Altruism in governance: Insight from randomized training
Sultan Mehmood (New Economic School), Shaheen Naseer (Lahore School of Economics) and Daniel L. Chen (Toulouse School of Economics)
GPI Working Paper No. 7 - 2022, published in the Toulouse School of Economics Working Paper series and in the Journal of Development Economics
Randomizing different schools of thought in training altruism finds that training junior deputy ministers in the utility of empathy renders at least a 0.4 standard deviation increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased their perspective-taking: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. Perspective-taking in strategic dilemmas improved. Field measures such as orphanage visits and volunteering in impoverished schools also increased, as did their test scores in teamwork assessments in policy scenarios. Overall, our results underscore that the utility of empathy can be a parsimonious foundation for the formation of prosociality, even impacting the behavior of adults in the field.
Other working papers
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…
Moral demands and the far future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving the value…
Consequentialism, Cluelessness, Clumsiness, and Counterfactuals – Alan Hájek (Australian National University)
According to a standard statement of objective consequentialism, a morally right action is one that has the best consequences. More generally, given a choice between two actions, one is morally better than the other just in case the consequences of the former action are better than those of the latter. (These are not just the immediate consequences of the actions, but the long-term consequences, perhaps until the end of history.) This account glides easily off the tongue—so easily that…