Radical Empathy

Core claim

The question “who deserves empathy and moral concern?” is central to effective giving, and conventional wisdom and intuition cannot be trusted to answer it — history is full of populations dismissed for reasons that fit the consensus of their time and look indefensible today. Open Philanthropy therefore aspires to radical empathy: working hard to extend empathy to everyone it should be extended to, even when doing so is unusual or seems strange.

Editorial context

Published under the organisation’s former name, the Open Philanthropy Project. Karnofsky, a co-founder and former CEO, left Open Philanthropy in April 2024.

The pattern in Open Philanthropy’s work

• A recurring theme: trying to help populations many people don’t feel are worth helping at all.
• Factory-farmed animals — major opportunities to improve welfare exist precisely because so few others are trying.
• Immigration reform — public debate focuses on effects on wages for people already in the US, with much less discussion of effects on immigrants themselves.
• Global health and development — many Americans accept that charitable dollars go further overseas but still give domestically; only ~4% of US giving in 2015 went to international aid.

Terminology

• “Radical” is the opposite of traditional or conventional, not of moderate. It doesn’t mean extending empathy to everyone and everything — that would leave no basis for moral decision-making — but working hard to choose well without anchoring to convention.
• “Empathy” means being able to imagine oneself in another’s position and recognising them as having experiences worthy of consideration. It does not mean literally feeling what another feels, and so is distinct from the sense of “empathy” critiqued in Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy.

Conventional wisdom and intuition aren’t good enough

• Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle traces how “the circle of altruism has broadened from the family and tribe to the nation and race … to all human beings” — adding that “the process should not stop there.”
• Historical examples cited from Singer:
  • A mid-fifth-century BC Athenian tombstone praising a man who slew seven enemies as “having brought sorrow to no one among all men who dwell on earth.”
  • Plato’s proposed advance on prevailing morality: Greeks should not enslave other Greeks or raze their houses — but may do so to non-Greeks.
  • Assyrian kings recording their torture of enemies in stone; Romans treating barbarians as capturable like animals; Europeans, less than 200 years ago, regarding Africans as a resource to be harvested; early English settlers treating Aboriginal Australians as pests to be hunted.
• In recent centuries, extreme racism, sexism and slavery were practised explicitly, without apology, and often endorsed by the most respected people in society.
• Early abolitionists and early feminists now look to have done extraordinary amounts of good — but conventional wisdom at the time would not have identified them as such.
• Today’s norms are better in some respects but still inadequate. Explicit racism is more rarely advocated, but US discourse on immigration largely avoids explicit racism while embracing nationalism — excluding or downplaying the rights of non-citizens.

Intellect vs. emotion

• A common view holds that moral atrocities come from thinking about morality abstractly and losing sight of the emotional basis for empathy. Karnofsky thinks this is true in some cases but importantly false in others.
• Squeamishness about violence appears to be overcome disturbingly quickly with experience; history offers ample cases of ordinary people casually practising direct cruelty against those whose rights they didn’t recognise.
• Watching the casualness of factory farm workers, he doubts people would eat much less meat if they had to kill animals themselves.
• The key variable is not whether people see and feel the consequences of their actions, but whether they recognise those affected as fellow persons meriting moral consideration.
• Conversely, abstract logical reasoning has sometimes produced strikingly prescient moral conclusions: Jeremy Bentham (1747–1832), reasoning from quantitative utilitarianism, advocated equal rights for women, the right to divorce, decriminalising homosexual acts, abolition of slavery, abolition of the death penalty and of physical punishment — and was an early advocate of animal rights.

Principles for aspiring to radical empathy

Acknowledge uncertainty

• Karnofsky is “quite unsure” where animals fit into the moral framework. His own reflections on philosophy of mind have so far seemed to indicate against chickens meriting moral concern, and his intuitions value humans astronomically more.
• But he doesn’t consider either his reflections or his intuitions highly reliable, especially given thoughtful disagreement — and if chickens do merit moral concern, the scale of their mistreatment is staggering.
• With worldview diversification in mind, this uncertainty warrants putting significant resources into farm animal welfare, and avoiding language implying only humans are morally relevant. (Open Phil uses “persons” for beings that merit moral concern; the more precise term is “moral patients.”)
• He does not feel uncertain about all unusual choices: differences in geography, nationality and race ought not affect moral concern, and giving should reflect that.

Be careful about dismissing “strange” arguments

• Small numbers of people argue that insects, and even some algorithms running on today’s computers, merit moral concern.
• It’s easy to laugh these off — but we should be highly suspicious of our instincts to dismiss unusual viewpoints on who merits moral concern, and the stakes are high if such views turn out more reasonable than they first appear.
• Karnofsky remains unconvinced about insects or present-day algorithms, but thinks it important to keep an open mind.

Explore supporting deeper analysis

• Luke Muehlhauser was, at the time of writing, surveying research and argumentation on moral patienthood; identified gaps could lead to funding further work.
• Such work could affect priorities within farm animal welfare — for example, how to prioritise work on fish.
• The ideal: views on moral patienthood informed by an extensive literature drawing on deep reflection, empirical investigation and principled argumentation.

Don’t limit ourselves to the “frontier”

• Open Phil often focuses on unconventional targets (farm animal welfare, risks from advanced AI) because disproportionate opportunities tend to sit in neglected areas.
• But the goal is to do the most good, not to support whatever is most “radical.” Where there are great opportunities in widely acknowledged areas — e.g. US criminal justice reform — they take them.