Making the Cages Bigger: The Peter Singer-Alice Crary Debate

Resolved: Effective Altruism is a Defense of the Status Quo

Alice Crary of the New School for Social Research (Left) and Peter Singer (Right)

I was quite honored recently to be invited to the preview taping of a debate on Effective Altruism organized by Open To Debate, between EA godfather Peter Singer and EA critic Alice Crary. The debate will be released to the public before too long here, but I thought Dark Markets supporters would be interested in a summary. I also want to thank Open To Debate for apparently noticing my work – I was one of only about a dozen previewers of the taping.

The discussion between Singer and Crary was illuminating on one point in particular. Crary is a professor at the New School, who across a journal article and now an edited volume has articulated a much more focused and grounded critique of Effective Altruism than the often theoretical threads I’ve been pulling at here. Her overriding and to my mind irrefutable argument, both in writing and very well articulated in her debate with Singer, is that Effective Altruism is fundamentally a philosophy that defends the status quo, particularly the economic status quo. EA, she argues, “places moral agency in the hands of the wealthy, and encourages them to see themselves as saviors to the poor.”

It’s a well-worn point to some, but Crary has fleshed it out and solidified it. Specifically, and through points I’ll detail below, Crary made the very strong point that Effective Altruism has no systematic or historical analysis of the problems it is trying to address. This is why an EA sees every problem as solvable by money – they take the money-dominated social dynamics of the present as an eternal given. It is in this sense little more than a repackaging of the neoliberal end-of-history thesis, which believes at its core that a combination of markets, technology, and “objective science” can determine the solution to all human problems.

Crary’s second well-articulated critique was leveled against this ‘scientistic’ worldview, which I’ve previously written about in its guise of Yudkowskyite Rationalism, and as part of the larger “TESCREAL” ideological bundle. Crary’s much more grounded critique was that EAs specifically believe that randomized controlled trials can predict where the most effective interventions are.

Her point was not that this is wrong, but that EAs hubristically ignore existing results-oriented work by development experts. EAs implicitly believe, she argued, that some methods aren’t being used in philanthropy, so “we’re going to do it better.” But in fact, development experts and non-EA social change groups already believe in measuring outcomes. (Again we see how EA attracts and cultivates conceited egotists.)

What these groups also know, and EAs seemingly don’t know or can’t accept, is that experimental results are not always actually good predictors of outcomes in reality. According to Crary, randomized trials can form starting points for good interventions, but unexpected consequences are frequent and, well, unpredictable. This requires an iterative, engaged, boots-on-the-ground approach to helping people. At a high level, Crary argued, EA posits instead that experimental results constitute reliable proof that X amount of money will always produce Y outcome when pushed through Z program.

Singer argued in response that the failures of initial experimental results to hold up in the field are used to make adjustments to EA-backed programs. Crary, in response, argued that if that’s the case, Effective Altruism offers nothing new of substance: after all, if they too sometimes spend money without getting the result they predicted, how exactly are they more effective than anyone else?

As soon as EAs have to start acknowledging failure and reform, Crary argued, they’re just doing regular evidence-based but complex nonprofit and NGO work.

This is ultimately the point where all consequentialist philosophies fail. They begin from an assumed ability to predict the future, and when that inevitably proves false, they fall back to stances little different from everyone else’s provisional, try-your-best efforts to navigate and improve existence. Somehow, though, the massive egos required to believe you can predict the future emerge from this apparent humbling fully intact.

This was illustrated in a frankly disturbing exchange at the end of the debate, when Crary and Singer took questions from four handpicked interlocutors. One of them was Richard Yetter-Chapel, a Princeton PhD and EA theorist who teaches at the University of Miami and has coauthored an op-ed with Singer. I didn’t get his exact wording, but in essence, Yetter-Chapel asked Crary whether she worried that her “derisive” comments about EA risked indirectly killing children currently being aided by EA-funded programs.

This frankly offensive proposition reflects many things that are diseased about Effective Altruism as an ideology. Obviuously Yetter-Chapel’s question amounts to a pretty “derisive” rejection of the idea that trying to change society is a good way to help people, seemingly supporting her critique of EA as an apologetics for stasis.

It also recapitulates Singer’s own comically blinkered presumption that EA alone can claim “effectiveness” in helping people; and that adherence to Effective Altruism is the only reason anyone would give money to save children from suffering. Peel back the surface, and this line of thinking seems to support my intuition that EA is attractive to people without an internal moral compass – people who may have an intellectual belief in helping others, but need a purely rationalist and thoroughly instrumental framework for it.

In the most important exchange of the debate, Singer cited research showing that too much animal welfare funding went to pets like dogs and cats, and not enough to reduce the suffering caused by factory farming. For Singer, there seemed to be two laudable solutions – lab-grown meat, and collaboration with industry to sign pledges to improve the conditions of factory-farmed animals. Taking Singer at his word, those pledges have largely been adhered to, and led to things like making the cages in which farm animals are held a little bigger.

Perhaps you can anticipate Crary’s critique. While the EAs whose work Singer was lauding worked in collaboration with industrial farmers to make small changes (but for some people I’m sure meaningful ones!), there were also, in her words, “more justice oriented” activists working, not to ask industry to sign nonbinding pledges, but to change the actually-binding laws dictating how animals are treated.

According to Crary, in this and other cases, systemically critical activists have found Effective Altruists a concrete obstacle to real reform. It’s not hard to see why: by acting as a controlled opposition that fiddles with details around the edges, EAs provide a “self regulation” narrative that factory farmers could use to defuse attempts at legal or systemic change. This, as Gebru and Torres have argued in the context of “AI Safety,” is why EA has proven such an attractive recipient for a certain kind of donor – it’s charity that is fundamentally disinterested in reforming the social order.

Staggeringly, when told about these frustrated activists, Peter Singer professed that “I don’t know much about them, [but] they sound like a good idea.” That a man who has supposedly committed much of his life energy to improving animal welfare “doesn’t know much” about the radical animal liberation movement is beyond shocking: it is, almost certainly a sign of carefully cultivated and intentional ignorance that speaks volumes about the utter lack of nuance that fundamentally underlies Effective Altruism.

Compounding that impression is Singer’s citation of lab-grown meat as a solution to the problem of factory farming. It’s not so much that this answer is wrong, as that it is left to do far too much work in the aggressively technocratic Effective Altruist worldview.

At the very base of that worldview is the idea that any problem can be solved simply by throwing money at it, whether via “investment” or “charity” – and all without ever seriously grappling with the exploitation and abuses of power that caused a problem in the first place.