I feel I'm missing a logical leap they're making, where they criticize utilitarianism for maximizing the number of people living, presumably not only by preventing deaths and improving existing lives, but by maximizing childbirths to the point of impairing lives (which I wouldn't do and wouldn't expect utilitarians to either).
You might need to read up on the repugnant inclusion. It compares a small population of high individual welfare with a large population of lower welfare. If you assume the desirability of each option to be the product of individual welfare and population size, each population of high welfare has an equally appealing alternative population of many people living just above the point of not wanting to exist.
Utilitarianism requires additional assumptions to decide between many people in subsistence and few people living carefree.
You are introducing (I suspect) such an addictional constraint, comparable to the Pareto criterion that forbids making individuals worse off in a trade off. However, accepting/demanding/proscribing such trade offs that accept making someone worse off are central to most utilitarian theories.
There isn't One True Utilitarianism anyway because you still have to specify a utility function and the aggregation of it that you want to maximize. And that's an AGI-hard problem. So in practice you can only do vastly simplified approximations of utility and then occasionally check whether the outcomes make sense in an intuitive way.
> Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god.
You are talking about the "mere addition paradox" [1] (aka the "repugnant conclusion" mentioned in the article). The point, as I understand it, is that whenever you maximize a metric it ceases to be a good metric, and optimizing for "people living" you reach a bunch of bad conclusions such as the one you mention where the more lives the better.
You say that you wouldn't do something like that, but the core of the question is "why?": what would be the utilitarian argument against going that way? You could argue that "happiness" should be a measure, at which point you need to contend with the problem of an "utility monster" [2]: what if it turns out that (say) Americans enjoy a dollar more than shell-shocked Ukranian refugees? Should we optimize the happiness of the Americans? How about those people with negative happiness, should we simply euthanize them?
The fault, according to the interview, is that you can't treat happiness and well-being as a matter of sums and averages. If you kill a man to open an ice-cream factory, no amount of happy children should absolve you of that crime.
This is probably the best summary in this entire thread.
The argument is basically effective altruism, taken to its conclusion, leads to some pretty morally questionable actions.
It's not arguing being altruistic is bad. It's just that effective altruism has a bunch of pretty big holes in it.
Another good example is the framework used to determine cost-effectiveness of drugs. At first glance it makes sense - just calculate [benefit]/[cost].
But then you realize that for some diseases, the cost baseline is really low because, well, people die when they are babies. So the model falls apart for some real life situations where the model says the ideal outcome is to just let people die because it's "cost effective"
That there can be a good utility model remains a postulate. How can you know that your choice of utility or trying to aim for utility at all does not have catastrophic consequences, sowing more misery through unintended consequences? How can you factor that in? [0]
Why would i spend my time explaining this to you when i could spend that time consulting and then use that money to buy mosquito nets for people in Africa?
Mosquito nets and deworming pills were on the better side of it:
>Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
>That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation
This is awful. He starts with people giving away money and wanting it to do the most good rather than be wasted and goes from there to trollies running over people, leaving drowning kids to die, butchering people for their organs, and bulldozing cities. This appears to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities of chaos and uncertainty.
Just to point out two very real examples that run counter to this thinking:
Recent studies of benefit programs that give college scholarships to top academic performers it was found that these programs are entirely dominated by girls with essentially zero male participation. This was unexpected, unintended, and raises some major issues regarding gender balance and equity. But in the context set up in this talk both of these outcomes are essentially the same and not differentiable.
This is also all hovering near the issue of how best to execute philanthropy. One of the big issues in this space is how much workers involved should be paid. Currently dominant thinking is that charity work as good and wholesome and no money should be wasted and so pay for charity workers tends to be a fraction of what people with similar skills would make at the same or similar jobs in industry. However, experimentation has shown that paying charity workers similar amounts to what people earn in industry jobs results in increased productivity and mission successes. So there is a very interesting open question about exactly how much charity workers should be paid. It seems that in this piece the argument is being made that the entire issue is fundamentally grotesque and immoral.
So the issues related to making philanthropy are real and do not in general involve trollies, drowning children, people as potential organ banks willing or not, or the bulldozing of cities. This is really just another sad and tired example of philosophers completely missing the point of pragmatic action.
Surely the very point he is making is that it is the Effective Altruists who are ignoring the real complexity? I don't really understand your critique of what he's saying - it seems to me you're agreeing.
Hey, maybe when dealing with a runaway trolly or when deciding what worlds to bring into existence you can really nitpick the details but I don't really need to have that sorted out to tell that I prefer 10 people's lives saved compared to 5 or compared to a puppy getting surgery.
If someone can do the math and tell me this charity would on average save X lives while that will save Y with your money, that already helps me a lot compared to just donating to Red Cross or whoever because I saw their ad without considering strong alternatives.
The point of the speaker is that /in general/ these types of comparison amount to equivocation of the incommensurable, and this characteristic leads to progressively more unintuitive results as the breadth of application expands. The fact that the trolley problem intuitively suggests the opposite (it just makes sense!) is kind of the jumping off point for the interesting conversation.
This is a kantian imperative type concern. The question is: at the very highest level, should we use this principle /to restructure our society/. At the scale of influence of these schools of thought have the impact is unintuitive because it challenges the makeup of the normative fabric that society tacitly exists within. The more you apply the principle the less familiar notion of charity even becomes. The new thing that emerges is a purer and purer reflection of the ideological core of utilitarianism. As this slow move begins it seems wise to ask ‘do we want to move towards a society structured according to this principle?’.
The fact that the logic holds in a simple ‘charity is a fixed structure, I am already committed to giving X amount away, I am torn between two choices, equivocation and metric comparison is possible between these two similar options, an independent organisation has scored the effectiveness of these charities, which should I choose?’ Kind of does not relate to the complexity of the problem if you take the logic to the level of society wide acceptance as guiding principle.
I’m not saying EA really has the power to guide our /entire/ society but it is so enormously well funded that it is certainly a conversation worth having. It was the point of this podcast to discuss those more complex implications of utilitarianism in general which you have not considered noteworthy.
I was succinct and clear. You were not. You used long complex words and chains of weak logic for your point. I used "many is more than few" super simple logic.
The key topic discussed in the OP, which I engaged with in my comment, is the extent to which 'simple logic' fails to map to complex problems. Naturally, sometimes it is appropriate to describe a problem in a simple way, sometimes it has shortcomings yet remains a useful compromise, and sometimes it is completely inappropriate and misleading. The problem at hand is, in the broadest sense, how to try improve conditions of (human) life throughout the world.
Your take seems to be that there is no complexity, no square to be circled in trying to apply vague principles like "do maximum good" to a discussion of how to tackle all of the worlds problems. To me that seems like a very unserious take.
To me what it means to properly engage with this question is to discuss what we mean by good, to discuss the notion of quantifiability, etc.. I think avoiding these discussions is just a game of whackamole - as best you try to stamp it out you never escape the thorny issue that so much complexity hides in our silly contradictory human language notions of things.
Our vague human language notions serve a purpose but to be uncritical of them or even deny their importance when they are doing the heavy lifting of your argument seems strange to me. Notions like 'do more good' are very vague loose suggestions and so their value is only realised if also applied in a loose human common sense manner. Utilitarianism is the opposite of this loose human common sense approach, it demands your loose notions removed of their blurry edges and inherent contradictions and if you succeed in this unnatural transfiguration you will unhappily discover later on that the contradictions just pop up in your new solution because when you force natural language into an unnatural rigid form like that you find that you are no longer saying that which you thought.
I would love to know what in particular about my perspective you find interesting / flawed. I have tried to make arguments that aren't too flowery but if you find my chains of logic unsatisfactory please let me know where, although don't expect to find any very very clean lines of formal reasoning because I am writing in a conversational style.
Can’t we just cut through the Gordian Knot and understand that our moral obligation is somewhere between an annual donation to a local opera house, and donating all your excess money to organizations to end malaria?
It’s so tiring to see this quibbling over what the absolute best giving philosophy is when there is such ample opportunity for individuals to make a difference in the world.
It’s like watching someone in a pie eating contest lose because they spent the first 10 minutes deciding what the optimal first bite would be, then convincing themselves that optimal first bites are actually a form the Repugnant Conclusion which will ruin all their future meals.
You can do more than you are. You SHOULD do more than you are. You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. We don’t need perfect knowledge of a situation to start improving it, and boy oh boy do we need to start improving the world.
If you don’t want to call yourself an effective altruist, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t let this petty quibbling over the most extreme examples of giving let you stop yourself from making a $300 monthly donation to a charity with good reviews on Charity Navigator.
> You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team.
I most certainly don't know that. The more local, the more immediate, the less distance between action and effect, the less unintended consequences, the better.
1) I prefer what I can verify, understand, and immediately experience to what I cannot.
2) I use the heuristic that where there are more participants and intermediaries, it is more likely that something ugly will happen even if the original intentions were noble, which is already a big if.
3) I prefer improving my own neighborhood which also affects me, to some abstract global goal which I find less tangible.
EDIT: 4) I am put off by the grandiosity of "saving lives" far away, and I prefer more modest goals, e.g. provide a warm soup for the local soccer team.
If you are saying that a near guaranteed miniscule benefit to rich people outweighs a risky gift to desperately sthenuffering people, you know you are doing so little good that it may as well be zero.
Yeah, I'm genuinely curious as well. Malaria nets are cheap, well studied as highly effective, and directly prevent debilitating and life-threatening illness. We're talking about something that can fairly immediately save real existing lives, no hypotheticals or easy to conceive of major deleterious second order effects.
Considering that malaria infestation has historically complicated making use of the land available to humans all over the world, we know that efforts towards managing and eradicating malaria improves the human condition. Resistance to malaria and other diseases was one of the reasons why humans were trafficked all over the world.
Mostly caring about your immediate neighbourhood and local effects does not mean ignoring that other places and their history exists.
For Malaria, there is not even a debate that it historically was a very widespread disease with high impact in economy and also in warfare. It is estimated that 60000 US soldiers died to Malaria alone in WW II.
10/10 would pick local soccer team anytime. I am not utilitarian and I do not believe in human interchangeability. I value the health of local youth in my backyard far more, especially when the cause is boys in sports.
Sure, but _why_ is the question. I cannot understand how you think more good comes from making sure the local boys soccer club has a clean field to play vs. ensuring 4 families will sleep without the risk of contracting malaria. What makes you value the former more than the latter?
If you were the family facing malaria, and someone tried to donate the nets to you, would you sell them and donate the proceeds to their local soccer club?
"More good" reeks of nerdy utilitarianism which I completely reject. What makes me value the soccer team is love and kinship and vitalism. Mine extends to the local boys playing soccer. I want to see them thrive. I do not care about the malaria net folks. No ill will - I just do not care, I want them occupying no part of my brain.
And certainly no dorky nerds unable to comprehend human reality and attempting to force everyone in their abstract streamlined toy-reality with Philosophy 101 word games will change my mind.
If we're looking for a giving threshold that has also stood the test of time in terms of practicality for a reasonable portion of the population to be able to follow it long term, then we need to look no further than the precedent of the 10% church tithe.
Giving 10% is practical for many and would make an enormous difference in the world. Seems like a good baseline.
Weird example since the most famous 10% in the modern world funds the gilded real estate empire of abusive bigots, the latest in a long line of religious authorities who use the threat of supernatural damnation to exploit people.
Yeah, not arguing in favor of any churches here. Just pointing out that 10% is a practical level of giving for many, so a good place to start in considering how much you might want to be charitable.
Zakat’s also a great model and the principles behind it are sound too, I think regardless of one’s faith or tradition. Given that it’s wealth rather than earnings based it a more progressive model than tithes’ usual 10% of income.
Well, giving is by its nature optional, so you must fit it into your personal circumstances. I'm just pointing at a reasonable baseline that many people around the world have followed for generations.
Nope. That’s too simplistic. There’s no "effective altruism", just people trying to buy a good conscience.
You can’t become a billionaire without f* lot of people and exploiting the system’s loopholes. There’s no way to be a moral billionaire. In fact, by definition, every billionaire is a dangerous psychopat (normal people would stop focusing on earning money pass a given amount. You can’t be intellectually sane and a billionnaire).
Every billioniare is a policy failure.
So now, we have those dangerous psychopats who f* the system for money who try to justify their action by using the money in a way that they find morally good according to their own f** up moral values. Which means that they get even more power than just money: they start to define what is good and what is bad.
The only sane way to give money is to let the community decide how to spend money.
That’s called taxes.
Strangely enough, every single billionaire is against paying taxes. Because they consider themselves morally superior.
I agree that government are corrupts. I agree that democracy has lot of failures. But between a system which is not perfect and a dangerous psychopat who consider himself superior to any democratically elected government, I know which one is the worst for our future.
"evil capitalists". This is ridiculous. It's envy rationalization at this point.
There are plenty of truly evil capitalists if you want to look for them, but many just aren't.
Economy isn't zero sum game, like the truly evil communists would have you believe. Capitalism let's people vote continuously with their wallets. J.K. rowing might have gotten a big paycheck from everything, but much of the economic value dispersed to everyone else. And people wanted those resources in the hands of people making the movies.
Nothing is free. There's always a price, and many times the margins of profits are just the margins required for stability anyway. And stability always comes with a price for risk, and it's always the investors paying the risk. What turned out as positive outcome could come from a negative expectation value distribution. There's nothing morally wrong from making a profit especially if you took a risk with negative expectation outcome. You expect these people to give you for free, but if they gave you for free on success they have negative expected outcome and they will never do it. That's like expecting people to give you money, and that's rude.
They acquired far more resources than they could ever need, while others around them lacked even the most basic resources necessary to life.
This is a systemic failure to be sure, but a failure nonetheless. The end result is these people ending up with massive surpluses of resources and power that others desperately need, simply because they have accumulated a larger amount of "money" from the luck of their circumstances.
In the old days, these failures were mediated by debt jubilees, potlatches and such. More recently, we've moved on to wealth taxes, although these are a poor shadow of what we had before to ensure a minimum level of equality in a society.
So, why are so many people against them giving away that money in pursuit of a fairer world? Is it just frustrating to see the rich (aka evil) give away money consensually rather than it being taken by force?
I totally get it if the donations aren't actually doing anything good, but most EA donations go to global health initiatives that save lives, in quite large numbers (I think SBFs did not, however).
Edit: I would also get it if donations were being used as an anti-tax argument, but I don't see that being the case? I've never seen any billionaire say their donations should make them exempt from taxes. I believe eg. Gates and Buffet both favour higher taxes for the rich (publicly, at least). Sure there are anti-tax billionaires, and billionaires who make large charitable donations, but I'd guess the correlation between the two things was actually negative.
It's not a problem of giving away to charity; It's a problem of people reaching this level of wealth in the first place.
In the early days, people who became too wealthy were killed by the rest of the villagers. Potlatches were a natural response to this because equalizing society reduced the resentment and also raised the prestige of the givers. Charity giving is the modern equivalent of this, but in a severely watered down form (they still get to spend their entire lives in unfathomable wealth).
With 2 million USD in personal wealth, you can dump it into safe, passive investment vehicles and life comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of your life in a first world country. Tens of millions or more is simply avarice, and needs to be discouraged in order to mitigate the steady slide into extreme inequality that comes as a natural consequence of unequal luck or opportunity over time.
So many people seem to leap into this "billionaires are bad" rhetoric when EA is mentioned. I mean, fine, but it's not really an answer to what I said. I think it's maybe an example of the "Gordian Knot" mentioned upthread. I'm not asking whether billionaires are bad or not, I'm asking why so many people would prefer that billionaires keep their money, rather than the money being used to save lives.
Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than accepting a billion dollar donation from a very rich person?
IMO, people would prefer that billionaires keep their money because they also buy into the idea of making it big themselves one day, someday. If you get rid of the billionaires, that prize no longer exists for people to wish for.
Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent.
> Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars?
I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?
Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your EA goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people.
It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or controversial "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives.
So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. You could tweet about it and probably get a lot of likes. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is that really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd (and frankly horrifying) that anybody would even have to think about that question for longer than a millisecond.
250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.
They don’t use money to save lives. They use the money to maximize their prestige and their power. They save lives when it fits their agenda.
Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists".
Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves.
It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)
I don't understand or like Gates' IP fixation. Of the many criticisms I've seen leveled against him, the covid vaccine IP thing seems like the most genuinely bad. But it seems like a huge leap from that to everything his foundation has done is worthless. I say this as a former Gates loather from his MS days.
I am fairly confident that stopping people dying of preventable diseases is an actual thing that happens in the real world. There's certainly prestige and feel-good involved in saving lives, but are you sure that makes saving lives bad? What's an acceptable exchange rate? If somebody saves a thousand lives and feels only slightly good about it, would that be acceptable? How many people would you have to watch die of preventable diseases, before you'd start to think it was OK for somebody to feel good about preventing them, or even enjoy a bit of prestige?
> every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors
Givewell's current list[0] of top "high-impact, cost-effective" charities has two Malaria charities, vitamin A supplements and cash incentives for vaccinations. GiveDirectly (which "gives money to the poors") was in the list until a couple of years ago.
Where did I say that everything they are doing is worthless? I said exactly the opposite. They are doing good stuff too. Because, statistically, it seems really impossible to only do bad thing.
The main take is that "doing good "is not their motivation. They are pursuing their own selfish interests. And when those interests align with the general good, they use that opportunity to do some marketing and say "look, we are doing good." Which is true but they fail to mention "because it’s in our own interest and we are also doing very nasty stuff in our own interest but we will, of course, try to hide it as much as we could".
Even if they are doing 90% good stuff, it is really scary to realize that those people have so much power because they had the luck to won at what Cory Doctorow call the "lucky orifice lottery" (they had rich parent then they compounded on that to become even richer). Which means we can’t trust them, we should not trust them. Elon Musk is an excellent example : what he was doing seemed good (electric cars, space stuff) until you realize what he really did (founding the hyperloop project as a scam to prevent, on purpose, any big scale public transportation project that would compete with Tesla).
Bezos is wealthy simply because he owns a large chunk of Amazon. Because he started the company. He's only a billionaire because literally everyone in the world is willing to pay him a substantial piece of money for a tiny piece of the company. How is that Jeff's problem? The world could make Jeff not a billionaire in a moment by merely saying "none of us want a piece of Amazon".
At what point was Jeff supposed to give away his ownership of Amazon? Who should he have given it to? Would they then get to run the company, would Jeff keep running it?
Wait, the popular author J K Rowling was in the list of wealthy people whose financial actions you've said are a problem.
J K Rowling wrote some books that lots of people liked and accepted a modest payment for each copy, making her wealthy.
To check, are you saying it's not good enough even if she decides to give away the money now, because she should never have had that much financial power in the first place, to decide what to do with so much?
If so, what should she have done instead? I think a wildly successful published author can only avoid getting rich by giving away their royalties. Declining to take royalties in the first place is just another form of giving them away, and that decision exercises equivalent financial power to taking them and giving them to someone else.
Same with making the books freely available, free to copy: that's exercising the power to give away the wealth to readers who would have paid, instead of someone else.
So taking less money in the first place is not a way out of your ethical constraint. It's just another form of being rich and giving it away, but with a faster cycle.
In some sense it's not her fault she acquired financial power, except in the sense that she chose to make something lots of people loved enough to be willing to pay for, which is hardly something to criticise. The power simply exists by virtue of large numbers of people being willing to pay without coercion.
If there's no way for a person to avoid having financial power as a result of some welcome action they did, not even by choosing to give every penny of their wealth away while earning it, I don't think it's fair or ethical to blame them for having that unavoidable power, nor sensible to deem them a psychopath. If you're going to judge the person, better to judge how they exercise the power they have, not that they have it.
Jerry famously hosed over the other primary cast members on residuals. Didn't matter much for elaine, but George and Kramer didn't come from a family of billionaires.
Michael Jordan thought selling shoes was more important than making a statement denouncing a racist man running for office in his home state.
JK used her money to stifle fans free speech and fair use with lawsuits galore if she disagreed that they were "true fans".
Those are the worst things I can think of for those 3. I don't think it rises to the level of psychopathy but it certainly is questionable behavior.
Except for Jerry, those are random stuff done WITH the money they earned. Not something they did to get the money in the first place. So you're just off topic.
Curious. How do you see the system actually working - how do you stop at a billion?
So, let's say you start a company. Then raise some VC money. You start getting users and things are going really well, but you aren't quite profitable. You see a path to that but need to make investments to get there. So you raise another round of money. However, as you are doing well, the valuation of the company is set to three billion. As the founder, you still own 50% of the shares.
You are technically now a billionaire. Of course, just on paper but Forbes will still put you on the "overnight billionaire" list.
What are you supposed to do in this case ? When exactly did you go from "not psychopath" to "psychopath"?
3. Either loan against your shares (good luck) or(and probably even if you do get a loan)
4. Go public early, selling your shares and let others partake in the companies growth
Alternatively, give your shares to employees, donate, whatever. It's not really rocket science, just tax wealth (radical markets proposes a nice way to get honest self assessments...) and as a side benefit, you benefit employees by creating much more incentive against staying private forever
How do you think someone like Mark Zuckerberg fits into that model?
From what I observe, his personal motivation really does seem to be “build the most powerful social media company” and not “accumulate as much personal wealth as possible”. I think the VR bet is a good example of that - any sane CEO trying to maximize shareholder value would have scrapped it long ago.
I’m not saying Mark is a great person, far from it, but I think it’s worth scrutinizing how billionaires got in their positions. There’s a lot amount of difference, in my mind, between Bill Gates and John Bogle.
Say what you will about Notch since he's become a billionaire, but he became a billionaire just by creating a game that people really really liked and being willing to sell when Microsoft came knocking. He wasn't wealthy before that and didn't seem to have ambitions as such. So, it seems there are avenues to such vast wealth that aren't so clearly, "you must f many people over and have sociopathic ambitions".
That is to say, in many ways I agree with your assessment, but let's be careful not to over-generalize.
There are of course exceptions who became billionaire nearly by accident. Such is notch and, if I remember correctly, it was really hard for him to become so rich. Also, now that he has enough cash, you never heard him "trying to change the world with his cash". So, yeah, he might be one of the exceptions.
There is a lot in here that seems like unsubstantiated opinion, like the only sane way to give money being donations to a community, but I do agree that billionaires are policy failures. I just don’t see how all that relates to an individuals obligation to contribute to good.
I didn’t listen to this, but the essay is full of straw men and contrived arguments about how utilitarianism is a bad moral philosophy. While utilitarianism is not perfect, this essay just regurgitates others’ criticisms of it and provides no useful alternative. As an aside that bothered me (but not related to the content directly), the tone of the article also wants to be scholarly so badly, which made it really long-winded and hard to read.
>> Indeed, this very essay, which I’d long planned to write some version of, is coming out now because the same effective altruist organization is offering a $20,000 prize to whomever gives the best critique of effective altruism this month.
I think this sentence tells you everything you need to know about this guy’s philosophy. The article also ends with him suggesting, as an “alternative”, to give a money to fundamentally utilitarian/effectively altruistic sources (AI safety research) and to fund projects that he’s interested in under the premise that these underfunded scientific fields are “awesome and epic”.
What you call strawmen are just example of where the philosophy falls apart. i mean, how else do you test a philosophy other than throwing all possibly scenarios at it and see what comes out?
Russ Robert's Econtalk podcast is fantastic. He brings on all sorts of authors and discusses their books, challenges their theories, gets challenged back.
He's had Michael Pollen on about psychedelics and I thought he was pretty fair and engaged considering he's a conservative Jewish guy in his 60's that leans more right than left (though with libertarian beliefs, but mostly economic ones).
It's a very academic podcast (Russ is an economics professor at the Hoover Institute), but his podcasts on the financial crisis (I think there are over a dozen) are really good if you want to understand how all the stuff works under the hood. He had former heads of the Fed on, numerous professors who are globally recognized as monetary experts, etc.
Besides being a s*tshow in practice, and I'm not saying that just due to recent developments, I reject EA even at its hypothetical pure form. Even outside direct family bonds, I do not value all peoples the same and do not support my discretionary resources going to them. Holding people's feet to fire with rationalizations, hypotheticals, Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct. I have zero respect for deracinated disembodied nerds lost in their own abstractions who waste their surplus IQ to try to bully people into accepting their imaginary toy world through word games.
Deracinated nerd here, but I find your perspective at least a lot more understandable than the people who at appalled by the idea of using rich people's money to save poor people's lives, from a robustly anti-capitalist standpoint.
Totally - instincts are powerful and attempting to collapse their multidimensional information space into words and rationality forces people into absurdities (and the nerds get immense joy at seeing their betters squirm at their toy games). I side with the "appalled", but that's because I know they are soft and polite people clumsily trying to catch up to the high-IQ* nerds.
I have no problem looking nerds dead in the eye and say "I have no respect for you and your abstract games in your toy fantasy world".
* EDIT: high-IQ sounds too flattering; I meant just-smart-enough to vomit articles, books, PhD theses, insufferable "discussions" in tasteless EA-parties crying about "why reality should work different" - throwing a temper tantrum and stomping their feet because normal humans do not want or respect the toy games they play in their toy worlds
> Rawlsian veil of ignorance questions are all forms of shaming people for this completely normal human instinct
Shouldn't instincts be subject to reason and falsification, regardless of whether they're normal? If you can find little to no rational justification for preferring your instinctive choice, shouldn't you seriously consider overriding that instinct?
Absolutely not. Words and rationality are far inferior clumsy tools of communication (and - with respect to the nerds in question - tools of manipulation) to the vastly more multi-dimensional, multi-generational, tried-and-true, human instincts.
> Words and rationality are far inferior clumsy tools of communication (and - with respect to the nerds in question - tools of manipulation) to the vastly more multi-dimensional, multi-generational, tried-and-true, human instincts.
You mean the kind of instincts that justified slavery, that oppresses women, that justifies spousal abuse and racial or ethnic hatred? Yeah sorry, "instincts" have orders of magnitude more failure modes than reason and language.
Philosophical frameworks can be useful when you know their limits.
A single formula cannot possibly give you the answer to any human interaction.
Physicists (successful ones anyway) do not try to use a single equation for all problems.
Only fanatics think a single moral framework can solve all problems, no need to give them any mind.
Every single moral system leads to repugnant conclusions if you push it just right.
So okay, you don't like utilitarianism. Let's try deontology for size. Deontology works effectively to following a set of rules and duties, consequences be damned. So if our rules say you don't steal, then you don't. Don't murder. Etc.
But the snag is that since you don't care about the consequences, any consequences, of any size are irrelevant. So for instance, if contraception is deemed bad, then no amount of negative consequences has any relevance. Families are brought down to crushing poverty, orphanages are overflowing, starving children are wandering on the streets? Absolutely not a reason to change that rule.
Also, where utilitarianism can make iffy tradeoffs (eg, this particular person would be better dead because we'd benefit from it), there's usually some practical limit to that. If you ever can do that under deontology you can do it on an unlimited scale. If you ever work out that "those people" aren't really people legally speaking and you can just kill one of them, then you can kill them all you want, any time you want, on any scale you want.
Point being, most any system followed indiscriminately has problems because people are people and will look for loopholes and ways to exploit any rules to benefit.
From what I understand Utilitarianism doesn't really have this problem. Why? Because if you say "if you do x a lot it causes bad thing y", well then that's a part of the utility function and the consequence. You only end up with absurdities if you actually don't think through it too far.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadUtilitarianism requires additional assumptions to decide between many people in subsistence and few people living carefree.
You are introducing (I suspect) such an addictional constraint, comparable to the Pareto criterion that forbids making individuals worse off in a trade off. However, accepting/demanding/proscribing such trade offs that accept making someone worse off are central to most utilitarian theories.
https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1497157447219232768
> Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god.
You say that you wouldn't do something like that, but the core of the question is "why?": what would be the utilitarian argument against going that way? You could argue that "happiness" should be a measure, at which point you need to contend with the problem of an "utility monster" [2]: what if it turns out that (say) Americans enjoy a dollar more than shell-shocked Ukranian refugees? Should we optimize the happiness of the Americans? How about those people with negative happiness, should we simply euthanize them?
The fault, according to the interview, is that you can't treat happiness and well-being as a matter of sums and averages. If you kill a man to open an ice-cream factory, no amount of happy children should absolve you of that crime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
The argument is basically effective altruism, taken to its conclusion, leads to some pretty morally questionable actions.
It's not arguing being altruistic is bad. It's just that effective altruism has a bunch of pretty big holes in it.
Another good example is the framework used to determine cost-effectiveness of drugs. At first glance it makes sense - just calculate [benefit]/[cost].
But then you realize that for some diseases, the cost baseline is really low because, well, people die when they are babies. So the model falls apart for some real life situations where the model says the ideal outcome is to just let people die because it's "cost effective"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-an-effective-al...
- Maybe a future billionaire -
>Then you will be delighted/horrified to find out that the effective altruism community doesn't feel the need to make quantifiable justifications for how they spend their own donations, as evidenced by this $20k grant they gave someone to learn to ride a bike and think about AI[1].
>That's about 3853 to 4090 mosquito nets' worth of donations, using GiveWell's numbers for the Against Malaria Foundation
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/...
Just to point out two very real examples that run counter to this thinking:
Recent studies of benefit programs that give college scholarships to top academic performers it was found that these programs are entirely dominated by girls with essentially zero male participation. This was unexpected, unintended, and raises some major issues regarding gender balance and equity. But in the context set up in this talk both of these outcomes are essentially the same and not differentiable.
This is also all hovering near the issue of how best to execute philanthropy. One of the big issues in this space is how much workers involved should be paid. Currently dominant thinking is that charity work as good and wholesome and no money should be wasted and so pay for charity workers tends to be a fraction of what people with similar skills would make at the same or similar jobs in industry. However, experimentation has shown that paying charity workers similar amounts to what people earn in industry jobs results in increased productivity and mission successes. So there is a very interesting open question about exactly how much charity workers should be paid. It seems that in this piece the argument is being made that the entire issue is fundamentally grotesque and immoral.
So the issues related to making philanthropy are real and do not in general involve trollies, drowning children, people as potential organ banks willing or not, or the bulldozing of cities. This is really just another sad and tired example of philosophers completely missing the point of pragmatic action.
If someone can do the math and tell me this charity would on average save X lives while that will save Y with your money, that already helps me a lot compared to just donating to Red Cross or whoever because I saw their ad without considering strong alternatives.
This is a kantian imperative type concern. The question is: at the very highest level, should we use this principle /to restructure our society/. At the scale of influence of these schools of thought have the impact is unintuitive because it challenges the makeup of the normative fabric that society tacitly exists within. The more you apply the principle the less familiar notion of charity even becomes. The new thing that emerges is a purer and purer reflection of the ideological core of utilitarianism. As this slow move begins it seems wise to ask ‘do we want to move towards a society structured according to this principle?’.
The fact that the logic holds in a simple ‘charity is a fixed structure, I am already committed to giving X amount away, I am torn between two choices, equivocation and metric comparison is possible between these two similar options, an independent organisation has scored the effectiveness of these charities, which should I choose?’ Kind of does not relate to the complexity of the problem if you take the logic to the level of society wide acceptance as guiding principle.
I’m not saying EA really has the power to guide our /entire/ society but it is so enormously well funded that it is certainly a conversation worth having. It was the point of this podcast to discuss those more complex implications of utilitarianism in general which you have not considered noteworthy.
Helping more people > helping fewer people.
Helping some people > killing some people.
This is not hard philosophy. It's like straight out of the Kalama Sutta. You know what is blameful. You know what is blameless.
Your take seems to be that there is no complexity, no square to be circled in trying to apply vague principles like "do maximum good" to a discussion of how to tackle all of the worlds problems. To me that seems like a very unserious take.
To me what it means to properly engage with this question is to discuss what we mean by good, to discuss the notion of quantifiability, etc.. I think avoiding these discussions is just a game of whackamole - as best you try to stamp it out you never escape the thorny issue that so much complexity hides in our silly contradictory human language notions of things.
Our vague human language notions serve a purpose but to be uncritical of them or even deny their importance when they are doing the heavy lifting of your argument seems strange to me. Notions like 'do more good' are very vague loose suggestions and so their value is only realised if also applied in a loose human common sense manner. Utilitarianism is the opposite of this loose human common sense approach, it demands your loose notions removed of their blurry edges and inherent contradictions and if you succeed in this unnatural transfiguration you will unhappily discover later on that the contradictions just pop up in your new solution because when you force natural language into an unnatural rigid form like that you find that you are no longer saying that which you thought.
I would love to know what in particular about my perspective you find interesting / flawed. I have tried to make arguments that aren't too flowery but if you find my chains of logic unsatisfactory please let me know where, although don't expect to find any very very clean lines of formal reasoning because I am writing in a conversational style.
It’s so tiring to see this quibbling over what the absolute best giving philosophy is when there is such ample opportunity for individuals to make a difference in the world.
It’s like watching someone in a pie eating contest lose because they spent the first 10 minutes deciding what the optimal first bite would be, then convincing themselves that optimal first bites are actually a form the Repugnant Conclusion which will ruin all their future meals.
You can do more than you are. You SHOULD do more than you are. You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. We don’t need perfect knowledge of a situation to start improving it, and boy oh boy do we need to start improving the world.
If you don’t want to call yourself an effective altruist, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t let this petty quibbling over the most extreme examples of giving let you stop yourself from making a $300 monthly donation to a charity with good reviews on Charity Navigator.
I most certainly don't know that. The more local, the more immediate, the less distance between action and effect, the less unintended consequences, the better.
2) I use the heuristic that where there are more participants and intermediaries, it is more likely that something ugly will happen even if the original intentions were noble, which is already a big if.
3) I prefer improving my own neighborhood which also affects me, to some abstract global goal which I find less tangible.
EDIT: 4) I am put off by the grandiosity of "saving lives" far away, and I prefer more modest goals, e.g. provide a warm soup for the local soccer team.
For Malaria, there is not even a debate that it historically was a very widespread disease with high impact in economy and also in warfare. It is estimated that 60000 US soldiers died to Malaria alone in WW II.
If you were the family facing malaria, and someone tried to donate the nets to you, would you sell them and donate the proceeds to their local soccer club?
And certainly no dorky nerds unable to comprehend human reality and attempting to force everyone in their abstract streamlined toy-reality with Philosophy 101 word games will change my mind.
Giving 10% is practical for many and would make an enormous difference in the world. Seems like a good baseline.
You can’t become a billionaire without f* lot of people and exploiting the system’s loopholes. There’s no way to be a moral billionaire. In fact, by definition, every billionaire is a dangerous psychopat (normal people would stop focusing on earning money pass a given amount. You can’t be intellectually sane and a billionnaire).
Every billioniare is a policy failure.
So now, we have those dangerous psychopats who f* the system for money who try to justify their action by using the money in a way that they find morally good according to their own f** up moral values. Which means that they get even more power than just money: they start to define what is good and what is bad.
The only sane way to give money is to let the community decide how to spend money.
That’s called taxes.
Strangely enough, every single billionaire is against paying taxes. Because they consider themselves morally superior.
I agree that government are corrupts. I agree that democracy has lot of failures. But between a system which is not perfect and a dangerous psychopat who consider himself superior to any democratically elected government, I know which one is the worst for our future.
There are plenty of truly evil capitalists if you want to look for them, but many just aren't.
Economy isn't zero sum game, like the truly evil communists would have you believe. Capitalism let's people vote continuously with their wallets. J.K. rowing might have gotten a big paycheck from everything, but much of the economic value dispersed to everyone else. And people wanted those resources in the hands of people making the movies.
Nothing is free. There's always a price, and many times the margins of profits are just the margins required for stability anyway. And stability always comes with a price for risk, and it's always the investors paying the risk. What turned out as positive outcome could come from a negative expectation value distribution. There's nothing morally wrong from making a profit especially if you took a risk with negative expectation outcome. You expect these people to give you for free, but if they gave you for free on success they have negative expected outcome and they will never do it. That's like expecting people to give you money, and that's rude.
This is a systemic failure to be sure, but a failure nonetheless. The end result is these people ending up with massive surpluses of resources and power that others desperately need, simply because they have accumulated a larger amount of "money" from the luck of their circumstances.
In the old days, these failures were mediated by debt jubilees, potlatches and such. More recently, we've moved on to wealth taxes, although these are a poor shadow of what we had before to ensure a minimum level of equality in a society.
I totally get it if the donations aren't actually doing anything good, but most EA donations go to global health initiatives that save lives, in quite large numbers (I think SBFs did not, however).
Edit: I would also get it if donations were being used as an anti-tax argument, but I don't see that being the case? I've never seen any billionaire say their donations should make them exempt from taxes. I believe eg. Gates and Buffet both favour higher taxes for the rich (publicly, at least). Sure there are anti-tax billionaires, and billionaires who make large charitable donations, but I'd guess the correlation between the two things was actually negative.
In the early days, people who became too wealthy were killed by the rest of the villagers. Potlatches were a natural response to this because equalizing society reduced the resentment and also raised the prestige of the givers. Charity giving is the modern equivalent of this, but in a severely watered down form (they still get to spend their entire lives in unfathomable wealth).
With 2 million USD in personal wealth, you can dump it into safe, passive investment vehicles and life comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of your life in a first world country. Tens of millions or more is simply avarice, and needs to be discouraged in order to mitigate the steady slide into extreme inequality that comes as a natural consequence of unequal luck or opportunity over time.
Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than accepting a billion dollar donation from a very rich person?
Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent.
> Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars?
I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?
Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your EA goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people.
It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or controversial "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives.
So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. You could tweet about it and probably get a lot of likes. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is that really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd (and frankly horrifying) that anybody would even have to think about that question for longer than a millisecond.
250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.
Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists".
Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves.
It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)
I am fairly confident that stopping people dying of preventable diseases is an actual thing that happens in the real world. There's certainly prestige and feel-good involved in saving lives, but are you sure that makes saving lives bad? What's an acceptable exchange rate? If somebody saves a thousand lives and feels only slightly good about it, would that be acceptable? How many people would you have to watch die of preventable diseases, before you'd start to think it was OK for somebody to feel good about preventing them, or even enjoy a bit of prestige?
> every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors
Givewell's current list[0] of top "high-impact, cost-effective" charities has two Malaria charities, vitamin A supplements and cash incentives for vaccinations. GiveDirectly (which "gives money to the poors") was in the list until a couple of years ago.
[0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
The main take is that "doing good "is not their motivation. They are pursuing their own selfish interests. And when those interests align with the general good, they use that opportunity to do some marketing and say "look, we are doing good." Which is true but they fail to mention "because it’s in our own interest and we are also doing very nasty stuff in our own interest but we will, of course, try to hide it as much as we could".
Even if they are doing 90% good stuff, it is really scary to realize that those people have so much power because they had the luck to won at what Cory Doctorow call the "lucky orifice lottery" (they had rich parent then they compounded on that to become even richer). Which means we can’t trust them, we should not trust them. Elon Musk is an excellent example : what he was doing seemed good (electric cars, space stuff) until you realize what he really did (founding the hyperloop project as a scam to prevent, on purpose, any big scale public transportation project that would compete with Tesla).
At what point was Jeff supposed to give away his ownership of Amazon? Who should he have given it to? Would they then get to run the company, would Jeff keep running it?
J K Rowling wrote some books that lots of people liked and accepted a modest payment for each copy, making her wealthy.
To check, are you saying it's not good enough even if she decides to give away the money now, because she should never have had that much financial power in the first place, to decide what to do with so much?
If so, what should she have done instead? I think a wildly successful published author can only avoid getting rich by giving away their royalties. Declining to take royalties in the first place is just another form of giving them away, and that decision exercises equivalent financial power to taking them and giving them to someone else.
Same with making the books freely available, free to copy: that's exercising the power to give away the wealth to readers who would have paid, instead of someone else.
So taking less money in the first place is not a way out of your ethical constraint. It's just another form of being rich and giving it away, but with a faster cycle.
In some sense it's not her fault she acquired financial power, except in the sense that she chose to make something lots of people loved enough to be willing to pay for, which is hardly something to criticise. The power simply exists by virtue of large numbers of people being willing to pay without coercion.
If there's no way for a person to avoid having financial power as a result of some welcome action they did, not even by choosing to give every penny of their wealth away while earning it, I don't think it's fair or ethical to blame them for having that unavoidable power, nor sensible to deem them a psychopath. If you're going to judge the person, better to judge how they exercise the power they have, not that they have it.
Michael Jordan thought selling shoes was more important than making a statement denouncing a racist man running for office in his home state.
JK used her money to stifle fans free speech and fair use with lawsuits galore if she disagreed that they were "true fans".
Those are the worst things I can think of for those 3. I don't think it rises to the level of psychopathy but it certainly is questionable behavior.
So, let's say you start a company. Then raise some VC money. You start getting users and things are going really well, but you aren't quite profitable. You see a path to that but need to make investments to get there. So you raise another round of money. However, as you are doing well, the valuation of the company is set to three billion. As the founder, you still own 50% of the shares.
You are technically now a billionaire. Of course, just on paper but Forbes will still put you on the "overnight billionaire" list.
What are you supposed to do in this case ? When exactly did you go from "not psychopath" to "psychopath"?
1. Found a unicorn. Congratulations!
2. Get a tax bill
3. Either loan against your shares (good luck) or(and probably even if you do get a loan)
4. Go public early, selling your shares and let others partake in the companies growth
Alternatively, give your shares to employees, donate, whatever. It's not really rocket science, just tax wealth (radical markets proposes a nice way to get honest self assessments...) and as a side benefit, you benefit employees by creating much more incentive against staying private forever
So if you IPO at 1b ( probably the valuation will drop after ipoing early but ok ) you are not considered a "psychopath" ?
I'm sure all the employees with stock options will be thrilled as well after they drop in value.
From what I observe, his personal motivation really does seem to be “build the most powerful social media company” and not “accumulate as much personal wealth as possible”. I think the VR bet is a good example of that - any sane CEO trying to maximize shareholder value would have scrapped it long ago.
I’m not saying Mark is a great person, far from it, but I think it’s worth scrutinizing how billionaires got in their positions. There’s a lot amount of difference, in my mind, between Bill Gates and John Bogle.
That is to say, in many ways I agree with your assessment, but let's be careful not to over-generalize.
>> Indeed, this very essay, which I’d long planned to write some version of, is coming out now because the same effective altruist organization is offering a $20,000 prize to whomever gives the best critique of effective altruism this month.
I think this sentence tells you everything you need to know about this guy’s philosophy. The article also ends with him suggesting, as an “alternative”, to give a money to fundamentally utilitarian/effectively altruistic sources (AI safety research) and to fund projects that he’s interested in under the premise that these underfunded scientific fields are “awesome and epic”.
He's had Michael Pollen on about psychedelics and I thought he was pretty fair and engaged considering he's a conservative Jewish guy in his 60's that leans more right than left (though with libertarian beliefs, but mostly economic ones).
It's a very academic podcast (Russ is an economics professor at the Hoover Institute), but his podcasts on the financial crisis (I think there are over a dozen) are really good if you want to understand how all the stuff works under the hood. He had former heads of the Fed on, numerous professors who are globally recognized as monetary experts, etc.
And the podcast archives go back to like 2006.
I have no problem looking nerds dead in the eye and say "I have no respect for you and your abstract games in your toy fantasy world".
* EDIT: high-IQ sounds too flattering; I meant just-smart-enough to vomit articles, books, PhD theses, insufferable "discussions" in tasteless EA-parties crying about "why reality should work different" - throwing a temper tantrum and stomping their feet because normal humans do not want or respect the toy games they play in their toy worlds
Shouldn't instincts be subject to reason and falsification, regardless of whether they're normal? If you can find little to no rational justification for preferring your instinctive choice, shouldn't you seriously consider overriding that instinct?
You mean the kind of instincts that justified slavery, that oppresses women, that justifies spousal abuse and racial or ethnic hatred? Yeah sorry, "instincts" have orders of magnitude more failure modes than reason and language.
So okay, you don't like utilitarianism. Let's try deontology for size. Deontology works effectively to following a set of rules and duties, consequences be damned. So if our rules say you don't steal, then you don't. Don't murder. Etc.
But the snag is that since you don't care about the consequences, any consequences, of any size are irrelevant. So for instance, if contraception is deemed bad, then no amount of negative consequences has any relevance. Families are brought down to crushing poverty, orphanages are overflowing, starving children are wandering on the streets? Absolutely not a reason to change that rule.
Also, where utilitarianism can make iffy tradeoffs (eg, this particular person would be better dead because we'd benefit from it), there's usually some practical limit to that. If you ever can do that under deontology you can do it on an unlimited scale. If you ever work out that "those people" aren't really people legally speaking and you can just kill one of them, then you can kill them all you want, any time you want, on any scale you want.
Point being, most any system followed indiscriminately has problems because people are people and will look for loopholes and ways to exploit any rules to benefit.