"Moral Weirdos": Effective Altruism and Empathy in Engineering Education

Richard A House

Download Paper | Permalink

Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Transgression, Conflict, and Altruism
Tagged Division: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES)
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/46399

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Richard A House Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

visit author page

Richard A. House is Associate Dean for Professional Development and Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received a B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His interests include liberal education for engineers, engineering communication, and the rhetoric of science and technology. With Richard Layton, Jessica Livingston, and Sean Moseley, he is co-author of The Engineering Communication Manual (Oxford UP 2017).

visit author page

Download Paper | Permalink

Abstract

Public attention to the effective altruism (EA) movement—in which utilitarian moral calculations are applied to career choices, seeking to maximize the good of an individual’s work—has exploded over the last year. Unfortunately, that attention is currently monopolized by the scandal around FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, EA’s highest-profile champion.

Those of us who study engineers’ liberal education will recognize the default reasoning styles of the young professionals who ran FTX and its hedge fund “sister” organization, Alameda Research. A 1982 article by Carl Nelson and Susan Peterson, “If You’re an Engineer, You’re Probably a Utilitarian,” captures it bluntly but accurately: utilitarian reasoning asks us “to choose actions which give us the highest possible value. The precision involved in such quantification is attractive to engineers.” The challenge of accurately measuring utilitarians’ units of value—“hedons” or “utilons”—is typically outweighed by the appeal to objectivity and rigor. It is unsurprising, then, that EA recruits most successfully in STEM fields. Utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill reports that EA “appeals to…the demographics of a physics Ph.D. program” (Lewis 2023 p. 50).

At first glance, EA appears broadly consonant with broad trends in engineering education dedicated to applying engineering work toward global human problems. Indeed, “EA for Engineers” seems to attract humanitarian and civically engaged engineers and engineering students very similarly to initiatives like NAE’s Grand Challenges for Engineering and Engineers for a Sustainable World.

Yet EA also differs from those enterprises, most starkly in extolling the philanthropic “Money-Maker” over mere “Direct Benefiters.” Michael Lewis paraphrases MacAskill’s argument that a gifted young person should become a banker rather than a doctor [or, by implication, an engineer] serving the developing world: someone else does the investment banking, “very little of the replacement banker’s earnings would find its way to doctors in Africa. All those people you might have saved if you had become a banker and given away your money would die.” In this way, EA runs directly against most cases for “Engineering as an altruistic STEM career” (Lakin et al. 2021). EA doesn’t pose a higher good of civic involvement or service against the temptation to maximize elevated personal earnings. Most surprisingly, EA advocates often treat empathy, a central element of much liberal education, as a mere shortcoming in decision-making, misdirecting altruistic impulses to causes that are emotionally engaging but logically subordinate to causes with more proven need or measurable benefit to be discovered by “running the numbers.”

EA, then, may be highly valuable as a way for some engineers to make altruistic use of their quantitative tendencies. We should hesitate, however, to concede the traditional aims of liberal education to those tendencies. Among Bankman-Fried’s failings, his aversion to humanities courses isn’t especially noteworthy. (“‘I objected to the fundamental reality of the entire class,’ Sam said of English… ‘It was subjectivity framed as objectivity’” [Lewis 2023 pp. 28-29]). Rather, EA should cause us to look skeptically at efforts to paint humanistic education as obsolete, subsumable within STEM—and at any effort to replace qualitative judgment with fully formalized quantified reasoning.

Citation
Format

House, R. A. (2024, June), "Moral Weirdos": Effective Altruism and Empathy in Engineering Education Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/46399

TY - CPAPER
AB - Public attention to the effective altruism (EA) movement—in which utilitarian moral calculations are applied to career choices, seeking to maximize the good of an individual’s work—has exploded over the last year. Unfortunately, that attention is currently monopolized by the scandal around FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, EA’s highest-profile champion.

Those of us who study engineers’ liberal education will recognize the default reasoning styles of the young professionals who ran FTX and its hedge fund “sister” organization, Alameda Research. A 1982 article by Carl Nelson and Susan Peterson, “If You’re an Engineer, You’re Probably a Utilitarian,” captures it bluntly but accurately: utilitarian reasoning asks us “to choose actions which give us the highest possible value. The precision involved in such quantification is attractive to engineers.” The challenge of accurately measuring utilitarians’ units of value—“hedons” or “utilons”—is typically outweighed by the appeal to objectivity and rigor. It is unsurprising, then, that EA recruits most successfully in STEM fields. Utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill reports that EA “appeals to…the demographics of a physics Ph.D. program” (Lewis 2023 p. 50).

At first glance, EA appears broadly consonant with broad trends in engineering education dedicated to applying engineering work toward global human problems. Indeed, “EA for Engineers” seems to attract humanitarian and civically engaged engineers and engineering students very similarly to initiatives like NAE’s Grand Challenges for Engineering and Engineers for a Sustainable World.

Yet EA also differs from those enterprises, most starkly in extolling the philanthropic “Money-Maker” over mere “Direct Benefiters.” Michael Lewis paraphrases MacAskill’s argument that a gifted young person should become a banker rather than a doctor [or, by implication, an engineer] serving the developing world: someone else does the investment banking, “very little of the replacement banker’s earnings would find its way to doctors in Africa. All those people you might have saved if you had become a banker and given away your money would die.” In this way, EA runs directly against most cases for “Engineering as an altruistic STEM career” (Lakin et al. 2021). EA doesn’t pose a higher good of civic involvement or service against the temptation to maximize elevated personal earnings. Most surprisingly, EA advocates often treat empathy, a central element of much liberal education, as a mere shortcoming in decision-making, misdirecting altruistic impulses to causes that are emotionally engaging but logically subordinate to causes with more proven need or measurable benefit to be discovered by “running the numbers.”

EA, then, may be highly valuable as a way for some engineers to make altruistic use of their quantitative tendencies. We should hesitate, however, to concede the traditional aims of liberal education to those tendencies. Among Bankman-Fried’s failings, his aversion to humanities courses isn’t especially noteworthy. (“‘I objected to the fundamental reality of the entire class,’ Sam said of English… ‘It was subjectivity framed as objectivity’” [Lewis 2023 pp. 28-29]). Rather, EA should cause us to look skeptically at efforts to paint humanistic education as obsolete, subsumable within STEM—and at any effort to replace qualitative judgment with fully formalized quantified reasoning.
AU - Richard A House
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - "Moral Weirdos": Effective Altruism and Empathy in Engineering Education
UR - https://peer.asee.org/46399
ER -