Effective altruism and free riding

Abstract

I’d like to thank Parker Whitfill, Andrew Kao, Stefan Schubert, and Phil Trammell for very helpful comments. Errors are my own.

Many people have argued that those involved in effective altruism should “be nice”, meaning that they should cooperate when facing prisoner’s dilemma type situations ([1] [2] [3]). While I believe that some of these are convincing arguments, it seems to be underappreciated just how often someone attempting to do good will face prisoner’s dilemmas. Previous authors seem to highlight mostly zero-sum conflict between opposing value systems [3] [4] or common-sense social norms like lying [1]. However, the problem faced by a group of people trying to do good is effectively a public goods problem [10]; this means that, except in rare cases (like where people 100% agree on moral values), someone looking to do good will be playing a prisoner’s dilemma against others looking to do good.