Why Be an Effective Enlightenment Activist

Ten years ago, Peter Singer, a professor of ethics at Princeton University, gave a talk at the TED conference entitled “The Why and How of the Effective Altruism.” TED brings together a wide range of prominent figures from science, design, literature, music, and other fields to share their reflections and perspectives on technology, society, and people. It’s arguably the most important conference in influencing social thinking nowadays.

 

Singer began by showing a surveillance video clip of an evening street in a Chinese city.  In it a child of a few years old for some reason was wandering down the street and a truck drove up from the opposite direction. It was supposedly a side street, not a highway, and the truck wasn't going too fast, but it didn’t stop. The child was run over. The truck stopped but briefly and drove off. The child's name is said to be “Yueyue" on the screen.

 

Later, in more footages captured by the security cameras, we see pedestrians walking by, swaggering around Yueyue as if she were a pile of garbage, until much later a sweeper called for help to take the child to the hospital. But it was too late, and Yueyue died.    

 

Singer paused to ask the audience, "How many of you, when you see a situation like this, say to yourselves, no, I'm not going to go around the child, I'm going to rescue her, and if that's the case, raise your hand." Almost all the listeners raised their hands.

 

Singer went on to say, "I believe in you all, but in being a little self-congratulatory for thinking that way, have you ever thought about the fact that there are 20,000 children in the world right now, every day, who are dying because they don't have enough to eat. Have you ever thought about what you should do for them while they are still alive?

 

Next, Singer argues for the need for "effective altruism". Wealthy people should reduce their consumption of luxuries slightly in order to help these children. Not only that, people should find the most effective ways to do that. This is effective altruism. In layman's terms, it means adding a little bit of calculation to the ethic of compassion and spending every dollar so that the children who need it the most can be helped.

 

Effective altruism was still in its infancy when Singer gave this talk, but it soon became more and more popular in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and on the campuses of prestigious universities in the U.S. In the two years from 2022 to 2023, a number of major events taking place in the high tech finance and high tech industry in the U.S., and many others were linked to this movement. Examples include the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the arrest and conviction of its founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, and the dramatic battle between the board of directors and the CEO of OpenAI, the company that spearheaded the artificial intelligence revolution.

 

In the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, we know that when he was graduating from MIT, he was thinking of going into charity and he happened to run into one of the pioneers of effective altruism, William MacAskill, a young associate professor at Oxford University, who told him that with his abilities, he could go to Wall Street and make more money to give to charities, which would be much more effective than if he had gone out and done the charity work himself. Sam Bankman-Fried took this to heart, and while working on Wall Street, he was invested by investors who also believed in effective altruism, and together with friends who also believed in effective altruism, they founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In the years that followed, Sam Bankman-Fried gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the effective altruism movement. In the case of OpenAI, board members with effective altruistic beliefs removed CEO Sam Altman on November 17, 2023, arguing that his work had strayed from the original intent of the company that was closer to effective altruism when it was founded, and the board resigned four days later, with Altman returning.

 

Effective altruism has had an impact on many other influential figures in Silicon Valley and finance, for example, Musk, the world's richest man, tweeted that McAskill's philosophy was essentially the same as his.

 

But "Yueyue", the child who was run over by a car and died without being rescued in time, appears only as an example of the opening line of a lecture for effective altruism. She is bypassed not only by people, but also by Singer, and even more so by the elites and billionaires of effective altruism.

 

Because Yueyue was not starved to death and did not live in a society below the poverty line, the donations of effective altruism would not have come to her, and she would not have appeared on the "frontiers" of the "effective" calculations of these elites.

 

Yueyue's death is due to a kind of indifference to human life, a kind of selfishness that only cares about individuals’ own survival. This is not only found in a few people, but pervades the whole society. Because of this indifference and selfishness, similar things often appear not only in other people's "Yueyue", but also from time to time in their own “Yueyue”. For example, we often see that some children are bullied by their classmates or even teachers, while others stand by and do nothing, and recently some of them are even said to fall down from a building, or mostly likely committed suicide as told by the schools. But the suffered are also like Hua Lao Shuan in Lu Xun's novel, who remained indifferent to the innocent death of other people, and cared only about getting some blood for cough curing.   

 

What is needed to save a child like "Yueyue" is enlightenment. Enlightenment literally means to open blinded eyes so that they can be illuminated by sunlight, see more colors. Only when enlightened people’s heart can be rich and compassionate enough so that they can do the right thing.

 

Singer, a professor of ethics, challenged the group of audience by saying that after learning about poverty and hunger in the world people who stand by and do nothing is a way of indifference, morally indefensible.

 

But I want to make the point that while poverty and hunger certainly need to be eradicated, we should also find out if there is a reason behind poverty, is it because of people net having been enlightened? If the fundamental problem is not solved, charity is like pouring water down a leaky bucket, the bucket will never be filled.

 

Secondly, it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish. That is, effective altruism is not in itself effective. No matter how precise the calculations are, they are not helpful.

 

Instead, calculation should be used for doing enlightenment. Enlightenment itself is more effective than altruism. Effective enlightenment would be far more effective than altruism.

 

The word "effective" is itself a product of the Enlightenment. It can be traced back to utilitarianism, or efficacy, which refers to doing things "to maximize the happiness of the greatest number of people". Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman born in 1748, was the inventor of the word "utility". The emphasis on "greatest" makes what was originally a moral theory mathematically appealing. This is a product of the Enlightenment because it was an idea shared by many other enlightenment figures, such as two prominent ones in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hutchison, born in 1694, and Hume, born in 1711. Hutchison pointed out that in the process of choosing the most moral action, virtue should be directly proportional to the number of people a particular action will benefit. Hume, on the other hand, said that the overall benefit to humanity should be the most important factor in making all moral decisions.

 

The problem with Utilitarianism is also regarding the "effective". Opponents criticize its quantification, comparison, and measurement of happiness or well-being. There may be no answer to the question for "Is the life of an ascetic better or worse than that of a happy debauchee?", but utilitarianism forces people compare. Marx criticized it, and Popes have criticized it, for materializing man. But there's nothing wrong with forcing people to think about the pros and cons of everything, and to spend money in charity more effectively. It is also with this attitude that we can see that effective enlightenment is much more effective than effective altruism.

 

Wherever we live, let's be effective Enlightenment Activists. Don't turn a blind eye to what is wrong, false, vicious, and ugly; that kind of society is bound to come back and bite on you. Do what is right, true, good and beautiful.