Wokeness and effective altruism

Birds of a feather

I always thought that wokeness and effective altruism were sharply contrasting moral outlooks with nothing in common. But then I read Hanno Sauer’s The Invention of Good and Evil, and it changed my mind. This post includes some of my own ideas, but mostly it’s just me conveying Sauer’s arguments, which I find persuasive.¹

To be fair to my past self, these approaches really are different in many ways. For the woke, the worst evil is racism, particularly anti-black racism. For effective altruists, racism is small potatoes, a rounding error in moral math. They tend to worry instead about the suffering of the very poor and of the billions of animals that are tortured to death through factory farming, while those of a more “longtermist” bent think we should focus much of our energies on combating existential threats such as asteroids, climate change, and, of course, superintelligent AI.

The woke tend to be deeply invested in the policing of speech—”Words are violence”, as the expression goes. Effective altruists tend to be anti-censorship and believe that violating speech taboos might be necessary when dealing with hard moral problems.

Not surprisingly, then, effective altruists often describe the woke as virtue signaling scolds. Like, here:

[they] combine extreme self-righteousness with opposition to actually doing anything of consequence, and spend much of their time condemning those with the temerity to try to make the world a better place, rather than joining reading groups where they fatalistically complain about the impossibility of genuine progress.

Or here is a quote from Sauer (though he’s expressing the position of others—not his own).

[Wokeness] is ultimately an elite project from smart alecks and goody-two-shoes who keep coming up with new linguistic landmines to signal that they belong to the moral avant-garde, which always knows itself on the right side of history, and who behave insincerely and self-righteously.

It’s harder to provide quotes where the woke attack effective altruists because, while wokeness is a popular and influential movement (a lot more popular and influential than effective altruism, actually), the term “woke” is somewhat pejorative, and people don’t usually describe themselves as such. So rather than put individuals into a category they might reject, I’ll give up some symmetry here and say that progressives have little love for the effective altruists. Here’s a typical quote from an article called “The predictably grievous harms of effective altruism”:

EA is morally and politically wrong-headed, pernicious in its basic precepts, covering up systemic injustices embedded in the fabric of existing capitalist societies in a manner that clears the way for the perpetuation of significant wrongs. It is doing harm, in an increasingly global manner, to the work of activists for liberating causes.

My own impression is that the woke/progressives see effective altruists as hyper-rationalist, privileged white nerds with no real respect for those who are less fortunate than they are and no real interest in social justice. And they see the broader community that they are most associated with—“Rationalists”—as rife with racists, sexists, incels, and sex pests.

In romcoms, mutual hatred is often a sign of repressed passion. I don’t think this is happening here (though I’d definitely see a movie about a crazy love affair between a woke gender studies prof and a Silicon Valley longtermist). But I am tempted by the milder Freudian claim that a tacit recognition of profound similarities contributes to this mutual hatred, where a narcissism of small differences drives opposing groups to assert the worthlessness of their foes and their own superiority.

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And what are these profound similarities?

First, Sauer notes that both groups represent the extremes of Western values. This is obvious for the effective altruists, who draw explicitly on Western philosophy, including contemporary philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, as well as old-school utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (though not all effective altruists are utilitarians). More tendentiously (and Sauer doesn’t go here), it’s worth considering Tom Holland's argument in Dominion that Christianity, with its emphasis on the moral status of the weak, is another, less acknowledged, foundation for what seem to be secular moral movements such as Effective Altruism.

Sauer makes a good case that this origin story is true for the woke, too.

Protecting minorities, calling for social justice and demanding equality, anti-discrimination and anti-racism are ideals that are especially prominent in [Western] societies. Discrimination, exploitation, subjugation, genocide and inequality are the default, both historically and in the present, global sense (beyond simple, prehistoric tribal societies).

The woke are no fans of the West, though. Unlike the effective altruists, who worry about the suffering of people in faraway lands and the distant future (even poor Americans, they would tell you, are doing so well that it’s a waste of resources to try to help them), for the woke, morality begins at home, which for most of them means the United States. When it comes to sexism and misogyny, say, they are more outraged by what happens in Hollywood movie studios and Manhattan law firms than in Iran and the Sudan.²

For Sauer, this self-directed critical focus leads to a paradox.

The paradox of wokeness is that in its most extreme manifestations, spurred on by moral hypersensitisation, it could begin to reject the one major form of society that has ever made an imperfect, but at least serious, attempt to overcome the moral deficits it rightly sees as such. At its fringes, wokeness becomes an autoimmune disorder: a desire for moral improvement, which is intrinsically worth striving for, begins to question the foundations that allowed this desire to arise in the first place.

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The second similarity lies in the extreme demands that these movements make.

Most everyday moral philosophies—the ones that most of us live by, that we intuitively accept—tell us that if we keep our noses clean, we’re doing just fine. Thou shalt not kill, steal, etc. Give to charity, but it doesn’t have to be too much. Feed your kids, hug them occasionally. Maybe, as the Apostle Paul said, a perfect person would abstain from sex entirely, but if you can’t do that, get married and don’t sleep around. (“Better to marry than to burn.”). Do all this, and you’ll get to heaven just fine.

The woke have no patience for such low expectations. Before I read Ibram X. Kendi, I thought that my sole moral duty regarding race was not to be racist. It turns out, though, that you’re either racist or anti-racist—actively fighting against racism. There’s nothing in between. As Sauer puts it, for the woke, racism “remains impossible to eradicate or can only be remedied, if at all, through constant penitence, soul-searching and flagellation.”

And this is nothing compared to the demands of effective altruists. Before being exposed to Effective Altruism, I thought I was a pretty good guy overall; now I worry that I’m a moral monster. At the very minimum, I should have moved to a vegan diet long ago. I should give much more of what I earn (much more) to effective charities. More generally, instead of spending most of my time pursuing my own interests and those of my friends and family, I should be working tirelessly to maximize the flourishing of all sentient beings, present and future. That’s a lot.

As Sauer writes, these views share

a moral absolutism that always views the private as political, which allows no compromise and knows no escape, to which everything must subordinate itself in the eternal struggle of the good (to which we belong) against the evil (to which the others belong), which makes every waking moment and every sphere of life, from loving and laughing to eating and sleeping, subject to the dark and monastic asceticism of a moral demand for purity.

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The third thing the woke and the effective altruists share is that they are unpopular.

The woke tend to be hated by the non-woke. In the last election, Harris carefully tried to position herself as a reasonable non-woke centrist, avoiding any appeal to her race and gender as reasons to vote for her. Trump, for his part, did his best to paint Harris as woke, talking about her support for “government-paid transgender operations on illegal aliens” (a very woke idea) and putting out ads saying “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”. Such attacks are far from a complete account for why Trump won—but they sure didn’t hurt.

The effective altruists aren’t hated to the same extent because, to be hated, people have to have heard of you. The movement has not caught on outside a particular elite community (the sort of smarties who read Small Potatoes). Those few who know about them tend to find them irritating. Occasionally, the New York Times writes an article about the effective altruists, and even the best of these articles (like one I’m going to talk about below) can’t resist a tone of sneering disapproval.

It’s hard to see either view getting popular. For one thing, some of the woke and some of the effective altruists hold rather incredible views. For the woke, these include: Standardized tests like the SAT are inherently racist and should be abolished—even if they help identify talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and Cooking food from another culture, or practicing yoga, can be forms of cultural theft, even if done with admiration. For the effective altruists, these include: Preventing the suffering of future digital minds—billions or trillions of simulated beings—may be more morally urgent than improving life for humans now, and Factory farming is akin to the Holocaust, and one of the greatest injustices is … the suffering of shrimp. It’s hard to sell the Normies on any of this.

Then there’s the point raised in the previous section. The woke and the effective altuists tell us that we need to transform our lives, to become warriors in the fight against racism/shrimp farming. Is it any surprise that these are messages we don’t like to hear?

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The fourth thing that the woke and the effective altruists have in common is that they are probably both doing something right.

It would be a miracle, after all, if the commonly accepted moral worldview right now turned out to be the right one. More likely, moral progress has not come to an end. We’re probably still doing things wrong. The pressure to get better will come from people who are making annoying and ridiculous-seeming demands on us, just as the pressure to get better in the past—as in the movements against slavery, for women’s suffrage, and for gay rights—came from people who made annoying and ridiculous-seeming demands on people in the past.

I find it easy to like Effective Altruism. (Privileged white guy with strong rationalist leanings is a fan of EA—big surprise). I forgive its excesses and the occasional bad choices, because I think many of its core claims are right and believe that in the future, we’ll look back and wonder how anyone could have ever doubted them. I think the cruelties we inflict on animals are terrible and that we should care more about the people who are suffering the most. I am sold on the core effective altruist idea (it’s in their name!) that we should direct our charitable efforts in ways that are the most effective, rather than supporting causes that give us the warm-fuzzies.

It’s not just the movement I like; it’s the people. When I read about individuals who devote their lives to the cause, like Julia Wise (profiled in Larissa Macfarquhar’s wonderful Strangers Drowning), I am moved by the extent to which they care for others.

And I respect the efforts that prominent effective altruists make for their cause, which includes downplaying their movement’s more extreme demands. They might want you to give away most of your money (and one of your kidneys!) to strangers, but baked into the logic of their movement is the idea that a little bit is better than nothing, and so they try not to scare people off. You can see in a quote that a prominent effective altruist gives in a recent New York Times article called “What if Charity Shouldn’t be Optimized?”

Even the chief executive of the Center for Effective Altruism, Zachary Robinson, said in an interview that optimization did not dictate all his ways of doing good. He gives to effective altruist causes — but he also donates locally, supporting YIMBY Action because he is concerned about the housing crisis in his own community, San Francisco.

“We don’t need to be dogmatic,” Mr. Robinson said. “I don’t think this should be the entire part of someone’s life or altruistic portfolio.”

You can help those who need it most, says Robinson, but there’s no need to be weird about it—you can also support the causes that matter most to you personally.

I’m less fond of wokeness (as you can probably tell from my failed attempt here to treat the two movements on a par). In part, this follows from my appreciation of effective altruism. As I said earlier, the movements care about different things. The woke would have you send your money to racial justice groups and transgender protection groups (two causes promoted in the anti-optimization New York Times article), and they don’t care about preventing children in Africa from getting malaria. The effective altruists have the opposite priorities. They both can’t be right.

And there are other issues as well. There isn’t really a woke equivalent of Zachary Robinson, telling people that there’s no need for dogmatism—fighting racism can be just part of one’s life, and it’s fine if you also care about other things, like the suffering of animals. Some of the prominent features of wokeness, such as the obsession with language, a focus on us-them identity politics, and what Sauer describes as “the constant penitence, soul-searching and flagellation,” really are features, not bugs—take them away from wokeness, and there’s nothing left. I find little to appreciate in any of this.

But this isn’t the note I want to end on. Sauer has persuaded me to try to be humble here, to accept the possibility that my moral positions are almost certainly flawed and that I can learn something even from a moral movement that I find unappealing. So I should try to extend my open-heartedness to the woke, forgiving their excesses and occasional bad choices. I should recognize that they may hold moral insights that are of real value. This is Sauer’s own view, and I’ll end with his positive words.

Wokeness is here to stay. For we cannot do without it: in a modern society committed to the ideals of freedom, equality and human dignity, but which has only implemented them imperfectly so far, there will, and must, always be a social movement that reports on what inequality and disadvantage feel like with the authenticity of those affected, and that takes their authority and formulates demands to help us all get along better. These demands should not be trusted blindly, but they should be listened to.³

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1. Sauer’s discussion of these issues is restricted to his final chapter. The rest of his book explores the evolution—biological and cultural—of morality. The whole book is very highly recommended.

2. The exception here is that the woke are often deeply concerned about the actions of Israel. But this can be seen as a natural extension of their critical focus on Western values.

3. Thanks to Yoel Inbar, Michael Inzlicht, Christina Starmans, and Matti Wilks for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.