Abstract
Effective altruism is an ethical framework for identifying the greatest potential benefits from investments. Here, we apply effective altruism concepts to maximize research benefits through identification of priority stakeholders, pathosystems, and research questions and technologies. Priority stakeholders for research benefits may include smallholder farmers who have not yet attained the minimal standards set out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; these farmers would often have the most to gain from better crop disease management, if their management problems are tractable. In wildlands, prioritization has been based on the risk of extirpating keystone species, protecting ecosystem services, and preserving wild resources of importance to vulnerable people. Pathosystems may be prioritized based on yield and quality loss, and also factors such as whether other researchers would be unlikely to replace the research efforts if efforts were withdrawn, such as in the case of orphan crops and orphan pathosystems. Research products that help build sustainable and resilient systems can be particularly beneficial. The "value of information" from research can be evaluated in epidemic networks and landscapes, to identify priority locations for both benefits to individuals and to constrain regional epidemics. As decision-making becomes more consolidated and more networked in digital agricultural systems, the range of ethical considerations expands. Low-likelihood but high-damage scenarios such as generalist doomsday pathogens may be research priorities because of the extreme potential cost. Regional microbiomes constitute a commons, and avoiding the "tragedy of the microbiome commons" may depend on shifting research products from "common pool goods" to "public goods" or other categories. We provide suggestions for how individual researchers and funders may make altruism-driven research more effective.[Formula: see text] Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0 International license.
Highlights
In times of funding challenges, it would usually only be practical for individual researchers to invest in altruism-driven research that is simultaneously resource-driven or
Regional microbiomes and regional pathogen metacommunities can be thought of as common pool goods, just like the example of air and water, because they are open to the influence of all people who have access to them and who may degrade them through poor plant disease management choices
We present a categorization for several important types of plant pathology research products
Summary
Effective altruism is a framework for making altruism more efficient, advocated by some utilitarian consequentialist ethicists (MacAskill 2015; Singer 2015; Unger 1996) and others (Pummer 2016). For the purposes of discussing effective altruism, we might consider that there are three types of research: (i) curiosity-driven or “blue sky” research, (ii) research to support endeavors in scenarios where primary stakeholders are already successful enough and powerful enough to generate funding (which we term “resourcedriven”), and (iii) research with the goal of providing as substantial a benefit to humans and other species as possible (which we term “altruism-driven”) (Fig. 1). These categories for research are not mutually exclusive, and there might be elements of each type in any given research project. One point that this article emphasizes is that altruism-driven research may or may not be effective; the effective altruism framework offers concepts to support making altruism-driven research more effective
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