In 1999, [Peter] Singer was asked how someone who helped to shape the current theory and practice of utilitarianism explained financially supporting his mother when she needed caregivers because she had Alzheimer’s disease. He replied it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money.” … The rational-economic man is unable to say, “I care about my mother and have a responsibility to help her as she suffers this disabling illness.” Or to discuss the reciprocal nature of care: “My mother cared for me, and I want to return that care now.” To respond thusly he would have to acknowledge the validity of the ethics of care in influencing decision-making about financial resources.
Carol J. Adams, “A feminist ethics of care critique of effective altruism”
1. Recap
This is Part 3 of my series The good it promises. This series draws lessons from a recent collection of academic essays, The good it promises, the harm it does: Critical essays on effective altruism.
Part 1 introduced the series and looked at the foreword of the book by Amia Srinivasan. Part 2 analyzed Simone de Lima’s discussion of colonialism and animal advocacy in Brazil.
Today, I want to look at a feminist perspective offered by one of the volume’s editors, Carol J. Adams. Adams is an author, feminist and animal rights advocate. Her books include The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory, Animals and women: Feminist theoretical explorations, and The pornography of meat.
One of the most important ethical advances contributed by feminist theorizing is the tradition of care ethics, which emphasizes the importance of ethical perspectives that put care, partiality, and interpersonal relationships at the center of ethical theorizing. Adams’ paper, “A feminist-ethics-of-care critique of effective altruism”, draws on insights from the ethics of care to problematize a set of broadly consequentialist assumptions shared by many effective altruists.
2. Singer’s dilemma
Many of us think that it is ethically permissible, even required for us to show additional concern for our friends and family. The problem is that it is notoriously hard for utilitarians to justify such partiality: if all that matters is the impartial promotion of utility, then we may be left with little grounds on which to claim that it is permissible to benefit those closest to us instead of others.
Adams makes this difficulty salient by recalling a difficult question that was once posed to Peter Singer, a leading utilitarian philosopher.
In 1999, Singer was asked how someone who helped to shape the current theory and practice of utilitarianism explained financially supporting his mother when she needed caregivers because she had Alzheimer’s disease. He replied it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money.”
Ouch. That is not an easy sentence to utter. But how might Singer have avoided it? Traditionally, utilitarians and other consequentialists have tried a number of strategies. They have stressed that we may have more information about the needs of those nearest to us; that we may be in a better position to provide our friends and family with what they need; or that the feelings of those closest to us will be deeply hurt if we do not show them special favoritism. (A variety of newer `consequentializing’ strategies on offer are more controversial, and go beyond the scope of this post).
That is all well and good. I am, for my own part, a consequentialist. I have uttered and will continue to utter all of the above sentiments. But it is important to acknowledge, in a deeply felt way, some respects in which this response may fall short.
One problem is that the traditional consequentialist view of partiality expressly forbids us from justifying our actions in the natural way, by appeal to duties of care created by our special relationships to friends and family. Adams writes:
The rational-economic man is unable to say, “I care about my mother and have a responsibility to help her as she suffers this disabling illness.” Or to discuss the reciprocal nature of care: “My mother cared for me, and I want to return that care now.” To respond thusly he would have to acknowledge the validity of the ethics of care in influencing decision-making about financial resources. Nothing in his philosophical system would allow for this.
Like Singer, I feel the intuitive pull of this reasoning. I would like to be able to utter the above sentences. I cannot utter them. But I would nonetheless show my own mother the same partiality that Singer showed to his mother. How would I justify this? Likely, as with Singer, I would judge myself to be ethically inconsistent.
At this point, Adams pounces. She thinks that I, like Singer, am taking desperate measures to save my view, to the point that we are more willing to accuse ourselves of deep-rooted inconsistencies than to change our moral views to accommodate the behaviors we seem to endorse. Adams writes of Singer:
Singer chooses to be seen as inconsistent rather than caring because it is less problematic for his utilitarianism. If there is a reason to devote extra resources to one individual because of the responsibilities of care, why not other individuals needing care, including a specific animal at an animal sanctuary?
Are desperate measures being taken here? Certainly, there is a deep tension which should be felt, acknowledged, and not dismissed. Adams also points to another tension in the way that utilitarians handle their views prohibition of partiality: they shift the burden of partiality and care onto others, often women, who are more ready to acknowledge and assume the burdens of care. Adams writes:
Twenty years later, again given the opportunity to articulate a defense of why—contrary to utilitarianism—some of his money went to support his mother, Singer answered, “The money that my sister and I spent on my mother, and keeping her comfortable, at that level—there could have been better things you could have done with that.” … When challenged about finding himself situated in a very specific social location, the nowhere man finds his theory not only fails him in providing an explanation but condemns him for what he did. Another ethical theory existed that could help him out of this quandary: the feminist ethics of care. But acknowledging that would require him to reject utilitarianism. So he passes off caring to his sister, that other decision-maker, and justifies inconsistency with appeals to entanglement.
So far, Adams has argued that Singer, like many consequentialists, is unable to give the natural explanation for permissible partiality in terms of an ethics of care. Singer and many other consequentialists go so far as to deny that partiality towards one’s own mother is permissible, taking themselves to be deeply and irredeemably inconsistent in their views and behavior rather than changing their ethical views to accommodate the behaviors they seem to endorse. They accommodate this felt inconsistency, in part, by foisting `irrational’ duties of care upon others in their lives, often women, who are willing to bear them.
Is that what consequentialism amounts to? For my own part, I feel at once a deep-seated desire to protest and a nagging suspicion that I may be standing on weaker and less consistent ground than I would like to occupy. Certainly, I find myself moved to doubt the source of my own convictions, the consistency of my views and behaviors, and the real grounds on which these convictions are formed and maintained. I hope that other readers will be similarly moved.
3. Bro culture
Focusing on a case study of animal advocacy, Adams complains of the evolution of a type of `bro culture’ within Animal Charity Evaluators and some other EA-aligned and EA-adjacent organizations. Adams writes of:
A “bro” culture (self-named by the participants) that emphasized centralized leadership over grass-roots movements, and in which these leaders adopted over-the-top-praise schemes for each other. By fetishizing authority, they diminished the role of entire teams that make significant events possible. These “bros” were and are banded together not only through institutional association, but through financial, personal, and affective ties (some calling each other “brothers of different mothers”). They became a class of elites, offering each other jobs, praise, book promotions, and investments in new not-for-profit and for- profit companies. Protected via their leadership position, some of these “bros” were also serial sexual exploiters, whose decision to exploit others was supported or overlooked by some of the other “bros”.
That is a lot to take in. I suspect that many readers will be primed to be skeptical of Adams’ claims. Let’s unpack some of the evidence Adams offers for these claims, one at a time.
Begin with the claim that incidents of sexual harassment and abuse may have been downplayed or overlooked within the movement. Events in recent months have suggested that there may be some truth to these claims. For example, Part 4 of the Belonging series discussed a TIME Magazine investigation alleging “an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away”. In that post, we also discussed a wide range of often dismissive or otherwise unacceptable responses to the TIME Magazine article.
Adams complains of similar incidents within the animal advocacy movement. Focusing on Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), Adams writes:
One source told Marc Gunther that ACE had been “slow to look into allegations of sexual harassment in the movement, and timid in its response” (Gunther 2018d). Their executive director, Jon Bockman, referred to “ ‘the rumblings we’ve heard for a while’ about issues of gender bias and sexual harassment in the movement” (Gunther 2018a). Just how long “for a while” continued without being attended to and why it took so long to respond is left unsaid.
Readers are invited to assess the merits of these and other specific claims raised by Adams on their own merits. But I hope that readers will keep an open mind toward the possibility that they could harbor more than a grain of truth.
Another complaint that Adams raises is that networks of men may have been “banded together not only through institutional association, but through financial, personal, and affective ties … offering each other jobs, praise, book promotions, and investments in new not-for-profit and for- profit companies”. Could this be true? It is not entirely implausible: many effective altruist organizations have largely male leadership, and some have complained that a small, largely male inner circle seems to dominate the boards of leading organizations.
For example, Adams discusses the Good Food Institute. ACE rescinded its endorsement of the Good Food Institute in 2021 due to problems with workplace culture. Five years before, in 2016, the Good Food Institute was ranked highly by ACE even though it had been founded in the very same year. Adams complains that a double-standard was applied:
One might wonder how GFI rocketed to top charity ranking in its first year, 2016. That was the year EA advocates Nick Cooney and Bruce Friedrich founded it, with funds and support from ACE-endorsed Mercy for Animals. Being a new organization, it did not have a track record of accomplishments, nor could it, as a new organization, demonstrate “cost-effectiveness” – criteria ACE used for evaluating groups.
What led to this evaluation of GFI? Adams suggests that even if GFI showed strong evidence of potential, there may well have been favoritism shown towards the male, EA-aligned founders of GFI. Adams continues:
Nathan Harrison (2016) raised this issue at the time of GFI’s early funding, “The question should not be whether GFI has potential, but whether, as ACE claims, the evaluation process was rigorous. It obviously wasn’t.” Harrison (2017) also suggested that ACE was “strongly biased toward a few nonprofit organizations, especially those in which [Nick] Cooney is involved.”
Could Adams be on to something? I will leave that to readers to decide. But here it may be helpful to put aside binaries and defensiveness and open ourselves up to the live possibility that there may be more than a small degree of truth to some of the following claims: that the culture of effective altruism, like many other movements, is often male-dominated, favoring the social and professional interests of men, paying insufficient attention to sexual harassment and other workplace issues, and drawing on male-dominated insider networks to maintain and reinforce existing hierarchies.
4. An ethics of care
In place of utilitarianism, Adams proposes an ethics of care. Since the pioneering work of the feminist scholar Carol Gilligan in her book In a different voice, care ethicists have emphasized the importance of ethical perspectives that put care, partiality, and interpersonal relationships at the center of ethical theorizing.
Adams criticizes an adherence to a concept of rational economic man underlying some utilitarian theorizing.
The rational-economic man construct gained ascendancy because it is authorized by and mirrors historic patriarchal fictions about gender: that a gender binary exists (man/woman), and that it is related to other binaries (rational/emotional; objective/subjective; abstraction/particularity). The gender binary, in its facilitation of other binaries, interacts with and is influenced by race, class, and disability status.
Adams argues that the concept of a rational economic man and the consequent marginalization of caring and sentiment is an impediment to theorizing about effective altruism, and in particular to animal advocacy:
The division between reason and emotion, or rationality and sentiment, is—like the gender binary—a fiction, but acceptance of these binaries as accurate representations of reality has distorted philosophy. The result is a valuing of disembodied rationality and the devaluing of caring. Lori Gruen and I point out how abstract reasoning is also “the capacity that historically has served to justify the hierarchical ranking of beings”, establishing a legitimization of the oppression of those ranked lower, including the other animals. With the construction of political and moral discussion as rational and “manly,” the role of “womanly” sentiment was seen as an impediment rather than an aid to engaging with the problem of what humans are doing to other animals.
In place of the rational economic man, Adams argues, we should identify at least as strongly with:
A Western philosophical tradition of sympathy that existed alongside the prizing of abstract reasoning as the preferred philosophical approach.
Adams suggests we should extend this tradition by turning to theories of care ethics developed by contemporary philosophers.
5. Taking stock
Today’s post looked at Carol J Adams’ feminist critique of effective altruism, focusing on the ethics of care. This critique urges that an ethics of care is needed to capture natural beliefs, feelings and behaviors involving those closest to us. Adams suggests that consequentialists often shield themselves from the concerns of care ethics by taking themselves to be inconsistent, or by passing off the responsibility of caring to others.
We also saw that the care ethical critique connects to broader concerns about a male-dominated bro culture within some animal advocacy spaces, as well as to broader concerns about male leadership, in-group favoritism, and the treatment of sexual harassment and abuse within the effective altruism movement.
Adams proposes that effective altruists could draw on an ethics of care to improve the consistency of their beliefs and behaviors, strengthen the climate for women within the movement, and improve the results of altruistic activities.
Perhaps it might help to invite effective altruists to view the turn to care ethics in non-binary terms. There is a large gulf between the staunch utilitarian who clings so firmly to his views that he refuses to admit the moral permissibility of caring for his own mother, and the most firmly anti-utilitarian ethical positions which take the promotion of value to have little or no moral importance in its own right. Drawing in part on traditions such as care ethics may be an important way to deepen the beliefs and behaviors in a movement that is often heavily responsive to, and driven by utilitarian considerations.
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