EA - Deontology is not the solution by Peter McLaughlin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deontology is not the solution, published by Peter McLaughlin on November 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a lightly-edited extract from a longer post I have been writing about the problems Effective Altruism has with power. That post will likely be uploaded soon, but I wanted to upload this extract first since I think it's especially relevant to the kind of reflection that is currently happening in this community, and because I think it's more polished than the rest of my work-in-progress. Thank you to Julian Hazell and Keir Bradwell for reading and commenting on an earlier draft.In the wake of revelations about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried's behaviour, Effective Altruists have begun reflecting on how they might respond to this situation, and if the movement needs to reform itself before 'next time'. And I have begun to notice a pattern emerging: people saying that this fuck-up is evidence of too little 'deontology' in Effective Altruism. As this diagnosis goes, Bankman-Fried's behaviour was partly (though not entirely) the result of attitudes that are unfortunately general among Effective Altruists, such as a too-easy willingness to violate side-constraints, too little concern with honesty and transparency, and sometimes a lack of integrity. This thread by Dustin Moskovitz and this post by Julian Hazell both exemplify the conclusion that EA needs to be a bit more 'deontological'.I’m sympathetic here: I’m an ethics guy by background, and I think it’s an important and insightful field. I understand that EA and longtermism emerged out of moral philosophy, that some of the movement’s most prominent leaders are analytic ethicists in their day jobs, and that the language of the movement is (in large part) the language of analytic ethics. So it makes sense that EAs reach for ethical distinctions and ideas when trying to think about a question, such as ‘what went wrong with FTX?’. But I think that it is completely the wrong way to think about cases where people abuse their power, like Bankman-Fried abused his.The problem with the abuse of power is not simply that having power lets you do things that fuck over other people (in potentially self-defeating ways). You will always have opportunities to fuck people over for influence and leverage, and it is always possible, at least in principle, that you will get too carried away by your own vision and take these opportunities (even if they are self-defeating). This applies no matter if you are the President of the United States or if you’re just asking your friend for £20; it applies even if you are purely altruistically motivated.However, morally thoughtful people tend to have good ‘intuitions’ about everyday cases: it is these that common-sense morality was designed to handle. We know that it’s wrong to take someone else’s money and not pay it back; we know that it’s typically wrong to lie solely for our own benefit; we understand that it’s good to be trustworthy and honest. Indeed, in everyday contexts certain options are just entirely unthinkable. For example, a surgeon won’t typically even ask themselves ‘should I cut up this patient and redistribute their organs to maximise utility?’—the idea to do such a thing would never even enter their mind—and you would probably be a bit uneasy with a surgeon who had indeed asked himself this question, even if he had concluded that he shouldn’t cut you up.This kind of everyday moral reasoning is exactly what is captured by the kinds of deontological ‘side constraints’ most often discussed in the Effective Altruism community. As this post makes wonderfully clear, the reason why even consequentialists should be concerned with side-constraints is because you can predict ahead of time that you will face certain kinds of situations, and you know that it would be better ...