I agree that happiness and suffering are reasonably good measures of how well the world is doing. It makes sense to me that effective altruists use an intervention’s apparent effect on suffering and happiness to measure to which extent it achieved its target to make the world a better place. However, I think it is important to distinguish between the target and the measures we use to assess our progress, because "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Goodhart’s law as phrased by Strathern [1997]). For instance, student grades can be a reasonably good measure of student learning when the target is learning. But when "good grades" becomes the target, then teachers and students are incentivized to narrowly focus on the small number of questions that will be on the test and examiners are incentivized to lower their standards. Under these conditions the students’ average grade is no longer a good measure of student learning.
I would like to argue that because happiness and suffering are essentially analogous to grades maximizing happiness and/or minimizing suffering should not be the target of effective altruism. And, for the same reasons, it also shouldn’t be the goal of your personal life.
Our experiences of pain and pleasure are imperfect measures of whether and to which extent we are succeeding to achieve our implicit or explicit personal goals. It usually feels good to achieve a personal goal and it feels bad to fail. So, we can use our emotional experience as a clue to what our implicit personal goals might be and as a measure of how well we are doing relative to our personal goals. But doing good for the world (or even for ourselves) doesn’t always feel good. And not everything that feels good is actually good for us or for the world at large. Our emotional experiences are like grades that part of our brain awards us for our performance in life. Unfortunately, our brain is not a perfect grader and its rubric can be far off from what’s actually good. This is understandable given how hard it is to figure out what is best and what the long-term ramifications of our actions will be. I would be surprised if our emotional appraisals would be any less susceptible to systematic errors than our more cognitive judgments and decisions.
Like the grades we received in school, our emotional experiences are imperfect reflections of the things that really matter to us. They can give us useful feedback. But we should take this feedback with a grain of salt because it is unreliable, biased (especially if you are depressed or manic), doesn't don't always measure exactly what you really care about (e.g., when procrastination feels better than working towards your goals), and can be manipulated by cheating (e.g., by taking drugs that make you experience euphoria even though your life is rather miserable). In a sense, manipulating people's emotions in ways that don’t bring them any closer to their goals is like trying to fight global warming by tinkering with thermometers. It will make things look better, but it won’t improve anything.
If we were to mistake our measures, happiness and suffering, for the target of doing good, we might end up making the world and our own lives worse. For instance, imagine you were able to electrically stimulate the reward centers of your brain to make yourself experience maximal amounts of pleasure while doing nothing for the rest of your life at the press of a button. Pressing this button would maximize your happiness (i.e., the measure) but it would derail you from all of the personal goals you really care about (i.e., the target). And what if you could do the same to another person or to every sentient being in the universe. Would they thank you for it when they lie on their deathbed or would they be angry at you because you derailed from everything they wanted to achieve in their lives?
Now imagine that you could destroy the universe as we know it and turn it into an orgasmic plasma that experiences the maximal amount of joy possible without ever accomplishing anything. If you seriously subscribed to the maxim of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering that’s exactly what you should do. But I think you shouldn’t do that because happiness and suffering are only imperfect measures of the things that people really want.
If maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering is not the right target for effective altruism, then what else could it be? I won’t pretend I know the answer to this question. But I think it would be worth considering different variants of empowering beings to achieve their implicit and explicit goals as a better target for effective altruism. Most of the things that effective altruists endorse — including global health, reducing poverty, and mitigating existential risk — do in fact empower (present and future) individuals to achieve their implicit or explicit goals. Yet, rethinking the target of effective altruism might have implications that go beyond hypothetical ethical dilemmas. There is a real chance that if we accept some version of empowering individuals to achieve their implicit and explicit goals as the right target then we might realize that at least some of our priorities should be different. I think this is definitely worth thinking and discussing about. For instance, at least to me, this new perspective suggests that our research and development efforts to develop software tools and training programs that empower people to achieve their personal goals is more central to effective altruism than the perspective of minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness would suggest.
1. Marilyn Strathern (1997). ‘Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system. European Review, 5, pp 305-321.