The Judaeo-Christian ‘heart’ tradition and Christians in Effective Altruism

by David Leech

[Originally published in the EA for Christians website blog at https://www.eaforchristians.org/blog/the-judaeo-christian-heart-tradition-and-christians-in-effective-altruism]

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In this post I offer some brief thoughts on whether the impartial welfarist stance of Effective Altruism (EA) conflicts with what we might call a deep ‘heart’ strand within Judaeo-Christian thought. 

In his article ‘Loving Kindness and Mercy: their Human and Cosmic Significance’, John Cottingham argues for the central ethical importance of understanding Judaeo-Christian mercy and compassion as a ‘direct, physically and emotionally involved response’. In a first section of the article, ‘The phenomenology of mercy’, he refers to Jesus’s response to the cries of the two blind men ‘Son of David, Have mercy on us!’ in Matthew 20:29 as a direct and physical one: Jesus ‘had compassion on them’ (King James Version). The Greek is still more direct and emotional: splanchnistheis, from ta splanchna (bowels). As Cottingham notes, to feel compassion, in both the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, is ‘to be moved deep inside you, in the entrails, in the guts, in the womb’. From this starting point, Cottingham makes a critique of universalist, impartial ethical approaches, which he describes as ‘abstract, analytical, rational, intellectual’, whereas the approach which he finds implicitly in scripture is ‘more immediate, more holistic, more empathetic, more ‘touched’ – a kind of direct taking in of the distress of the other, and a spontaneous, deeply involved outflowing of compassion and concern’. ¹

This scriptural model of compassion/mercy is certainly altruism, but it is not necessarily effective altruism. To illustrate this with a non-scriptural example, I want to turn to an example with which the moral philosopher Raymond Gaita begins his work A Common Humanity (1998). Gaita relates that he worked in the early 1960s as a ward-assistant in a psychiatric hospital, whose patients were regarded as incurable, and they:

appeared to have irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives. They had no grounds for self-respect insofar as we connect that with self-esteem; or, none which could be based on qualities or achievements for which we could admire or congratulate them without condescension.²

Gaita speaks of his admiration for a small set of psychiatrists at the hospital who spoke about the inalienable dignity of those patients, but that they too, despite themselves, were ultimately condescending in their attitude to them. He then, however, relates his experience of the arrival one day of a nun at the ward:

In her middle years, only her vivacity made an impression on me until she talked to the patients. Then everything in her demeanour towards them – the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body – contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.³

Like the scriptural examples, Gaita’s describes a direct and deeply involved love (here, of the nun) towards the patients, which inspired in Gaita – himself not a theist – a conviction that an adequate ethics needs to be based in such heart-responsiveness. As Mark Wynn has interpreted this, from a more explicitly theistic perspective (and drawing on Newman), the psychiatrists only had a ‘notional’ grasp of the patients’ dignity and value, whereas the nun had a ‘real image’ (or ‘affectively resonant responsiveness’) to them.⁴

Gaita claims that the nun’s non-condescending love for the patients ‘reveal[s]’ how they belonged fully to the human community.⁵ As Wynn notes, Gaita’s account comes close to a Christian one in the centrality he gives to the weak/marginalised. He notes of Gaita’s account of the nun: ‘in the light of her love, [Gaita] came to see the patients as rightly accorded the sort of non-condescending regard that was evident in her behaviour towards them’.⁶

The nun’s love of the patients is not effective in any obvious sense. MacSwain, in a recent discussion of EA and sainthood, observes that e.g. Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities, in which individuals with cognitive disabilities lived together with those without such disabilities, would not count as a moral exemplar from a secular EA perspective, since Vanier’s work is not doing good effectively from such a perspective.⁷ Even more so must this be the case with the nun’s investment in the patients in the psychiatric hospital where Gaita was ward-assistant.

However, from a Christian perspective, somebody like Gaita’s nun would indeed serve as a moral exemplar for Christians, despite the ineffectiveness of her love in secular EA terms, and indeed Jesus himself can serve as the principal exemplar of such not-necessarily-effective, but very heartfelt, altruism in passages such as Matthew 20:29. 

What is the significance of this for Christians in Effective Altruism? It does not follow from the heart emphasis within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, or – as MacSwain has noted, following Adams, the fact that (Christian) saints are not necessarily effective altruists – that Christians cannot embrace a universalist and impartial stance in ethics. Cojocaru, for instance, has recently proposed one way in which EA could make room for the ‘heart’ – by restricting the rational and impartial stance to the level of engineering good laws and institutions, rather than requiring it at the level of individual moral actions. She also notes the range of altruistic motivations found within the EA community (ranging from ‘deep sense of empathy‘ to ‘sense of pride and accomplishment when I do good’ or ‘I really love efficiency’), and there is no reason why Christian motivations to altruistic action cannot belong among this diversity of altruistic motivations within EA.⁸

Another way in which Christians can embrace a universalist and impartial stance in ethics is by recognising that humans have emotional responses to suffering in general, not only to a concrete suffering human being or animal in front of them. Derek Parfit himself, whose moral philosophy has had such an important influence on EA, could cry if he thought abstractly about suffering.⁹ Where this sensitivity to suffering in the abstract is present, we can speak of an affective motivation to alleviate that suffering which need be no less authentic in its heartfelt quality than that of e.g. the nun’s loving care for the small number of patients in the psychiatric hospital.

Furthermore, feelings seem to play an unavoidable role in the choice of causes/options and in rational decision-making, for EAs just as much as for anybody else. Wynn, in his appraisal of the role of emotions in decision-making, refers to an example by Antonio Damasio of a patient of his, who had suffered ventromedial pre-frontal damage resulting in a flatness of affect, and was unable to agree with Damasio on which of two alternative dates they should next meet. The patient spent half an hour consulting his calendar, running through reasons for and against the two dates, until Damasio arbitrarily stopped him and stipulated a date they should next meet. The point here – as Wynn notes – is that the patient was able to think abstractly and rationally, run cost-benefit analyses etc, but due to the bluntness of his affective response he lacked the felt sense (in Damasio’s language, ‘somatic markers’) which would have informed him that it was inappropriate to take so long over the decision; that the outcome of the choice was relatively unimportant; and that some options could be left out of consideration. In other words, the ‘head’, or reason, cannot alone prioritise between causes/options, make moral decisions etc.¹⁰

It is therefore not the case that Christians drawn to EA are faced with a choice between an ineffective but heart-based Christian altruism versus an effective but head-based and impersonal Effective Altruism. Christians in Effective Altruism may well encounter secular EAs who reject many of their Christian moral exemplars (such as Gaita’s nun), perhaps at times even vehemently, for being focussed too ‘ineffectively’ on the suffering directly in front of them.¹¹ There may indeed be areas of disagreement between Christians and secular EAs about whether individuals like Gaita’s nun (or their secular equivalents) ought to direct their loving concern in ways which do more good for more people, or whether, as many Christians will want to insist, saintliness should not be measured in any simplistic way against the criterion of doing the most good (even while Christians recognise that doing the most good is a very great value).

But leaving these issues aside, there is no in-principle reason why EA needs to have a deficit of ‘heart’; there is not a binary choice here between heart motivated altruism which can only be directed at the concrete and particular, versus affectless ‘head’ motivated impersonal altruism which is directed at suffering in the abstract. I have suggested that there are strong reasons for thinking that feelings are inevitably involved in cause choice and decision-making, and it is also possible to have heartfelt responses to suffering in general. All of this is compatible with a rigorous use of reason and evidence in doing the most good possible, and indeed this is the case for many EAs – Christian and secular – in practice.

1. Cottingham, John. 2019. “Loving Kindness and Mercy: their Human and Cognitive Significance.” Philosophy 94 (1): 27-29.

2. Gaita, Raymond. 1998. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. Routledge, 17-18.

3.  Ibid. 18-19.

4. Wynn, Mark. 2005. Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling. Cambridge University Press, 31.

5. Gaita, Common Humanity, 19.

6. Wynn, Emotional Experience, 35. Wynn has suggested that Gaita’s account of ethics ‘invites completion in religious terms’ (ibid. 31).

7. MacSwain, Robert, ‘Are Effective Altruists Saints? Effective Altruism, Moral Sainthood, and Human Holiness’, in Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue, eds. D.Roser, S.Reidener, and M.Huppenbauer. 2022. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 225-226. With reference specifically to Peter Singer, he notes (ibid.): ‘To regard the cognitively disabled as in fact deserving special esteem and privileged treatment is, therefore, a sentimental fallacy of the first order.’

8. Cojocaru, Mara-Daria, ‘This World Needs More (than One Kind of) Love. A Modest, Murdoch-Inspired Proposal to Take the Heart in Effective Altruism More Seriously’, in Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue, eds. D.Roser, S.Reidener, and M.Huppenbauer. 2022. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 108-110.

9. I am grateful to Vesa Hautala for this example.

10. Wynn, Emotional Experience, 115-116, discussing Damasio, Antonio. 1995. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Picador, 193–194.

11. This, for the Christian, would miss the dimension of holiness in such exemplars.