The missing mood about EA guilt

It basically makes sense

Many Bay Area rationalist types¹ have long held that being motivated by guilt is bad. It’s not just miserable, it’s also harmful to your soul’s integrity on some deeper level and ineffective even for the altruistic goals in question.² I have a mixed relationship to this whole doctrine.

I do think a certain kind of person gets in their own way by continually picking over their own flaws and shortcomings with little to show for it; self-recrimination can be a kind of narcissism. The returns to self-sacrifice are often not as great as the returns to other traits (like creativity or charisma or courage) that excessive guilt can interfere with. And in practice, I’m not spending all that much energy feeling guilty these days, and it’s not because I have nothing to be guilty about — I work much less than I could, I spend much more on myself than I could, I put time and mental energy into hobbies like this blog or my wedding micro-business.

But ultimately I am here, doing what I’m basically doing with my life for a fair bit more than forty hours each week, out of a sense of moral obligation. And I do feel guilt when I fall short and fuck up. Such guilt is responsible for some of the most painful experiences of my life, and I would not change myself to be the kind of person who doesn’t experience that.

In this light, the anti-guilt propaganda rings hollow. Yes, it happens to be true as a contingent empirical fact that some EAs would have more impact if they experienced less guilt. But I feel like people say that without a real examination of whether it’s true. When people say that to me, I feel like they generally don’t understand me well enough to be credible in their assumption that my sense of obligation must be harming my productivity.³

And on a deeper level, I want to be like: I’m sorry, wasn’t this about morality? You know, that thing where most people in human history supported slavery, and we don’t want to be like them? That thing where you must rescue a drowning child, where you must not run over someone else on the way to the hospital, not even to save your own life? Where you must lie to the Nazi who knocks on your door, must not give up your comrades even under torture? Aren’t lives on the line, here and now? Am I in the wrong club right now?

To state the obvious, people who are down on guilt motivation in EA careers are not against guilt in full generality (at least I hope not). They’d endorse people feeling guilty about cheating on their spouse or hitting their kids or stealing billions of dollars from customers of their crypto exchange. In some cases they’d endorse someone living with a constant guilty vigilance: if someone is born a kleptomaniac, or born with powerful violent urges, I think they would endorse that person taking continuous pains to control and crush their own impulses.⁴

The obligated EAs, the “excited” EAs, and the vast majority of human beings agree: at least some people, at least some of the time, are doing the wrong thing. Those people don’t need to do a bunch of focusing and goal-factoring to get to the root of their “true values.” They need to start doing the right thing.⁵

For your anti-EA-guilt manifesto to get off the ground, I think you need to start by clearly stating as a premise that doing as much good as you can with your career is not one of those decisions that falls in this category. It is not a real moral choice, the no-bullshit kind where you need to hold yourself to choosing rightly and you absolutely should feel guilty if you fail. You need to say: of course I agree actual moral choices exist and you should feel a lot of guilt when you get those wrong, I’m not a lunatic psychopath. It’s just that maximizing the impact of your career and/or donations isn’t one of those. Bryan Caplan says it with classic Caplan simplicity:⁶

The “Catholic” approach [to morality] has extremely high moral standards (e.g. Be celibate; give everything you have to the poor; love everyone), but enforces them loosely.

The “Protestant” approach has moderate moral standards (e.g. Don’t commit adultery; prudently give to the deserving poor; don’t hate people who’ve never done you wrong), but enforces them strictly.

As a moral realist, I think the most important question is “Which ethical view is correct?” And as a moral intuitionist, I judge the Protestant approach plainly superior. The moral case against adultery is easy to grasp; the moral case for celibacy (!), not so much. The moral case against hating people who have done you no wrong is easy to grasp; the moral case for loving (!?) total strangers, not so much.

I don’t think I’ve really heard an EA just come out and say what Caplan says in so many words, even when they’re trying to offer anti-guilt-motivation self-help. It’d play awkwardly with their audience.

Many EAs are born Catholic moralists who’ve long felt a preverbal drive to save strangers drowning and to heal the sickness of the world. To many of us, EA did not feel like a free choice, like picking out a college major or nice living room drapes. To our ears, it was a commandment from God. As grueling as it can sometimes be to uphold moral standards under which we’re always failing, it would be more destabilizing and more self-violating to casually discard them. As Joe Carlsmith says:

Effective Altruism is a lot about Morality with a capital M. Maybe it presents itself, in various contexts, as just-another-hobby. And sure, hobbyists are welcome. But various strands of philosophical EA want, underneath, to act with the righteousness of a True Church—to be doing, you know, the Good Thing, the Right Thing; and to be doing it the best way; the way you, like, should. Maybe you’re not obligated to do this (rather, it’s “supererogatory.”) And sure, you’re too weak to do it fully. But God smiles brighter as you do it more.

Sure, the vast majority of people don’t strive for the moral ideal of doing as much as possible for strangers far away in space, time, and species. They don’t feel bad about that, and they don’t think anyone else should have to feel bad about it either. And sure, most EAs don’t judge normal people harshly for this.⁷ So if you’re trying to argue the guilty EA out of their guilt, you might be tempted to say: “Look, you don’t expect other people to live up to this standard of moral perfection, so it’s silly and inconsistent to hold yourself to it.”

But this also rings hollow. It is perfectly coherent to choose to take on a weighty responsibility that not everyone chooses to take on. Think about serving in the army, or doing social work, or fostering at-risk kids. And it’s perfectly reasonable to feel guilt and remorse when you struggle with these chosen responsibilities and fall short of your expectations for yourself — just because most people don’t sign up to fight in a war in the first place doesn’t mean it’s completely fine and merits no guilt to be a deserter.

And it’s possible for other people to endorse and admire this sense of guilt, even though it stems from them striving to do more than others do. I have so much gratitude and awe for the guilt and self-recrimination that Oskar Schindler and John Woolman felt. I do not think they would have done more if they had felt the weight less.

And when you disagree with and dismiss someone else’s sense of responsibility, that usually stems from an actual ethical and philosophical disagreement you have with that person. I think it’s very rare for it to be a pure, bloodless calculation that they would do just as well according to your shared value system if only they stopped feeling so guilty.

Imagine you’re friends with a Catholic priest who’s struggling with guilt over his lust for a beautiful stranger, his resentment at his oath of celibacy. You, atheist that you are, don’t care about the priesthood or its oaths. But wouldn’t you feel weird saying “Look, you don’t judge other non-priests for having sex with hot strangers, so why are you judging yourself?” Wouldn’t you feel a little ridiculous telling him he sh—uh, he’d get more of whatever it is he actually values if he were to—dissolve his notion of “should” and step back and listen open-mindedly both to the part of him that really wants sex and to the part of him that really wants him to stay abstinent? Isn’t there somebody you forgot to ask?

The way I see it, you have two main reasonable options here: you could commiserate with the struggle he’s going through while fundamentally affirming his goal of remaining a Catholic priest in good standing, providing social support and even social pressure to help him uphold the requirements. Or you can say, “Look dude, Catholicism is false, you made a mistake, you should quit the priesthood and build yourself a whole new community and sleep with whoever you want.”

Similarly, I think any intellectually honest and robustly satisfying argument against EA guilt needs to directly convince us that our religion is false. You can’t hide behind “career advice” and “motivation advice” that attempts to talk us down from EA guilt while leaving the underlying moral framework unchallenged.

And I actually think there is probably a case to be made that the standard-issue hardcore EA way of thinking about morality is in some deep sense wrong-headed, and that the wisest version of most EAs would probably end up adopting a substantively different perspective about some pretty fundamental questions upon further reflection.⁸ But whatever that different perspective ultimately ends up being, I think it, like all moral traditions, would have its place for guilt. On a basic level, it is rational and noble to feel guilt when you fall short of what you believe is right.

1. I think this is very different among EAs in the East Coast and UK; the Bay Area scene (which to be clear I like way more on balance) is much more Silicon Valley-flavored and hippie-flavored.

2. And, well, it’s kind of cringe. Beta. Alphas are motivated by excitement.

3. In fact, I think it’s clearly quite good for my productivity, for the simple reason that if I felt less moral obligation I wouldn’t try as hard to do ambitious scary things, and would therefore be in a totally different and more chill line of work, such as “pilates mom.” I don’t really have that much “native” ambition, I have no psychological need to “build” or “grind” or whatever. This is very gendered, and all the people I’ve seen swear up and down that guilt only ever gets in your way are men.

4. Some especially woo-ey rationalists may have the conviction that all this hypothetical kleptomaniac needs is a certain genre of self-help / therapy / inner work, and after doing that work they would be able to avoid stealing without having to live a life of guilty vigilance. Maybe, but it’s quite the gamble to take on other people’s stuff.

5. Yes, I’m a moral anti-realist, like everyone in the Bay Area. Yes, I still endorse this statement, like everyone who’s not a sociopath or a completely dysfunctional pushover. No, I don’t totally get it. No, I’m not giving up on it (and you won’t either).

6. This essay genuinely made me laugh out loud — it was a delightful shock to see into the mind of someone with so little inner conflict or moral angst. I’ve remembered it for years.

7. Though some, uh, do.

8. I’ve become more open to this possibility over the last decade and I hope to try to articulate some pieces of why on this blog sometime, though my views are currently pretty inarticulate and unstable.