Christians and effective altruism

I.

As with the last time I reviewed an effective altruism book, I am using All The Lives You Can Change as a spur to write a barely related essay. And as with the last time I reviewed an effective altruism book, I will open the piece by explaining who should read this book.

All The Lives You Can Change is an introduction to effective altruist ideas aimed at Christian readers.¹ If you read this Substack or otherwise participate in the effective altruist community, even if you’re a Christian, it will have almost no new information for you. However, if you’d enjoy reading about Badass Christians of the Past, you might want to get a copy and skip past all the introduction to EA stuff to read more about badass Christians. (I particularly recommend Oliver’s Story, page 35.)

However, as an introduction to effective altruist thought, All The Lives You Can Change seems unobjectionable. It covers the basic topics in an accessible way. I don’t know whether the authors master the ingroup signifiers of Protestantism.² But in general it seems like a good book to give to friends and family who are devout (Protestant) Christians and whom you think would be interested in effective altruism if it were presented to them properly, or who want to know about that effective altruism stuff you spend all your time doing. It also seems like potentially an interesting read for a church book group, if you’re an effective altruist Christian yourself who wants to introduce the ideas of effective altruism to your church.

II.

The entire time I was reading this book I was going: C A U S E P R I O R I T I Z A T I O N

Fundamentally, effective altruism comes from a secular set of assumptions. If you genuinely believe that an all-good God governs the universe, that suggests that many effective altruist assumptions are mistaken. In a secular context, like the Effective Altruism Forum, arguments should be made from secular principles. But in a religious context like All The Lives You Can Change, I really want to see rigorous cause prioritization work coming from a Christian worldview.

Global health is probably the area where Christians and secular effective altruists agree most. All The Lives You Can Change does a nice job highlighting the role of care for the poor in Scripture and Tradition (or whatever the Protestant equivalent of Scripture and Tradition is). Fundamentally, God has commanded Christians to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and look after the sick, and GiveWell is the best source of information about how to do that efficiently (especially now that they’ve expanded into livelihoods research).

All The Lives You Can Change addresses animal welfare but not in very much detail: it points out that there are a lot of farmed animals, and that many farmed animals are horrifically mistreated. But I’d like to see a more detailed discussion of animal welfare from a Christian perspective, perhaps along the lines of Matthew Scully’s Dominion, which argues that God granting humans dominion over animals actually requires us to treat animals with mercy and stewardship.

From a secular perspective, humans are on a spectrum with animals: they suffer and feel joy the same way we do. Secular animal advocates emphasize that, because animals are similar to humans, they have the same rights humans do to be protected from unnecessary suffering or from exploitation. But from a Christian perspective, humans and animals are fundamentally different, because only humans have souls and were made in the image of God. You can be a Christian and advocate for animal welfare. But Christians come at animal advocacy from a different perspective than non-Christians, and I wanted to see that explored more thoroughly.

All The Lives You Can Change falters when it addresses longtermist cause areas, such as AI safety. From a Christian perspective, you know exactly how humanity is going to end, and it isn’t “an AI released a bioengineereed pandemic because it was afraid we would try to turn it off.” Furthermore, to Christians, the end of humanity as presently conceived isn’t the destruction of all value, the way it is for secular people; to the contrary, it’s the beginning of the world to come, a period of literally infinite goodness.³

Furthermore, Christians almost all believe in objective morality. From a secular perspective, AI alignment is hard, because you’re trying to specify one complicated set of goals that isn’t any different from nearby complicated sets of goals that would result in disaster. But from a Christian perspective, the correct goals for AIs to have are different from other goals, because morality is a fact about the universe and not a fact about human minds. Under a Christian worldview, AI alignment is likely substantially easier than it is under secular worldviews.

Even from a Christian perspective, AI is a powerful technology, and some people ought to devote their careers to ensuring it goes well. But most people who work on AI safety believe that teaching an AI to want safe things is extremely difficult, and if we fail at it then all humans might die, and so destroy all value in the universe.⁴ If you don’t accept any of those three beliefs, the case that AI risk is overwhelmingly important is pretty weak.

A Christian longtermism likely looks very different from a secular longtermism. Christians probably ought to be more sympathetic to patient longtermism, and also more sympathetic to non-existential-risk-focused varieties of longtermism. As such, I’d expect a Christian longtermism to focus on movement building, global priorities research, and saving money to donate decades or centuries in the future—all proposals that look good under patient longtermism. Similarly, Christian longtermism would probably focus more on making the future better, and less on making sure that there’s a future at all: for example, to the extent that it addresses AI, Christian longtermism probably ought to focus on values lock-in and gradual disempowerment, rather than existential risk.

I also think a Christian longtermism should potentially focus on preserving the global church. One of the longest-lasting human institutions is the Christian church (specifically its Catholic and Orthodox strains). Guiding the church itself and ensuring its preservation seems like a crucial cause area for Christian longtermists.

Of course, if you believe existential risk is impossible and the future is inevitably going to be great, the case for longtermism itself—that is, the idea that one of our major moral priorities should be making sure the long-term future goes well—is much weaker. Longtermism is important to secular people because secular people believe the world isn’t guided by God’s providence. If it is, shaping the future yourself seems much less important!

All The Lives You Can Change, however, recommends a longtermism whose conclusions are pretty similar to the conclusions of secular effective altruists. Some of its arguments—that there might be a lot of people in the future, and that we tend to underweight the future—seem plausible. But it also says:

The theologian N. T. Wright argues that building just institutions, and attending to the needs of the world around us, is fully compatible with a belief in the end times. This is because the “new creation” should be understood as a fulfillment, rather than a replacement, of our efforts to build a better world. Our role in building this new creation may mean investing in institutions, policies, and actions that affect future generations; we should trust God to honor this good work, rather than see our long-term actions as futile.

what we don’t know is the mechanism by which humans are saved from extinction. It may be that God fulfills his plans through our actions; there is plenty of precedent for this in the Bible, from Mary’s obedience to Judas’s treachery... A Christian might very reasonably conclude that God is calling her to faithfully work to prevent human extinction, even if she trusts that such an extinction may never happen, and God may be using her to prevent that very outcome.

It’s not like these arguments are wrong, precisely. It’s just that they feel like the author first wrote “Christian effective altruists should prioritize the same longtermist cause areas secular effective altruists do” as their conclusion on the bottom of the page, and then filled in any argument that came to hand.

Certainly many Christians believe that Christians work to bring about the New Creation.⁵ But I’m not sure why that would mean preventing great power conflict or improving political institutions, instead of giving people malaria nets or fighting factory farming. Malaria and factory farming aren’t part of the New Creation either! The division being made here is one that makes sense from a secular perspective; if you want to make the argument that preventing great power conflict and improving political institutions are better ways of building the New Creation than preventing malaria and doing cage-free egg campaigns, you have to make that argument from Christian principles.

Similarly, “maybe God is using us as His tools to accomplish the inevitable continued existence of humanity” raises serious questions about causality and cluelessness. What’s the counterfactual here? If God is definitely not going to let humanity go extinct, wouldn’t the counterfactual impact of existential risk work be literally zero? Or maybe we’d be putting God in the position of making some kind of unfortunate tradeoff: maybe He brings about a civilizational collapse because that’s the only way to prevent a bioengineered pandemic that kills everyone. Does this suggest that we should focus on preventing existential risks that cause an unfortunate tradeoff for God (like bioengineered pandemics) over those that definitely don’t (God can simply make sure there aren’t any planetkiller asteroids around)?

If you accept the premise that you should do work with zero counterfactual impact because you might be God’s tool, the entire way effective altruists reason about effectiveness is caused into question. Developed-world doctors have a relatively small counterfactual impact, but maybe God chose you as His tool to perform amputations for reasons of His own. This argument saves existential risk work at the cost of effective altruism itself.

The section I found least convincing was the section on evangelism. From a Christian effective altruist perspective, Christian evangelism is extremely important. Like helping the poor, it is the subject of an explicit commandment from God (the Great Commission). In Christian theology, forming a personal relationship with God is the literal purpose of human existence. And—not to put too fine a point on it—the mainstream Christian belief is that non-Christians are risking a literal eternity of torture. Seems bad!

I agree that the Bible commands a portfolio approach where Christians both help the poor and do evangelism. Christians can’t accept the straightforward consequentialist argument that any risk of eternal torture outweighs any finite suffering in this life. The argument I’m most skeptical of is:

One view is that becoming a Christian is a spiritual process that is deeply personal. Many Christians throughout history have experienced it as a revelation or as God’s grace working in us, rather than us playing an active part in the process. Even if friends, family, authors, and pastors have supported our faith journeys, to many of us faith can feel more like God’s mysterious gift rather than an outcome that others have produced in us. Some denominations go even further and place the responsibility for conversion fully in God’s hands, such that entire revivals are the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit rather than the result of clever human strategizing about church growth.

Clearly, Christians have different models of conversion, but under all models, evangelism arguably works in a somewhat different way from providing food for the hungry or jabs for the unvaccinated. To put it crudely, there is less human agency and more divine agency. There is no button to press on a machine, much less predictability about outcomes, and it becomes harder to apply human models to maximize results.

This is primarily a point about tractability; it is not easy for us to control or guarantee conversions, and therefore difficult for us to adopt an “effective” approach to evangelism. However, there is also a point about division of labor. Since the Bible clearly indicates that the demands of the Christian life are more than just evangelism, including living our lives in certain ways and attending to the earthly needs of those around us, it is plausible that strategizing about saving souls on a macro level is more God’s job than ours.

But the exact argument used in favor of working on existential risk can be used in favor of evangelism: even if God wills that a particular person be saved, He might have chosen you as His tool to save them. And whether any particular person is saved is (clearly) far more in question than whether God would allow humanity to be unexpectedly driven extinct or whether the world to come is devoid of all value.

Besides, most effective altruist cause areas are hard to control or guarantee. Is evangelism really harder to collect evidence about than AI alignment, alternative protein development, the preservation of American democracy, or global priorities research? Under Christian premises, God is certainly particularly involved in conversions, but are we to assume that His involvement is qualitatively different than His involvement in malaria nets or cash transfers? Doesn’t God Himself have a special concern for the poor? Isn’t every human a subject of His special care, protection, guidance, and love?

Overall, I felt like I wanted significantly more thought about cause prioritization. A friend of mine, a serious Christian and serious effective altruist, has done her own cause prioritization work. Because she’s pro-life, she donates to the Against Malaria Foundation, which she believes to be the most cost-effective way to prevent miscarriages. And she considers healing the Great Schism to be potentially one of the top effective altruist cause areas. It’s this energy I wanted from All The Lives You Can Change, and it’s this energy I wasn’t getting.

Christianity is a set of fact claims, which imply different actions than the fact claims believed by the average atheist effective altruist. A Christian effective altruist’s cause prioritization shouldn’t look like an atheist effective altruist’s cause prioritization.

III.

The passage in All The Lives You Can Change that most stuck with me is:

The Christian message starts first and fully with affirming our weakness. It doesn’t start with us pulling ourselves together. It starts with acknowledging that the superpowers described in this book have been put into frail hands. And when we acknowledge this, God’s work can start...

since Christianity affirms our weakness while simultaneously affirming our infinite worth, the two must be compatible. God loves us—no matter what. His love is independent of whether we have much potential to make the world a better place, and of whether we make good use of this potential. Our impact and our worth are utterly independent from each other. You may be Norman Borlaug, whose actions fed billions—or you may be a random person in a small town struggling with failed relationships, addiction, and a slow-moving career. From God’s perspective, the two of you are equally fascinating, valuable, and infinitely worthy of his love...

affirming our weakness means, perhaps surprisingly, that we can aim high. How come? Because of grace; we don’t need to be overwhelmed by the gap between our ambition and our actions. In contrast, the secular world often finds it harder to acknowledge the chasm between our high ideals and our pitiful failures. And the secular response to this chasm can be to dial down our standards: Aren’t we pretty decent anyway, at least most of the time, and surely when compared to some of history’s true villains? Low standards feel like the only livable standards. But this is not the Christian route. Instead of watering down ideals, we can simply accept our shortcomings and rely on God’s grace to make the gap bearable.

Effective altruists like strength. More people than would like to admit the fact joined the effective altruism through reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, in which Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres famously says, “Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can’t answer, I feel guilty about not being God.”⁶

A lot of effective altruists, even those that joined the community in some more dignified manner, are sympathetic to Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres here. It feels like it ought to be possible to become better and fix everything. When I summarized effective altruism in three traits, one of them was ambition. Even once we’ve made our peace with not being able to solve any problem with a snap of our fingers, we like becoming more powerful, richer, better-connected, more intelligent, more diligent, more skilled, more able to shape the world to our will.

I’m not different here. My blog description, for a long time, has been “the nicest herrenmoralist”, which is the best compliment Scott Alexander ever gave me. To me, that means you ought to become brave and strong and talented and powerful, all that Nietzschean master morality stuff, and then you ought to use your courage and strength and talent and power not for self-aggrandizement but to make the world better.

“Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can’t answer, I feel guilty about not being God” is, for obvious reasons, less appealing to people who believe there is a literal God in His Heaven Whose hand is guiding the world with wisdom and love. Secular effective altruists tend to be deep atheists; the only people who can improve on the barbarity and suffering of the world we have been given are us, and since it is notably difficult to get “us” to do anything, that really means that the only person who can do anything about it is you.

But I’m still interested in the prospect of approaching effective altruism from a perspective of weakness. Heroic responsibility, ambition, herrenmoralism, and the rest all have the problem that they have nothing to say to you when you fail. Just git gud. If you can’t git gud, then idk you’re an NPC and Homer will allot half a metric foot to Achilles stabbing you with a spear.

And everyone is going to fail. For one thing, disease and depression and irreversible serious mistakes and errors of judgment and grief and aging are the human condition.⁷ But there’s a deeper thing here.

If you’re sufficiently ambitious, a version of the Peter Principle applies to your own life. If you reach your goals, you will raise your sights, which means that you will pursue more and more ambitious goals until you find a goal you can’t achieve. It might be “become the president of the United States”, it might be “get out of bed this morning”, but regardless your targets will rise to the level of your incompetence.

Since incompetence is an inevitable feature of the ambitious life, we ought to figure out some way to deal with it. And I think a good approach here does, in some sense, involve affirming our weakness. To an atheist, there isn’t a specific Person Who believes that you are fascinating, valuable, and infinitely worthy of love. But I think there is some sense in which all sentient beings and all beings that can rationally pursue their own vision of the Good are fascinating, valuable, and worthy of love. I wrote in a review of Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals:

Nussbaum highlights three essential virtues in thinking about animals: wonder, which draws our attention to the value of animals; compassion, which alerts us to suffering; and outrage without the desire for retribution, which motivates us to improve the world. Compassion and outrage are common and valued in the animal advocacy community, but wonder is rarer.

The virtue of wonder is both amazement at animals’ unique ways of life and curiosity about why they behave the way they do. When we wonder at an animal, we recognize that their behavior has a purpose, that there is something it is like to be them, and we try to understand. Wonder, she writes, “takes us out of ourselves and toward the other… [It has] nothing to do with our own personal search for well-being. It is connected to our original joy at life itself.”

All sentient beings are a proper object of compassion and wonder, simply by virtue of being sentient. We can only feel a certain amount of wonder at a time; if I feel wonder at a dolphin’s echolocation, then I’m not feeling it about the problem-solving abilities of octopuses. But that doesn’t make the octopuses any less deserving of wonder. And if I am awestruck by octopuses, who can’t even comprehend the concept of taking the Giving What We Can pledge, then perhaps I can also feel awe at myself, in spite of my difficulties budgeting to fulfill same.

But the second part of the quote—affirming weakness as a way to aim high—is something I desperately feel the need for, and something I don’t have a good answer to.

I don’t have God’s grace to rely on to make the gap between my ideals and my shortcomings bearable. Like the authors of All The Lives You Can Change, I observe that most people in the secular world dial down their standards until they’re achievable, and I refuse to do so; I am not going to settle for being a decent person. But I don’t believe in God. I don’t even believe I can become God. And I don’t have a great answer for how to deal with my inevitable failures and shortcomings without being able to rely on the grace of a being I don’t think exists. But I do think it’s worth taking seriously as an aspect of how to live well in a world beyond the reach of God.

1. Implicitly Protestant—not a ton of references to the Pope or the Church Fathers here.

2. I am a weird kind of Protestant and only dubiously a Christian at all. The atheism is a bit of a problem.

3. Although I’m discussing AI here, a similar argument applies to nuclear war and bioengineered pandemics.

4. Or a substantial fraction of the value in the universe, if AIs are sentient.

5. This is the Quaker eschatology, so I’m fond of it.

6. And then he remarks that the solution to this problem is to “hurry up and become God.”

7. So far, growth mindset.