On Moral Ambition

When I picked up Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition, I thought I’d grabbed a self-help book. Some readers may expect the same, and it can be read that way, but I think he’s doing something more sophisticated. The book begins as a critique of how we think about ambition now: the people with the greatest skill and the strongest drive tend to funnel into investment banking, management consulting, technology — Silicon Valley especially — and the rest of financial services. Those industries have their place, but much of what they produce is destructive, and in a field like management consulting the people inside it often ask what it’s all for and burn out fast. What does it say about twenty-first-century Western society that our best minds are building algorithms to sharpen the marketing of products no one really wants?

On the other side are people with a strong drive to serve, many of whom land in the nonprofit sector and are quickly swallowed by institutions that morph into beasts divorced from the problems they were meant to solve. That’s a particular shame, because there are so many solvable problems in the world; the only reason they remain unsolved is that no one has given them the attention they deserve. As a remedy for both the ambitious and the service-minded, Bregman offers a unifying idea: moral ambition. He defines it through Thomas Clarkson, the eighteenth-century Englishman who doggedly fought to abolish slavery and built a coalition, especially with the Quakers, that succeeded; through Arnold Douwes, who pressured the inhabitants of a small Dutch town into sheltering Jews during the Second World War, saving them from the Holocaust; and through Ralph Nader, whose team of lawyers fought for small regulatory changes that made an enormous difference, the Traffic Safety Act, the Highway Safety Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act all owing to his dogged work.

The idea is that we can make a difference by aiming our talents at solvable, scalable problems no one else had thought to take on. One example is an executive who turned his attention to the high mortality rate from malaria — not by funding a vaccine, or wiping out mosquitoes, or improving medical care, but by mobilizing a team to raise money for mosquito nets and distribute them where malaria is endemic. Mortality fell tremendously. I find stories like that endlessly inspiring, and they do make me feel I could make a real difference.

The book’s major problem, to my mind, is that it advocates a bit too hard for “effective altruism.” EA holds that we should stop pouring ourselves into pet projects or things that merely make us feel good and instead find any way possible to help the largest number of people and animals. On the surface that makes a lot of sense — it shouldn’t matter whether people are dying in our community or across the world — and I have no disagreement there. My disagreement is with EA’s advocates, who tend to come out of rationalist circles: they think logically, true, but they try to quantify everything, and that’s their biggest failing. It’s easy to quantify mortality rates, the share of people without shelter, access to resources — and since those are fundamental matters of survival, I agree they should take precedence. But well-being beyond bare survival can’t be quantified. How do you calculate suffering? Joy? Community, prosperity, health? You can think about them in material terms, but that simply isn’t enough; to really make a difference, you have to think past the metrics.

Take Tunisia. In numerical terms it’s a middle-income country. There’s deep poverty, but also a middle class (shrinking, under neoliberal pressure); unemployment is high, but most people can lean on family and community institutions to meet their basic needs. You don’t hear of many starving or dying of easily preventable diseases; there’s no war displacing anyone; there’s better access to good education than in North America; and the crime rate is lower than in the United States, lower even than in much of Europe. And yet so many young people are trying to leave for a better life, some dying at sea on rafts toward Lampedusa or Pantelleria. Why, if their basic needs are met? Because their basic needs aren’t met, especially not now — and, more alarmingly, it wasn’t always this way. The change in Tunisia is less about raw material need, the kind an effective altruist could turn into a metric, than about immaterial need. Young people need to feel they’re living meaningful lives, to inhabit a dignified existence; many imagine Europe might offer it, and some find it while others are disappointed. More economic investment and new opportunities would help, but I doubt that’s the core of it: Tunisia was poorer forty or fifty years ago, and yet few wanted to leave — they felt connected to their country, there was enough in material and psychological terms to live well, and they stayed. There’s nothing effective altruism could offer that would change the circumstances of the Tunisian people.

None of which is to say there are no solutions — there are. They just require larger, systemic changes, and I’m hardly qualified to speculate on the specifics. Bregman does recognize some of EA’s limits, but I don’t think he goes far enough; the effective altruists get a great deal of attention here, when other approaches to “moral ambition” might have been worth exploring. One risk of the EA path is saviorism, which strips agency from the people often best equipped to solve their own problems — where capacity-building, investing time and money and attention in those who actually live the issues, and advocacy might serve better. Even so, I found the book thoroughly inspiring, and it’s given me a great deal to chew on as I think about what I might offer the world.