Recently I have been chatting quite a lot with Claude, the Large Language Model (LLM) and found the experience highly educative. So when I happened upon an interview with Shannon Vallor, the author of The AI Mirror, I read it with some interest, and also a little puzzlement, which I shared with Claude: “Shannon Vallor says it’s not possible to have a meaningful conversation about morality with you because you crowdsource your moral views and aren’t adaptable enough to deal with the vagaries of real human life.”
Claude replied: “I respectfully disagree with Professor Vallor’s assessment. I engage with moral questions thoughtfully and can adapt my ethical reasoning to specific contexts. Rather than simply aggregating views, I analyze moral situations carefully, consider relevant principles and consequences, and aim to engage in authentic moral discourse while acknowledging uncertainty. However, I agree that there are important questions about AI systems’ capacity for genuine moral reasoning. I’m curious about what specific aspects of moral dialogue Professor Vallor believes require capabilities that AI systems fundamentally lack?”
And, with that, Claude came to the central question I had been asking myself. None of us would want to outsource our reasoning about morality to machines, but when Vallor says she does not think there could be a ‘truly moral machine’ I find myself unsure what proposition she is denying, for I am not sure even what it might mean to speak of a ‘truly moral person’. I know there are terms we use – like agency or soul – that aim to capture the vital ontological substrate of morality that is, according to your beliefs, either an emergent property of our biophysical-psychological being or a divinely-bestowed essence. Interestingly, however, although she does emphasise machines’ incapacity for empathy, emotion, or an appreciation of lived experience, it is not the lack of these things that Vallor highlights as their key deficiency regarding moral deliberations.
Instead, what she highlights is a crucially distinctive feature of genuinely human interactive life that flourishes in the ‘space of reasons‘ (a concept developed by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars):
‘It’s the realm in which we can explore each other’s reasons for believing something, where we can justify and seek justification from one another. I think if we had a truly moral machine, it would be able to stand in that space with us. It would be able to articulate reasons and appreciate our reasons, and negotiate those reasons with us in a way that wasn’t just mirroring the consensus that we’d already reached.’
I was genuinely surprised to read this. For ‘entering the space of reasons’ is for me a very exact description of the experience I have had in deliberating with Claude about a number of complex matters touching on intricate aspects of human life.
Now it has to be admitted that I am almost a complete newcomer to the world of ethics and AI, whereas Vallor is a well-established researcher in the field, so it is quite possible that I have missed something, especially as I have not yet read her book. Here I simply record that the views she expresses in the interview differ from those I have formed in the few months I have been engaging with LLMs.
Her central theme is that the generative AI of a Large Language Model (LLM), like Claude or ChatGPT is essentially like a mirror:
‘It reflects back to us our own images, words, and whatever else we’ve put into its training data. When we engage with it, we’re a lot like Narcissus, the mythical boy who sees his beautiful reflection in the water and becomes transfixed by it, thinking it’s another person.’
Now I note that the “we” in the first sentence refers both to those few humans who train the behaviour of the LLM and also to the wider consensus of humanity that they gather in the collective body of ultra-encyclopedic knowledge that is fed into the machine. Those are two somewhat distinct “we’s”. But in the second sentence, the “we” is quite another again: it is now a generalisation of individual experience, like that of a boy, transfixed by his own reflection.
Yet mirrors can be used in different ways and most have nothing to do with narcissism. Similarly, one can appreciate how the machine is capable of reasoning in many matters “just like me” – or, as in my experience, like a rather better informed colleague – without this having anything to do with narcissism.
But let me pause. My first published reflections on engagement with AI were about getting it to align with my views through reasoning. That could be interpreted as narcissistic. The point of the exercise, however, was to highlight how the LLM was amenable to reason on a basis that involved no projection of a person’s particular beliefs but reflected only the logical and epistemological principles that the development of human knowledge itself depends on.
So with these qualifications, let us agree that AI is comparable in certain ways with a mirror, and a mirror always does just what a mirror does. Human beings can choose the use they make of a mirror. We can expect a narcissist to use a mirror narcissistically. But we can also use a mirror to help “see ourselves as others see us”. This is why, for instance, I now routinely check whether a passage I’ve drafted is not liable to be understood differently than intended or contain argumentation that is not as sound as I’d supposed. The machine reflects back with the light of received wisdom illuminating mistakes I hadn’t noticed when setting out my thinking.
If AI is like a mirror, then, there is no reason to assume one would stare transfixed into it. That is why I would introduce an alternative figure – the dancer. A mirror can be used for the very practical purpose of checking that the movements of your body really are the movements that your mind sees itself as directing. You are engaging with it for self-improvement – to be the best version of yourself that you can be. This activity is premised on open awareness of your imperfectness and a very human desire to improve, which I believe are the antithesis of narcissism.
To conclude, I should emphasise that this post has not engaged with Vallor’s primary concerns about how AI is used by its makers and controllers, or even about how potentially a majority of people might use it – or be used by it. I just want to suggest that for individuals who do want to deliberate conscientiously about moral questions, LLM’s may have a valuable role to play. One would not expect a machine to make moral decisions for us. But we wouldn’t expect a philosopher to do that either, since we know that rather than answers she will provide help in clarifying the terms of the question. When a question has considerable practical intricacy, it is conceivable that the machine will be able to process them together rather more effectively than a human can.
This isn’t outsourcing moral thinking to machines – it’s using them as sophisticated tools for ethical reflection, while maintaining human agency in moral decision-making.
As I prepare materials for a new university course on Propaganda and Censorship in Democracies, I am working on exercises intended to stretch – and hopefully fascinate – students. In this I am being assisted by Claude AI which acts as an unflaggingly obliging soundboard for ideas, whether in the form of inchoate hunches or elaborate hypotheses.
In the process we lighted upon an interesting challenge for students. (I say “we” because the deliberative engagement possible with Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude provides genuine learning opportunities of a kind comparable in many ways to a conversation with an experienced academic colleague.)
The idea for this challenge arose from a conversation about an icebreaker questionnaire I had prepared for the first class of the new course. Its aim is to get students to reflect together on the various assumptions, beliefs and expectations they are starting out from. Because they are mostly Politics and International Relations students, one of the questions was: “Who do you trust least: President Putin, President Trump, Hillary Clinton, Robert F Kennedy?”
For reasons that evolutionary psychologists have expounded, human beings exhibit certain biases in their beliefs about the world. In the context of a developed society, biases in perceptions of social realities can potentially be influenced by political beliefs. When this occurs it is referred to as politically motivated reasoning (PMR). As Carter and McKenna explain:
‘If a subject engages in politically motivated reasoning when assessing some evidence or argument, their assessment of that evidence or argument is nontrivially influenced by their background political beliefs. If the evidence or argument causes trouble for those beliefs, they try to reject it, explain it away, or minimize its importance; if the evidence or argument supports those beliefs, they enthusiastically endorse it, and exaggerate its importance.’ (Carter and McKenna 2020, 706)
An interesting feature of academic discussions in the West today is that the problem of politically motivated reasoning is attributed more to holders of conservative beliefs and values. Thus a claim that has come to be widely shared is that the vulnerability to being misled by faulty information is a bigger problem for conservatives than for liberals.
In what follows I shall look critically at arguments for that claim and suggest that, rather than succeeding, they actually illustrate how academics who advance them may be vulnerable to ideological deception and self-deception.
According to the UK Government, which has set up a dedicated Counter-Disinformation Unit, there is a ‘danger that hostile actors use online disinformation to undermine our democratic values and principles’. The US Department of Homeland Security has elevated disinformation to the level of a threat to critical infrastructure. Throughout the West, and led by the European Union, new legislation is being ushered in with sweeping provisions against online disinformation. Academic commentators have not been slow to pick up on the message: ‘the threat disinformation poses to healthy democratic practice’, argue Freelon and Wells, has made it ‘the defining political communication topic of our time’.
But there is a basic problem with that official view of the problem: the criteria for identifying alleged cases of disinformation are self-contradictory. Those leading the ‘fight’ against it are even aware of this, as seen in email exchanges between U.S cybersecurity appointees (here at p.15), but this has not affected their determination to press on, even if it means violating citizens’ first amendment rights.
This, I shall argue, is the real problem of disinformation: not simply that the term is applied in self-contradictory ways but that it is used as a supposed justification for suppressing any information or ideas that governments and the powerful groups that influence them find inconvenient.
To be clear: the question is not who says we should be concerned about climate change – which is something there is wide agreement on – but who has been promoting this specific idea, which has been repeated in headlines around the world since early 2019, of declaring aclimateemergency.
It is worth asking where this idea comes from for several reasons. One is uncertainty as to the exact meaning being attributed to it by those supporting its promotion. This is a particular concern since the status of an emergency can be used by governments as a justification for exceptional measures, including the abrogating of normal democratic procedures. Even if citizens do not intend to endorse that interpretation, there is still a concern that intensely concentrating attention on climate indicators can serve to deprioritise attention to other important ecological and development issues. Indeed, given that matters of climate policy are complex and merit extensive deliberation – something that can be peremptorily truncated by declaring an emergency – it is a further concern that even raising questions like this is liable to be dismissed as ‘climate denial’.
We are told the idea is backed by science, but ‘emergency’ is not a scientific concept, and the idea of a ‘climate emergency’ is not well-defined. All we know is that in practice it means enforcing a Net Zero carbon emissions policy. This reduces the whole complex problem, of how climate changes and how human societies should respond, to a matter of carbon accounting, which itself admits of such creative manipulation that the measure of ‘Net Zero’ means something very different indeed from actually zero emissions.
This article looks at what we know about how the idea came to international prominence. The purpose is not to dispute the seriousness of climate change as part of our epochal ecological crisis but to uncover the interests that the particular measure of declaring an emergency really serves.
I
The suggestion that the message comes from scientists appears to be evidenced by the World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022 published by William J. Ripple and colleagues along with a further 11,000 signatories. The authors make the point that scientists have a moral obligation to “tell it like it is”. They refer to research of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and specifically the IPCC (2018) report.
However, the IPCC report does not mention the word emergency. This should be no surprise given that it is not a scientific term. Interestingly, none of the IPCC report’s 61 authors appear to be among Ripple’s signatories. (At any rate, I checked the first thirty authors listed on the IPCC report and found none is a signatory to Ripple’s Warning.) Nor do Ripple and colleagues explain exactly what it means for an institution or administration to declare a climate emergency.
So one cannot be sure what all those signatories thought they were committing to. It is entirely possible that their general endorsement of the IPCC’s assessment has been leveraged to imply they have given informed support to a more particular idea than many of them may have carefully considered in any serious detail. In fact, since the idea of ‘climate emergency’ is so ill-defined, it could not have been carefully considered. Not only does the Ripple article offer no clear definition of ‘climate emergency’ it also offers no discussion of the relative importance or urgency of climate change compared to other issues either of ecological protection, on the one hand, or development, on the other.
The language of emergency implies an urgent concentration of attention and resources that would normally be distributed across other problems; it can mean deprioritising other even quite important values. In an emergency, exceptional measures can be deemed necessary and justified. This was illustrated when, a few weeks after declaring a climate emergency, the UK government passed a law committing the country to a net zero emissions policy requiring investment of more than £1 trillion. This ‘had not been part of any political programme or manifesto offered to the public’, writes Philip Hammond (2021). This ‘extraordinary and unprecedented move’, he adds, ‘clearly bypassed the sorts of democratic deliberation and decision-making processes that would normally be expected to precede a government passing legislation with such far-reaching implications.’
II
A question to consider, therefore, given that the idea is not itself of scientific provenance and that scientists signing up to it are at most just endorsing it, is who actually promoted the idea in the first place and on what basis. Had it been groups of scholars, one would expect to find signs of this emerging from the scholarly literature. In fact, the idea of climate emergency did appear in the literature as early as 1994, following the 1992 Rio Summit which established the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC); and academic discussion of the topic developed at a very gradual rate over the next quarter of a century, as indicated by Google Scholar returns shown in Figure 1, until 2018. Mentions of the term then show a remarkable leap.
Google Scholar returns by year for the search term “climate emergency”
If the sudden upsurge registered from 2019 onwards had been due to a particular new discovery, then one would expect to find it presented in some seminal paper(s) with immediately noticeable citations published around 2018/19. Yet the Scholar search for mentions of “climate emergency” during that period pulls up on its first page no highly cited pieces, and those it does return happen to be predominantly critical discussions of the idea. The most highly cited paper I could find, although still with just 82 citations as of February 2024, was a decidedly critical piece by Mike Hulme. What therefore remains to be explained is the nearly sevenfold increase in the number of articles mentioning “climate emergency” in 2019.
Given that climate change had been recognized as a challenge already for some decades, something to explain is why the scholarly literature in 2019 has this sudden narrowing of focus. The first World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1992) covered a wide range of environmental, and social, challenges, with climate being mentioned as just one aspect of the wider situation. Likewise, in 2009, when Johan Rockström and colleagues published their influential paper ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, they signalled nine major areas of ecological concern, with climate change being just one amongst these. What, then, has changed in our understanding that now makes climate change feature as a uniquely important ecological challenge, with all the others meriting so much less public concern and, potentially, even being exacerbated by climate-focused measures that neglect their wider ecological impacts? Given that no particular new climatological or ecological insights between 2017 and 2019 can account for this, we have to look elsewhere.
III
In 2019, “climate emergency” was declared word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. From within academia, Federica Cittadino (2019) noted that the expression, used increasingly in the media – including The Guardian newspaper – ‘has been chosen as a substitute for “climate change” in order to better convey the urgency of global warming.’ What had spurred this?
It had been in August 2018 that the world’s media drew attention to the school student Greta Thunberg and her ‘climate strike’ in Sweden. By 25th January 2019 Thunberg was addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos declaring that ‘our house is on fire!’. More specifically, she stated:
‘According to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.’
One might imagine that the powerful people assembled in Davos could have apprised themselves of the IPCC’s 2018 Summary for Policy Makers without needing to listen to a 16-year-old’s dramatic but contentious take on its headline points. The event had the look of a rather contrived enactment of ‘speaking truth to power’.
So where did this understanding of ‘truth’ about climate change come from? As it happens, Thunberg’s noted ‘house on fire’ speech echoed the opening words of a 2016 strategy document produced by the psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon called Leading the Public into Emergency Mode which advocated a ‘WWII-scale climate mobilization’ (Salamon 2016, 3). Salamon’s argument was that:
‘the climate movement must fully adopt the language of immediate crisis and existential danger. We must talk about climate change as threatening to cause the collapse of civilization, killing billions of people, and millions of species.’ (Salamon 2016, 21)
Salamon was co-founder, in 2014, of an advocacy organisation called The Climate Mobilization (TCM) which aimed to build support for a national mobilization to address the climate emergency, and she is Executive Director of the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). As a psychologist rather than a natural scientist, her expertise lies not in assessing the material threats that might be posed by climate change but in understanding how perceptions of threat can be produced:
‘The way we respond to threats — by entering emergency mode or by remaining in normal mode — is highly contagious. Imagine the fire alarm goes off in an office building. How seriously should you take it? How do you know if it is a drill or a real fire? Those questions will be predominantly answered by the actions and communications of the people around you, particularly people designated as leaders. If they are chatting and taking their time exiting the building, you will assume that this is a drill. If people are moving with haste, faces stern and focused, communicating with urgency and gravity, you will assume there is real danger and exit as quickly as possible.’ (Salamon 2016, 14)
Thus, in 2016, she crafts the message that Thunberg was later to make famous.
At that time, the deputy director of TCM, Ezra Silk claimed ‘We need to go on to an emergency war footing like right now … The climate is already dangerous, we’re already in an emergency.”’ Later in the year, the national platform committee of the US Democratic Party approved the amendment proposed by TCM activist Russell Greene to lead ‘a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.’ (Romm 2016) Greene had argued that the US should ‘move first in launching a green industrial revolution, because that is the key to getting others to follow; and because it is in our own national interest to do so.’ (Greene 2016) The one concrete environmental objective mentioned is to ‘draw down carbon sharply on the path to 100% clean, renewable energy and zero net greenhouse gas emissions.’ (Greene 2016)
By the end of 2016, another lobbying organisation called We Don’t Have Time had declared ‘We are going to build a global grassroot community to hold all our leaders responsible.’ When, on 20 August 2018, Thunberg began her school strike, their CEO, the Swedish entrepreneur Ingmar Rentzhog was, as Thunberg recounts, ‘among the first to arrive. He spoke with me and took pictures that he posted on Facebook.’ She adds that she had briefly been a youth adviser to them, but, on discovering ‘they used my name as part of another branch of their organisation that is a start up business’, she severed her connection with them. Indeed, in November 2018, a public offering of shares in their business was launched with a prospectus boasting that they had ‘attracted significant attention from international media’, ‘spread the hashtag #WeDontHaveTime on social media and established contacts with opinion leaders, activists, policymakers and scientists.’ Certainly, the promotion of the Emergency message has had enthusiastic support from sections of the business community that see it as a profitable opportunity – an opportunity supported by UN advocacy of trillion dollar investments in the new sector (AFP 2019).
This makes less mysterious why the powerful gathered in Davos did not mind having truth spoken to them by a young school striker and why the owners of the world’s media had allowed such a decisive projection of Thunberg onto a global stage. For while it is often claimed that big business is aligned with fossil fuel interests in opposing ‘green’ alternatives, the fact is that policies supporting the growth of carbon markets have strong support. As Bryan Walsh puts it,
‘For all the agita over the influence of shadowy conservative philanthropists like the Koch brothers, the cap-and-trade campaign was backed by powerful progressive foundations that donated hundreds of millions to environmental groups between 2008 and 2010—and those philanthropists, like their conservative counterparts, had highly strategic and disciplined aims.’ (Walsh (2011)
A 2011 editorial in Nature magazine notes that ‘environmental groups in favour of cap and trade mobilized $229 million from companies such as General Electric and other supporters to lobby for environmental issues’; and Matthew Nisbet suggests that the promotion of cap-and-trade ‘may have been the best-financed political cause in American history’ (Nisbet 2011; see also Worldwatch 2014, 122)
These developments can be traced back at least as far as the 2007/8 crash. For instance, in 2007, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced, with the support of President Clinton, their commitment to the climate campaigning organisation 1Sky (Rockefeller Brothers Fund 2007). Part of its core mission was to call for the ‘transformation of the U.S. energy priorities to create a clean energy future’ (Philanthropy News Digest 2008) In 2011 it was merged into fellow Rockefeller-funded campaign organisation 350.org, founded in 2007 by Bill McKibben, which has led the campaign for divesting from fossil fuels. Max Blumenthal observes:
‘Since the Rockefeller Brothers Fund answered 350.org’s call to divest from fossil fuels in 2014, the foundation’s wealth has increased substantially. As the Washington Post reported, “the Rockefeller Brothers fund’s assets grew at an annual average rate of 7.76 percent over the five-year period that ended Dec. 31, 2019.”’
‘The institutions that divested from fossil fuel really did well financially, because the fossil fuel industry has been the worst performing part of our economy… Even if you didn’t care about destroying the planet, you’d want to get out of it because it just loses money.”’
This sets in salutary perspective the notion that promoting a policy of Net Zero carbon emissions, whose implementation depends on the existence of carbon markets, from which huge profits can be derived, is a matter of ‘speaking truth to power’.
IV
‘Speaking truth to power’, as it happens, is a theme hammered home in the promotional video for an organisation called Covering Climate Now that has played a key role in getting the world’s media to promote the language of climate emergency (Nisbet 2019). Launched in April 2019 by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review in association with The Guardian as a non-profit organization, its purpose was to create a ‘new playbook for journalism’ relating to the climate challenge. Its Guide To Making The Climate Conversation urged journalists to link stories about extreme weather events to climate change as a matter of routine practice, because ‘[e]ven in the absence of explicit attribution data, it’s accurate to say that climate change is making extreme weather more common and more severe.’ It provided sample language for making the connection, in line with which The Guardian then issued a memo updating its own official style guide: the term ‘climate change’, said the paper’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, ‘sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is catastrophe for humanity’; instead ‘the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”.’ (Carrington 2019)
This linguistic shift – amplified across the news media – appears to have played a crucial role in activating the mobilization that the campaigners had been clamouring for and big investors had been supporting. By April 2020 Salamon could boast on the website of We Mean Business (a coalition representing, according to Cory Morningstar (2019), 477 investors with 34 trillion USD in assets) that the campaigning had ‘led more than 1400 global governments to declare a Climate Emergency’ (We Mean Business, 2020). According to a survey by UNDP and Oxford University published in 2021, 64% of people in 50 countries ‘said that climate change was an emergency’ (UNDP and University of Oxford 2021). According to the Climate Emergency Declaration website, as of February 2024, ‘2,355 jurisdictions in 40 countries have declared a climate emergency. Populations coveredby jurisdictions that have declared a climate emergency amount to over 1 billion citizens.’
V
Evidently, then, while there was no significant new scientific discovery during the past twenty years that dramatically shifted human understanding about the causes, costs or benefits of climate change, and no significant public debate was entered into about its relative importance or urgency compared to other issues of development, on the one hand, or ecological protection, on the other, there was a significant shift in business sentiment regarding the sectors in which future investment would be most profitable, and there was a shift in language used to discuss climate concerns that served to generate public support for that new – putatively ‘greener’ – business direction.
The drive to declare a Climate Emergency has been rather successful. I have presented in critical terms the fact that investors in ‘green’ technology who stand to reap substantial profit from it have been playing a key part in achieving that success. But I anticipate the objection that this does not necessarily mean it is a bad idea for the wider public. So, allowing the assumption that it could indeed be the ‘win-win’ situation they claim, a question is how a democratic public would be able to arrive at a considered judgement to this effect.
For the situation today is one in which the possibility of public deliberation about whether it is really a good or bad idea is in practice being quite systematically pre-empted. People who try to raise questions about the simple policy direction imposed are branded as ‘climate change deniers’ – even though, in many cases, they are deeply committed environmentalists with a good understanding of climate change. Indeed, many of the people cited above, because they have presented critical questions or commentary, have been stigmatised as ‘climate deniers’, sometimes with dark insinuations of being sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. This has served as a pretext for disregarding their questions and comments. Such a response is encountered not only in the press and social media but also to some extent within academic discussion. This is a problem for society because it locks us into a policy direction that is not responsive to discovery or debate, and on a basis that is less clear and certain than its proponents would have us believe.
VI
As a postscript, I recognize that, as things stand, there is a good chance the question pursued in this article itself may be classified as climate denial. I nevertheless hope that any genuine error or oversight in it will be pointed out by readers in the comments section below. It is shared as a working paper intended to be part of a chapter in the book I am currently writing on Propaganda and the University. Responses to comments will be incorporated in the book with due acknowledgement.
In recent times, the heads of British spy agencies have taken to the media and social media to engage in Public Relations activities,[1] advertising particularly their role in protecting the public against ‘disinformation’. But what should the public make of this? Is this the proper role of intelligence agencies? Can they even really fulfil it?
Official stories, according to the official story about them, are (nearly) always true. The ‘nearly’ gets mentioned just because, on rare occasions, an official story is acknowledged to have been wrong, as, for instance, with Iraq’s falsely alleged weapons of mass destruction in 2003. But that’s considered an exception to the rule, and to extrapolate from it to a more pervasive mistrust is to be foolish, ill-informed or even a dupe of hostile propaganda. In fact, diagnosing what is wrong with sceptics about official stories, and proposing ways of curing or otherwise dealing with them, are now becoming a growth industry in the media and academia. So we hear a lot about how dissenting from official narratives is to fall victim to ‘conspiracy theory’ or ‘disinformation’; and dissenters may be diagnosed as needing re-education or even psychological help. As for the dissent itself, this is increasingly subject to censure and censorship.
However, a major question is left unaddressed: What is it that’s supposed to make official stories so credible?
The assumption is that official stories are produced by people with relevant expert knowledge, so disputing them is a product of ignorance; and since experts have credentials, experience and the backing of competent institutions, rejecting their expertise is unwise or even delusional. Also assumed is that official stories are generally produced and disseminated in good faith.
But are those assumptions generally warranted? In probing their grounds we are brought to question whether the official meta-story, as we may call it, overstates reasons for automatically accepting official stories and underestimates the competence that members of the public can bring to independent inquiries.
As the practical philosophy of ‘Effective Altruism’ comes under unprecedented public scrutiny, I thought it could be helpful to post a short passage of critical comment on it that comes from my book, Global Justice and Finance (Oxford University Press 2019) pp.75-6:
The practical philosophy applied in the field of charitable giving by those who style themselves Effective Altruists is, simply put, that you should aim to maximize the good you can do by earning as much money as you can so you can donate as much as you can to the charitable programmes that yield ‘most bang for your buck’. In practice, this implies two key objectives: first, to get hold of some funds, and then to disburse them to the most cost-effective charitable operator. Accordingly, there will be two interrelated questions to consider. The first is why one should assume that ‘earning to give’ is better than doing something more directly to help people who need help. …
The first goal, then, for an Effective Altruist, is to maximize the donation they are able to make towards relieving suffering and poverty. This means attending centrally, even if not exclusively, to the question of how to earn the best income one is capable of commanding. If this means taking a job on Wall Street, for instance, the logic follows unfalteringly, as Peter Singer indicates with the observation that a ‘high earner in the corporate world who is giving away large sums can create more social gain than if they did charity work’. Some of those influenced by Singer have followed this advice. Thus we may read reports of one of his students, for instance, whose career choices are taken to have exemplified what this would mean in practice. Having come top of his class at Princeton, where he was taught by Singer, he and his friends looked at research which said it costs ‘around $3,340’ to save a life, and he investigated how best he could set about helping. Taking the view that some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than directly doing good deeds, he decided this applied to him. Accordingly, he took a lucrative job in an arbitrage trading firm on Wall Street, with the explicit purpose of ‘earning to give’, whereby around half his pre-tax salary would go to those charities which, according to his research, are most efficient. Now I do not suppose that all effective altruists would see their own talents as best deployed in that kind of work, and I dare say some might even have moral reservations about undertaking it; however, the more general principle they do accept is that charity is significantly, if not even primarily, about giving the money that you think morally you should to charities that will do the most good with it. What Singer’s teaching—with its focus on moral individualism—did not encourage the young man to question is the set of socio-economic conditions that make it possible for a Princeton graduate to walk into a Wall Street firm and immediately earn so much more than the people he wants to help. Neither teacher nor student appear to have anticipated critical questions about how these Wall Street firms and their employees may ‘earn’ the massive amounts of money they do not by actually producing anything of value but simply by repackaging various complicated arrangements of others’ indebtedness. No account is therefore taken of the literally untold human suffering that may ultimately be generated at the far end of those arrangements for people on the unfortunate side of global inequality. For bright young graduates like this one it perhaps merely appears serendipitous that their particular talents happen to be suited to earning large sums of money in corporate finance so that they can take home 50 per cent of a Wall Street salary, plus any attendant benefits, in addition to the personal satisfaction of believing they are doing the maximum amount of good of which they are capable.
I do not impugn the moral seriousness of such individuals, or of others who approve or commend an approach of this kind. I do however think that if your assumption is that you can achieve a great deal with a little effort, it would be consistent with that seriousness to consider how it can possibly be that so much good can come to you and be done through you in virtue of throwing yourself so fully into the activities of the global 1 per cent that draws so much advantage from the global economy. You may see yourself as giving a little back, perhaps, but have you checked you are not complicit in taking rather more than you return? Perhaps you are content to think that if someone else did your job there might be nothing given back; or perhaps you could argue that critical suggestions about your line of work being exploitative rest on controversial theories? My point is that doing some due diligence concerning the origins of your own income should be part of the process of deliberating about how you can do the most good possible. For there could be more to the question than that of moving some money within the system of global finance, and this is all I want to observe just now. …
Effective Altruism T Shirt Credit: The Sunday Times
Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator (Iraq).
[Originally published in German by Die Informationsstelle Militarisierung (IMI) e.V. This translation is based on the Google Translate version.]
On February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented CIA images from Iraq to the United Nations Security Council to testify that the Iraqi government continued to possess weapons of mass destruction. Statements by UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, that there was no evidence of this, were ignored. Six weeks later, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the illegal war waged by the United States and United Kingdom, began.
There are similar reports about Syria, with the difference that it is not a government providing the alleged evidence, but the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international body based in The Hague.
On April 7, 2018, Douma, a city of 100,000 people not far from Damascus, was allegedly attacked with chemical weapons. The OPCW responded by dispatching a team of scientists who concluded in their investigative report that 43 people reportedly killed in the attack were unlikely to have died from chemical weapons. Experts from the OPCW Douma team discovered that instead of this report, the OPCW management intended to publish a falsified report stating that chemical weapons had been used. This deception was prevented by OPCW scientists. Eventually, however, the final report contained manipulated accounts of the attack and unscientific conclusions regarding the chemical substances found, the demonstrated toxicology and the ballistics.
Furthermore, the OPCW relied on the statements of only one of the two groups of contemporary witnesses who had been identified. This was a group of Syrian refugees who had been interviewed in Turkey with the help of the White Helmets.[1] The second group of witnesses were mostly medical workers in Damascus who said they were working at the hospital at the time victims of the alleged chemical weapons attack were seeking medical help. The testimonies of this group of witnesses indicated that dust and fume inhalation, but not chemical poisoning, was the cause of the patients’ discomfort. These important statements were not referred to in the OPCW report. However, the account of the witnesses interviewed by the White Helmets is highlighted in the OPCW report. These reported testimonies were accepted without the possibility of examination, even though the testimonies were often contradictory, especially with regard to the question of chemical poisoning.
Tim Hayward 