| This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. |
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Cause neutrality is one of the guiding principles in my understanding of effective altruism. It's something like a regulative ideal - a goal that no individual or community can ever hit, but one that helps you do better the more you aim for it.
Cause neutrality is the idea that you should go into cause prioritisation with a neutral attitude towards every possible cause and only update towards supporting one over the other based on discoveries about your morality or empirical facts. You could put this in a more rationalist way as having a uniform prior about which cause you should work on — before you start investigating. The opposite of this is to have a cause you are already devoted to and go into prioritisation looking for ways to justify working on that cause.
Everyone has biases that affect their cause prioritisation. However, striving for cause neutrality makes us more likely to explicitly notice and counteract those biases.
A crucial point about cause neutrality is that it is an attitude with which you approach the cause prioritisation process. It doesn't describe the end results of that process. By the time you have done cause prioritisation, you shouldn't end up with neutrality between all causes.
This seems like a semantic issue, but I think it is occasionally more than one. Some EA meta-organisations, like CEA, OpenPhil, Giving What We Can, 80K etc... work on promoting a range of EA causes. Occasionally, the organisations themselves or their supporters justify this with reference to “cause neutrality.”[1] I think they are wrong to do so, and this is the gripe that motivates my post.
To be clear, these organisations are not necessarily wrong for promoting various causes. There are many good reasons to do so, including substantive uncertainty about which cause is the most effective, risk-aversion, or a view on which work on multiple causes creates a more value-aligned and sustainable EA movement. I support the practice for a mix of these three reasons.
However, what we absolutely should not do is use “cause neutrality” as a way to avoid making hard trade-offs between causes. It’s still true (and always will be) that we are in triage, and we can’t avoid making trade-offs. There is no neutral position. We can only continue to promote various causes for good reasons, not because of loyalty, excessive conservatism[2], or bias.
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This is the claim which is load-bearing for this take, but also might be totally wrong. I'd particularly love feedback on this point.
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I say excessive because there are good reasons to have a minor conservative impulse - in other words to demand a strong understanding of potential consequences before you make radical changes.
I can see how encouraging this sort of "cause neutrality" might keep people cognisant of particular programs in a given field that is not, in general, highly ranked for effectiveness where nevertheless that particular program is very effective, perhaps?
I haven't actually observed this issue, the project of EA seems all about beginning neutral and ending up with a hierarchy—if it is swerving away from this approach then that seems antithetical to the general mission.
On a personal note, I generally try to direct my giving towards the least emotive topics (general funds for boring diseases), assuming that there will be an over-supply for more emotive areas.