Owain Johnstone

Words and Deeds

So it turns out that philosophers who study ethics aren't actually all that ethical - this according to a recent 

 by Eric Schwitzgebel that I’d encourage you to read. Schwitzgebel writes about his research into the ethical activities of those who study how we should live for a living. He finds, broadly, that they don't act as morally as we might expect them to.

You might disagree with his metrics for assessing how ethical a person is (does it really matter how often you call your mother?), but I think he's hit on an important point, and one we can all recognise in ourselves.

Very often, the beliefs we claim to hold about how one ought to live one's life don't square all that well with the lives we're actually living. That's certainly true of me. In principle I agree wholeheartedly with the argument that I should do as much as I can to improve the lives of others – and continue doing so up until the point at which acting in that way begins to harm me more than it helps someone else.

But although I agree with that I definitely don't act accordingly.

Think of what that would entail in practice. I could sacrifice pretty much the entirety of my worldly possessions (including one of my kidneys), condemning myself to a life of poverty. Even at that point there might be more I could do. Because the levels of misery elsewhere in the world are so great, any sacrifice I perform is almost always going to benefit someone else more than it will inconvenience me.

That's an extreme example, but we can all think of less demanding principles that we say we believe but don’t put into practice (at least not consistently). Most of us probably believe that it's ethically important to consider the effects of our actions on others whenever possible – but often we don't.

One possible reason we don't is that we're fallible. We might firmly believe our principles, but other things get in the way – like our own selfishness.

Alternatively, it might be that instead of being fallible we're just lying to ourselves about what our principles really are – maybe, deep down, I don't really believe that I have an obligation to help others.

In either case, we're dealing with motives for action that are in some sense implicit or subconscious. We say one thing, but we do another. So, crucially, what we say isn't enough to explain what we do.

Why does this matter for effective altruism? The basic logic of effective altruism is a watered down version of the argument that I gave above – if you can, at comparatively little cost to yourself, save someone else's life (or significantly improve it), then you should. It's a reasoned argument about your ethical obligations.

The problem with that is that many people will agree wholeheartedly but won't change how they act on a day to day basis. I'm somewhat ashamed to be an example of this, too, but I don't think I'm the only one.

the force of the argument is difficult to contest, but that's not enough to persuade people to behave differently.

Now I am slightly caricaturing the effective altruism movement here. It is not just the propagation of a reasoned argument. Giving What We Can, for example, organises a variety of 

 and events, in part to enhance the felt attractiveness of effective giving – such as showing those still undecided what acting on the 10% 

However, the making of arguments is a large part of what the effective altruist community does, and I think we should consider how we might go beyond that. Because I am unconvinced that simply reaching more people with the same rational argument is going to persuade large numbers to become effective altruists. By large numbers I mean millions rather than thousands.

What we can do over and above explicit argument is to 

appeal to the implicit or subconscious decision making that people employ.

 One of the most fundamental ways of doing that is to 

make effective altruism the default or easier choice – the norm rather than the exception.

A world in which everyone carefully considered each of their choices so as to maximise the beneficial impact they can have would be a wonderful one. But we need to acknowledge that that actually makes things harder. Most people have enough on their plate that making things more difficult for them won’t prompt them to change how they act.

So how do we make effective altruist choices easier? This is what organisations like 

 set out to do – in their case by giving people the necessary information to decide between different charities. But their research, while excellent, is still too voluminous and complex for most people to bother with.

We could do a lot more to make those choices more straightforward.

Here's one small example of how we might make it easier and more rewarding for people to donate to effective charities. There are a couple of big online fundraising platforms that large numbers of people use, one of which is 

 to have channelled $3.3 billion to charity since their foundation in 2001. That's a lot.

But there's nothing (or nothing I could find) on their site about charitable effectiveness. What if GiveWell's research and ratings were incorporated, in a user-friendly manner, into the site? Or how about promoting particularly effective charities as targets for donation?

By making it easier for large numbers of people to make effective altruist choices the gains are potentially enormous.

embedding effective altruist ideas into the landscape of day to day activity is in the long term more important than pushing the rational argument for effective altruism

. The reason being quite simply that most people do not have large amounts of time or energy to devote to complex reasoned debate about these issues, despite intuitively agreeing with the basic position.

Winning the argument is easy – what we need to focus on is changing the way people act.

This and much of the subsequent discussion has obvious links to recent work in behavioural economics to do with the manipulation of choice architectures - popularly known as nudging. I won’t discuss this any further here, but if you’re interested then you should take a look at Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book ‘Nudge’.

When is systemic change a good idea?

 considering when you might want to pursue systemic change rather than marginal change. In this post I'm going to take a closer look at that.

A system's key elements are: a group of actors (with some interests in common), their interactions, and the outcomes that result from those interactions.

A single actor can be part of more than one system at once, and systems can change over time. They can also vary in size.

Consider the 'donating to charity' system ( the example I discussed in my last post). Its actors include donors, analysts, and aid recipients, and the main outcome of the system we're interested in is how much money gets to the recipients.

A marginal approach to change in that system would simply try to increase the amount of money donated (perhaps by taking a job as an investment banker and earning to give).

A systemic approach to change here might try to suggest that the money should be going to a different set of recipients – maybe by arguing for a new metric against which to assess charitable effectiveness.

If successful, this systemic approach would change a parameter of the system (who the recipients are), which is a potentially powerful way of changing the system's outcomes.

But when should we pursue marginal change and when systemic?

In my last post I suggested that there were at least two factors we would need to bear in mind when making that choice: 

Choosing marginal change or systemic change requires expertise appropriate to the task.

 If you want to earn to give, you need to have the expertise required of, say, an investment banker. If you want to argue for different charitable aid recipients, you need to have the expertise to analyse charitable effectiveness and present your arguments in a compelling manner.

As to mindset, marginal change can be more predictable and controllable. The reward is readily calculable and the risk is comparatively low. 

Systemic change, because of the complexity of even very small systems, is much riskier

 – i.e. far more likely to fail. However, it is possible that the reward (relative to the effort put in) may be greater.

For example, it may take only one report on charitable effectiveness to channel a significant proportion of donations away from some organisations and towards others – that may well be far more money than one person could expect to earn to give over the course of their working life. (This is an idealised example, of course.)

What about qualities of the system itself?

It's not just about expertise and risk/reward mindset. Those terms describe the characteristics I think are important for us to possess if we want to pursue systemic change. But we also need to consider the conditions of the system.

A system can be more or less amenable to change, and we ought to take that into account when choosing whether or not to pursue such change.

The more complex the system, the less likely it is that we can predict the effects of our actions on it

, which makes identifying suitable levers of change extremely difficult.

Generally, the larger the system (so the more actors and/or interactions it has) the more complex it will be.

In terms of what a small group of individuals or organisations can hope to achieve, large complex systems probably aren't worth bothering with – the complexity is simply too great.[1]

a system needs to be dense enough to be worth trying to influence

. In other words, there need to be enough actors with close interactions. If we're talking about a few actors who interact only quite loosely and occasionally, or with little mutual influence, then what we have is barely a system at all. Trying to exert influence in that kind of an environment is like pulling a lever that isn't properly attached to anything – the effect just won't be very big.

So assuming we have a system that is just the right size – neither too complex nor too ill-defined – 

we need to have enough knowledge of that system to identify the levers of change we want to use

. Gathering that information ourselves might not be possible since it could require substantial resources, so it may be that we have to wait for someone else to gain that understanding.

We also need to be able to access the levers of change that we identify.

 In many systems a majority of those levers may belong to national or local government. That means we need to be able to convince others to press those levers for us.

That in turn means that politics becomes a factor. Is the general political environment likely to be in favour of the change(s) we're seeking? Do we have any influence with the rights parts of the government? Can we work with someone who does? (This may mean that a political career could be advantageous to pursuing systemic change. See 

 for further thoughts on the ethical effectiveness of a political career.)

To illustrate the above, I'm going to return briefly to the topic of my own research – human trafficking in the UK.

Human trafficking is a poorly understood problem. There is little robust empirical data on the scope or extent of the problem anywhere, and while the UK has better data than many other countries it's still not much to go on.

However, understanding has been increasing over the past ten years or so.

The anti-trafficking 'system' in the UK consists of traffickers, victims, law enforcement, victim support NGOs and various branches of the Government. They produce several outcomes that we're interested in, such as criminals convicted, and victims rescued.

Ten to fifteen years ago it could be said that this system barely existed. There was little awareness of trafficking amongst law enforcement, immigration and social services, and there were fewer active NGOs than there are today.

That's not to say that trafficking didn't exist – it did. But there wasn’t a system that we could hope to influence.

Since then, the UK's trafficking response has developed substantially – such that we can now call it a system. There are enough actors involved with a sufficient density of connections and interactions.

As that system has developed, many NGOs and other actors have identified weaknesses within it that they thought needed to be changed in order to help victims and obtain more convictions of traffickers. In other words, they identified what they thought of as likely levers for systemic change.

However, until relatively recently, few of those changes were successfully introduced.

That changed somewhat in 2013, when a think-tank called the Centre for Social Justice released a report (

'It Happens Here: Equipping the United Kingdom to fight modern slavery'

) on the UK's anti-trafficking response. That report led almost directly to the introduction of the Modern Slavery Bill in Parliament – a Bill that has now become law.

The Modern Slavery Act introduces several new measures that we can see as operating levers of systemic change. A good example is the clause mandating that companies above a certain size report on efforts they are taking (or not) to combat modern slavery in their supply chains. By producing new information that may influence how large numbers of actors conduct themselves (e.g. consumers in their buying choices), the way the system works may change.

Why did this Bill get introduced and become law? Obviously the reasons are complex but I think we can see it as 

a relatively successful example of systemic change that illustrates the importance of the factors I discussed above

 – cohesive enough to identify as such but not too large that its complexity could not be grasped.

sufficient knowledge of that system existed

. Several major NGO reports had thoroughly mapped it over the previous few years and the CSJ report did so again – working on the basis of over 200 interviews with relevant actors. That enabled the CSJ to confidently identify the levers of change.

the general political environment was fortuitous

. Another Bill had been thrown out, leaving Parliamentary time available, and the issue of trafficking (or 'modern slavery' as it has come to be termed) is bipartisan enough that a Bill had a chance of succeeding in the limited time available.

the CSJ had good connections with the Government

 and so were able to communicate their findings effectively.

The vagaries of the political process have meant that although the Modern Slavery Act has on the whole been welcomed as a success, it has not addressed all the points that the CSJ report – and many other actors – would have liked it to. 

Several potential levers of change remain undisturbed.

Further, although the CSJ's report, building on other work, constructed the best map of the UK trafficking system we have yet had, it was of course not perfect. 

Our knowledge will continue to improve and as it does it may well change what we perceive to be the relevant levers of change.

Finally, statistical data (for example on number of victims rescued and numbers of traffickers convicted) remain poor, which means that 

it will be difficult to evaluate the success of the new law.

I think we can cautiously see this as a good example of successfully engineered systemic change, albeit with the caveats noted above.

It suggests that the conditions under which systemic change is an appropriate choice are quite limiting, however. The choice to pursue such change is therefore one that we should take only after careful consideration.

Owain Johnstone

Articles

Words and Deeds

When is systemic change a good idea?