I run The Dignity Project, a campaign for more respectful development. I also consider myself aligned with EA, and I've been wondering how to integrate those two interests. I'd be interested in the community's feedback on this.
I've tried to make a positive case in favour of dignity, rather than an objective assessment. What holes do you see? What evidence would you value to help resolve what weight an EA should place on dignity?
EA aims to do the greatest good. How to define that good is one of Bostrom’s ‘crucial considerations’. The past few years have seen increasing debate. ‘Lives saved’ has largely been replaced by QALYs and DALYs. GiveWell and IDinsight have been researching the moral weights people place on different outcomes. There are strong arguments for using WALYs, incorporating life satisfaction. Dignity deserves its place alongside these measures - because it meets criteria of neglectedness, solvability and scale (Wiblin, 2019).
Dignity as a definition of the good life has historically been neglected. That is starting to change. In 2019, Jeremy Shapiro’s article on cash transfers posited dignity as an important differentiator between cash and in-kind aid. Banerjee & Duflo’s new book 'Good Economics for Hard Times' urges us to study dignity; they write "Restoring human dignity to its central place...sets off a profound rethinking of economic priorities...". Just this week, Gene Sperling launched a book called Economic Dignity, and it has been an important feature in considerations of effective medical care (Jacobson, 2007). Yet I have found no projects that have attempted to evaluate interventions or advocate for them, and very few that define dignity or develop measures - and none of those that do exist are EA-aligned.
As McKaskill and others have argued, epistemic modesty suggests that when we are in a position of moral uncertainty, we should consider an intervention through multiple measures - to do so is the equivalent of robustness checks in statistical modelling. Dignity is - or should be - an important meeting point between EA’s values, and other value systems. This is doubly the case when EA has taken so little account (Brown, 2016) of the extensive articulation of the good life - underpinned by dignity - put forward by Sen, Nussbaum, Alkire and others.
Addressing dignity potentially has huge scale. Disrespect is extremely common; in 13 Afrobarometer countries more than 50% said public officials do not treat them with respect. My own experiment in Nairobi showed that experiencing disrespect was associated with feeling significantly less happy and less empowered. Since disrespect is most frequently experienced when individuals interact with bureaucracies (Scott, 1999), it is relevant for global development, government, businesses and beyond. A robust theory of dignity in EA would have implications for how we rank causes and interventions, with wellbeing and cash interventions likely to seem more urgent.
Dignity is also highly solvable. The philosophical literature already gives us a framework for generating interventions, and these include potentially highly cost-effective interventions such as listening (Wein et al, in progress). As we uncover effective interventions, they can be spread. My own research has shown that there is a unique consensus in global development: the US public say they would donate 60% more to a more respectful charity, while 79% of US non-profit professionals say they are personally committed to raising dignity with their colleagues. Senior figures in global development such as Winnie Byanyima and Antonio Guterres have called for more focus on dignity.
Some resources
More about the Dignity Project at dignityproject.net. Specific resources that may be of interest are this one page flyer summarising research so far, and this work-in-progress literature review.
I think the right kind of feedback here depends mainly on whether you mean to propose that EA underestimates the extent to which treating people with dignity improves their welfare or you mean to propose that EA fails to consider the importance of dignity as an intrinsically and independently valuable element of a life lived well. If dignity is only important on account of its instrumental role in improving welfare, I very much doubt that a thorough evaluation of that role would lead many EAs to conclude that they should redirect their charitable giving. Even if treating someone with dignity were associated with a truly striking increase in their welfare, it seems unlikely to me that, for instance, global health interventions with such an emphasis would outperform distributing insecticide-treated mosquito nets or deworming pills. Among other things, I imagine that most parents of young children would agree to an arbitrarily large amount of undignified treatment in exchange for preventing their child from dying of malaria (revealed preferences suggest this is true). This suggests that the AMF would outperform a hypothetical charity with a dignity focus even without accounting for the positive impact of saving children’s lives unless promoting dignity were extraordinarily cheap per person affected. Similarly, I doubt that integrating concern for the role dignity may play in determining welfare into longtermist perspectives would do much to shift people’s ideas about the best giving opportunities to safeguard the long-term future of humanity.
If on the other hand you take dignity to be valuable in itself (apart from any role it might have in bringing about another good, like improving welfare), I wonder whether the philosophical foundation for your view is really fully compatible with EA. From what I’ve read, it seems as if most of the philosophers who take treating people with respect to be a good in itself view dignity as the sort of thing that each of us has a reason to accord to others when we interact with them. They do not, however, by and large view dignity as the sort of thing that we have a reason to impartially maximize (i.e. while it’s very important for me to treat you with dignity, it’s nowhere near as important—and may not even be valuable at all—for me to counterfactually enable you to treat someone else with dignity). In their view, the obligation to treat others with dignity “spring[s] from an agent’s special relationship to his own actions” and “the claims of those with whom we interact to be treated by us in certain ways” (Korsgaard 1993, emphasis mine), not from the objective value of the world having more dignity in it (or anything like that). As a result, some (see, for example, Taurek 1977) go so far as to argue that it is not necessarily any better for more people to be treated well than for fewer. Following Korsgaard, we might think of the value of treating people with dignity as similar to the value of keeping promises — while I have reason to keep my own promises, I likely do not have reason to promote a world in which more promises are kept. Doing so would suggest that I misunderstood the way in which keeping promises is valuable. If dignity is the kind of moral good that most clearly has a place in non-consequentialist moral views that oppose interpersonal aggregation wholesale, I suspect that at least our present philosophical concept of it may be unsuited to sit among what we might conventionally refer to as “EA values.”
That said, I should note: Like surprisingly many EAs, I am not a utilitarian. I am, however, some kind of consequentialist, and I would love for EA folks to invest more effort in developing a thorough conception of human flourishing, of what it means for a person’s life to go well for them. Without such a theory, we cannot ensure that we are actually improving others’ lives to the greatest extent possible (because we lack a robust understanding of what it means for a life to be improved). For that reason, I personally welcome posts like this that seek to draw attention in those kinds of directions and propose some less conventional ideas about what flourishing might involve.
Thanks for this very thoughtful response - I think it really clarifies some of the tensions I referred to in my response to DavidMoss above. I framed my original post as one about integration of different interests, but you are right that they proceed from different ethical commitments. As you conclude, many of us here have some personal commitment to both those ethics, but they aren't really integratable
I think some dignity-informed interventions *would* pass a cost-effectiveness test - but probably not at the very top of the effectiveness pyramid. D... (read more)