like trying to hook more teenagers on cigarettes, or flooding the country with guns or the world with weapons. One ought to think twice about lending one’s efforts and talent to certain enterprises. On the other hand, if the activity is not unjustifiable, then applying one’s own talent to add the most economic value to the world and then reallocating the output of that economic value does strike me as a worthy pursuit. Because talent, energy and expertise are limited resources, I don’t think it makes sense for a highly educated person to work in a soup kitchen as opposed to donating enough money to hire far more people to work in soup kitchens. Working in a soup kitchen is a conspicuous sacrifice that advertises what a generous person you are, but it is not the way that a person who potentially can earn a lot of money can do the most good.
HPR: Moving on to the criticisms of effective altruism, critics of the movement argue that effective altruism, despite being rational and logical, is too unnatural to catch on because of its cold utilitarian approach. Others argue that humans are inherently self centered and as such there is a biological limit to how altruistic people can be. As a psychologist, how do you assess these claims?
SP: I think there’s some merit to both of them. I think it is completely unreasonable and a waste of time to try to convince large numbers of people to give as much of their money to other people’s children as their own. Or to sacrifice themselves to the extent that they themselves live a basic standard of living and give away every excess nickel. That probably won’t succeed, and it would just discredit the movement if that were the demand. However, all of us could probably give a lot more than we do. We could be persuaded that charity and philanthropy are more effective than most people think they are — that they really can save lives. And to the extent that you do give or sacrifice, why not allocate it in the ways that will do the most good if that’s your goal in the first place?
HPR: Another critique of effective altruism is that it does not focus on political and institutional change, which economists have argued are most crucial in reducing poverty. Should EA shift its focus towards achieving more institutional change instead of excessively focusing on the individual?
SP: I think there’s merit to that criticism as well in that the reason that extreme poverty has been plummeting in the last 30 years, with a billion and a quarter people escaping from extreme poverty, is not that they were all beneficiaries of care packages or Oxfam. It’s because countries like China and Bangladesh and Vietnam and many others increased their standard of living through investment in public goods, education, markets, and indeed, those are far bigger drivers of prosperity and reducers of extreme poverty. But they’re not mutually exclusive. And philanthropy absolutely makes a difference as well, especially in the poorest parts of the world before they can develop economically. Someone who is committed to effective altruism ought to keep in mind the massive benefits of sheer economic growth, and should in addition to their philanthropic efforts, support political and policy prescriptions that promote economic growth and support the institutions that support it. But in addition, at the margins, philanthropy can save lives as well, so both should be pursued.
HPR: Finally, do you think effective altruism has the capacity to spark an ethical revolution that will change our world in a very fundamental way?
SP: That might be a bit ambitious, but it could be part of an overall movement of the rational, evidence-driven everything. We humans are saddled with a number of cognitive biases and flaws and fallacies. We’ve inherited institutions that were adapted to an earlier period and to different goals than necessarily making people best off or accomplishing particular targets and goals. And if we keep in mind what we want our institutions to accomplish and then use our collective brainpower to come up with the best possible ways of accomplishing it then things will be better off. So effective altruism is a way of making philanthropy smarter. And we see this in a variety of domains: moneyball in sports, which replaces a lot of the superstition and hot stove speculation with data crunching; in data-driven policing, which is probably responsible for the massive decrease in homicide that the country enjoyed in the 1990s and 2000s; in evidence-based medicine, which has the potential for eliminating massive amounts of medical error, malpractice and wasted resources; in feedback informed therapy, where psychotherapists see if their interventions are making the patient better by having monitoring their mood and behavior. In domain after domain, there is scope for improvement if we are thinking more rationally. That’s one of the reasons why, when students at Harvard approached me to teach a course on effective altruism two years ago, I was intrigued, but ultimately decided that effective altruism is too narrow a focus. And I made it a module in a larger course on rationality, which I have since turned into a book. Effective altruism is rationality applied to the efficacy of altruism — it being one domain in which rationality can improve the things we want to improve.
Image Credit: Photo by Rose Lincoln / Harvard University is licensed for use under CC BY 2.0.
