I loved Phoebe’s Updates from the Swarm and George’s Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on. I think it’s a good time for sharing big feelings, so here’s an essay which rhymes with theirs. I drafted most of it in 2022, which was also a time of big feelings for me.
I grew up in a small town surrounded by good people. My mum stayed at work late to help women through labour and my dad really tried to lead the Rotary Club in helping our community.
I had some general sense that there was more that we should do about helping others in low-income countries, but I was young and the world was complicated, and I hadn’t figured all of that out yet.
When my friend Dan introduced me to The Life You Can Save, I saw a clear argument that our lack of action to help those folks meant that each of the good people around me was allowing tens, and often hundreds, of people to die through inaction.
It seemed like the most important truth I had ever come across. But when I talked to people about it they scarcely changed anything about their lives.
I spent a few years feeling frustrated and dumbfounded by this – I just couldn’t understand how the clarity of argument here wasn’t enough to motivate major changes in the kind people around me.
***
Over time, I refined my understanding of people.
I learned about signalling, status quo bias, absurdity heuristics, scope insensitivity, and so on. Gradually the broad picture of humanity’s actions made more sense.
We’re not best understood as ‘moral agents who act to look after the welfare of others’, but as a grab-bag of moral and amoral drives. Those drives were selected because they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, and each of them gets dialled up or down depending on context. Most people spend their time acting according to those drives, instead of working to act consistently on their stated values.
Those drives often lead to motivated reasoning, anger, rejection of uncertainty, and tribalism. They served our genes well in the past. But the modern world is immensely complex, it’s full of economic and game-theoretic pressures, and it has enormous engineering and scientific power. So the same old drives are now playing a changed game, and the stakes are much higher.
Within that new understanding, none of these are puzzles:
- Most people eat animals raised in factory farms.
- Most people give <5% of their income to charity, and make ~no focused effort to find the best ones or check whether their reasons for not giving more are valid.
- The world is collectively choosing to not spend 1–2% of its resources to prevent climate change.
- Some people work on technologies which they believe may destroy the world.
- My parents bought a catamaran, instead of giving in to my frustrated pleas and giving the money to anti-malarial bed nets (saving >10 people’s lives).
Sometimes I’m in a mindset which extends compassion and love to all beings. When I’m there, people behaving like that seems almost impossible to relate to.
But then, at other times, I can see in my own ape brain the motivations that lead to every single one.
***
It’s more pleasant to feel curiosity about what motivates people than to feel outrage at what they’re missing.
I don’t manage to feel like that all the time though.
Right now, there are a few thousand people racing towards the production of a technology with a >10% chance of killing us, killing our children, destroying ~everything we care about, and I’m… Yeah, I’m pissed off again.
I really want us to be better.
***
I know that this isn’t everything that humanity is.
We really are capable of great courage, love, and kindness, and of questioning our own motivations and trying to be better.
People have formed movements and communities to try to make the world better. Sometimes, these have been really important – like environmentalism, feminism, or the scientific revolution.
The one I’m most trying to contribute to, Effective Altruism, has a better shot than most at seriously helping.
We’re smart, interested in strategic improvements, reasonably well coordinated, well resourced, growing, and we are really trying.
Through this community, I’ve been able to find teammates who I love and trust. They make me feel less alone and less powerless when I look at these problems.
***
We find ourselves here together at the hinge of history.
On one side lies disaster or dystopia. On the other is a utopia which is better than what most people have ever conceived. A world without starvation, slaughter, or biological ageing. One in which there are beings who get to understand the mysteries of the universe more deeply than my mind will ever be able to, and have lives full of adventure and joy and meaning.
We could get there. We could use what we’ve learned over the last hundred years about game theory, coordination, economics, governance, the nature of consciousness, and technology to create a future which is wondrous.
I don’t know that we will. Humanity isn’t what I thought it was when I was a kid.
But I’m going to fight to help get us there, and I feel awfully grateful to have teammates who I love and trust fighting alongside me.
Hi Bren, thanks for this.
It got me wondering about a few things though. In the essay you explain that good people heard the argument and didn't change with psychology: biases, evolved drives, etc.. But your mum staying late to help women in labour, your dad working for the community, for most ethical traditions that is a good life, catamaran included. And what is more telling for me, people like Susan Wolf in "Moral Saints", or Bernard Williams in several of his works (or many others really), serious and very intelligent moral philosophers that knew the arguments very well, would have said your parents lived moral lives. They don't say we owe nothing to strangers, and I agree most of us should give more, but they would say the distance between your parents and the argument is not only bias.
So what is your answer to them? Is the explanation that they are less smart, or less educated, or more affected by evolutionary pressures than people in EA? I guess not, and if not, why are they wrong about something that in this text looks so clear and obvious?
Have you read them? And when you were frustrated with your parents, did you ever think they could be partly right? I am not utilitarian so I see this from outside, but I would like to understand how you see it.
Thanks Silvan, this was a really nice comment and I appreciate you engaging! I do see (and sometimes acutely feel) some of the tension you're pointing at, around how to think about morality and how that relates to whether people are good people.
I think I have a coherent model for how to think about it, though it won't entirely resolve the cognitive dissonance. Rather than speaking to each of your questions, I think it might be most useful for me to lay out the model, and then you can decide if there are parts you'd like to probe on. Feel free to push me on your questions again if I've skipped something you wanted answered.
***
1. Everyone is born with inbuilt moral drives. We come into the world with various instincts and intuitions, and then the environment we're in moulds them. There's a big literature here: Moral Foundations Theory took a reasonable stab at describing a set of 5–6 of these drives, The Blank Slate makes the general case for us not being blank slates, The Moral Animal gives an intuitive sense of how these moral drives get shaped by our environment, books like The Selfish Gene describe how altruism emerges, etc.
2. Most people behave well by following their drives. If someone has (a) ~normal morality-inducing genes (nothing that particularly promotes aggression, nothing that leaves them with little empathy) and (b) grows up in a reasonable environment, they'll usually behave well by following where their drives lead them.
They'll still have some drives which often lead to bad behaviour (greed, lust), but those get balanced out by the pro-social drives, and the person tends to behave well within their community without needing to philosophise much about the nature of morality or what their principles are.
For example, they don't beat their dog because doing so would feel terrible, rather than because they have a principled view about how one ought to treat dogs. Their decision not to cheat on their spouse when tempted comes from an intuitive sense that it would be wrong, rather than from having independently thought much about the nature of cheating.
If you ask these folks why they didn't take the immoral action, they'll refer to some moral principle rather than the feeling. Now, they people might be acting due to some articulate-able principle rather than a feeling (and, as I describe in the next section, in addition to acting on drives everyone is also acting on principles to some degree). But it's absolutely possible to act on a feeling without any background principle. We can be confident in that because:
3. Sometimes people spend a lot of effort to follow principles about how to act. These principles might have felt compelling because of a surge of moral feeling at some point, but people act on them even in cases where they don't strongly feel the moral drive. This can look like going to church every Sunday, a child being told they shouldn't lie and then avoiding even white lies, or a newly converted Muslim deciding to pray 5 times a day. Or it can look like something which pushes someone to devote their whole life to pro-social work, even though the people around them don't. William Wilberforce, after his conversion, agonised over whether his faith required him to leave politics altogether; John Newton and Pitt talked him into staying, and he took up abolition. Or someone chooses a career path where they'll earn more money in order to give more of it away.
4. Effective altruists tend to have stronger moral drives, and make a higher effort to follow principles, than average. On drives I'd guess something like the 90th percentile on average for highly engaged EAs, with some people (Julia Wise comes to mind) well into the 99th. On following principles I'd guess the average is above the 90th percentile too, but it won't be above the 99.9th. Lots of people try very hard to follow principles!
***
Given that background, here's how I think about whether people are 'good people'.
Basically, there's a spectrum. Take the people I grew up among in Queensland, and rank them on some combination of how intensely they feel moral drives and how much effort they put into following principles. My intuitive sense is that anyone above roughly the 30th percentile is living a good life and being a good person. I think my parents are well above that line.
There's something remarkable about this definition, which is what follows from people being this level of good. I'm saying that ~80% of people are good people. And with the distribution where it is, points 1–5 in my post are all true.
Isn't it pretty good that we live in a world with lots of people like my parents in it? Yeah, it's nice. But goodness gracious, humanity is falling short. With the world's current approach to morality we get all 5 of those things. That's really bad, and I'd really like us to do better, and so I don't feel very satisfied with an account of morality which doesn't ask for much more than that.
There are two ways I can imagine us doing better.
The whole population moves up. Imagine everyone shifts up by one standard deviation on drives and principle-following. Some fun sums: if ~5–8% of people refuse to eat meat today, that shift takes it to ~25–35%. If a few percent of people give away 10% of their income, it takes that to 10–25%. I'd guess that more animal advocates at the top end, plus everyone knowing several everyday vegetarians, is enough to get us to fewer than half the population eating meat. (And if we moved down a standard deviation, the world would look a lot worse.)
More people make the move. The other way is about how OK it is to be a basically good person (say, 90th percentile) without really amping up how seriously you act on principles. I'd really like more people to move up towards the top top end of the spectrum. Someone like Wilberforce was acting well into the 99th percentile. I think many of my colleagues are. I think many of the doctors at Médecins Sans Frontières are, etc.
I feel this most strongly about people who are talented and broadly thoughtful, who want to make the world better, and who are provisioned enough to have a real degree of choice about what career they have, but who don't shift much of their time and attention towards helping others. There's a very adjacent version of those people who takes the 'following principles' side more seriously, and who as a result ends up well into the 99th percentile on that axis. I really do want those people to step up more than they currently are.
If 10–100x more of them moved up to the 99th percentile of moral seriousness, such that they're really trying to act on principles to make the world better (rather than being a consultant, or working at an AI startup, or working as a doctor in a high-income country as many of the 90th percentile 'good people' will be), then I think we'd have a substantially better chance of solving the 5 problems in my post and more, or at least of being in a much better place on them. Sometimes I feel the energy that Rutger Bregman has at the School for Moral Ambition. I understand him as saying something like: "Guys, what on earth are you doing being a consultant, or working at a startup, right now?"
So yeah, that's where I am. I think the world is full of good people, but at the same time I really want them to be better.
Is there something my parents / others are getting right that I'm missing? I haven't found anything compelling there. Like, I think that it's good for people to behave as well as my parents do, I think I behave at least as well as them within my community and towards the people around me: including staying late to look after patients when I was a doctor. It's just that, in addition, I'm more obsessed with the principles aspect, and I'm more willing to let those principles dictate my major life decisions, including my career choice and choosing to work unusually hard.
For what it's worth, my parents don't think I'm missing something that they understand. Their view of my work is that it's wonderful that I'm doing this extra-mile thing. They've done a lot to support me on it! They once came on a 2,000 km trip with 20 medical students, driving around the country giving talks on the moral imperative to give (a project called Run to Better Days), and their biggest charity is now the Against Malaria Foundation. They do worry about the effect the intensity has on my welfare, and if they had their way I'd be physically in Australia and close to them. But they understand it: and their main orientation to it is actually about being proud of me trying particularly hard to help others.
***
I should add: I don't feel very sure of the model above. It's the one I've mostly relied on for at least 8 years, but I don't remember seeing a writeup which puts it exactly like this, and there's a good chance there's a better way to think about it. In fact, a colleague messaged me after reading the post to say she has a "deep sense that you're wrong about how you think about people", and we've just set up a time to chat about it!