When people seek to encourage philosophical reflection, they often trot out the old Socratic hoare, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” What they don’t tell their would-be converts, however, is that the examined life often ends up looking like one filled with things not worth doing.
Consider, for example, the sponsored walk I did last week, a marathon in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. Most people would think this is a Good Thing. But a significant minority believe that if you look at it rationally, it makes no sense for me to do it or for anyone to sponsor me.
Objection one is the idea that an individual giving relatively small amounts to charities has no or neglible impact. Macmillan raised £20 million though its Mighty Hikes last year. But for any one donor, their tenner is neither here nor there. It won’t make a difference between someone getting support with their illness or not. It’s just a hundredth of a percentage point of an accounting error. Under the scientific-sounding name of Rational Choice Theory, this logic is also often used to advise against voting. The chances of a single vote affecting the result of an election is so tiny that unless you have a good reason to believe yours is on a knife-edge, your vote won’t change the outcome. Just stay at home.
The second objection is that the cause is the wrong one. The “effective altruist” movement argues that we should channel our charitable donations to where they have the biggest impact. If our motivation is to help others, anything else is irrational. Unfortunately for Macmillan, although support for people with cancer and their families is wonderful, it delivers much less bang for your buck than other interventions that actually save lives. By the same reasoning, you should not give to provide guide dogs, air ambulances or lifeboats as there are more cost-effective ways of supporting people in need or of saving lives.
The third objection is that the whole institition of sponsored activities is ridiculous. What is the supposed connection between a cause being the worthy recipient of your money and someone walking 26.2 miles? If it is worth giving £20 to Macmillan, me walking doesn’t make it any more or less worthwhile. Worse, there are costs of staging and attending a walk. I had to pay an entry fee to help cover these (100% of sponsorship money goes to the charity) and I had to travel to get to it and stay somewhere the night before. Had I just given that money to Macmillan, and my sponsorers had too, cancer sufferers would have benefitted even more than they did by the walk. It’s all terribly inefficient.
As I did the walk, you’ve probably guessed that I don’t buy these arguments. What they all have in common is a flawed and simplistic notion of what “rational” means. Worse, many people believe that this conception of rationality is self-evidently the right one, allowing them to confidentially go around proclaiming that all sorts of entirely sensible things are “irrational”.
The idea of rationality in question is very close to that held by almost all orthodox economists until quite recently.The human agent is conceived as Homo economicus, a rational maximiser. That is to say, we make choices that have the optimal outcome. It is a caricature of economists to suggest that this always equates with maximum self-interest, although some do indeed think this. But the effective altruist can also be a Homo economicus whose desired optimal outcome is the general welfare of humanity.
Put this way, it might indeed seem obvious that’s this is what it means to act rationally. To do something that is less effective at achieveing your goals than the alternative is not rational. True. The problem is that for all their supposed rationality, advocates of this view tend to put suprisisingly little thought into what goals it is rational to want to aim for, and how to achieve them.
Start with the idea that sponsored activities are an inefficient way of raising money. First, this would only be true if the vast majority of people were both perfectly rational and strongly motivated to support good causes. In such a world, we would all agree, like effective altruists, to donate a large proportion of our incomes to charity. But we do not live in such a world. In the real one, sponsored events prompt people to make donations that they would not otherwise have made. Most of the £20 million raised by Mighty Hikes would have been spent on ourselves, not given away. So in fact they are a very efficient way of tapping into people’s inconsistent altruistic instincts.
Just as importantly, events like this do not exist merely to raise money anyway. They meet a range of other needs and desires. Many people do the walk as a way of honouring their deceased friends and relatives, or showing solidarity with sick ones. They also help to raise awareness. And the walks can also be rewarding challenges. If the only reason we did such a sponsored activity was to raise money, we might be irrational. But we have complex and mixed motivations. Such events are uniquely able to satisfy this wide range of desires.
What about the objection that our small donations, like our votes, won’t make a difference? Most people instinctively smell something wrong here: if we all went along with this line of reasoning, no one would donate, no one would vote, and the millions of pounds and votes that do make a difference would not be gathered.
The standard objection to this defence is that it misses the point. Knowing that your act makes no difference is a reason for you not to act. But knowing that other people’s collective actions do make a difference, you should encourage them to keep on acting irrationally. Indeed, encouraging others is more important that acting yourself. By making a lot of people falsely believe that their donations count, I raised over £500, which is enough to actually do something.
This strikes me as nonsense. We have to step back if we are to see the flaw in the fundamental premise of the argument. The idea that we are supposed to accept as intuitively obvious is that an act which makes no decisive difference is not worth doing. But human beings are social animals and as such it is rational to take part in collective endeavours, even if our contribution does not make the difference between success and failure. To believe that the decisiveness of my own contribution must be central betrays a radically indivualistic mindset.
For example, collectively we need to reduce our fossil fuel usage. To meet this collective goal requires each individual to reduce their usage. The fact that it doesn’t matter if a few don’t is besides the point. It is our responsibility to share the burden, and so for that reason it is rational to do our bit. To put it another way, we are not just interested in outcomes but in how those outcomes are produced. Fairness and justice require that we shoulder our share of the burden. It may be rational to be a free rider if our only goals our selfish, but is is irrational to be one if we wish to be good citizens and neighbours.
The final objection is that the cause of helping the sick deal with their illness is not as cost effective in reducing human suffering as giving cash directly to very poor, or providing cheap, life-saving medicines. The unstated premise here is that a rational person with altruistic motivations should be concerned with maximising well-being across the entire global population, irrespective of other desires, interests or social ties. That might sound reasonable, but what if I put it this way: a rational altruist is someone who does not act as a specific individual with relationships, interests and ties to the world, but as a God who stands above it, seeking the maximum good with cold objectivity.
The effective altruist might sound nobel but there is not a human being alive who even comes close to having the mind of one, and nor should we want to. One advocate, Peter Singer, was embarrassed many years ago when it turned out he paid for care for his ageing mother with Alzheimer’s. But of course he did. To have told her his money would have been more efficiently spent on mosquito nets in Sub-Saharan Africa would have made him a moral robot, not a flesh and blood son.
Effective altruists are right to challenge us to think more carefully about the impact of our giving. But to reduce maximum impact to number of Quality-Adjusted Life Years saved is a value judgement, not a rational necessity. Indeed, were we to accept that we have a moral obligation to maximise our altruistic impact, we have to give up any notion that it is rational or ethical to enjoy even the smallest indulgence or give any preference to friends and family. Peter Singer has explicitly argued this.
As David Hume realised, it is not reason that makes some goals more worthwhile than others. Reason does not say it is good to love some people more than others, or that watching tennis is a good use of an afternoon. If someone chooses the wrong means to an end, they may be irrational. But reason cannot tell them which goals they should be pursuing, and it certainly can’t tell us we ought to make maximising the general good our number one life goal.
In short, sponsored walks only look irrational to those who conceive of rationality as the property of disinterested calculators looking for the the objectively maximum benefit. But they look perfectly rational to those who see reason as a tool to help us to achieve the many different and often conflicting aims and goals that make up a rich, human life. So if you’d like to top up the funds I raised, it would be both generous and rational for you to do so.