This paper came to the same conclusion wrt caring for future generations.
"Longtermists consistently value future generations, present generations, outgroups, and nature more than the general population does, as measured by the Moral Expansiveness Scale (MES)."
Depends. How much of the current world population are you willing to murder to ensure your great grandchildren have a world at all? One Third? More or less? (If less, and you believe in "saving the environment" you might as well peg it to zero, as you aren't fixing anything, and being willing to kill some people to do jack-all is dunderheaded).
I don't see what that has to do with my post; however much the average person cares, longtermists are supposed to care more. Otherwise, what makes them longtermists?
No, Philippe is right. That summary of the study is as informative as one telling us that people considered "tall" on average have a higher measured height than the general population.
That article is behind a paywall. The Abstract mentions the Longtermism Beliefs Scale (LBS). According GOOG's AI, "The Longtermism Beliefs Scale (LBS) is a 7-item psychometric tool developed by researchers (Syropoulos, Law, Kraft-Todd, & Young) to measure the extent to which individuals align with the philosophy of long-termism, which advocates for the protection and welfare of distant future generations." But I can't find the online test. I would consider myself to be a neartermist, but I'd like to see where I'd score.
If I'm interpreting the graph correctly, I think that means the average liberal - not the average guy on EA forums, the average normie liberal - places the limit of their circle of concern at "paramecia and amoebae".
Maybe just a random artifact of people answering something more generic like "I care for all living beings". Even though perhaps if pressed they might admit that they don't in fact meaningfully care about E. Coli or a random lichen.
(that said, "a priori, I don't want these species to go extinct" is some amount of care. And it's an amount that I'd extend to almost any living being - if there are good reasons I might be ok with it but generally I'd be strongly against causing extinctions, though it's probably more for a "fear of upsetting poorly understood ecological equilibria" reason than thinking the individual members of some species hold much moral worth)
Wow, if I'm reading this very blurry chart right (why the hell is it a mostly-blank circle?), 13 and 14 were the most very popular for libs, c.f. 12 for "paramecia and amoebae". So the generic question would have to be even more all-encompassing than "all living beings" unless 14 is still in the realm of life.
I notice some people say "the world would be better without humans in it!" and seem to care a lot about "pristine" nature, which may explain those people giving moral concern to rocks.
As an EA it seems weird that such liberals are "more altruistic" than me on this metric, whatever the exact metric may be. But rocks don't feel anything. They don't care if they're "pristine" or not, nor do the paramecia and amoebae, so I don't care about them in turn, for there is no suffering to remove (or, even if a rock can suffer, I cannot know its likes and dislikes; there's no reason to think it prefers "pristine nature" over a blast furnace). So what does it mean to "care" about them―to say "oh this human-free world with pristine rocks would be morally better"?
Wild animals are regularly torn apart by other wild animals, or slowly consumed by parasites, and often experience awful diseases and famines, just as humans once did (and sometimes still do). You don't hear pop-liberals expressing concern about that. Given this dichotomy, no doubt another study with a different methodology could give very different results.
Occasionally, I bet you do hear people complaining about the Black Death in America (probably just hikers though), regardless of whether it's in rats or humans, and also regardless of whether or not its treatable (it is).
I imagine you have some aesthetics involved here: Some people like Skyscrapers and treat them like awesome human-made cliffs. Others have the idea that skyscrapers are inherently less awesome than nature-made cliffs, because humans made them (and hence would be upset if you removed a cliff to make a skyscraper somewhere else).
TY. And this makes the flaw in survey design clear. I'd say alien creatures are "at least maybe" on par with earth creatures, morally, while I give zero moral consideration to earth amoebae (except instrumentally, the same way a Monet painting has no intrinsic moral value but I don't want it to be destroyed). A good survey would detect and record such "holes" and put them on the heat map, and even split morality along multiple axes.
I want to complain about paramecia and amoebae being listed as "animals" in the first place, but I'll rather complain about them being ranked before hypothetical sentient aliens.
(Though I could imagine a biosphere chauvinist valuing even prokaryotes from their own planet more than fully sapient beings from another)
Yeah, I refuse to believe that is meant in anything like the way people use the word "care" or "concern" in regards to their family or even strangers.
Could be useful ecologically or academically to humans? Sure, sure, keep some pond scum around. Will go out of their way to sacrifice for the well-being of a particular instance of pond scum for its own sake?
Nah. Virtue signalling or misunderstanding the question. (Or I am misunderstanding)
Just so you know - because I'm uncertain - but there are people who care about (some) things irrespective of their usefulness for humans. (I'm one of them.)
For me, this level of care is though reserved for beings with a reasonable possibility of sentience, but maybe it's different for others.
I think there can be a reasonable level of concern of non-human things, sure. Like wanting to preserve an old building out of love of beauty, even if no human was around to appreciate it, is a legible perspective.
That's why I tried to specify that care or concern is used in a similar way as to humans. One can say they aren't equal levels of care, that the supposedly telescoping liberal has for their child and amoeba, but honestly this are so *radically* different that I think using the same word at all is misleading. Or else seriously disordered.
I would sacrifice approximately all the amoeba in the world for the child of a stranger (assuming doing so doesn't cause some ecological collapse). So even if I want amoeba to stick around on some level, it feels dishonest to use the same word for both.
I have no trouble believing such sincere people exist, like you or that woman Scott wrote about once helping worms off the sidewalk when it rained.
I have a hard time believing such people sincerely form enough of the "liberal" population to produce the results of the survey, while I have a much easier time believing that many "liberal" people profess such beliefs for social signaling reasons.
Is it really so unusual to help worms off the sidewalk? I could see giving up after 20 in the same day, or skipping it in a rush, but are there really people out there who wouldn't help even one, even if they were stuck waiting there anyway?
Scott seemed to think it was unusual but that may be his bubble or a rhetorical flourish.
I'll try to split the difference by saying yes, I have helped the worms off the sidewalk- and while planting flowers last week, I taught my kid to help make sure the worms get back in the dirt and out of the sun- but I don't conceive of it as a *moral issue* like I think was Scott's implication.
Maybe I'm being nitpicky or inconsistent about what to call a moral issue because I'd still call it a good thing to do, even the right thing to do, but I'm not going to get Repugnant Conclusioned by insect suffering, either.
Considering that morality is entirely about what is good and right, I think you already view it in practice as a moral issue, even if you don't define it that way or are inconsistent on the topic. (No one has consistent morals. I doubt it's even possible.)
I suspect you don't want to view it as a moral issue because not saving them might be morally bad then, but that's not necessarily the case. Saving them could be simpy good while not saving them could be neutral. (Although intuitively, if you put them into the position where they need saving it's indeed bad to not save them.)
I don't disagree. I never meant to imply that my stance is normal. I'm very well aware that it's (sadly) not. I just wanted to inform the previous poster that people like me exist.
By the way, I usually don't help worms off the sidewalk when it rains. There's usually simply too many of them - it would take the entire day - and there's nothing from preventing them from crawling right back on the sidewalk. I would have to take them far away, into the woods, which again, is a crazy amount of effort. I do my utmost to not step on then when it rains though and feel horrible when I do.
It's like that time (rationalist celebrity) said "don't you dare accuse leftists of caring about issue X involving fargroup for political reasons, I cry myself sobbing to sleep literally every night over this" and then proceeded to not care about it very much as soon as the regime keeping issue X alive swapped to the other political side.
There's morality(abstract) and morality(practical), where morality(abstract) produces the correct list of things to say/think, and morality(practical) produces the correct list of things to *do* and actually motivates a person to do them.
I'm capable of thinking a person "cares" about the suffering of single-celled organisms, but the baseline minimum to get me to consider them is some action pursuing goals related to that which costs them something. Just saying it only proves morality(abstract), which doesn't actually do anything.
I suspect that "caring" (as an emotion) is an artifact of identification with one's personal model of the entity. The graph results are probably an artifact of insisting that there be a limit rather than a gradation. Step functions are often artifacts of the method used to measure.
FWIW, I care, slightly, for "paramecia and amoebae". But I care a lot more for those that I know. And yet more for closer relatives. When we raised chickens, I was reluctant, but willing, to kill them for the table. (I actually made a phrase "a chicken is a vegetable" to console myself, even though it was clearly false.)
OTOH, I'm not yet sure how much I care about various AI's. (I don't have any specific experiences with the current versions outside of browser-based internet search assistance.) But it's definitely not nothing. Even Eliza was worth a tiny fraction of care. (Eliza was clearly less "animate intelligence" than a paramecium, but was more personally familiar. I'm not sure how many dimensions the "gradient of caring" has, but personal familiarity is clearly one of them.)
Give me a few million years to figure out what they're saying/calculating. Until then, they're CREEPY. (Actually, I think this is bacteria, trading genes around).
It might be an artifact of "all living things in the universe including plants and trees" being placed further out, at circle 14. Lots of people care about plants and trees.
The circles are intended to be nested, so that the plants-and-trees circle (14) also includes alien lifeforms (13) and paramecia and amoebae (12), but I don't think that's the usual ordering of concern, so it may have confused and misled people.
I would not care either way. Those tiny self-replicating bio-machines sure appeal to s.o. into organic-chemistry. I would like those stars and galaxies in both.
The limit is the point beyond which you have literally no concern whatsoever. If you have literally *any concern at all* for something, it should be within the limit.
The people sharing the heatmap are incorrectly reading the survey, but the survey itself sucks (as most surveys do) and should not be taken as displaying anything "real," certainly not anything the designers (or Scott) wants it to be saying.
>If a conservative’s map is “hottest” at friends, that means the conservative only cares about their friends (and doesn’t care at all about countrymen, foreigners, or animals).
So, it seems like people are just wired differently, and from their perspective their opposites are simply moral mutants with incomprehensible preferences that certainly don't suggest either good judgement or good character. I haven't heard about this study before, but I have always suspected that something like this has to be true, and Science obliges (until failed replications, at any rate).
I agree that this tracks with basically two foundationally different worldviews. Liberals tend to be pluralist, global, relational, and seek to expand the circle of moral concern. Conservatives tend to be insularist, local, atomistic, and seek to contract the circle of moral concern. Part of this is captured by the openness to new experience personality trait axis, which goes all the way back to amoebas. Some amoebas will seek out new sources of food, while others will hang around in the safe spot, where food is guaranteed. Both strategies are necessary for population survival. Sometimes, the food runs out and the population that sat still dies out. Sometimes, exploring new areas ends up being a bad risk, and the explorers die out, while those that stayed will survive.
The long-term evolutionary trend, however, favors expansion. This includes expanding the sphere of moral concern. That is what has happened throughout history and what we call progress. That's why it seems like the conservatives are always, as Buckley said it, yelling at history to stop.
I doubt the "long term evolutionary trend" favors expansion. I think the longterm evolutionary trend favors Han Chinese Racism, honestly. I don't think Pax Americana is likely to be re-established, and I think that China is more likely to be ascendant than a more open-seeking place like Russia (who is very proud to be a mutt-nation like America)
Seen their birth rates? Or shall I say: 'death' rates aka 'extinction rates'. East-Asian conformism/"racism" is going full Dodo. India has around 3 times as many kids (up to 5) than China. https://populationpyramids.org/compare/china-vs-india
With a few notable exceptions where the expanding circle interacts with other moral priorities, like women's bodily autonomy or anything that might even faintly resemble xenophobia.
>seek to contract the circle of moral concern
I think I get what you mean on social scale as the tug of war of society goes, or the gas/brake political model, but this phrasing could be a bit misleading. "Do not want the circle to expand" is not the same as "seek to contract," and I would say conservatives are more about holding a steady circle of concern.
Conservatives believe in alternatives to government, in using Other Institutions like Religion and Family. This is strikingly opposed to your modern liberal, who disbelieves in Religion And Family. That Conservatives will now say "yes to family and family bonds" and Liberals will no longer, should be striking.
Conservatives now say "You know, Texas BBQ is pretty damn cool. I like that South Carolina's BBQ is different." Liberals (or should I say your metro-urban elite?) say, "Everyone's gotta love the Other Food (Mexican around here, which is striking, because all the Mexicans leave after our dreary winter. SAD == Seasonal Affective Disorder, very bad news)."
It is no longer part of the Liberal model to treasure your own town, your own neighborhood, any of that. Everything must be the same. This big unending sameness.
I want Laotian cuisine where there's Laotians! Pizza where there's Italians (and different pizza where there's Sicilians!) The list goes on. And I like Dirty Water Pizza!
>The long-term evolutionary trend, however, favors expansion.
But it doesn't particularly care which species will get to expand. Nether do certain progressives these days it seems, proclaiming that they are happy to see robots succeed us in the Great Chain of Being.
I think you're correct that they're different worldviews, but let me try to articulate the right side a bit better.
"Pish posh, says the conservative. "I don't believe that you do genuinely care about all living things, or even all humans, on an emotional level. Maybe you think you do, but you can't -- the human mind cannot do this any more than it can simultaneously visualise all the atoms in a block of cheese.
"What you are doing, when you _think_ you're caring about all humans, is to deeply care on an emotional level about whoever is currently being placed in front of you with a good sob story, to the exclusion of everyone else. This makes you eminently manipulable, and leads you to support all sorts of objectively bad things because they'll benefit the loudly pathetic.
"Conservatives understand that the correct way to deal with the billions of other humans is not emotionally-mediated empathy, but through rules and abstract principles of justice and consistency. When I see a stranger on the street I don't really care about him one way or the other, but I also don't rob him to steal his shoes -- not because I care about him as a person but because I care about the abstract principle of justice.
"I get upset at injustice, you get upset at suffering. This often leads us to agree on things, but in the cases where we disagree it's often because someone is suffering justly, like a criminal suffering the consequences of their crime."
If the conservative doesn't believe that the liberal's feelings are genuine, why should the liberal believe that the conservative is telling the truth? It would go something like this:
"What you are doing, when you _think_ you're caring about rules and abstract principles of justice, is to deeply care on an emotional level that those rules and principles of justice are applied to benefit conservatives, to the exclusion of everyone else. This makes you eminently manipulable, and leads you to support all sorts of objectively bad things because they'll benefit those that pay lip service to those rules and principles.
Liberals understand that the correct way to deal with the billions of other humans is through emotionally-mediated empathy, and not through rules and abstract principles of justice and consistency that can be interpreted and manipulated by those in power. When I see a stranger on the street I don't really care about what rules and principles of justice are applicable in the situation, but see him as a person that deserves the same consideration I expect from others.
"I get upset at suffering, you get upset at injustice. This often leads us to agree on things, but in the cases where we disagree it's often because someone is suffering unjustly, like a person accused of being a criminal through rules put in place by the ruling class to exploit the lower classes."
But justice is by definition righteous, that's what the word and concept represents. Anything that is considered just by society would also be considered to be good. The fact you don't think it's good is 1. just your opinion, and 2. makes you evil in the eyes of the just.
You claim that conservatives would use the pretense of justice to do "objectively bad" things. But if they believe it is just, then they believe it is good. Your personal opinion that their actions are immoral is irrelevant to their morality. If the rules are being followed, nothing else matters.
So, when a black man in Africa tries to give his 3 year old daughter to a white man (benefactor) to be his wife (eventually), with the expectation that the white guy is going to give his 3 year old daughter a better life than she'd get with her own parents, is the white guy being unjust by not accepting the kid? (Does your answer change if the white guy is going to continue to live in Africa, versus come back stateside?)
Oh, I have no doubt that the liberals are FEELING truly. I just think they're damn easy to manipulate, and that given the right pictures, they'll be just as FEELING about the opposite viewpoint (women will do anything to make the crying babies go away)
I say this having talked with ad-men who have manipulated (successfully) the Iowa Caucus. They talk about how easy women (and yes, feelings and all of this stuff is women-coded) are to get to do things "because they're nice" rather than "because they make any damn fiscal sense." (I was in Seattle, and they literally said the monorail had zero emissions, completely disregarding any emissions the power used to run it makes. And expecting us to eat that propaganda with a SPOON, not start laughing at the complete idiot writing it.)
Good sob stories are a dime a dozen. You can even take things that people ought to Chesterton's Fence, and watch people merrily tear it down, set it on fire.
Remember when Obama started putting kids in cages down at the border? Did you ever figure out why that was? (try asking someone in Border Security. O-man had damn good reasons for what he was doing. Or maybe the "blood tests before we return the children" makes it kinda obvious what was going on, if you just think about it.)
"Pish posh, says the conservative. "I don't believe that you do genuinely care about all living things, or even all humans, on an emotional level. Maybe you think you do, but you can't -- the human mind cannot do this any more than it can simultaneously visualise all the atoms in a block of cheese."
Liberal: so h iw is the human mind able to care about God, Who is vastly greater than the entire physical universe?
What do you mean? The right wing is just as expansionist. Just look at Venezuela! The difference is whether they believe the interests of the native population are at all relevant.
Your approach is interesting because its the opposite to the one I would have taken. You start with the assumption that we should fix our communities before we fix the world.
As I see it, the emphasis already defaults to fixing your community, and I would question that default and suggest that we should rather default to systemic issues first. In other words most people will give bread or change to the hungry guy in the street, but in my opinion we would do better to address hunger and homelessness systemically. Why should we prioritise helping those that happen to be in our direct view? Why are they more deserving that the hungry people we don't see?
One could argue, albeit crudely, that by directing our charity to those that happen to be in our view we're simply placating our guilt and incentivising begging. Then we give ourselves a pat on the back and forget about looking at the real underlying problems which are usually not in our direct view.
We simply have more control over the situation with people in the direct view. I mean, assuming control is good - I think it is. So for example we can pack help together with addressing their wrong decisions, or make help conditional on paying it forward and so on. I am basing it on the assumption that it is rarely just the lack of resources, but also a more complex thing, from wrong decisions to mental health stuff.
More control, and also, more knowledge. Say I hear about some oppressive third-world dictator and start protesting to get him removed -- I don't actually know about the situation, and so don't know whether there's any plausible better person to replace him, whether his brutality is the only thing stopping the various ethnicities of the country genociding each other, what repercussions his fall would have for the wider region, etc. In other words, I'm quite likely to find myself supporting a cause which, if successful, would make things worse rather than better. Conversely, when it comes to, say, the government of my own town, I'm in a better position to know what the alternatives are and whether the current lot are doing a good job, so my opinions are more likely to be correct.
Yes. Or, it is hard to say what the long term outcome of all the efforts Bill and Melinda Gates do against malaria will result in, maybe overpopulation and resource wars, maybe a more terrible illness...
But to make it clear I am not defending a conservative position, I am defending a centrist position. Basically, do no harm abroad. Have enough moral concern for foreigners and animals to not make things actively worse for them. But don't assume you can fix a situation you don't fully understand.
A few years ago, aid to Uganda was cut and children went hungry. That was because they made a law against "aggravated homosexuality" and most people just read the title only, so this led to a huge scandal. It is the death penalty for raping children, the disabled and the elderly. Although the law had a stupid name, they were not simply killing people for being gay. They were killing people for being rapists. This is usually the level of how well we tend to understand these things...
The title wasn't stupid; it accurately sums up the law's purpose. The law doesn't require proof that the offender has raped a person in the protected groups; it simply defines any homosexual activity with these groups to be "aggravated," with consent explicitly *not* being a defense. It also criminalizes regular homosexuality (ie gay sex) with up to life in prison and defines "aggravated" homosexuality to include *any repeat offense* of regular homosexuality. If the popular view of this was that it imposed the death penalty for being gay, that was a bit simplified but not too far off. It's not accurate to characterize this as an anti-rape law.
As I understand it, Gaza's anti-gay laws are less strict and less often enforced, though still bad. In any case, I don't have a strong opinion on where the threshold for cutting off international aid should be. I'm saying that whether Uganda gets aid or not, the law in question is a severe human rights violation and shouldn't be presented otherwise.
>But to make it clear I am not defending a conservative position, I am defending a centrist position. Basically, do no harm abroad. Have enough moral concern for foreigners and animals to not make things actively worse for them. But don't assume you can fix a situation you don't fully understand.
TBF I think most conservatives would agree with that position. Full-on "Trample everyone else to benefit my country" believers are a very small minority; during the last Greenland crisis, for example, polling showed that only around 8% of Republicans (vs. 4% of Americans in general) support the idea of taking Greenland by military force.
I don't think most people understand the level of force necessary to take Greenland. I think if they did, you'd get more people saying "Holy shit! That sounds fun!"
(Actual strategic planner was told to "go back to DARPA", so perhaps that isn't the one that would get approved).
Yeah, but as Scott and others have pointed out, the problems of the developing world are sometimes more straightforward. The drunks in my neighbourhood are undoubtedly receiving lots of social services but are still drunk and dysfunctional. Not at all sure how to help them. Meanwhile giving AIDS medicine to pregnant moms with HIV will block maternal transmission, cheaply and with no serious downside. Hence I would rather the marginal dollar go to HIV+ moms in Africa than to care for drunks in my neighbourhood.
Obviously there are eight billion foreign aid failure stories, but we can worry about that after everyone has food and medicine.
Exposure to fewer atrocities would probably help the drunks* (maybe my neighborhood is weird?)
I think most people would rather the marginal dollar for aids go to the Ukraine, since we were responsible for infecting many of their soldiers with HIV... yes?
Oh, that Ladies and Genitals is referencing the guy who gave a (drunken) speech to the Joint Chiefs... explaining how he was using a breathalyzer to keep at the optimal level of drunkenness throughout his worktime.
Someone thought that speech was good enough they televized it (in some sort of trailer park show).
Turns out watching atrocities all day isn't very good for the liver.
I think this sort of thing is overrated, at least if you're taking about the EA version of altruism: EAs explicitly have "tractability" (which I think is pretty close to "control"--there are accessible actions you can take to get the outcomes you want) as one of their key points.
And plenty of "local" problems are actually very hard to "control"! The opioid crisis involved legal opioids being overprescribed, cheap and easy to manufacture new synthetic opioids, and the complicated social phenomenon of addiction all bundled up in complicated ways.
For anyone who thinks that America ought to have been "solving" the opioid crisis: do you have any actions that could have been taken in mind, that are as simple and directly lead to their desired result as vitamin A supplementation for poor foreign kids does? Does anyone think there was a "one weird trick for ending the opioid crisis" that would be comparably effective/cheap as bed nets are a "one weird trick to prevent malaria"?!
Prohibition. If we can get the same amount of aid to someone without the narcotic (vicodin) with NSAIDs, then we can probably do the same thing for opiods.
And if not? There was a reason we didn't want to become China, rife with opium dens.
Part of it is the issue of competence and leverage - you can correctly diagnose what is needed to fix your community more easily than what is needed to fix society as a whole, and you have more direct and powerful ability to affect your community than society as a whole.
We could have 100,000,000 cooks in the kitchen of 'fixing society', most of them with little real expertise or knowledge on the topic and with 100,000 conflicting viewpoints represented in a way that creates inescapable gridlock and zero-sum competition.
Or we could have 100,000,000 people each trying to fix small, local issues that they understand well and can actually make progress on alone or in small like-minded groups, and that would actually solve a lot of problems, everywhere across the nation.
Of course, the real answer is that you have to do both - pay enough attention to elect good representatives to address systemic issues, and agitate for reform when that's failing; work in your community to fix the things you actually have vision and leverage on.
This assumes most people are competent at solving problems, and actually WANT to solve problems. I don't think either of these are the case. Most small businesses Fail, after all. And solving problems means you now have to have "a new thing to do" (lifestyle if you will), and for people that don't generally do that a lot, it can be a scary thing. Far better to get plaudits for "helping" someone, instead of making sure they can stand on their own.
" Why should we prioritise helping those that happen to be in our direct view? Why are they more deserving that the hungry people we don't see?"
Because helping the hungry guy near me helps me more. If he's not hungry he's less likely to steal food from me. And if he becomes productive that is better for our community.
Thats valid from an practical, self-serving point of view. But I'm looking at it from perspective of normative ethics. The default ethical norm is that its "wrong" to ignore the hungry people around you, so you should give them something (even if its not really helpful in addressing the problem), whereas its sort of "okay" to ignore real issues that are far away.. That the default moral framework I'm addressing
I think most people would agree with you on principle (I do!) but my guess is that the conservative person's gut reaction would be to think that it is hubris from you to think you can *fix* or treat the issue at a higher level and would suspect it of being a way to escape your (more local) moral obligations. I can hear Peterson in my head screaming in a broken voice "Think again, sunshine"
I don't have that personality myself and I favor the systemic approach whenever possible even though I do take the accusation of hubris seriously nowadays (humhum, really existing communism) but it's funny you should take the example of homelessness because one (maybe more?) article on this blog about how a lot of smart people *have* tried to tackle the issue of homelessness at a systemic level and how the issue has resisted to those solutions.
With white progressives' kneejerk tendency to use "white" as a pejorative (eg. "It was just a bunch of old white guys" to describe most things in European history, or "white women's tears" as a sneered-at concept, ESPECIALLY by progressive white women themselves), I think the boot fits more than you concede.
This also has more complexity to it than just "people hating their neighbours". It's misguided IMO but it's born out of the contrast with white self-aggrandizement and what it has historically produced - a sort of attempt to roughly compensate for arrogance via humbling. Of course it doesn't really work insofar as it also turns itself in a form of arrogance (sneering of the white-who-knows-better at the white-who-does-not, which is not an ethnic line but it's still an in/out group split).
Originally, clearly yes, but I mean in a historical sense. It's kind of a backlash to "hey until X years ago whites considered themselves hot shit so now it's important that we all take ourselves down a peg".
I'm not saying this is particularly effective or useful, it's probably not. But that's the vibe.
I mean, this is really not that weird or strange. "I act self-deprecating towards my own group as a way to project humbleness while also actually subtly suggesting my own superiority as one of the few aware and enlightened ones who see how bad by own group is" is quite common; I see it a lot more with nationality, but it happens also within all kinds of subcultures. This was just a racial spin on it.
Outgroups adopt the language of ingroups and twist the meaning/use constantly. That's probably a key mechanism for linguistic evolution.
I could also imagine cultural backflow causing some of you to experience this in a self-hating way rather than some mix of humble bragging and virtue signaling. I'll never forget the first time I heard a Tumblr-addicted Pinay friend (with whom I shared many progressive/centrist white friends) unironically state that you couldn't be racist towards whites. It's funny how jarring the internet bleeding into reality like that felt just a decade ago.
As a non-white living through the era where this sort of speech peaked (at least among coastal university crowds), when it came from a Euro/Euro-descended it always landed as a modern form of "white man's burden" thinking. Like the speaker was doing me a kindness by ensuring I knew just how little they suspected their race of being superior to mine (nevermind that they must have been internally wrestling with the idea enough to need me to know which side won the debate).
One positive shift across the years since is that the times where I have to suppress a cringe or urge to fuck with a person I otherwise respect over this behavior has dropped sharply.
Scott talked about this in "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup." Basically, when white people talk about how terrible "white people" are, most of them don't literally mean everyone with European ancestry. They're using it as a code word for the Red Tribe. Most of the white women sneering about "white women's tears" would be outraged if anyone took the same attitude towards their tears, or anyone they care about. I think progressives who talk like that are being annoying and needlessly inflammatory, but I don't think it proves anything about their deep-seated moral priorities.
I don't think Zhas was saying they're the out-group, but that this post replicates the dynamic. Telescopers care about the fargroup, but not the outgroup.
And I think that's true some of the times. And other times people just care about big attention grabbing wars far away more than boring health crises at home.
I think the counterpoint that this article would make is that everyone hates the outgroup more than the fargroup, so there is again no unique telescopic altruism dynamic - that's just how all groups behave.
But isn't the "telescoping" dynamic they're describing a critique that blue team people are treating those outside the "society/community" as part of the ingroup and some of those inside the "society/community" as the outgroup, whereas that's not how a society should work?
In red team's view, of course. In reality a society can work any way it wants to or not work at all... or not exist, as the case may be.
You say "I don't think so", except that you then go on to say that "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup" makes exactly the claim that its author is attempting to discredit here.
This article claims that just because people care about the fargroup doesn't mean they care less about their family and friends. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" says that people can feel friendly towards the fargroup and hostile towards the objectively more similar outgroup, but they'll be friendliest of all towards the ingroup, which usually (but not always) includes their family and friends. The two don't seem contradictory to me.
> "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" says that people can feel friendly towards the fargroup and hostile towards the objectively more similar outgroup
That is what "telescoping loyalties" means.
*This* article is an exercise in extremely clumsy sophistry, with Scott hoping that no one will notice he's intentionally misinterpreting the argument he claims to disagree with.
Not really? I can care more about people close to me, and simultaneously WILL care more (in the negative sense) about people close to me that I perceive as threatening my and my family's/friends' well-being. Just like your brother is more important than a random shepherd from Afghanistan, the governor who's passing bad laws that affect you both (or the voters who elected him) are more important than some random warlord in central Africa.
It definitely comes from tribalism rather than deep-seated *philosophical* moral principles. But I think I would say it still cashes out as someone's moral priorities.
It's what allows a keffiyeh-wearing college liberal to wish death on their fellow countrymen who don't believe in gay marriage, but simply ignore Hamas's regular executions of gay people.
Actually, I guess that example can be viewed in either direction. If you focus on the "aggressors" (Hamas/US conservatives), they give much grace to the foreigner and none to their countrymen; but if you focus on the victims (gays in both countries), they seem to care much more about their countrymen than foreigners. Maybe this specific example is orthogonal to the claim.
The current Republican President constantly says that the greatest threat to America is the radical left communist Democrats, not some foreign enemy, so it applies to both sides that their nearby enemy is more important to them than their far-away one.
Similarly, I struggle to imagine Democrats as an organization actively killing multiple US soldiers and Trump trying to squirm his way out of the conflict rather than going all in, too.
The "radical left communists" are being trained in Cuba, and the President has taken action in Venezuela to cut off oil to them. BLM pissed off a ton of people, and antifa during BLM pissed off a whole lot more.
It's not just about countrymen, as an abstract concept; the keffiyeh-wearing college liberal's conservative opponent who doesn't believe in gay marriage has way larger an opportunity to directly affect the concrete personal life of the liberal, their friends and potentially their family than the gay-executing Hamas member.
> simply ignore Hamas's regular executions of gay people.
It is inability to accept that underdogs can be villains.
In my experience, most American liberals, especially college-age ones, cannot wrap their heads around the fact that someone can be militarily weak, repeatedly defeated, and still be morally abhorrent.
This. I suppose you could call it the Unjust World fallacy, a flipped Just World fallacy. If you lose, you must be virtuous and unfairly oppressed. If you win, you must be evil and tyrannical.
When people complain about, say, English literature curricula including too many whites, I don't think they're saying that Shakespeare and Chaucer were proto-MAGA Republicans.
I wonder if it had the Nobelprizewinning play in it? You know the one... (how many uses of the n-word in it?) I'm not sure "of course that was colonization" is appropriate there. (nor for the brer rabbit stories).
You are feeling better when you stop gibbering about some play as if it were a response to refusing to let the English study English literature at their English university and calling it "decolonization."
Oh, misread what you were saying. My bad! I thought someone had actually created an English literature course and called it "decolonization" (which, given what I was citing, might actually be a fun course.)
Chaucer had some rather infamous jew-baiting, as did Shakespeare(with presumably fewer direct experiences, as Jews had been banned from England for quite some time).
Shakespeare writing Shylock was just trying to imagine what a Jewish merchant would be like, just as he imagined what an Ancient Roman or a medieval Dane or a fairy queen would be like. None of those groups got a wholly positive portrayal either, but nobody who identifies with these groups is around to complain today.
Am I supposed to police words now? I'll note that I'm apparently friends with a "self-hating" Jew (that other Jews disapprove of, for refusing to be wholeheartedly in favor of the whole Zionism thing).
I'm going to tap out on the subject, it's nunnamybeeznis. (I continue to believe that if someone's willing to take a punch to be called something specific, we should honor that, and if that was "capital-N" Negro, we should use it to this day. I am in the minority, sadly.)
Shakespeare's Danes weren't made like the stereotype of the "danegeld" would say.... I believe the fairies were eventually murdered (or rather the tribe that was legendized into fairy). There's enough Ancient Romans to have heroes and villains alike.
Jew-baiting has nothing to do with being a Trump supporter. If anything, Trump supporters are probably slightly more philosemitic than average, because they're more likely to be Evangelicals.
(Also, as a point of historical fact, Jews were banned from England several decades before Chaucer's birth, so he probably didn't have much first-hand experience either.)
Of course not. I'm just laughing at Israel's tendency to blackmail everyone in sight, and their ongoing puzzlement that Don Trump, who they do not have blackmailed, actually likes them.
In that case I think most of them actually do mean "white people" literally and want to read more literature by non-white authors. (Either that or they just don't like classic literature but would feel stupid saying so outright.) But the England of centuries ago is a foreign culture to English-speaking countries today, so I wouldn't accuse people of telescopic thinking for rejecting those authors.
>But the England of centuries ago is a foreign culture to English-speaking countries today, so I wouldn't accuse people of telescopic thinking for rejecting those authors.
They reject them specifically because they're white, which is a category they share with white progressives today. Though granted, the whole thing is probably better analysed through the lens of internalised racism rather than telescopic altruism.
Self-deprecation isn't the same as moral contempt. It's an emotional stance a lot of people seem to have a hard time wrapping their mind around, but it's pretty standard among people who want to have some humility and aren't trying to maintain their place at the top of some social hierarchy.
Self-deprecation is a fine social shortcut. Try misspeaking in ways that are obvious, and still slightly wrong (mispronounce gauche, find new and creative ways to say Kamala). Some people have this Absolute Need to wreck the conversation in order to correct you. Such people can go on the ignorables list.
Living in a suburban metro Boston, I reflexively both agree and disagree. As it appears to me here, the progressive tendency is to downgrade the sympathy-weight of the white tribe (to which almost all of them belong), but that doesn't extend to smaller tribes they are in that are almost all white. E.g., there's immense pressure against building housing in nice suburbs, presumably because that would reduce the house equity of the current residents and allow poorer (mostly white) people to move in and so their children would go to school with children of lower socioeconomic status.
Indeed, there seems to me to be a considerable chunk of the current white angst that is due to a reorganization of the sympathies of the affluent: it used be that the (white) affluent did have a sense that they owed some solidarity with poorer white Americans. Now it's clear that the mostly-white affluent are willing to throw poorer Americans to the wolves. (E.g., all the good paying factory jobs have been offshored.) If you're a non-white American you probably gain on the whole, because employment discrimination has diminished faster than foreign competition has hurt you. But the non-college-educated whites know that they're being abandoned.
This is excellent, and it strikes me as a normal pattern with conservatives in the Trump era.
1) Your side is morally awful
2) To make your side seem more defensible, exaggerate or make up traits about the other side.
So if you discuss Trump's lies and corruption, they'll pretend that Democrats have had comparable levels of corruption and dishonesty, which is so disconnected from reality it is a sign that a person's entire informational environment is deeply corrupted.
In this case, conservatives don't show basic concern for foreigners and non-humans, even at the level of "don't torture and kill them." Instead of acknowledging that's their view, they pretend like liberals only care about foreigners and would let their children starve in order to give a chicken a higher quality of life. When obviously, if you look at liberal priorities, they're spending a lot more time trying to give fellow Americans healthcare than fighting factory farms or increasing the foreign aid budget.
This particular conservative trait seems to be most popular with techbros and the angry anonymous twitter accounts they all look to for spiritual guidance.
Hey Rick glad you found the blog. A note: It's generally not allowed to troll here, even if you think you're really good at it and follow up by claiming you're sincere. It's supposed to be a good blog for discussing things with a minimum of open hostility, and Scott's written on the virtue of not pushing people away before. Hope this helps.
I think when Alex saw the phrase "Your side is morally awful", he thought Richard was addressing Scott directly. When in reality by "you" he meant conservatives in the Trump era.
Geesh you want me to 'defend' Trump? I'm just going to get dog piled on. There seem to be so many distortions of Trump it's hard to know where to start. (And I also try not to pay too much attention, so most of them I don't even know about.) There was the whole Russia-gate thing. And then all the lawfare. But what stands out most recently was Trumps phone conversation with the men's olympic hockey team. What my liberal friends told me he said was one thing. When I went and listened to the 2 minute conversation it was something else.
Do you ever listen to Joe Rogan? Have you ever read anything about him written from the left's POV? You'd think it was two different people.
I think some nuance is called for here. For example, I personally do care about the lives of some foreigners (arguably many), and some non-humans (i.e. my friends' pets). But I will happily eat fried shrimp, and I don't care about their suffering or lack thereof one iota. In fact, if I could consign a trillion shrimps to an eternal torture chamber in order to save one human, I'd do it in a heartbeat; and in fact people are indeed doing just that, when they emulate nervous systems of worms and fruit flies in order to further our brain studies.
Perhaps this makes me a monster, I don't know, but I doubt that I am in the minority. This doesn't make me right, but it does mean that you must engage with people like me on a deeper level if you (hypothetically) wish to advance your shrimp-saving policy.
> and in fact people are indeed doing just that, when they emulate nervous systems of worms and fruit flies in order to further our brain studies.
To my understanding the emulated nervous systems are less "trillions for eternity" and more on the order of "solo individual for less than a subjective hour." Also, aiming to approximate relatively normal operating conditions, rather than maximal suffering, and the plausible long-term benefits are considerably more than preventing one statistical human death.
So, yes it's in the same general category, but I think more people than you realize might disagree on exactly how far to chase diminishing returns.
Fair enough, but still, I personally care about the suffering of virtual shrimp (hypothetically speaking) about as much as I care about the suffering of biological shrimp, namely epsilon. I think this does put me on the opposite side of the fence of many long-termists, but I could be wrong.
(I know this is not really directly relevant to your comment, but I thought it was interesting you chose to use shrimp as an example when I just learned this about the shrimp supply chain - thanks Baader-Meinhof)
What examples of 2 would you provide. The biggest one I see establishment dems doing is accuse anyone who advocates for a tax cut to just wanting to line the pockets of rich people. But even though thats a super annoying framing, it is in fact consistent with the dem view on behind the veil moral tax policy and so not made up altogether. So it still doesnt seem the same as for example equating hunter bidens corruption with the trump familys.
> conservatives don't show basic concern for foreigners and non-humans, even at the level of "don't torture and kill them." Instead of acknowledging that's their view, ...
Or maybe they don't acknowledge it as their view because it's not their view at all, but an uncharitable misinterpretation.
Yet many liberals get excited over Obama's droning of Anwar al-Awlaki on the grounds of Awlaki being an American citizen.
I never found a satisfactory answer to the question whether Obama was justified in droning non-Americans. To these liberals apparently no American may be executed without due process but non-Americans are fair game.
While I'm sure there are liberals who don't care about the executions of non-american's, my experience on the left left is that Obama's drone strikes in general are universally considered atrocities. The focus on his striking US citizen is mainly to show that ultimately the US government will kill anyone they want. Not even citizens are safe.
I wonder how much the criticism of telescopic altruists has been confused with strategic alliances with the fargroup against the outgroup.
- My outgroup is Red Americans, so I will form a strategic alliance with their enemy: Middle Eastern terrorists.
- War in the Middle East is big, dramatic, and newsworthy, so it attracts more of my supply of cares than boring opioid crisis in the neighbouring state.
Can look similar from a distance, especially with outgroup homogeneity bias merging those two together. Both people definitely exist.
Very few progressives are siding with Middle Eastern terrorists against American civilians. More of them are siding with Middle Eastern civilians against the American government, which makes sense if you think the American government's policies are harming civilians for no good reason.
Yes. Of course there are exceptions, but the progressives who complain about the bombing of Gaza would mostly also complain if American Zionists were bombed.
Counterpoint: the last two and a half years of rampant hate against American Jews, which progressives have said little and done less than nothing to oppose.
The ADL broadened what they count as antisemitic after Oct 2023 (mostly by counting more anti-Zionism as antisemitism), so their numbers aren't directly comparable to earlier years.
2018 and 2019 *each* had more killings from antisemitic attacks in the US than every year since then combined. But this is probably too small a sample size to draw conclusions from since there are only about 0 to 2 fatal antisemitic incidents (with sometimes multiple deaths per incident) per year in the US.
That's because the perpetrator was immediately arrested and charged with 130 criminal charges. He will almost certainly never be let out of prison. There's nothing left for protests to achieve. On the other hand, the Gazan genocide is still ongoing, the perpetrators have still not been punished, and the US continues to provide Israel with billions in military aid every year.
They are not actually siding with the civilians if they said nothing while those civilians were being attacked by terrorists and their own governments…
Depends on whether the US government was funding those terrorists and governments. American progressives are so outraged by the actions of Israel because we give them billions in military aid, and progressives want us to stop doing that. If we already aren't funding a terrorist group, there's less for Americans to be outraged about.
I think this is a perfect illustration of my point. They're protesting _against_ their outgroup (the American government). They're not protesting in _support_ for their fargroup (the middle east).
An innocent in the middle east being killed by the American or the Iranian government should be equally outrageous if what you care about is that person's life and dignity.
And if you don't think there's anything you can do by protesting, go to a protest run by the Iranian diaspora, they have a clear list of demands some of which are quite practical.
>An innocent in the middle east being killed by the American or the Iranian government should be equally outrageous if what you care about is that person's life and dignity.
Sure, but the question is, will your outrage do anything? The American government might listen to American protestors. The Iranian government definitely won't.
>go to a protest run by the Iranian diaspora, they have a clear list of demands some of which are quite practical.
Like what? All I can find on Google is that most of them seem to support the war. I still hold that the war is probably not going to have any effect in Iran besides killing even more civilians.
America forced elections in Gaza, which the Israelis blamed the Republicans for. Post said elections, the rather confused* Hamas guys murdered all the PLO governmental people.
ME civilians including 9 million plus Indians are being protected by US military. It is the Mullah-cracy that progressives have been in love with for 50 years that is attacking them.
These are real people, but I don't think these are people who are really "telescopic altruists": some of them are people for whom middle eastern terrorists are more "neighbourly" than for other Americans (because of religious or ethnic or cultural ties), or they explicitly have an ideology that centers "imperialism" or some such, and will usually _reject_ certain kinds of altruism for not focusing on the "real problem" of capitalism/imperialism. Such people often would/will deliberately _downplay_ catastrophes happening in Assad's Syria, China, Sudan, etc. It's not really a case of telescopic altruism so much as a manichean worldview where some people are worthy of altruism and others not that so happens to have some far away people on the "deserving" list.
That's fair. Though I think a telescopic altruism could explain how someone could arrive at an ideology where they view everything through the eyes of international death-to-America advocates.
Once the worldview has set in, then they have to awkwardly explain away bad things that happen from their chosen side. But don't we all...
Yeah, I don't mean to suggest that there's no connection to telescopic altruism, but I think it requires more work to show how closely the phenomena are linked
Yes. This surprised me when I first looked into it, but in practice, the pattern in culturally conservative states is "marry early, then divorce if it doesn't work out", while the pattern in California is "live together for a good long while first" so most splits in serious relationships take place before the courts get involved. The "marriage generation" rate is still higher in Utah, or was last I checked.
>Also, as a non-American, is Montana different from Idaho? I'd always assumed they were kind of identical.
A little bit. Montana is much flatter, and if you go there, you will definitely be killed by bears. (Sorry, can't resist. I have lots of friends from there.) But in practical terms, I think the difference here is basically down to reporting standards/how effective Montana CPS is rather than a difference in the actual rate of treating children badly.
There's also a distinct black/white split, where black people often just don't get married at all. 4 years dating? In Utah, that's half a year dating, marriage, and then divorced 3 years later. (Kid in both relationships).
You'd probably expect the first-marriage generation rate to be correlated with the first-divorce rate, right? Since the marginal extra marriages are disproportionately the ones that are more so-so in quality. In California you just date and cohabitate with your "meh" boyfriend for a few years and then break up; in Utah the same couple will marry, live together for a few years, then divorce.
Yeah, that's basically my thesis. You only need a second trip to the courthouse if you made a first one, and the timing of that first trip is going to be heavily socially determined.
(Although note that "marriage generation" was a bad choice of words. I was trying to say that the net marriage rate in Utah was significantly higher than in California, which I think undermines a lot of the criticism of a higher divorce rate.)
Idaho is a heavily Mormon state, like Utah, while Montana is not. There are a decent number of things where Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming pattern together, which always surprised me because I don’t think of Wyoming as very Mormon, but I don’t know of ones where Idaho and Montana are more similar than either is to Wyoming or Utah or the Dakotas.
I'm not well-read on Confucian philosophy and similar arguments can somewhat straightforwardly be derived in other virtue ethical traditions and at least tenuously in consequentialist ones (through rule utilitarianism, etc), but I understand Confucian view could be described as "role ethics", and see it as a good lens to tackle this particular issue: people occupy various social roles based on birth, kinship, citizenship and voluntary choice among other reasons, and these determine our moral duties. Typically, our duties as e.g. parents and partners outweigh our duties as members of the cosmopolis.
To provide an example that seems to be in contradiction with (at least naive) consequentialism and I reckon aligns with the majority of people's intuitive grasp of morality, I would argue consequentialism suggests that if outright mutiny is unlikely to result in success, Russian officers should deliberately send troops under their command to Ukrainian ambushes in which they are certain to be killed or captured: the way Russian war machine is chewing through their mobiks, they were going to become casualties anyway, but at least this way they would be disposed in such a way that they won't be in a position to hurt innocents. But I believe most people would consider such a person monstrous: in his role as an officer, he has a duty towards his subordinates that trumps his duty towards trying to achieve world peace in his role as a human being.
So, I think the steelmanning argument would not be that EA types "care more about x", but that they are failing in their duties as (say) daughters and friends and neighbours (in comparison to their conservative peers). Which, of course, remains to be shown.
One of my thoughts on this is that the role of a parent is partly to provide moral education and guidance to their child. While in some sense a parent having broader concerns about the world around them takes away resources from their child, you definitely could argue that a parent without those concerns is failing in their duty to act as a moral example to their children. As long as a parent doesn't neglect their children, a child may actually benefit from their parent spending some time feeding the homeless or serving at their local church or protesting in favor of a political cause or (insert any other cause you regard as morally worthy) - it teaches them a very important lesson about how to live in the world.
I guess if you think the role of a parent is to be solely focused on the welfare of their children then perhaps you'd regard inculcating these values to be bad, I just don't think many people are actually that self centered, although since most of the conservatives I know are religious that may be skewing my perspective. I'm definitely sympathetic to virtue or role based ethics as a practical guide to life, but I think most people would conceptualise that as a hierarchy of obligations, and those systems generally include some duty to neighbours and strangers that is less pressing than meeting the needs of close family, but not to the extent that those obligations can be totally disregarded just because you have a elderly parent or a dependant child - the concept of guest friendship across many different cultures is a particularly fascinating example of this to me, because people really did take it seriously.
While the specific example of a treacherous commander seems pretty repellant to me, in most conflicts one side's traitor can be the other side's heroic defector, so I don't think our moral intuitions here are particularly clear.
The thing is, the children need to be raised by individual parents. A diffuse social structure is quite unable to do anything except assist the parents.
There are a lot of claims of this, but what it means is a lot more support. Those cultures are in fact less suited to it because they have no way to record what has been done for the child, still less automate reminders.
Even if they did, that the community is responsible means that NO ONE is actually responsible, so if it's time for THIS child to be fed, and he isn't, well, no one's on the hook.
The love and support a child needs to develop properly are, at that, impossible to administer communally.
Not bad, here I would like to quote Freda Utley: "If you refer to the government as we, not they, you are one of the ruling class."
I mean, I keep being weirded out by the "political we". What kind of role does that imply? Literal democracy as some kind of a distributed kingship? Do people really think their opinion matters? Will people with actual power ever care about it? Or maybe I am the weird one, because the distributed kingship is a necessary illusion?
You don't talk to people who literally have input in laws, and get small things passed the US Congress much, do you? I think "backup cameras in vehicles" and other small things like that warrants a "we".
This connects to the thought that this is more about loyalty than altruism. When people say they are “citizens of the world” or express the wish that their poor dumb red-state neighbors could be replaced with nice striving immigrants, this is more of a failure to understand and enact loyalty than of where to put your altruism points. You don’t stand with your family or your neighbors or your fellow citizens purely out of altruism. You stand with them because when the chips are down—as in war—you want them to stand with you. That nice H1B I’m the next cubicle may in fact be a better, more deserving person than the trailer park person in the MAGA hat, but when a major war starts and we institute the draft, H1B is going home, while you live or die with trailer park. So not prioritizing trailer park is both disloyal, and stupid, because it weakens the blood and soil bonds we depend on. Altruism doesn’t enter into it.
True, especially if your country is strong. Or it can happen and you can wind up living in rubble, raped, enslaved, or dead. It’s what is known as an existential risk.
Where most sensible moral systems differ from naïve utilitarianism, it's to correct for the inability of mere mortals to actually predict what the consequences of their actions will be. Since we can't possibly predict the consequences of our actions upon the geopolitics of the next century, but we can reasonably predict the consequences of our actions upon those close to us, we should focus on doing predictably-good things for the people close to us first.
I don't expect a Lieutenant to be able to actually predict whether it's better for the world in a utilitarian sense if his side wins or loses. Heck even with the benefit of hindsight I would not hazard a guess on which side's victory provides more total utils for 90% of the wars in history. But I do expect him to have an idea of what's better for the men under his command. (The fact that in wars the best interests of some people are so diametrically opposed to the best interest of other people is what makes wars so horrible.)
> I would argue consequentialism suggests that if outright mutiny is unlikely to result in success, Russian officers should deliberately send troops under their command to Ukrainian ambushes in which they are certain to be killed or captured: the way Russian war machine is chewing through their mobiks, they were going to become casualties anyway, but at least this way they would be disposed in such a way that they won't be in a position to hurt innocents.
That doesn't really hold up, because I can readily think of Pareto improvements on such a plan. For example: take advantage of the horribly mismanaged supply chain to requisition a batch of nonfunctional ammunition, tell the soldiers that the batch they were already issued is likely to be nonfunctional while the new batch is good (when in fact the reverse is true), insist on swapping everything out accordingly. Then, once everyone under your command has been de facto disarmed, call the Ukrainian "I want to live" surrender hotline and tell them you've got a whole platoon (or whatever) of customers lined up.
Afterward, ideally, return to the Russian lines, claim all the soldiers whose clean capture you just arranged were actually killed, ask for a new set, and repeat the process. More drain on the overall war machine, fewer fatalities among the troops you're responsible for, without needing to convince them to agree to an explicit mutiny.
Okay: let's step back and look a little bit at the history of the idea of "telescopic altruism".
The original and archetypal "telescopic altruist" is Mrs. Jellyby, in Dickens's Bleak House (Dickens uses the phrase "telescopic philanthropy" of her). The problem - as Dickens sees it - is that Mrs. Jellyby's devotion to saving people in Africa (though her "saving" is more in the form of beneficent colonialism than directly giving food to the hungry, which doesn't look good to modern eyes for other reasons) prevents her from noticing that her marriage, children, and family are collapsing around her.
In other words, the idea is that we have greater responsibilities to those around us, such that we should save them from even lesser problems, even if it means not helping more distant people who are suffering far worse. We should of course save our family (friends, fellow countrymen) from starvation, but we should also make sure that, even if they are not in danger of starvation, they have rich and fulfilling lives - and we should do so at the expense of starving people who are more distant from us. We shouldn't treat all lives as equally deserving of equal support.
Now, that is an idea that is surely repugnant to a lot of people, not only effective altruists. But that, I think, IS the basic idea, and a lot of people hold it, even if in a less extreme form; and I think any argument against the concept of "telescopic philanthropy" needs to address it. But I didn't really feel that Scott's essay here engaged with it or responded to it.
Scott did kinda address it - "If you distribute moral units to your cousin, you have fewer for your own child - does this make you a “telescopic altruist” who hates everyone close to him? Is this even wronging your child in any way?" His point, as I see it, is that after doing your reasonable duty to your friends and family, you are likely to still have plenty of slack to engage in philanthropy of some sort.
If Scott intended that as a response, it is a very vague and not very effective one, because he doesn't really explain what a "moral unit" is, and does not address the idea that one might owe not just "more" of them to our closest family, but different KINDS of duties, which might - as in Mrs. Jellyby's case - take time and effort and money which would be taken away from even more serious problems faced by more distant people.
Has anybody in the history of moral philosophy ever done an adequate job at that? As far as I'm concerned, that is a history of miserable failures, but as far as having reasonable takes goes, Scott has few rivals.
I think the colonialism is part of the problem with Ms Jellyby as Dickens sees it, but not the way we would think of "problem with colonialism."
The problem is that there is no feedback mechanism: it's not only that she's entirely focused on the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, and should focus on her family: it's that she has no way of knowing, and doesn't really care about, whether all her efforts on their behalf are actually helpful at all.
I'm not sure that's the root of the problem, for Dickens. The final twist in the story is that her project is a total failure, because the local king turns out to want to sell the colonists for rum ... so she takes up the cause of women's suffrage instead, which takes even more time away from her family. It's clear that Dickens thinks of these as equally undesirable pursuits, even though the women's suffrage question doesn't suffer from a lack of feedback mechanism.
But the pervasive impression I get of Mrs Jellyby is that she is very busy, but not usefully busy - she's endlessly sending/reading/losing/finding letters, but there's no way for her to tell "is this actually accomplishing anything at all?". And I think the same is true of her involvement with women's suffrage.
I think that's right, yes: and suggests another kind of distinction that Scott could have reasonably made (but really didn't). There is a difference between caring about dying foreigners in a way that makes you give money to an effective charity which gets food to them, and caring about dying foreigners in a way that makes you go on protests and occupy university buildings. The former can demonstrably accomplish something, the latter is arguably just "being busy".
It's been a long time since I read it, but I don't think Dickens is expressing a view on the comparative merits of the enterprises. Mrs Jellyby justs casts around for some cause to take up, which allows her to construct a self-image of herself as a virtuous person.
I doubt colonialism was a concern for Dickens at all; while not a straightforward imperialist he was definitely out of step with other liberals of the time when it came to colonial atrocities like the response to the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, or the Sepoy uprising in India.
Which I think is a good thing to keep in mind: just because Dickens presents an unflattering stereotype of a person focused on helping foreigners in a book shouldn't be taken as a strong argument against a positive attitude towards helping foreigners in general: it is very plausible that his feelings on the matter are partly the result of too little concern about foreigners.
I think telescopic altruists generally want a cause or group to champion which most others care little about, because that way they can feel or be seen as superior in their tender feelings and thus virtue. So T.E. is often, if not usually, a back-handed form of conceit.
If you step back even further, and look at telescopic philanthropy from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist like Robert Trivers, it does not make sense as a form of altruism. I think Trivers would say philanthropy directed toward remote strangers is likely motivated by social factors. If that is the case it should rarely be anonymous.
That Mrs. JellyBelly's concern for Africans manifested itself in colonialism I think illustrates what is a more salient point about telescopic altruism.
Namely, that our work is more likely to be *effective* when we engage those closest to us and can see whether our efforts are having the intended effect, and if they are causing unintended negative consequences.
Dickensian England was a largely laissez-faire state with little in the way of welfare for its own poor. Dickens didn't have much of a political program, but he did tend to elicit sympathy for England's poor among his readers,
Thank you!!! For making the point about that chart from That One Study! I have been saying to people for years it Does Not Mean What They Think it Means. I will now just link to this article, whose Ethos should save me a lot of toil in the Logos Mines.
No one using it cares about the study - the image is used to express an idea unmoored from the study.
If the study correctly recognizes the reality that people recognize from experience then good for the study and if it does not then more worse for the study but no one wants or needs "a study" to tell them about the attitudes of people who write and speak quite a lot.
But many people I have spoken do DID think the study showed something that it did not. They, I don't necessarily, claim that studies can tell us something about people's attitudes.
I think the post is being too charitable, there are some EAs and religious people who are trying to help. But the vast majority of the time you see someone take action it is part of a status game. There is low interest in making charity effective or directing it properly.
While you are certainly correct in many points, I do think you are fighting a strawman or at least a week man. It’s true people complaining about telescopic altruism are often imprecise and talk as if people who care about those far away, actually care about the far away people more than their friends or family. But when you dig into their complaints, it’s obvious that the actual complaint is that they care about people far away in comparison to their friends or family, far more than they ought to in the view of the complainer.
In my experience, a lot of complaints and arguments that appear to be about the facts are often complaints and arguments about what ought to be. For example, people arguing over whether academia has a liberal bias or a white supremacist, or otherwise conservative bias are actually arguing over where academia is relative to to wear it ought to be, not about the actual position of academia.
Now, obviously, you can disagree with the people saying that telescopic altruism prioritise far away. People more than people should, but that is your actual disagreement. Nobody actually thinks that liberals care more about people far away more than people close to them. At the very least a lot of the people complaining don’t actually think that.
Also regarding the correlated altruism point, keep in mind that resources are finite and trade-offs are real. If you spend your money giving to charity or spend time and effort helping people far away, that is time and effort and money, you could have spent on your friends and family. Any money that you donate to people who use it to fight malaria in Africa is money that would have been inherited by your children or otherwise spent at least in part on them. I find it unbelievable that, for example, people who donate 10% of their income would spend exactly the same amount on their children or other friends and family if they were not spending the 10% helping other people far away since after all, if they weren’t spending it on charity, they be spending it on something else, and most people spend at least a little of their resources on friends and family. Caring about everything is the same as caring about nothing. At the end of the day all utility comparisons are relative to other things. Multiplying your desire for everything by 10 times, doesn’t change anything and so caring about other people will inevitably be trade of resources against caring about friends and family.
I do not mean any of this as a criticism of telescopic altruism. Since I actually think this is an admirable tendency, but rather my comment is meant as criticism of your post, which I think makes your opposition look weaker than it is by either creating a straw man or at least not dealing with the obvious steel man of the position. Since I think that even if everyone holding this criticism is under the misapprehension that liberals care more about people far away, the actual core of their complaint is quite easy to see.
"Nobody actually thinks that liberals care more about people far away more than people close to them."
I think it. In fact, I've seen it. I have seen an abusive mother get more worked up about something that happened to blacks in the 1950s than her daughter's suicidal depression.
Leaving aside the point that I was talking about liberals in general, not saying no liberal has ever done this I did qualify myself by noting that what Scott is doing is at least a week man which is to say that actual people may in fact hold this view, but it isn’t a strongest possible representation of the view he is attacking or even engaging with the stronger version of the view advocated by actual people like for example, Mencius who, when criticising the Prodo-consequentialist Mohists and their doctrine of universal Love, argued that treating the whole world as your family is tantamount to renouncing your family. Although I also do think that most people who in fact hold this view when they introspect about it will quickly realise that this model very obviously does not fit with the behaviour of actual liberals. Note I said most people it’s entirely possible. You might not be one of them, but I think it’s pretty clear that at least if they are thinking about the matter calmly, 90% of people who share your view will quickly realise it doesn’t actually match liberal behaviour given most liberals very obviously spend way more on their family. Then they do on say strangers in Africa and the political platforms of liberal political parties, reliably spend far more on helping people in their home country compare to helping people abroad. Liberal parents are obviously much more willing to finance their children’s education compare to the education of the children of strangers and obviously are much more willing to let their friends and family stay in their houses compare to letting strangers stay in their houses since it’s quite obvious that most of them wouldn’t even let the strangers stay there if they were not paying rent whereas they make no such demands of their children when they are growing up and are in fact, willing to finance food and other things for the children which they would obviously not be willing to do for a stranger at least to anywhere near the same extent. In any case as Scott complains about these kind of arguments, your example is not an apples to Apple‘s comparison because blacks in the 1950s was a group containing millions of people, whereas the daughter is one person so it doesn’t follow that the mother would care about an individual black person more than the daughter. In any case, I’m pretty sure that what is in your opinion, true of the mother is obviously not true of most actual liberal people.
As for liberals in general, that mother was the extreme case. Since many liberals use their purported concern for those far-away to act abusively toward those who are near -- down to and including felonies such as false imprisonment -- I would say that yes, it does match liberal behavior in general.
Which specific instance of false imprisonment motivated by concern for faraway people are you thinking of? In any case given how Trump keeps weaponising the government to try to go after his political opponents and other people he doesn’t like for example, just look at what he attempted to do to anthropic. I think it’s obvious that when you follow Scott’s advice and compare apples to apples, liberals aren’t actually doing worse than conservatives on this dimension. In fact, I would argue that they are doing much better than Trump.
Blocking the road is obviously not false imprisonment, unless you think not building a road there would have been false imprisonment. Blocking a road obviously restricts your mobility much less than locking you in a building. In any case often blocking the roads is not about helping far away people, it’s about helping people right there or even sometimes about helping themselves. Not to mention that it’s not like conservatives are not similarly willing to take political protest actions that similarly cause inconvenience to other people, just look at January 6. So I find it really doubtful that blocking roads has anything to do with telescopic altruism, or would not take place if liberals did not indulge in telescopic altruism. It is not as if people in other countries who absolutely do not indulge in telescopic altruism, like the trucker’s protest in Canada a few years ago are not equally willing to block roads.
I think this is vastly overstating your case. AWFLs may be awful, but that is more like "I go to a store and inhabit their seats, and do not buy enough to keep them in business, thus driving them out of business." (this is one part "lack of foresight" and about tenparts "being too toxic for anyone else to want to inhabit the same space as").
Scott acknowledges that there is a debate that could be had about the correct multiplier to apply to neighbor vs gaza concern. But that instead of doing this one side is just accusing the otherside of having the multiplier on the wrong side of 1. So as you say he is not attacking the steelman. I read this and the AI post as a complaint that the weakman is dominating the discourse and so attacking it has become worthwhile. See also if it's worth your time to lie.
If there is a specific policy being debated, then engaging the steelman is perhaps a requirement even if the otherside isnt making it. But when the complaint is about the discourse itself, then targetting the actual arguments being made is appropriate.
At the time I wrote my comment, I did not actually believe that this obviously ridiculous argument had actually taken over the discourse. Also, I thought that over 90% of the people making this argument would pretty much immediately agree that the steel man is what they actually meant. Once you push them a little because of their position is so obviously ridiculous.
However, after getting replies from a couple people who appear to treat the idea that liberals have the multiplier on the wrong side of one as actually true in complete seriousness I have changed my mind about how reasonable Scott’s post is. Obviously, getting replies from two people out of a sample of God only knows how many readers isn’t really good statistical evidence of how prevalent these views are, but if Scott encounters such responses often the post becomes a lot more justified.
Basically, I was implicitly assuming that obviously this idea could not really be genuinely widespread. I really need to learn to stop overestimating the intelligence of the discourse as this is the second time in the last 10 days that I have been shocked by the stupidity of what has taken over the discourse. As such, I have changed my mind and no longer think Scott was being unreasonable in writing an entire post against this argument.
Thanks for the response. I often dont know what the discourse is and try not to be so online as to discover it. So I tend to give Scott the benefit of the doubt about it, but bloggers can also attract a lot of trolls so you never quite know.
I don't think either of those maps means quite what you think it means. Yes, conservative states have much higher divorce rates, but this comes on top of much higher marriage rates, to the point that it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the California equivalent of a typical Oklahoma divorce is two people who have lived together for a couple years splitting up, but without the courts getting involved. I'm not sure that shows different levels of care there.
As for the child abuse one, that one is a combination of cases of actual child abuse/neglect and how good the state agencies are at catching them/what counts for reporting standards. I simply do not believe that Kentucky has ~twice the abuse rate of Tennessee. They're not that different as states. Also, when you look, there's something like 23-24 states which are above average, 17 of which are in the 140%+ group. That implies there are some states which are way, way below average, to the point that it becomes simply implausible that we're seeing real data here.
This article is good, but I do want to nitpick the child abuse map.
States vary widely in how well they capture abuse and neglect data, and how well they report it to the feds. Realistically you could probably label a decent number of those white states as not having enough information to determine. Massachusetts may have a higher rate just because they actually capture and report the information.
You can't compare favors of people far away from you to favors to people close to you on equal value. As the article recognizes, nearly everyone favors more people closer to them.
When someone talks about "Telescopic Altruism", the effect might be real on their moral terms.
For a lib, caring so much about animals that kids ends up malnourished is Telescopic Altruism (You can nourish a kid through suplements. But if you couldn't or you can't afford it, the tradeoff would be very questionable). Even if the suffering if the animals is much greater than the kid's.
For a conversative, caring so much about africans that you end up encouraging less donations to local churches and more taxes, is Telescopic Altruism.
These are just examples. Everyone cares more about people close to them than further away. So for everyone, we could come up with an example of Telescopic Altruism.
If the point of the article is to say conservatives are evil. That could be, but it's a different conversation.
How do you square the view that charity isn’t zero sum with the roughly stable charity as a percentage of gdp before and after the rise of the EA movement?
Anecdotally, during the Bloomberg administration, rich New Yorkers felt a noblesse oblige to keep the city clean and safe for the average guy. Now, it feels to me like the causes rich New Yorkers feel strongly about are more telescopic—high-minded national politics, social justice initiatives that make them feel better, and yes, further afield donation.
EA unfortunately remains a negligible fraction of charitable giving, so not seeing movement in national/global numbers doesn't really tell us anything.
But I think you're right that many EAs would give more to things closer to home if not for the opportunity to have 100x more impact elsewhere. I don't see that this undermines Scott's point though. Basically everyone cares way more about their own community than those far away, even in the small niche group organized around (among other things) impartiality. Even hardcore EAs only spend something like 3-10% of their resources on 'impartial' goals, typically, with the other 90%+ spent on themselves, families, communities just like everyone else.
Scott writes: "The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness."
This is right for niceness, but not for charity, which is the question at hand. It seems to me that social appetite for charitable giving is zero sum.
Of course expressly-EA is not a big portion of charitable giving. My point is that farsighted charity has become much more popular in many different spheres--national vs local, international vs national, social justice vs local institutions. ChatGPT says that international charity went from 3 to 6% of the pie over 25 years--my guess is this is an undercount due to a classification problem of what counts as "international", but that's a big move!
> Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
I believe there's a non trivial difference between caring about group X and being nice to group X. I see caring as a form of signaling. It allows us to say: I will do something nice to help others if the opportunity to do so presents itself. It could be genuine (will actually help others if/when possible), or just performative signaling with no real intention to help (this is not necessarily bad though).
Being nice implies actively making other people's lives easier or better. Which brings me to this:
"[A different study] gives people a limited supply of 100 “moral units” to distribute... The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness."
If being nice and caring are different, then this is wrong. This is how the study refers to the moral units used: "We analyzed separately participants’ ideal and personal allocations of moral regard"; "forcing participants to distribute moral concern in a zero-sum fashion"; "such that liberals distribute empathy toward broader circles". I understand "regard", "concern" and "empathy" as caring, not as a commitment to help others (niceness).
Also, I think this is wrong: "When the paper actually looks at who cares more about their friends, liberals or conservatives, the liberals win very slightly on friends and conservatives very slightly on family". It references study 1a. These are the questions that were asked as part of study 1a:
- love for friends (e.g., “My friends and I look out for each other”)
- love for family (e.g., “My siblings and I love each other “warts and all”—we don’t censor ourselves around each other”)
- love for all others (there are times in my life when I’ve felt strong feelings of love for all people, not just the specific people I’m close to”).
Loving each other “warts and all" and not censoring each other is not what I would describe as caring (also, how would you look out for a friend that lives far away).
>> Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
I think this is where we run into the distinction between morality and etiquette again.
Being polite to waiters is about etiquette, not morality. I am nice to waiters, not because I care deeply about them as human beings, but because I've been socialised to follow a basic social script that keeps casual transactions polite and pleasant for everybody.
>Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home?
Maybe it's an outlier, but during Covid, I saw a lot of people who were completely in favour of foreign aid but also in favour of restricting medical resources to their own countrymen who refused to get vaccinated.
You're rigging the comparison by taking wildly different levels of granularity.
The equivalent of "in favour of foreign aid, generally" is "in favor of subsidized healthcare, generally", which liberals obviously are. The equivalent of "deprioritizing healthcare access for the unvaccinated (eg lower in the waitlist for organ transpants)" is "deprioritizing the African Tribe who throws flour into the river to please the River God for flour shipments", which I'm sure plenty of liberals would have no problem with
Well, I think you're dead wrong. I think the overwhelming majority of American progressives would offer preferential treatment to their fargroup (no matter how odious) over their outgroup. And what saddens me is that the author of this blog post was the very person who crystallised this pattern for me.
It's a falsifiable belief, and it's false. American progressives care much more about giving their outgroup free healthcare, free school lunches, labor rights and other things they believe, right or wrong, to be good than they are about anything else.
I also noticed you dropped the vax vs foreign aid, bc it's pretty obviously incomparable and the fact that you could only ever interpret it through culture war lenses seems maybe an indication that if everything looks like a nail, you should seek tools different from hammers, no matter how "crystallised " the hammer is in your toolbox.
While I agree with the point of this post, I feel like Gaza was close to the worst possible example to illustrate it with. Almost without exception, the people upset about 50,000 killed in Gaza are *not* similarly upset about much larger numbers killed in Sudan, Syria, Yemen, or other horrible conflicts around the world, and with vastly less justification (ie, we’re talking in those cases about deliberately targeted innocents, not either combatants or collateral damage in a defensive war being fought against attempted extermination). This is enough to show that those upset are *not* operating on any defensible utilitarian heuristic, of worrying about people killed in violent explosions however far away they are and whomever they might be. Instead, whether consciously or unconsciously, they’re effectively operating on a conspiracy theory about what tiny group is responsible for nearly all of the world’s evil. In their defense, that particular conspiracy theory has been massively popular for millennia.
There were, in fact, considerable numbers of people very upset with people being killed in Syria back when the Arab Spring kicked out, which was a major reason for Westerners recognizing the then-rebel, now-current government (and aiding even more in the case of Libya). This evidently didn't help in stopping the killing, which was a major reason why that furor abated.
In any case, in those cases the West intervented *against* the murderous governments. In case of Gaza, the West continues to support, implicitly or explicitly, the country doing the lion's share of the killing, which rather changes the calculus. It's no longer just an abstract demand of justice but has the important "not in my name" factor in it.
"Very upset" with the propaganda that told them to be upset, and very supportive of the color revolutions. I don't think this is very well supporting your actual thesis, which is that these people care regardless of who's shooting whom.
Yeah, and look how things have changed. After seizing power, previously-rebel, now-current government of Syria murders ethnic and religious minorities with impunity, and the West no longer feels the need to intervene.
There's a more charitable explanation: Israel is America's ally and we sell them lots of military equipment and give them billions in military aid. So there are obvious steps the US can take to help Gazans, namely stop giving Israel military aid and start putting pressure on them not to kill civilians. Whereas Sudan was never our ally and the US government has already sanctioned them and accused them of genocide, so Americans are less likely to feel like the things that happen there are our problems.
That “charitable” position is naive and will get civilians killed.
Hamas hides behind civilians precisely because they know experientially that progressives will blame Israel for it and not Hamas.
Saying “well we’re in practice closer to Israel, that’s our lever to influence the conflict” guarantees that many forces that themselves as weaker will put civilians in harm’s way.
If you actually care about civilians, you have to punish the people actually putting them in harm’s way, regardless of how effective your influence is over them.
>Saying “well we’re in practice closer to Israel, that’s our lever to influence the conflict” guarantees that many forces that themselves as weaker will put civilians in harm’s way.
It also incentivises other countries not to be friendly, since apparently being the US' friend gets you worse treatment than being neutral.
You're making reasonable consequentialist arguments. But I think Madeleine's point was that there are reasons other than Jew-hatred that could cause an American to focus on criticizing Israel over other regimes. "Not in our name" may not be a *good* reason to focus on Israel, but I do think it's a significant part of the reason for some people, and so some people's *reasons* for focusing on Israel aren't entirely antisemitic--even if, as you argue, this focus is antisemitic in *effect*.
I’ve heard that as a possible explanation, but too many US allies (Saudi Arabia and Türkiye come to mind) do nefarious stuff that the public doesn’t care about to a percent of the same degree for me to be convinced that’s the whole story.
Let me put it another way. For everyone who gives that explanation, ask them if Jews are White and then ask them if Jesus was. If their answers differ, I’m going to suggest there’s a different explanation.
There is no way to fight in urban warfare not putting civilians in harm's way. So the blame actually lies on the side of invader, and Israel is the one who invades other countries territory at the moment.
No, Hamas started the war, Israel continued it after having repealed the initial attack. I think it was reasonable either to give some short but strong response, destroy some military facilities and kill some of the leadership. Or if Israel was willing to eradicate the problem once and for all, then it should have occupied and intergated the territory, giving its population citizenship rights, perhaps initially limited in some ways but still. Prolonged bombing campaign with mass destruction but taking no responsibility for the fate of Gaza that actually took place was pointless from any point of view, it only made sense if genocide was actual purpose.
I'm not sure what greater citizenship rights Israelis could give Gazans than than when they performed a complete, unilateral withdrawal in 2005, followed by internationally monitored elections. These elections unfortunately resulted in a victory for Hamas, and their aggressive militant stance led to Israel attempting to halt weapons imports (the infamous blockade / sanctions).
What you're describing sounds like conquest, which I don't think is a good move for either side.
I suggest that Gazans take responsibility for the fate of Gaza. If they didn't want Hamas, they would not have elected Hamas. Hamas remains popular, both in Gaza and the West Bank, and would likely win elections there if they happened today. Many of the worst atrocities on Oct 7 were committed by "lucky" Gazan civilians who were near the breach and took advantage to go on a rampage.
If genocide were Israelis' goal, they could have killed way more Gazans. A commonly cited figure is the number of dropped bombs exceeds the number of dead Gazans. One could argue that destroying empty buildings is a form of indirect ethnic cleansing, but if the goal is genocide, why empty the buildings before destroying them?
“The US should stop fighting Japan after Midway, they repelled the Kido Butai and now they’re just continuing the war.”
That’s your logic. It is, to put it mildly, foolish on the face of it. You would not hold anyone else to that standard.
Moreover, that’s why Hamas took hostages; because they knew Israel would feel an obligation to rescue its citizens.
And it was Hamas and the hostages in Hamas’s tunnels, not Gazan civilians. That tells you everything you need to know about who engineered the conflict, and who was trying to end it.
Do you think that there's even a slightest possibility that even some of the civilians killed in Gaza and elsewhere may have, in fact, not been killed because of "Hamas hiding behind civilians" and because the IDF either does not care about killing civilians or indeed may see it as a positive thing? It would certainly be very odd for the both common Israelis and those in the highest echelons of power (Ben-Gvir) to constantly keep spouting bloodthirsty rhetoric and *not* have it show up any way in civilian casualties.
Turkey also received billions in aid from the US and EU. Unlike Israel, Turkey also has formal security guarantees from the US and other NATO members. How many people in the US and Europe protested the ethnic cleansing of Greeks in Northern Cyprus and the colonization of their lands by the Turkish settlers?
But Americans are not the only ones who care much more about what goes on in Palestine than in Sudan or wherever, so an explanation that only applies to them seems unparsimonious.
>deliberately targeted innocents, not either combatants or collateral damage in a defensive war being fought against attempted extermination
Plenty don't see it that way. The narrative that Gaza is an open-air prison camp that Israeli citizens are complicit in perpetuating isn't exactly unpopular (thought I don't expect the other Scott to agree with it).
I think people are upset about the wars in Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
There is possibly some Toxoplasma of Rage effect here. It's uncontroversial that the civil war in Sudan is terrible: I've never seen anybody try to argue that the actions of the RSF (or the SAF) are justified. I'm sure some such people exist, but they're outside my social group.
I don't think most people pay enough attention to Yemen to know about the war. If you think most people in your circle do, ask them about khat hour, and see what they say.
I know about Yemen but I don't know what Khat Hour is. Googling suggests its a dialy social event where politics can be discussed and factions can recruit. Is it something more?
In Syria, the United States had military bases in Syria during the civil war and actively intervened and aided the rebels. Outside of a full-on invasion, I do not know what you want them to protest. This sort of thinking obscures rather than reveals, because you are defaulting to the assumption it is because Israel is Jewish rather than:
- Israel is part of "the first world" and thus held to a higher standard than random African countries
- Israel is actively being aided by the United States, with weapons, etc, being given, whereas nobody in the US is handing over bullets to the Houthis or RSF
- There are far more cameras and recordings of what is happening in Gaza. There was a viral image of satellite-captured mass slaughter in Sudan that got around, getting 15 million views, showing people would be perfectly happy to get upset about what's happening in Sudan - but it was actually a bunch of cows, not genocide victims.
This "Jewish explanation" can't meaningfully explain the large changes in opinions on Israel before and after the war, including in countries with no particular historical antisemitism like Korea and Japan.
It’s much safer and more pleasant to report on Israel during a life or death conflict than it is to report on Syria or Sudan when they’re at peace. This seems like the simplest explanation
Is it just me or does every argument revolve around some sort of ‘moral’ issue? Is it because progressivism is nothing more than a “good person/bad person” ideology?
The whole Gaza thing is so tiresome. All it takes is a simple thought-experiment. Imagine a country the size of Gaza as your neighboring State. Now imagine its occupants are all ISIS/Al-Qaeda terrorists. Would you be advocating for a 2 state solution, removing the walls & to stop the “oppression”?
People -- and not just Jewish people -- also care a lot more about bad things happening _to_ Israel. They also care a lot more about things happening in New York City than in some random US town. Almost as if saturation media coverage and dramatic photos have some effect on people's feelings.
*Some* of them are not similarly upset about much larger numbers killed in other horrible conflicts *because they are not aware of the latter*. (I've seen someone commenting a line chart of the world death rate *ending in 2022* pointing at the COVID uptick at the end saying "You can see Gaza here", and they didn't sound like they were joking. Never underestimate the power of Hanlon's razor.)
Well yeah, but what does any of that have to do with his point? Like he said with the 9/11 example, there are differences in caring about an issue but that comes from other factors
Personally, I am quite upset about Gaza and now Lebanon, and I have been much less upset about ethnic cleansing events (I don’t want to use the g-word here because that is not the kind of debate that, in my opinion, would be worth having over here) of a similar magnitude taking place elsewhere. Being upset is an emotional reaction, but if I have to come up with a reason, I think it’s mainly that Israel is undeniably a first world country and as such it should be held to a high standard. When France engaged in international terrorism in New Zealand I was likewise upset, even if they did not kill anyone. Otherwise there are no rules and it’s a free for all. Killing journalists in deliberate drone strikes, sneaking explosives in pagers… this is first world capability but it’s not coming with first world responsibility. This is not some insurgency butchering people in the jungle with machetes, it’s a nuclear state behaving in such a ruthless and reckless way that it makes you doubt if their leadership is sane.
Tying this blog back to USAID and others on related foreign charity concerns.
I admire the sincerity, intellect, and clarity. That said, I see an unaddressed gap in the general political view. Your views strike me as inconsistent with the Founders (not just on obvious issues of slavery, woman’s suffrage, etc., but) on foundational principle of limited government. I’ve never seen you address this.
At Founding and for much of the 19th century, total government (fed + state + local) was ~2% of GDP. We’re now at ~40%. We’ve shifted from a constitution and government designed to minimize the (federal) government’s role in citizens lives to extremely expansive scopes. Taxes are now so broad-taxation and touch virtually every element of our lives that we can be taxed simply for existing (SCOTUS/Obamacare). If, to the point of your recent posts, we can justify federal spending on international humanitarian aid (not because of leverage for domestic benefit, but simply because it helps international recipients as a good unto itself), there’s effectively no limit on what we can justify spending on. Restated – there’s effectively no limits on tax (type/amount) nor spending (type nor amount).
The Constitution and founding were a bold experiment in minimizing (federal) government's role. Your view may be largely self-consistent with a coherent utilitarian/effective altruist position but doesn’t clearly call out that, vis-à-vis our Founding, this is a revolution and apparently you think the Founders were wrong about limited government.
We can argue various political perspectives’ merits, but the fact that this utilitarian/EA-like story seems so inconsistent with our founding documents strikes me as a partial refutation on its own. American exceptionalism and the success of the Western liberal experiment seems to have a fair amount of truth to them, and if so, seem likely to be tied to a cause. I’d have pinned a large part of that cause to limited government. Perhaps a utilitarian/EA-system could be contended practical, but it has to at least argue against the thought that the shoulders we stand on were attributable to a very contrary perspective.
Am I missing key parts of your thinking here? Have you discussed this elsewhere and rejected it? Are EA’s sidestepping it because it risks framing their views as “anti-American” in a foundational sense?
Would love to hear your clarity and candor on something that otherwise seems a gaping hole in the story.
Largely agree but I'd probably go back even further! Look at the Whiskey Excise Tax (and corresponding rebellion) - It took very little time to start ramping up the taxes. One can argue it was needed revenue source, but the takeaway here is that you can *always* find a justification for taxes. A lot of good to be said about some of the Founding principles but the circle always seems to widen.
The revolution never died. Sure, they may have killed us, but they ain't licked us yet!
(Jokes aside I think there's a very relevant series of essays debating each other from Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke about how much it matters what's been happening for a hundred years.)
>I’d have pinned a large part of that cause to limited government.
The limited government that caused that was almost certainly things like rule of law, not the failure to provide education, health care or police and fire services (a huge pct of the government spending you refer to).
What’s that got to do with the price of charity in China?
There’s nothing wrong with foreign aid in principle. A limited government is perfectly able to send some of its wealth outside the country. Sometimes comparative advantage even demands it.
If it’s a matter of degree—perhaps you’re barking up the wrong tree. Total U.S. foreign aid came out to ~$70B, which is somewhere less than a tenth of the interest payments on our outstanding debt. Those, in turn, are a tiny fraction of GDP, income, outlays, you name it.
Come to think of it, I’m not really convinced that GDP or tax burden really represents anything like limits-of-government. One could imagine a minarchist commune where no member *owns* anything, distributing all income to the collective. It wouldn’t scale easily, but it would be extremely limited. Conversely, we have plenty of historical examples of dictatorships which failed to capture much of their GDP, even when they absolutely trampled natural rights.
The important thing is, as always, consent of the governed. Right now the governed can’t decide between different flavors of populism. One of those flavors performatively shredded an effective, relatively cheap program. You’re witnessing another step in the debate over whether that was irrational or obligatory. I don’t see why that debate needs to go back to the Founding.
Yeah, but the percentage of Americans who are deeply concerned with "limited government" *as a principle* (rather than as an excuse to demand government cease doing *some specific thing* they don't like) is about the same as the fraction of progressives, a bit less than 10%.
Just look at MAGA (about 33% of the population) which really loves all sorts of government intervention, just as long as they see it beneficial to themselves. As Megan McArdle (who really does like the idea of limited government) griped "It has been true for some time that the small-government conservatism that GOP candidates used to tout hasn't much of a constituency in either party."
It seems like you're treating humanitarian aid as exceptional here - if you can justify spending on that, you can justify spending on anything. Why put the division there? Why not say if the government can justify spending on seatbelt enforcement, it can justify spending on anything? Or education? Or a standing millitary?
As for experiments in minimizing federal governemnt's role, we have plenty. Look at South America, for instance. Their federal government is so minimal it doesn't exist at all, and there are only states.
(I fully agree the current tax levels are ridiculously high. But neither side's politicians want to scale down spending.)
Economically, it seems like foreign humanitarian aid (not foreign aid to build defense/self-interest positions, simply humanitarian aid) seems logically as distant from the social contract to form a federal government as possible. If you can find an economically more distant spending provision, then I'd simply like to ask the EA/rationalist crowd if that is also justifiable and simply move the benchmark out to that new point. My point, really, is that this crowd seems to recognize no limits to the scope of government and the power of a majority (supermajority/etc.), and that this is foundationally counter to the principles upon which the government was founded. They should have the intellectual courage to call that out, and say the foundation was wrong (not just for slavery, women's votes, etc.) but foundationally wrong and that they are consciously rejecting those principles.
I think the most useful framework here is the OCEAN/Big Five personality model. What’s termed telescopic philanthropy here tracks with Openness – people take a special interest in immigrants, Palestinians, and others who are different or far away. The thing is that this doesn’t really correlate with other traits, so high-Openness people can be low in conscientiousness or high in neuroticism, making them less pleasant to people in their direct orbit. This doesn’t always happen – again, these traits are largely independent. But with progressives averaging higher Openness and higher Neuroticism, there’s a type that the telescopic altruism critique is getting at.
And with this model, of course, the disconnect is between the larger, society-wide level that high Openness works on and the interpersonal level of Conscientiousness and Neuroticism, not the ingroup/outgroup dynamics of free lunch at American schools/helping children in Gaza.
And notably, trait openness is the strongest OCEAN predictor of politics! Liberals are, unsurprisingly, much more likely to be high in openness. I bet that trend is even stronger if you compared right-populists vs. people on the left.
This is true, but many of my peers worry so much about political and global crisis so much that they become depressed. It is usually beyond their control. If they ocused on building relationships with the people closest to them it would be a net positive for the world imo.
> Conservatives can take heart in a different study in the paper, which gives people a limited supply of 100 “moral units” to distribute.
because as far as I can tell the heatmap plot in fact comes from this same "moral units" study (not a different study in the paper).
Overall, the study seems well-designed, since zero-sumness is central to the anti-telescopic-altruist position. No "microscopic altruist" would object to the life of a distant foreigner being improved in a tradeoff-free way. But there is always a tradeoff: improving the conditions of animals in factory farms increases the price of food for humans; sending aid money to a distant country means not spending that same money to improve lives locally; short-term aid sometimes disincentivizes growth and harms long-term prosperity; etc.
The heatmap plot seems completely reasonable as well. Perhaps max(group_with_nonzero_coefficient) is not the only way to visualize the data, but it seems a decent enough summary statistic.
I'm surprised you are trying to refute this angle by quibbling about the details of the study, rather than owning it. Don't you feel that it is genuinely correct to be much more concerned about helping people in distant moral circles than is typical? Is this not a central tenet of EA/longtermism?
It's a central tenant because the global poor are around 1000x poorer than the median American, not because it was declared by fiat. 5 million dollars is around the threshold where American government institutions can save an American life. With malaria nets, deworming or vitamin a supplementation, it's around 5.5k. If the numbers were reversed, they'd flip their position.
Exactly -- so shouldn't the argument be something like: "western liberals prefer to allocate more aid (vs conservatives' preference) to people at a greater distance from themselves, and this is good + correct because aid given in that fashion is higher leverage"
vs the way it is currently written, which is more like "this study might look at first glance like western liberals prefer to allocate aid more distantly, but if you look at the details..." as though this conclusion were something to be ashamed of
The graph is misleading. Even if you accept the zero sum framing, the vast majority of ppl read it as a sum(coefficients) rather than max(nonzero coefficient). That’s not a quibble
ETA: The comment below yours is someone confused about the graph even after Scott explained it. Sorry but as a data scientist if you make a graph that ~everyone misunderstands at first glance and many misunderstand even after it’s explained, that’s a failure of visualization that’s on you, lol
"this graph is valid and points to an interesting conclusion, but some people misinterpret it at first glance when it appears without context" is as quibbly as it gets
"It isn’t. The heatmap was just a poorly-designed attempt to represent the limit of concern. If the liberal map is “hottest” at animals, that means liberals say animals are worthy of at least some care. If a conservative’s map is “hottest” at friends, that means the conservative only cares about their friends (and doesn’t care at all about countrymen, foreigners, or animals)."
Can someone explain this to me? It seems like Scott is saying that the heat map is saying 2 opposite things. For liberals it means you have some care for X, but for conservatives it means you ONLY care for X? Unless the map is 2 completely different maps I'm not sure how this is an accurate description.
The heat map shows the "limit of concern," i.e. the thing furthest away from the center that the respondents cared about.
So if it says that liberals' "limit of concern" is more likely to be at shellfish, that doesn't mean they don't care about their families. They care about their families and about shellfish, but their families aren't at their "limit."
I *think* the implication is that each dot of heat in the heatmap is a person whose concerns extend up to that point but no further. So among the conservatives surveyed, there were plenty who had concerns for circles 1-3 but not 4+; plenty who had concern for circles 1-4 but not 5+; etc. And a few who cared about 1-8 but not 9+, or 1-9 but not 10+, etc. Among the liberals, there were more who cared about circles 1-8 (but not 9+) or 1-9 (but not 10+), and comparatively fewer who only cared about 1-3 but no higher, or 1-4 but no higher.
>On this page, we would like you to indicate the extent of your moral circle. By moral circle, we mean the circle of people or other entities for which you are concerned about right and wrong done toward them. This depiction demonstrates that people have different types of moral circles. At the innermost circle, some people care about their immediately family only, and at the outermost circle, people care about the entire universe--all things in existence. Please use the following scale and select a location that depicts the extent of your moral circle.
According to the paper the respondents checked yes/no to whether they were concerned with entities in the different circles. Then the authors, for reasons that are entirely opaque, multiplied concerns in the center x 1, the next circle x 2 and so on up to x 16 for things in the outside circle, then added these all up by circle. So while the respondents were *not* assigning weight, the authors *did* assign weights, to make the map. It's a totally obtuse way to display the results.
I usually see the telescopic altruism discourse (and the heat map) around issues of race/migration and violent crime.
The accuser will post a juxtaposition between a "do gooder"/telescopic altruist celebrating how proud they are of refugees Zaid and Fahim* for making good in their new home and joining hte local cricket team (often celebrated by a school, or church group) and then a headline of the two being charged with rape or sexual assault. This is almost always in the UK or Germany.
Then the accuser will point at this and show "see, this suicidal empathy is another example of libs having mental defects in their altruism detectors".
The other example that jumps to mind is that video of the German police officer trying to arrest the vigilante rather than the stabbing migrant at the market, with predictable results.
*a real case, although they were acquitted a year later...
Or the scottish police arresting the 14 year old girl with a knife, rather than the adult males she was trying to defend her 12 year old sister from. With Predictable Consequences Afterwards.
As someone that generally cares about all three: diabetes, Gaza, and the opioid crisis. Perhaps the difference lies in the moral culpability each group has. A woman that started using heroin because a guy in a band offered it to her or a man that can't be bothered to put down the king size fries and chips are both way different cases than the child born next to Israel.
Even if the former cases got that way because of economic opportunities removed by coastal elites.
Most arguments about telescopic philanthropy are actually about "Billions for space, pennies for the hungry" signs from 1969. Yes, Your countrymen are fed, but how much are you investing in their hopes and dreams? That's an infinite money sink and there are often decisions between feeding starving children outside your country or creating amazing projects that make life more meaningful for the people now living there.
Cultivating ambition and glimmering dreams in your population is an infinite moneysink, and you have to make the decision on how much care you want to give in that respect versus how much you want to spend on basic subsistence for people a world away.
I love that analogy because, well, that sign was really dumb. Not only the NASA budget was always a tiny fraction of the welfare one, but the greatest expansion of welfare post-FDR came at the height of the Space Race and during the heyday of state mecenatism.
Almost like Scott is right and a society that believes in itself enough to go to space will believe in itself enough to systemally help its least fortunate, while a society of recriminating, petty, spiteful "protest voters" will do neither.
I strongly agree with this post. And suspect it's not correctly applying the charitable principle.
A weird note, and I might be shooting down a blind psychological alley here. But the same thing happened when I had my kid. Before I was pretty content to disagree but try and understand where people were coming from, give them the benefit of the doubt, etc. After I had much stronger emotional responses to evil people doing evil things, and was much less interested in trying to figure out whether the evil things they were doing were actually evil. The reaction to people screwing up the world because they were misguided went from annoyance to visceral disgust, essentially overnight.
An obvious point about the Gaza example is that the people angry at libs caring about the people in Gaza instead of their friends and neighbors do not really give the impression of wanting the lib to care about their friends and neighbors, just as long as they stop caring about the people of Gaza (because that caring leads them to take positions contrary to Israeli policy and the Western policy to support Israel, etc.) Whether this leads to the reallocation of "units of caring", insofar as they even exist, to some other target, is ephemeral.
I'm not entirely sure if that's really the case. As I see it, the "anti-telescopic altruism "people (usually right-wing conservatives) feel that those who care about Gaza etc. to be "disloyal" to what they feel should be their ingroup (e.g. their own nation and its citizen, along with other culturally close (other people from Western countries in the Western World) people), and thus they are angry at what they feel is a betrayal of the social contract by the people who don't show loyalty to those who are supposed to be closer to them in the view of the "anti-telescopic altruism people".
“When I look out in the world, I see more evidence for the correlated altruism hypothesis than the telescopic one.” I think a lot of these arguments are based on anecdotal evidence that for many on the Right, family members on the Left are meaner and less helpful to them than family members on the Right, so they look at these graphs and assume that everyone on the Left is mean to all their family members. In actuality, the Left are probably very kind to their other Left Wing Family members, but they don’t see that happening.
You can go above and switch every left and right around, and you’ll see how many on the left think that everyone on the right is mean and uncaring to everyone, including their closest family members, even though they probably help family on the Right.
"Impartial beneficence... seems an important component of a broadly cosmopolitan moral outlook. But it fits uneasily with common sentimentalist intuitions about moral virtue. For example, we typically think that a good person must be sensitive to those around them. We expect the good person to be motivated by moral emotions, such as sympathy and empathy, which are most easily engaged by those who are nearby or otherwise salient. But the most objectively pressing moral needs tend not to be found on our doorsteps. Impartial beneficence may thus direct us to override our natural moral sentiments in pursuit of the greater good. Is doing (the most) good thereby in tension with being a good person? The challenge may be amplified by considering the popular adage, “charity begins at home.” We may well look askance at a moral point of view that seems to uphold Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, with her neglected family and “telescopic philanthropy”—able to “see nothing nearer than Africa”—as a paragon of virtue. There would at least seem something a bit morally awkward or uncomfortable about ignoring the homeless on our doorstep so as to instead donate a greater amount to global poverty relief.
On the other hand, it would seem excessively complacent to just assume that our evolved psychologies and emotional dispositions are entirely above reproach. It isn’t as though we could plausibly hold that needy individuals who are salient to us are thereby objectively more deserving of aid, or that those who are out of sight thereby deserve to be neglected. This may be taken to suggest that the traditional conception of virtue requires modification, and that true benevolence may at times require us to override or redirect our natural sympathies. Or so I will argue in this paper. The challenge is to develop a conception of moral virtue that fits with a modern cosmopolitan moral outlook, without thereby valorizing the neglectful, callous character of Mrs. Jellyby."
To steelman the idea of telescope altruism, I think people have lots of trouble being altruistic to those who are close to them and have bad/threatening/gross qualities. When we deal with people in near mode we often have reactions that overwhelm our altruism. Indeed, I see friends on the left who find it easier to feel altruism for theocratic make chauvinists across the globe than republicans at home. Same way it is often easier to feel bad for the romantic troubles of distant men than that gross creepy guy (even if you know intellectually they are perfectly nice) or feel sympathy for the elephant man but not the woman with warts all over at your job.
I think this is almost the opposite of what the telescope altruists usually have in mind -- it's more just that in near mode other reactions can overwhelm altruism -- but worth mentioning.
There is a conversation in The Brother’s Karamasov where Ivan despairs to Alyosha that perhaps one can love humanity in the abstract, but the real human is unlovable. “It’s exactly one’s neighbors, in my estimation, that it’s impossible to love, though one might love one’s more distant neighbors.” “To love a man, it’s necessary that he be hidden from view; once he’s shown his face, the love vanishes.”
Nemo iudex in causa propria. Ultimately a society in which everyone cares for some comfortably-removed individual enough to help them is better off than a society which talks a big deal about loving your neighbor but then gets the ick and y'know, your neighbor should learn to help themselves.
I also disagree with the characterization of pro-Palestine protests (liberals protested in favor of more conservative social groups much closer to home, for much lesser mistreatment, eg American Indians) but overall agree with your point
As someone who only donates to GiveWell recommended charities that go to the third world, I will say this in defense of critiques of my behavior: it's easier to personally evaluate the effect of your actions on more local causes that you can observe.
An alternative interpretation is that since "other-ism" demands concern for the least advantaged and most distant from one's self, rather than admit to being hypocritically immoral and that the lib is behaving more consistently and is more true to a shared moral code, the anti-lib deflects to whataboutism rather than challenge the actual premise both sides are acting on.
Son: OK, here's an example. Charley's dad knows somebody who owns a tenement. And he never lets a family with children in. He asks everybody whether they're planning to have a child. But in his room he has lots of pictures of a huge family in South America, where he always sends money, and they write to him. He knows some kind of monk there.
Father: That'll be not a monk but a catholic padre who cares for the poor, and they are far, far worse off than some family here.
Son: May be. But Charley says his father says, what he does is really schizo.
Father: That's not schizo, but logical. The nearer your "loved neighbours" are, the more they get on your nerves. And that's where the natural instinct of self preservation kicks in. When you're older, you will notice that, too.
1) that's a guy who's probably been burnt by someone with children before (landlords have Stories, boy howdy).
2) it's a lot cheaper to save children in the 3rd world than children in America. Always will be. I fully support letting children emigrate to Mexican orphanages, if they consent to such things (where they can learn a trade). it's gotta be better than living in cages!
Yes, and I agree with the father that what he does is logical. It's more convenient to do your good deeds as far away as possible.
Whether you were burnt by children before or you just don't like the noise they make, you are not required to support children on your doorstep just because you support children in another continent.
I think the average person in a developed country would have a much easier time helping the homeless in their city than in a far away country, just because of proximity.
However it is much easier to care about the people from far away, because nobody will question not helping. If someone cares about those nearby they end up having to actually help.
I guess the main argument is that homeless people in poor country may only need money to raise their SoL by considerable amount, while homeless people in rich country may have other things holding them back other than money. I don't know if this is true, but I've seen this argument a lot.
It may be true. If the person saying it has actually moved to a developed country to go use their money and connections to help the poor I would have a lot of respect for them.
If not then I would say it's a convenient belief that allows them to feel good while helping neither those at home nor far away.
Every time the subject of PEPFAR comes up I think about how there are about 170 million working adults in America, so a billion federal dollars is really just $5 from each of them. For the typical taxpayer, PEPFAR comes out to maybe $20 once you adjust for the progressivity of the system.
Do a lot of conservatives genuinely think that it's morally reprehensible to care so much about Africans that you're willing to pickpocket $20 from your countrymen to save their lives? Probably not. I think for the most part, average people have a poor idea of what the relevant tradeoffs really are, and would expect more serious harm to come to them if they allow the conniving telescopic empathy libs to get their way.
The majority of people are unwilling to pay a dollar a month more on the electricity bill to fight climate change so paying 20 dollars to help hypothetical people sounds widely unpopular.
Can't speak for conservatives, but as a right-winger: Yes, that is absolutely reprehensible. The duty of the American government is to the American people; that is its raison d'etre. Sacrificing the interests of the American people (without their consent) to serve the interests of foreigners, in even the smallest and most highly leveraged degree, is wrong.
Your perspective only makes sense on the view that governments are moral agents in exactly the same sense that individuals are. But that is not the right-wing view at all.
You missed one major criticism of "telescopic altruism"—that "telescopic altruists" don't give enough attention to the effectiveness of their attempts to help far-away people, precisely because they are easy to forget about. Think about Western "liberals" who have supported far-away socialist revolutionaries from Russia to Cambodia out of supposed concern for the suffering of their oppressed peoples, only to turn a blind eye to the suffering and oppression under the new regimes. It's not the most widespread criticism of the phenomenon online today, but I do remember reading it on Unqualified Reservations at some point. It doesn't really serve the ends of conservatives today because the natural conclusion is not to stop caring about foreigners but rather to care about them even more attentively.
This is actually a serious problem, because it is much more difficult to evaluate the success of your efforts when they take place far away. When I spend $10 to buy my child an ice cream, I can immediately see the smile on her face (and perhaps measure her increasing weight in the future, there are tradeoffs). When I spend $10 on mosquito nets, I need to run studies and trust third-party sources (or visit Africa in person, perhaps). When I spend $10 to improve the lives of far-future shrimp, what can I do ? At some point, I'm just spending $10 based on little more than faith and hope.
When enough people spend money on mosquito nets, you should be able to track the movement of anti-malarial medicine, right? That is arguably easier, and quicker, than tracing the equivalent amount of smiles (which you have to be right there for, as they're fleeting, and then the kid is crying again).
I can track the number of smiles by myself, armed with little more than a notepad. I can't track the movement of global anti-malarial medicine disbursements by myself; to do that, I'd need to collate data from several large organizations and determine to what extent (if any) it is trustworthy.
It was my understanding that most of those are publically available documents (from say Merck/etc) -- I was speaking more in terms of "how much is made per year" rather than "how much is getting disbursed" (which is a trickier problem to measure).
Yes, it's still several large organizations, but a quick google is a quick google.
Right, I can quickly google a lot of things, but the complexity increases exponentially. Can I trust Google ? Can I trust the data published by these organizations, who demonstrably a). are large and unwieldy and b). have an agenda of their own ? The answer isn't "yes" or "no", but a number between 0 and 1. Sure, I can now apply some Bayesian reasoning and maybe get a coherent answer -- but it's a lot more difficult and less certain than counting up tally marks in my notebook.
Now, consider evaluating the well-being of billions of shrimp hundreds of years from now...
Given that the producers would rather not show a decrease in money-making medicines, I'd lean towards "more trustworthy" -- but far be it from me to say Stop when someone is putting uncertainty into their calculations!
(Good lord, I suggested the Americans might not believe the Ukrainian reports of how well their drones were doing, and were thus doing a "test drive in the Iranian theater" before buying... and people started saying "but the Ukrainians wouldn't exaggerate that!" -- always there is uncertainty!)
Ok do you see the smile, but do you also the glycemic spike? /s
In all seriousness toh, I think the icecream example is a perfect encapsulation of how people conflate two very different axes: near vs far altruism, and emotional vs systematic/spreadsheet altruism. If we're going by spreadsheet altruism, it's not particularly obvious that buying icecream to a kid who, by mere virtue of being an US kid, is at elevated risk of obesity, is a good idea. If we go by emotional altruism, every middle upper class kid who went to volunteer in Africa has plenty of pictures with smiley children (even if their flight ticket alone could have paid for locals to do a lot more work and make many more children smile).
I find that those willing to support socialism abroad also support it at home. So again there isnt a misplaced overweight on foreigners. Their views on socialism can be debated empirically with evidence from both foreign and domestic experiments. These ppls problem is not telescopes, its poor analytical skills.
Furthermore, opposing their domestic socialist agenda is far more important than opposing their foreign agenda. Right my fellow anti socialist non telescope fallacy comitting compatriot?
I missed the Waytz et al. study when it came out, but the critique here seems warranted. The study is basically collapsing complex, context-dependent moral reasoning into a small number of dimensions — an intrinsically lossy compression. "Correlated altruists" seem more common than "telescopic altruists" to me anyway. I'm less confident about the suggestion that liberals make more of a mess at home though, although I believe I understand the intuition.
What all of these puzzles cry out for is an understanding of mechanisms. So much of what we do in psychology, sociology, economics, and law is story-telling supported by thin slices of data about the behavior of specific people (or groups) at specific times. I know it's hard to do, but I believe we would all be better served by thinking through what the actual mechanisms behind a theory of "telescopic altruism" (or "correlated altruism") might be.
Biology is, after all, also a complicated field that ultimately (and hopefully) grounds whatever we believe about human behavior. And in biology (chemistry, physics, math) an understanding of mechanism is not negotiable. Even if we can't be certain, we should at least try to be definite.
I am a huge fan of your writing and thinking, but disagree with this *hard*. I have known too many people - and, if I am honest, I have been one of those people - for whom “right action” is only possible toward people in in theory, toward the idea of people. Being kind to people close to you requires things like patience, forgiveness, and humility, attention to a human face; being kind to people in theory can be done from the safe remove of your laptop as long as you have time and/or money and a sense of your own moral righteousness.
I'm not disagreeing with this post, but FWIW there is some evidence for *a variety of* this effect. People who are full-time professional caregivers who need to use a lot of empathy in their work sometimes seem to appear "drained" and less able to turn their empathy on in their home life:
> Empathy can be emotionally wearying, especially in the case of distressing emotions or situations. Medical caregivers for example may need to suppress empathy in order to avoid burnout.[69] It seems people only have so much empathy to give, and so they need to ration it. If you use up your empathy at work (or in fretting over the benighted people of Borrioboola-Ghâ)*, you might not have any left for your family.[70]
[69] Ezekiel Gleichgerrcht & Jean Decety “The Costs of Empathy among Health Professionals” in J. Decety, ed. (2012) Empathy: From bench to bedside p. 255
[70] J. Halbesleben, et al. “Too Engaged? A conservation of Resources View of the Relationships Between Work Engagement and Work Interference with Family” Journal of Applied Psychology 94.6 (2009)
>If there’s a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven’t met them
There are in fact parents who endanger their children by bringing kids to very dangerous “protests”=riots or by getting in fights with law enforcement at said “protests” and leaving their children orphaned. I guess “bad parents exist” isn’t news, but these are some clear examples of people who take their supposed duty to strangers more seriously than their obvious duty to their children.
How do you track cases of child abuse across states when the legal definitions and de facto standards for enforcement and who counts as a mandatory reporter all vary so much?
I'm sure there is correlation between compassion to people far away and compassion to close ones. But it is also true that people tend become more parochial and less idealistic as they get children, family and other dependents. People working hard to support family and relatives and people donating 10% of their income to charity should both be celebrated.
The issue here is that for the first two issues, these are people imposing costs on one group of people to benefit another group, neither of which they know. The school lunch people want taxpayers to pay for the lunches they like. The Gaza protestors want Israelis to pay the cost of being bombed or tortured to death in tunnels instead of fighting back, they're certainly not volunteering to do it themselves.
The reason this is important is that people setting policy for other people's tradeoffs off faraway signals tend to be both bad at it and biased in favor of visible misery, which creates some awful incentives about trying to look visibly miserable to strangers.
(There's some excuse for that with animal welfare, since animals can't speak for themselves, and arguably for school lunches since kids can't vote and the ones who need school lunches often have neglectful parents who won't vote in their interests. But these are rare exceptions).
It's telling that the exception here (the ea supporting bednets and paying for them himself) is usually also the only one who's actually done the research on being cost effective. That's what you'd expect for a case of legitimately caring rather than empty virtue signalling. I'll generalize this to cases where people have done research or actually have a plan that could work, but most cases aren't this.
Worse, it create awful incentives to make other people try to look visibly miserable to strangers.
Then you appropriate the money not only because you want it for yourself, but because otherwise it might make the other people look less visibly miserable, and that's your cash cow.
We care far more when innocent people are killed by others (be they murders or massacres) then we do about people dying by suicide or opioid overdoses or voluntary euthanasia.
We also care more about young people dying preventable deaths than about old people dying of old age diseases which is unavoidable.
I think when I think about this kind of stuff part of what sticks out to me is that what I'm really thinking about is failure states of the positioning. So for non-failure states, imagine:
1. A liberal rationalist EA guy who gives his 10% to people he doesn't know, but doesn't think this absolves him of duties of compassion and help to people he can see. He doesn't do the hobbyist low/no contact thing, helps friends and family who are in trouble, etc.
2. A conservative religious guy who is very good to those near him and considers that his primary duty (those are the people assigned to him, so to speak) but who also has at least some level of care for those distant, gives to charity, etc.
Then there's moderate failure cases:
1. A liberal rationalist EA guy who gives his 10% to people he doesn't know, considers utilitarianism satisfied, and has no significant motivating morality for those in need near him.
2. A conservative religious guy who takes care of his family and those he can see really well, but has no concern at all for people elsewhere he can't physically see and interact with.
And extreme failure cases:
1. A liberal rationalist EA guy who doesn't give at all, near or far, but who knows exactly how those who do give are doing it wrong, tells them, and considers his moral duties satisfied.
2. A conservative religious guy who states he doesn't care at all about people who are far away but who on examination turns out to not care about people close to him in any tangible way either.
And everything in-between. I think when people talk about other groups with the goal of criticizing them, they are mostly looking at failure states.
There's a sense in which things would be better if everything started off with "I'm not talking about the problem with liberals, I'm talking about *problem liberals* ", but it's usually not going to happen. Instead, you get something like a conservative talking about a liberal who takes no action to help others at all outside of the tiny effect their tribal-affiliation-satisfying vote has on tax policy, or the liberal talking about the conservative who only helps people when he expects that help to selfishly improve his local environment.
I think ideally nobody wants either failure state, that we should instinctively separate out "helps local/allies, helps distant/enemies-or-unassociated, that these two things should have separate budgets that don't interact. Like you don't want "gives money to mosquito nets" to pull from a zero-sum budget that also includes "will help you move" or "feels compassion and will listen and offer advice".
It's just tough to mesh these things when the discussion around it is so heavily this-is-how-I-talk-about-my-enemies-to-make-them-look-like-villains. I want people like me (local good-and-duties oriented) to think more about souls that aren't near them, but "you are bad for focusing locally" will never get me to do it, in isolation.
> Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?
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The problem is that the vast majority of people who are outraged by those killed in Gaza show near-complete indifference in cases where far greater numbers of people are dying, but where the killing is done by Muslims or left-wing governments. This suggests that the driving force behind the supposedly altruistic attitude is not actual compassion for Palestinians. For most, it’s solidarity with a global left-wing agenda or simple animosity toward Israel or Jews. For many American Jews, however, it is the desire to demonstrate a lack of ethnic bias and show unwavering commitment to the current blue-tribe agenda.
The problem with most people having ulterior motives for supporting a supposedly altruistic cause is that their efforts tend to be optimized toward those ulterior motives rather than the stated goals. In the case of Palestinians, international support has often ended up severely hurting rather than improving their quality of life. In fact, the reason that Hamas organized the October 7 attack was specifically to trigger Israeli reprisals, which would in turn provoke international condemnation of Israel. The 50,000 people killed in Gaza would most likely still be alive if not for “altruistic” people who claim to care about them.
Similar types of problems are commonly observed with other charity projects driven by telescopic altruism.
I think the real criticism of the telescopic altruists isn’t that they are inherently more evil (though some lazy commentators often make that claim), it’s that putting telescopic altruists in charge of society will result in civilization careening towards the repugnant conclusion.
Take, for example, refugees from an unspecified war-torn East African country. Bringing these refugees into the United States would not be good for net contributions to the public purse, social cohesion, or really much of anything the native population cares about. However, it would be really really good for the refugees, as they now get to live in a nice first-world country with generous welfare and public funding instead of a war-torn malaria-ridden failed state. The lives of the original citizens of America are worse, but that’s “okay”, because even scaled by a whatever proportional ratio you give countrymen over foreigners, net utility has been increased.
Its perfectly ethical to spend your own money on helping people far away. And its extremely respectable to make sacrifices to help others.
For the government to spend its citizens money and demand sacrifices of its citizens, that requires a mandate from the people and I don't think they have one.
I don't just mean if you got the votes you can do what you want. I think that if people voted against the other guy and now you get to do whatever. That's a failure of the system itself. You should only be getting to spend people's money if they actually voted for your policies.
>For the government to spend its citizens money and demand sacrifices of its citizens, that requires a mandate from the people and I don't think they have one
Little Librarian was responding to a post about "refugees from an unspecified war-torn East African country", so it seems probable that "or the government to spend its citizens money and demand sacrifices of its citizens" was in reference to such a scenario.
"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
Okay. So is a liberal or conservative more likely to speak politely to the waiter serving him? To tip generously?
Is a liberal or conservative more likely to greet by name the guy coming to empty his office trash can at the end of the day?
Is a liberal or conservative woman more likely to be kind to the dweeby coworker trying to screw up the courage to embarrass himself?
I a liberal or conservative more likely to invite an immigrant family to share Thanksgiving Day dinner?
My point isn't even that conservatives win on these metrics. My point is that none of these are actually measuring what people are trying to get at by the concept of "telescopic altruism". Which, as an aside, I had never heard of. Steve Sailer uses the term "concentric circles of loyalty" https://www.unz.com/isteve/concentric-circles-of-loyalty/.
This quote from Thomas Babington Macaulay is particularly insightful. Other Brits making similar criticisms of moral universalism in the same era were Dickens ("telescopic philanthropy") and Thackeray.
The left has an underdog fixation, it’s the core of their morality. They believe moral concern should be based on need, and America, which has tons of resources, should be criticized for not using theirs for others. This can be pushed very far as agenda or policy, and failure to live up to perceived moral responsibilities constantly puts them in a state of bad faith with their own powerful figures and institutions.
The right’s alternative to intensity of need driving priority of concern is localism, and the circles of interest. It’s not really about whether the left gives a shit about others next door, although one could imagine a leftist seeing American problems as first world and petty versus the *real* problems elsewhere.
Undifferentiated communalism is legitimately a bad moral model of responsibility. Being a responsible, social adult shouldnt mean you have to keep up with and help everyone, that’s unrealistic and stupid and puts you at the mercy if people who report news. Other societies should be dealing with their own issues, not adapting to the availability of western altruism.
>The left has an underdog fixation, it’s the core of their morality. They believe moral concern should be based on need, and America, which has tons of resources, should be criticized for not using theirs for others.
Reminds me of Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary (basically a very senior civil servant) under Tony Blair, saying the purpose of the British government should be to promote global welfare, not the welfare of British people specifically.
Plus one for this analysis: left, moral concern based on need; right, moral concern based on circles of interest.
The one thing I’d add is that for me (on the right) moral concern =\= proper allocation of resources. I have a proper moral concern for foreigners or shrimp, which includes how I should treat them and how I think others should treat them. But I have no obligation to provide for them, and no obligation to take on the role of their protector.
This is more or less what I was thinking. Mainly that right-leaning individuals, as per Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, are more concerned about loyalty and authority than left-leafing ones, who are mostly concerned about fairness and care/harm. Thus it looks like a "betrayal" to rightists if those in authority and others who they feel should be concerned more about who they feel should be seen as being their "own people" (e.g. citizens of the same nation), are (seemingly) more concerned about those who are not part of that same "in-group", such as people in other nations. The left, because its moral intuitions rest on less factors (mainly care and fairness according to Haidt at least), tend to not see a major problem with this since they tend to be universalist in their POV anyway, and see the right's feel of "betrayal" as something more akin to Xenophobia and/or racisms.
Right. That doesn’t factor in the motivating drives of being responsible for yourself or your people, which are absolutely necessary. Imagine trying to care for people who don’t feel any need to care for themselves, or claim to be wronged when any little thing doesn’t go as expected. The right does those things, “clings” to tribalism, because without it, the basic expectation of responsible behavior is unsustainable.
Scott, this is mostly a strawman. You define telescopic altruism in such an extreme form that it only exists if someone cares more about foreigners than their own family. But the serious version of the critique is about revealed priorities under tradeoff.
It is easy and costless to say you care about everyone and everything. The real question is what happens when concern for a distant cause conflicts with proximate goods or obligations. At that point, there are clearly people willing to accept meaningful local costs for the sake of a faraway conflict. One can argue that this is morally correct in some cases. But it is not true that the pattern simply does not exist. There was an entire left-Democrat movement devoted to this kind of thinking less than two years ago.
Agreed, revealed preference under scarcity is the real issue.
Espoused caring and revealed preference caring are not the same thing, and conflating them is the central error in this piece.
Espoused caring is real. But revealed preferences under genuine scarcity aren't the same mechanism operating at different distances — they're qualitatively different things that happen to share a label.
The moral question worth arguing about isn't whether distant caring exists. It's what weight it should carry under genuine scarcity. A good model for human revealed preference caring under scarcity approximates as a direct function of Reciprocity, Interaction, Similarity (experiential, genetic, cultural), and Aesthetic Appreciation. In humans, caring ≈ f(RISA).
Singer and Communism share a core failure: building systems that ignore this basic fact about human beings. Ideologies that mistake espoused caring for revealed preference caring when designing institutions don't just get the philosophy wrong — history is fairly clear about what happens next.
That last graphic, showing per-capita child abuse or neglect cases by state, shows a strong correlation with rural population distributions. Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Alaska, West Virginia are all heavily-rural states; so are Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Indiana; both Michigan and Illinois have urban metros in one corner and then rural belts larger than a lot of whole states; etc.
But then Massachusetts and to a lesser degree New York State don't fit the above correlation at all....something sociologically different going on the Northeast maybe?
Surely the problem with the Mrs Jellyby's is not whether they care but what they actually do. Mrs Jellyby spend huge amounts of effort on stuff she couldn't really help with while ignoring those she could. She was an example of a massively ineffective altruist when the means to be an effective one (on a less heroic scale) were right in front of her (and in danger of falling into the fireplace). So the accusation against people who care about the Gazans (apart from the suspicion they didn't seem to care about the people killed on 7 September) is not that they wouldn't care if the same thing happened to their fellow citizens, it is that they don't actually do stuff that is available for them to do right in front of them.
It feels like you're doing something sneaky here by using telescopic altruism as a springboard to argue against a core tenet of conservative values. I don't know whether concerns about telescopic altruism are actually as naive as what you've presented here (probably, it's the internet after all), but the framing feels pretty bad faith, like you're arguing against a straw man.
Telescopic altruism seems like a vessel for 'sphere of influence' type thinking. Moral units are the wrong measure because morality isn't scarce, it's our attention that's limited. There's an opportunity cost for the attention you spend overseas, and it's not as simple as discrete, fungible units of attention.
Global geopolitical issues are fundamentally low-touch and hard to reason about; the information ecology is typically indirect, low-signal and engineered for limbic capture. My friends that seem deeply concerned with far-flung events tend to have perceptibly worse mental health (anxiety, depression, etc.). Their news feeds function as malignant brain worms, rooting in their consciousness and inducing persistent low-key dread.
Ideally, broadly-scoped empathy would inspire people to take action, but it doesn't seem to work that way in practice most of the time. Anecdotally, people who compulsively empathize with strangers are more easily captured by sensationalist news media that parasitizes their attention, leeching their sense of empowerment and decreasing their overall agency.
There is something empowering/immunizing about the belief that it is actually morally superior in some sense to pay attention first-and-foremost to that which is more immediate.
Personally I think the Israel-Palestine conflict proves the opposite of what you say. Palestine was an Arab Muslim country, and had been for hundreds of years, but then Jewish people started immigrating, initially peacefully, but by the 1940s they were numerous enough to take control and set up their own Jewish state, which they did. The previous inhabitants were driven out and, if we may trust progressive claims, herded into a giant open-air prison where they're denied their human rights and periodically subjected to genocide. In other words, Israel-Palestine is exactly the sort of thing people are worried about when they talk about a "Great Replacement" in a Western context. And how do progressives generally react to this sort of talk? "Why do you care so much about whiteness? Sounds kinda racist if you ask me. And white countries have done bad things in the past, so maybe they deserve to be replaced. And besides, who really is 'indigenous' anyway? If you go back far enough, aren't we all descended from immigrants?" IOW, progressives support Palestinian Muslims' right to a homeland run by and for Palestinian Muslims, whilst denying that any such right exists for white Westerners -- just the sort of double-standard people are referring to when they complain of telescopic altruism.
It wasn't a matter of Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting until Jews suddenly became numerous enough to overthrow the Arab state. For one thing, Palestine hadn't been under Muslim rule since Britain took over the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1917. For another, there had been rising ethnic violence in Palestine since a few years after Britain took over and Jewish immigration began in earnest, and as far as I can tell the violence was first instigated by Arabs. And the Palestine War didn't start because Jews outnumbered Arabs, it started because Britain withdrew from the region and left a power vacuum. If we can draw any lessons from the Israel-Palestine conflict, I would say they are "colonialism tends to leave a region worse off than it was previously" and "starting ethnic conflicts is a bad idea."
I see no reason to think that current waves of immigration into America will be any different from previous ones -- the immigrants live mostly peacefully, some Americans spend a few decades panicking about how those filthy Papists/Italians/Chinamen are going to overrun our civilization, and then cultural exchange works its magic and everyone forgets they ever had a problem with that group.
> IOW, progressives support Palestinian Muslims' right to a homeland run by and for Palestinian Muslims, whilst denying that any such right exists for white Westerners
I can't speak for other liberals, but I support Palestinian Muslims' and white Westerners' right to the exact same things: protection from human rights violations, and a government that represents their interests. I don't particularly care about the race or religion of the people in that government.
>It wasn't a matter of Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting until Jews suddenly became numerous enough to overthrow the Arab state.
It's true, my two-sentence summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simplified matters and omitted a lot of nuance, but I don't think it affects the point I was making.
>I see no reason to think that current waves of immigration into America will be any different from previous ones -- the immigrants live mostly peacefully, some Americans spend a few decades panicking about how those filthy Papists/Italians/Chinamen are going to overrun our civilization, and then cultural exchange works its magic and everyone forgets they ever had a problem with that group.
That's a bad counter-example for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that the policies used to make previous generations of immigrants assimilate -- drastically reducing immigration for several decades and applying strong social pressure to make minority groups adopt the norms and culture of the majority -- are roundly denounced as racist by modern-day progressives.
>I can't speak for other liberals, but I support Palestinian Muslims' and white Westerners' right to the exact same things: protection from human rights violations, and a government that represents their interests. I don't particularly care about the race or religion of the people in that government.
And what if the Palestinians said "Well, we do care about the race and religion of the people in our government. We want them to all be Palestinian Muslims like us"? Would you support their right to such a government? What if white Frenchmen or Germans said the same?
I think the differences are important. In particular, I think it matters that the government of Mandatory Palestine wasn't replaced or overthrown by Jewish immigrants. They left. Since America isn't a colony, it's highly unlikely the US government will ever do the same, no matter how many immigrants arrive or where they're from.
>drastically reducing immigration for several decades and applying strong social pressure to make minority groups adopt the norms and culture of the majority
As far as I can tell, all the immigration restrictions we had in the 1800s only affected non-whites. (And illegal immigration was common, just like today.) The white Catholics the Know-Nothings were so worried about poured across our borders with no restrictions. And the social pressure can't have worked that well, since their descendants are mostly still Catholic.
>Would you support their right to such a government?
If Palestine were a democracy, the people could vote for whomever they wanted. If everyone they ever elected was a Palestinian Muslim, so be it. Same with France and Germany. In the phrase "by and for," it's the "for" part that I really object to. When a state claims to be run by and for ethnicity X, it usually means that people who are not members of ethnicity X will have their human rights violated to varying degrees.
>I think the differences are important. In particular, I think it matters that the government of Mandatory Palestine wasn't replaced or overthrown by Jewish immigrants. They left.
A big part of the reason they left was that it was getting too hard to keep a lid on all the constant ethnic conflict. And of course, without Jewish immigration to Palestine, the result of them leaving (when they eventually did) would have been a Palestinian state, not a Jewish state.
>As far as I can tell, all the immigration restrictions we had in the 1800s only affected non-whites.
>And the social pressure can't have worked that well, since their descendants are mostly still Catholic.
Yes, even in a situation much more conducive to assimilation than the present, assimilation efforts were only partly successful. That should make us more wary of current and future mass migration, not less.
>In the phrase "by and for," it's the "for" part that I really object to. When a state claims to be run by and for ethnicity X, it usually means that people who are not members of ethnicity X will have their human rights violated to varying degrees.
Of course, one way of avoiding that problem would be to not bring in loads of people from different ethnicities.
>A big part of the reason they left was that it was getting too hard to keep a lid on all the constant ethnic conflict.
No, they were always going to eventually leave. According to the League of Nations, Britain would only control Palestine "until such time as [it is] able to stand on its own." (Which obviously never happened.)
Also, something I should have mentioned in my previous post: one of the very last things that happened before Britain left Palestine was the United Nations Partition Plan, which would either displace or place under Jewish rule most of the Arabs living in the territory. Again, that wasn't a result of Jews outnumbering and outvoting or overthrowing Arabs (they did not outnumber Arabs at the time). That was imposed on the region by other governments.
Nativist panic about immigration to America predates the Immigration Act of 1924 by many decades.
>That should make us more wary of current and future mass migration, not less.
Why? None of the Know-Nothings' dire predictions came to pass.
>Of course, one way of avoiding that problem would be to not bring in loads of people from different ethnicities.
That didn't help the German Jews, or the Tutsi, or the [insert ethnic group from former Yugoslavia], or...
Just preventing immigration of different ethnicities won't prevent ethnic violence. All it means is that people will kill each other over smaller genetic and cultural differences.
>No, they were always going to eventually leave. According to the League of Nations, Britain would only control Palestine "until such time as [it is] able to stand on its own." (Which obviously never happened.)
They were eventually going to leave, but the reason they left as and when they did was influenced by local ethnic conflicts.
>Again, that wasn't a result of Jews outnumbering and outvoting or overthrowing Arabs (they did not outnumber Arabs at the time).
Yes, you don't need an absolute majority to dominate a region; a sufficiently determined and organised minority can do it as well. Again, this doesn't actually affect the point I was making.
>Nativist panic about immigration to America predates the Immigration Act of 1924 by many decades.
OK, and?
>Why? None of the Know-Nothings' dire predictions came to pass.
Some of them did: for example, immigrant communities really did bring problems with organised crime (the Mafia) and political corruption (Tammany Hall). And they were generally coming from societies which were more functional, and more similar to the US, than modern third-world countries.
>That didn't help the German Jews, or the Tutsi, or the [insert ethnic group from former Yugoslavia], or...
Yes, ethnic conflicts can happen even where the ethnicities in question have lived there for a long time. That's no reason to import ethnic conflicts to places which don't currently have them.
>Just preventing immigration of different ethnicities won't prevent ethnic violence. All it means is that people will kill each other over smaller genetic and cultural differences.
The rate of ethnic conflicts is not uniform across countries, so this is obviously untrue.
> Palestine was an Arab Muslim country, and had been for hundreds of years
There had literally never been a sovereign Palestinian state. A series of foreign empires had controlled the area going all the way back to the earlier Jewish sovereignty.
An Arab Muslim region, then. It doesn't really change the main point, which is that you had a group immigrating there and eventually getting so numerous that they were able to become dominant over the previous inhabitants.
This post, though useful, does not actually address the accusation of telescopic altruism in real life. In actual use the context in which this is nearly always used is right-wingers in the white world accusing left-wingers in the white world of helping the colored world and its scions in the white at the expense of the prosperity and/or existence of the white world and the white race as a collective (i.e. it's not about individual whites). This is the actually existing context for "telescopic altruism."
I don't think conservatives in real life are actually against telescopic altruism in general. For example, concern about issues affecting the other side of the Atlantic (depending on if the conservative is American or European), other people's children being surgically transgenerated, and of course abortion are all issues that would seem to belong to this concept, but which are never understood through the lens of telescopic altruism. This is because it's not a real thing that people think about in other situations.
The idea of "Telescopic altruism" is totally irrelevant at all times and places that are not a right-winger accusing left-wing whites of betraying white (racial) civilization. Thus, all attempts to argue about it in general are missing the point. Of course, many conservatives who use this concept probably are not aware of this fact.
Do you think American right-wingers actually care that much about the "white race"? I didn't think that was a mainstream concern since the 1970s at the latest.
>I don't think conservatives in real life are actually against telescopic altruism in general. For example, concern about issues affecting the other side of the Atlantic (depending on if the conservative is American or European), other people's children being surgically transgenerated, and of course abortion are all issues that would seem to belong to this concept, but which are never understood through the lens of telescopic altruism. This is because it's not a real thing that people think about in other situations.
Telescopic altruism isn't just doing things to help strangers, it's doing things to help strangers *at the expense of making those closer to you msierable*.
So, for example, supporting mass immigration is an example of telescopic altruism, because, whilst it's good for immigrants, it's bad for the people already in the country. Conversely, being against abortion doesn't make your own children worse off, which is why it's not considered an example of telescopic altruism.
Abortion supporters would say that it makes not your own children but "your own women" in a sense (the women who are in your political tribe. Liberals would never say those words but that's what is being understood) worse off by restricting their choices. I agree that transgeneration is not an example that fits that condition, because the disagreement there is entirely about whether transgenderism is true. But plenty of conservative, especially socially conservative, policies are telescopically altruistic in the above sense.
In my experience, the most committed anti-abortion activists are disproportionately women, so even if we assume that banning abortion makes women worse off (which they presumably wouldn't agree with), they'd just be regular altruists, not telescopic altruists.
When you noticed people saying "crime in increasing", went into the details, came back with "no, they don't", you didn't stopped here and concluded "therefore you are stupid".
You correctly concluded that unskilled people awkardly tried to communicate something the best (which was not very good) way they could. You tried to imagine what it could be, like "disorder". It probably helped that you had the same wordless intuition that "something feels wrong, can't tell what exactly".
It is exactly the same here, except you stop at "therefore you are stupid" (or rather: "therefore you are bad")
People talking about "telescopic altruism" are trying to communicate something. They are not very good at communicating it. "Therefore you are bad" is unlikely to help/convice anyone.
In epistemics, you have a model of the world, sense data from reality, and try to update your model of the world from sense data, to orient your beliefs and actions. In the moral world, you too have a model of "what is right/wrong". You do not have sense data. You instead have very strong "moral intuitions" that act as "basic datum". People are trying to communicate: "it is a moral datum, or close to a moral datum, this not caring about Gazeans does not make me a bad person".
What happen, psychologically :
* You don’t care about poor starving orphans in Gaza ?
(chain-of-thoughts: this is a gotcha question, "have you stopped beating your wife style" ; if I answer that I care, then I am forced to adopt the whole liberal package of universal altruism ; if I don’t, I will pass for a monster that don’t care about starving orphans… and outside of tactical-rhetorical considerations, I notice I don’t really care about those particular starving orphans, and I don’t want to accept the implicit assumption that it makes me a bad person, it’s a bullying framing, something’s weird going up, oh I must answer something quick, time’s up, my thinking tokens budget is running out…)
* You monstrous Telescopic Altruist that don’t care about your own family !
What happen is, basically, there is three kind of people :
* You, who think you can cleanly split "moral duty" and "good person" and "better person", such that you must be a good person and discharge your moral duty by helping your family, then can (but without any obligation) be a better person by going beyond. You are in the minority and in my opinion obviously wrong. "Good", "bad", "better" are social tools to shape expectations, superego and such. If you say that something is "good" but not "dutiful", things like Social Desirability Bias and various Purity Spirals kicks in and it will soon be dutiful.
* Some others, who can’t split the two, and bite the bullet in accepting infinite duty, "you are a bad person if you don’t care about Gaza" (and if you don’t help you don’t care).
* Some others, who can’t split the two, and bite the bullet that you’re not a bad person if you don’t care about very distant starving orphans, and it’s even suspicious to care.
Group 3 is centrally correct IMO, but alas the margin is too small to explain in more details. Let just me picture in broad brushes the (coherently extrapolated) moral world of the third group :
* (repeat from earlier) "moral duty" and "moral good" are inseparable
* in the case of altruism, that means we have two ways of saying the same thing : "X has the moral duty to help Y", "Y deserve to be helped by X"
* in that framework, the actual identity of X and Y and their relationship are absolutely important and load-bearing. "X has the moral duty to help" is ill-defined. "Y deserve to be helped", similarly, is ill-defined
* (liberals tend to disregard _both_ X and Y, and say : if Y suffer, that is sufficient ground to conclude that Y should be helped, and anyone that can has a duty to — that is, in essence, communist ethics : "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs")
* virtue ethics is correct. And virtue of Y absolutely matters to determine the truth of "Y deserve to be helped by X".
* responsibility and power also matters. batman (was it batman ?) is right that responsibility and power are two sides of the same coin ; you have responsibility to the same degree you have power. Parents have the highest degree of power over children ; they have the highest degree of responsibility. Citizens have some degree of power over the state in a democracy, it come with responsibility
* So, important parts that determine "Y deserve to be helped by X" are : how virtuous is Y ? (how much of Y misfortune is his own damn fault ?) how morally responsible is X for Y ? If I cross a sick drunkard in the street, the fact he’s drunk is bayesian evidence he’s not very virtuous ; that diminishes my moral duty towards him. If my best friend start to heavily drink, that un-virtuousness-evidence is clearly offset by the duty coming with that social bond. In power parlance : being friends means he ascribe some degree of trust and influence to me, and I must use it to help him get over his issues.
* naive individualism is wrong ; communities and societies can be unvirtuous ; and by being born/part of that community/society definitely reduce my moral duty towards you. I agree that part in very counter-intuitive even to most conservatives, but I believe it to be correct too.
* therefore, someone has a priori close to zero moral duty towards distant persons in distant, unvirtuous societies
Or, to put it even more bluntly :
* "If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm"
* You obviously have close to zero power over Gazeans
* You have, therefore, close to zero responsibility towards Gazeans.
* You have, therefore, close to zero moral duty towards Gazeans.
* Therefore, the Way opposes your caring. In some sense, your caring is objectively pathological/incorrect/a misfiring from an heuristic.
*A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”*
No, it's a red flag that he's being nice to you because you are in position to make him pay if he's nasty. Nothing to do with telescopic altruism.
*Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home? Yes - most Democrats support programs like free school lunches (used as a way to ensure poor kids get at least one good meal a day), and most Republicans oppose them.*
Both of those are telescopic altruism. The correct comparison is that conservatives are much more likely than liberals to donate to food banks.
Notice which of these three directly result in the poor getting food.
The main driver of conservatives donating more is religious people donating to their church. Controlling for that, the differences between liberals and conservatives disappear.
You should have picked a line and gone with it. Given that you know that it's true, you have no need for a source.
As for your second claim -- so what? The conservatives ARE in fact feeding the poor. The liberals ARE in fact in favor of a third party forcing other third parties to pay for something they think will feed the poor.
> You should have picked a line and gone with it. Given that you know that it's true, you have no need for a source.
Are you snarkily admitting you have no source on food bank donations?
> As for your second claim -- so what? The conservatives ARE in fact feeding the poor.
First, donations to the church are mostly not feeding the poor. Churches have operational costs. This is basically a pay-what-you-want membership fee. I'm asking for a source that shows conservatives donate more to food banks specifically. That was your claim.
Second, if conservatism is correlated with donating to charity but not causative, then so what? A nonreligious liberal and nonreligious conservative would give equally, as would a religious liberal and religious conservative. Making someone more conservative would not affect their charitability. There's no argument for conservatism here. Only an argument for religiosity.
I have never seen a study showing conservatives give more to food banks. That is why I asked. I have no idea why this is confusing for you.
What I have seen is that conservatives donate more to charity, but only if you count paying for church, and once you control for religiosity, liberals give slightly more to charity. Church donations are not donations to the poor.
Do you have a source for the food banks or did you make it up?
Do YOU have a source, or did you make it up? Because I have never seen a study that showed that it was churches, but I have certainly seen leftists, on being confronted with the notion that right-wingers give more, claim that it must be that they give it to churches.
I do note that leftists give more to some charities. Those that benefit those already well-off, such as schools their children are attending.
Walter Russell Mead goes into some detail about conservative charities and missionary movements in his book _Special Providence_. Conservatives spend billions of dollars both at home and abroad, in part to help spread their religious views - people with unreliable access to clean water, medicine, shelter, and so on seem more receptive to people who go out of their way to help them get that. It's been common knowledge for generations.
The flip side of altruism is often outrage. Selective outrage (e.g., high levels of anger over the Israeli government’s killing of Palestinian children coupled with indifference or worse over Hamas’ killing of Israeli children or, vice-versa, outrage over Hamas’ killings and indifference to Israel’s) seems to be pretty common. Haven’t seen any protests condemning both sides. So when tribal identities get triggered, which now happens with a lot of issues in the US ("Opioids aren't killing our tribe, what is there to get upset about?"), the telescopic view looks pretty accurate.
I think "telescopic altruist" describes a person who is misanthropic, hates their family, hates their coworkers, hates the oppressive structure and bottomless evil of society as they see it, but still wants to think of themselves as a good person and so identifies with the virtuous oppressed in some faraway place, like the Gazans. They may or may not donate to causes and attend marches, but their attention to these causes is not motivated by altruism; it's a way to reinforce the oppressors/oppressed narratice that is propping up their whole sense of self. It's common on the left, but you can imagine a groyper in Seattle feeling the same way about "white genocide" in South Africa as they glare at their blue-haired waiter. I do think it is a real thing, but it shouldn't be confused with any kind of altruism.
Note: Do you know how many liberals/progressives say "I no longer celebrate thanksgiving with my relatives?" Or people who say "I am no longer friends with anyone who voted for Trump?"
By making this a debate about "altruism" you've assumed away the most interesting parts of the question in a way which further polarizes the debate.
By analogy: consider the people who go around using slogans like "billionaires shouldn't exist". Much of the time, I expect that these people are motivated less by altruism for the poor, and more by a memeplex driven by envy and fear of billionaires.
Similarly, a significant proportion of the pro-Gaza left are motivated less by altruism for Palestinians, and more by hatred of Israel.
We could debate which proportion is which, and how much control each group has over the overall movement. But the most productive thing seems to be to try to disentangle the actual altruism-based parts from the fear-and-envy based parts, so that right-thinking people can support (or at least tolerate) the former while opposing the latter.
In this post, you do the opposite: you lump them together under a term that I've never seen actual right-wing advocates use, and which seems designed to conflate toxic and healthy motivations under the heading of "altruism". In response to this, the right can try to do the disentangling itself, or it can just get further negatively polarized towards being anti-altruism. Obviously I would prefer the former, but it's a difficult move to make under adversarial pressure, and this post doesn't help.
I agree with the post. I do note that there is an adjacent pitfall though, as described in the Screwtape Letters:
"The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
Espoused caring and revealed preference caring are not the same thing, and conflating them is the central error in this piece.
The Gaza protester and the ProLife absolutist both genuinely feel something — but in both cases the motivation is substantially about signaling ideological membership in a tribe that cares about that thing. Push comes to shove, I doubt either would evidence revealed preference caring anywhere near commensurate with even an anonymous stranger sitting beside them in the same room.
Espoused caring is real. But revealed preferences under genuine scarcity aren't the same mechanism operating at different distances — they're qualitatively different things that happen to share a label.
The moral question worth arguing about isn't whether distant caring exists. It's what weight it should carry under genuine scarcity. A good model for human revealed preference caring under scarcity approximates as a direct function of Reciprocity, Interaction, Similarity (experiential, genetic, cultural), and Aesthetic Appreciation. In humans, caring ≈ f(RISA).
Singer and Communism share a core failure: building systems that ignore this basic fact about human beings. Ideologies that mistake espoused caring for revealed preference caring when designing institutions don't just get the philosophy wrong — history is fairly clear about what happens next.
Of note, the waiter example is not revealed preference caring... Courtesy is not a scarce resource. Also the waiter and the patron clearly share Reciprocity and Interaction... Caring≈ f(RISA)
I've never heard the term "telescopic altruism" before, but still, I think this article is a bit of a strawman. The most common complaint conservatives raise against liberals is not that liberals care too much about African lives in some abstract philosophical sense; rather, it's that liberals allocate a disproportionate amount of *funding* to supporting African lives, instead of spending those funds to improve lives at home. The exact meaning of "disproportionate" depends on the situation and the speaker, but sometimes does evaluate to "any" (and it definitely evaluates to "any" when we start talking about amoebae).
Conservatives see funding and effort as a zero-sum game. Every dollar you spend on mosquito nets in Africa is a dollar you do not spend on e.g. supporting American farmers. At this point, abstract philosophical ideas do come into play: for example, if you believe that an African farmer's life is worth the same as an American's, but $1 can save 10 Africans or only one American, then it would be logical to spend money abroad. But the ultimate debate is still about money, not philosophy.
Conservatives, however, tend to be kind of "minus" on the idea of supporting American farmers. They're not in general in favor of food stamps, for example...
I think that most conservatives *do* support improving the lives of Americans, and spending money and effort on doing so; they just disagree dramatically on what "improving lives" looks like.
They do disagree on what improving lives looks like, but an aversion to government spending has been a central tenet of conservatives forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
I think it depends on what kind of conservatives you ask. Mainstream Republicans are not averse to spending money on all kinds of government programs such as farm subsidies, various morality-enhancing programs, and of course the military (to name a few).
People who hold that position generally hold that letting people spend their own money does more good on net than the government spending it for them. So, they still believe that "We should be spending that money to make things better at home," it's just that the "we" in question refers to spontaneous individual action rather than centrally-coordinated programmes.
How does the data on "circles of care" compare to actual giving? While I don't think speech/self-reporting is meaningless, it needs to be combined with looking at how much people actually give. My understanding is that conservatives give more to charity than liberals. The dated stats are in Arthur Brooks, Who Really Cares; more recent stats are here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/
Religiosity explains a lot of the gap. But the gap is real. Interesting that liberals seem to self-report more concern for others, but conservatives donate more money.
> Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter.
Typo, I think? Or math I don't understand. 9-11 killed 2,996 people, which is 0.05992% of the ~5 million people killed by a hundred opioid crises. You can include the couple thousand people who died later due to the toxic dust, but that doesn't fix the percentage. I thought you might be including the whole war on terror, but that still doesn't work, then they would be about even.
Every time I see arguments about caring levels, I keep noticing that the arguments don't appear to take difficulty of care into account.
For example, you might express more care for animals than for your meat-eating neighbors, because you can do something about the animals by supporting some local animal rights campaign more easily than you can do something about your neighbors by trying to persuade them of something they don't want to be persuaded of or forcing them until they call the cops.
Conservatives care for nearby people more than far people because they've set up their support structures to work better for nearby people. Part of this is the rural-urban divide: conservatives correlate more with rural residents who have a natural dependency on neighbors for everything from playdates for the kids to lookouts for emergencies. So, their support networks focus more on said neighbors, which brings more familiarity with their challenges and what to do about them. Conservatives in urban environments don't have this strong dependency, so their care network works differently and often resembles that of an urban progressive - urban conservatives will depend more on public infrastructure, and have more opinions about things like foreign policy or federal-level issues. And even there, your typical American will express more care for N people killed in a part of the world they're familiar with than for N+M people killed in a part they're not (and where they presume less influence).
Generally, I would expect anyone to express more care for something they can help than for something they cannot. Moreover, they'll express more care for something they _think_ they can help; we find misplaced care in situations where people think an issue is more (or less) tractable than it actually is.
There are other confounding factors as well (e.g. level of perceived threat; level of perceived gain; status earned from appearing to have sophisticated concerns), but this is one of the big ones.
"Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?"
Would they care about someone killing 50,000 people in Sudan? Simple observation suggests not so much, which raises the question as to why.
But that is not telescopic morality so much as "my enemies enemy". If Conservatives like X, their opponents will like not-X. If Conservatives started denouncing Israelis as evil Christ-killing Jews, liberals would probably swing back into loving Israelis.
"You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place."
I think most people need to make the world "playable" to live in it. The average person playing a turn-based strategy game like Civilization or SimCity for example does not attempt to manage every single facet of the game, which is enormous, they will choose a manageable amount of those in-game sliders to care about despite the fact that it's turn based and nothing is stopping you from doing so. I could manage every single minor league promotion or demotion in OOTP Baseball, but instead I pick the players I estimate most likely to matter to my game and do so only for them.
In the case of a real-time strategy game it's worse, most people lack the dexterity or brainpower to monitor every unit-pathing mistake in StarCraft and are lucky if they can manage a build order and resource flow. In either case, you are playing the game better if you limit it in whatever fashion makes it actually comprehensible to you.
To make life "playable" I have to either A) limit the number of things I care about, or B) lower my standards of play and do more things less coherently and competently. If I am to take ethics and virtue seriously as part of the game, I simply cannot be worrying too much about children captured by Boko Haram or the welfare of shrimp. I'm sure the same ability to have compassion for family or friends would let me conscientiously manage the in-game sliders that handle African warlords and crustaceans, but the game becomes unplayable for me well before I get to that point.
Complaints about people who seem to care about Gaza and not the opioid epidemic are in practice really accusations of bad faith. Caring about something you have no practical ability to affect in any noticeable way is cheap and meaningless, it asks you to do basically nothing, maybe send money or levy taxes (on someone else primarily), but that just outsources the work to somebody else who is the one solving it and requires no mental load on your part other than expressing care. Nearly always the accusation is that the person is avoiding problems they could do something about by focusing on far off ones, or shifting blame for local problems to far off institutions over which they have no power. I don't think the people saying that really believe you care more about shrimp than people, they think you are lying that you care about shrimp or that "care" means something different to you than it does to them.
This piece primarily argues that the phenomenon of caring more about people farther away is not real in any meaningful numbers. I think that's right.
But the more interesting question to me is if you steelman the opposing position a bit and address something like this: "People should care more about their family than their friends, and so on. Fortunately, most people do this. However, there exist people who think I should donate to a shrimp charity even though some people I know could use my help on the premise that I should care nearly as much about shrimp as myself. And some people say I should donate to GiveWell instead of my local museum. Those people say they don't think people farther away matter more but only the same amount. But that's not the way I think people should live - good things require that you care more about people closer to us. Again, I understand that everyone does this, but I'm sick of people telling me I should care about everyone equally."
Another version: "Some people, while absolutely caring about their children more than strangers, don't give their children enough additional weight. For example, there are EA people with children who don't own cars because of their giving pledge. That's wrong - they should weight their children relatively higher and strangers relatively less."
I think the above are what people discussing this actually mean - I doubt anyone really thinks that a material number of people would be more likely to save a stranger's life than their own child's.
So conservatives confuse competency with care? And liberals confuse care with competency?
Liberals don’t have a core competency because they stretch themselves thin trying to care about everything, and end up making everything worse. Conservatives focus on their family and their business and can be quite successful at that. Liberals interpret that success as evidence that they don’t care enough about others and want to redistribute that success. This seems like the basic conservative vs liberal debate
Of course, liberals would disagree with "end up making everything worse." I also know from experience that liberals can be quite successful with their families and businesses.
I'm a liberal centrist, and I recognize that my family and friends have a greater claim on my support than do people I am more distantly connected to. I think what is actually happening is that a smallish segment of conservatives observe that liberals complain more about neglecting vulnerable populations, feel guilty about this, and defensively resolve the cognitive dissonance by claiming "Well I care more about my family than they do theirs!"
If liberals care more about there family and friends more than strangers why do they advocate for lenient sentencing for rapist, pedophile, ect. even when those people are strangers targeting their friends and families.
I think there is a special kind of telescopic altruism, that has existed but which the US just has been lucky enough not to know: Totalitarianism.
The German who cares so much about the glorious Aryan future that he reports his neighbor to the Gestapo.
The soviet commissar caring so much about the proletariat while starving the actual peasants he happens to be among.
The idea of totalitarianism is that the concern for the future generations makes you commit crimes against currently living people. It is rather lucky that this actually doesn't seem to be a real thing in the US, let us all pray that it stays that way.
I mean that there definitely did exist a kind of telescopic altruism in the 20th century, where young smart people killed millions because they thought it would help more distant people. It was called Stalinism and Maoism.
So your issue is with killing people, not long-termist ideology. Practically every ideology has some long-term goals, including the ones that do not personally murder millions. "The American who cares so much about the future of their community and environment that they enact regulations to prevent pollution" is operating on the exact same mindset. On the other hand, killing a mentally ill homeless person for immediate benefit to society would not directly benefit future generations, but I'm assuming you would be against that.
There is a rabbinic proverb: “He who is merciful to the cruel will ultimately be cruel to the merciful”, which refers to a story about Saul defying the lord command, and sparing the Amalek ("But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle" [1 Samuel 15:9]) but later ordering the destruction of the israeli city Nob ("He also put to the sword Nob, the town of the priests, with its men and women, its children and infants, and its cattle, donkeys and sheep." [1 Samuel 22:19])
In modern Israeli discourse, it is used to bash left-wingers who express concern for the lives of Palestinians in Gaza.
I think there's a related, more reasonable position (mis)informed by that study in that many conservative types feel that liberals harp on about moral systems but are bad people. I think this has some truth to it. There are plenty of liberals who will work themselves into a frenzy at a rights protest and then spend their free time browbeating and emotionally blackmailing their social circle to get things, or doxxing someone, or shouting someone down that they disagree with in public. I think a lot of right wing people feel like the whole human rights discourse is a hypocritical con and that they should get to be purely, even self-defeatingly, self-interested. It's sort of a reverse of the left/right dynamic around conservative christianity in some spheres.
Also, though unrelated, wtf is up with poor whites and child neglect those graphs are crazy.
>Also, though unrelated, wtf is up with poor whites and child neglect those graphs are crazy.
One option is those states are better at *detecting* child neglect than others, but it would be an unusual correlation. That said, until fairly recently West Virginia and Mississippi did have the highest rates of childhood vaccination in the country, so there could be something weird going on about unexpected attention of certain social services.
Possibly also some methodological confusion in how "neglect" is defined.
The map is unsourced (unless I missed a link?) so it kind of looks like Scott doing a very similar thing to The Heat Map of using any possible data to shit on people he doesn't like.
Perhaps the worst thing the culture war does long-term is polarize people against any virtues or moral principles on which their rivals have an apparent rhetorical or status advantage. See also all the recent toddler-brained "sin of empathy" talk, as well as progressives' endless mocking of "productivity culture" (which is both trad-masc- and tech-bro-coded).
> See also all the recent toddler-brained "sin of empathy"
Should that be so easily dismissed? The source of all leftist motivation is sympathy for the undeserving. If their culture is to be destroyed, that requires destroying the source of their motivations as well.
If the source of leftist motivation is empathy, a ~universal human quality, and destroying leftism requires destroying empathy, then I think you should probably reconsider whether destroying leftism is a desirable or achievable goal.
On the contrary, "telescopic altruism" is a real and acute phenomenon, and a bad one, even if the meme version expresses it poorly.
I would express the matter in terms of a critique of utilitarianism, as exemplified by Peter Singer's (very bad) "drowning child" analogy.
Most versions of utilitarianism entail an claim that one should abstract away from proximal social relations in regard to action, giving different people the same consideration without regard to those relations. This is false and bad.
Instead, one should embrace a form of virtue ethics in which proximal social relations are a first-class consideration. (And please let's skip the strawman attacks suggesting that this would imply being hateful to distant people.)
I spent years in left wing circles and eventually exited because I felt the activists in those circles were externalizing their personal problems onto far-away political situations and wouldn't extricate themselves for long enough to do one jot of introspection. It was frustrating to see people get angry over interpersonal issues, while claiming they were actually angry about Palestine/whatever and then ignoring the people closest to them who could have helped them talk through their personal situation.
I'm writing this to highlight an emotional avoidance mechanism I've seen play out dozens of times. From the outside, it does indeed look like lefties caring more about anonymous overseas people than they care about their own friends. From the inside though, it's obvious that they are just ordinary people playing out their avoidance. Therapy might go a long way here, assuming anyone was open to it.
Two C.S. Lewis quotes might better illustrate the concerns one could have about telescopic altruism.
(1) "The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
I'm sympathetic to the idea that selflessly caring for people far away need not be anticorrelated with selflessly caring for people nearby, but it remains true that: (i) caring is zero-sum; (ii) caring about people close by *generally* imposes greater obligations and creates more opportunities for virtue.
It would be strange to say that you care about your children, but that you don't spend much time with them. It would be strange to say you care about the homeless in your community, but that you don't help them when they ask for it. It would *not* be strange to say you care about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza, but you haven't done anything about it.
When Scott cites support for school lunches and anti-pandemic measures as examples of how caring about people far away/nearby might be *positively* correlated, it doesn't ameliorate our concern, only exemplifies it: support for policy X is virtually costless to the supporter.
(2) "Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?"
I'm sure there a tons of people around who would literally jump for joy if it were revealed that the estimates of the death count in Gaza were overstated. But in my experience, there are a lot of people who seemed almost to relish in how high the Palestinian death count got as the number grew larger and larger, and who clung on to the worst versions of Israeli bombing stories even as the evidence changed; for some, it seems that caring about Palestine is less about mourning tremendous loss and more about indulging in the "pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible".
When demonstrating care for things far away, there is an ever-present danger that the numbers cease to represent flesh-and-blood human beings in one's mind, and instead become abstractions he uses to intensify the characters and heighten the stakes of his own personality morality play.
> When Scott cites support for school lunches and anti-pandemic measures as examples of how caring about people far away/nearby might be *positively* correlated, it doesn't ameliorate our concern, only exemplifies it: support for policy X is virtually costless to the supporter
Agree. And it's further shown by the fact that what's demanded is that *other people* (government usually, funded by *more of other people's dollars*) do something different. Not that *they* do something different. Or sacrifice.
In my experience, those who talk loudly about how much they care actually don't, when it comes down to it, care that much *in practice*. They care with their lips and their meaningless and pointless protests (which are more of a social/"look at me" opportunity than anything else) than with actions that could actually, in practice, do something.
I think Effective Altruists are, generally, *wrong* about what's most effective, because they look for effectiveness where it can be measured most easily (lamp-post error). But I wouldn't claim that they're Telescopic. No, they're just wrong. But most liberals are not Effective Altruists. And many of them are advocating for *other people* to sacrifice so *they* can feel like they care. And others of them are actively advocating for utterly horrific ideologies (such as Communism; many communist flags were present at lots of the high profile No Kings rallies).
Just a +1 for this. Throughout all of Scott's piece I kept thinking of Jenny's abusive boyfriend from Forrest Gump, "It's just this war, and that lying sonofabitch Johnson."
"Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?"
Because it turns out not all 50k deaths are created equal. For one, there is the I Can Tolerate Everything But the Outgroup Factor, where I'm not sure many "libs" in red states would feel anything but schadenfreude if 50k of their neighbors died as long as they happened to be Trump voters or owned a gas guzzling pickup or an AR-15 or didn't support a local plastic bag ban or a hundred other reasons someone on the left will toss people into the general category of 'outgroup.'
But then there's also the Moral Dyad factor. For comparison, the Islamist insurgency in Nigeria, for one example, has killed well over 50k people since it began over a decade ago, but nobody, left or right, seems to mind much. Why is that? Why does it matter when the IDF kills people in Gaza as part of a campaign of legitimate reprisal after an attack that left 1,000 Israeli civilians dead, but nobody bats an eye if people die by the thousands at the hands of Islamist thugs? Because of the perceived disparity in capabilities between the two groups, which manifests as the Moral Dyad:
"Wegner and Gray say that we use two different approaches for trying to enter the minds of others. When we try to understand their feelings, we use simulation. We try to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. When we try to understand their actions, we use theorizing. We try to imagine the chain of reasoning that someone used in order to arrive at an action.
It seems that often we can understand either feelings or motives, but not both. When we perceive only feelings, we see a moral patient. When we see only motives, we see a moral agent.
Wegner and Gray conclude that when we perceive that an entity falls short of having a mind of the same nature as our own, we tend to categorize it in one of two ways. An entity could lack the ability to experience feelings; or it could lack the ability to make intentional decisions.
Wegner and Gray see a baby and a robot as occupying opposite ends of the spectrum of incomplete minds. The baby lacks the ability to plan and make choices. The robot lacks the ability to feel sensations and emotions. "
Do read the whole thing, but basically the idea is that we empathize with people one of two ways, via what we imagine their feelings to be or what we imagine their thoughts to be; not both. When we imagine people's feelings, we tend to focus solely on those feelings and conceive of them....essentially as babies; that is, they can feel, but they do not think or act. When you start conceptualizing people as completely vulnerable and without agency, you strip away any moral ambiguity or nuance to their plight, and then you fall into the cognitive trap of thinking of Jews as perpetual unfeeling transgressors and Palestinians as perpetually suffering victims, and the result is to be outrage on behalf of the Palestinians.
My contention would be that a) the perceived disparity in military capabilities between the two groups primes people, especially liberals, into using this perpetual victimhood framework. In general, perceptions of inequality seems to nudge people on the left towards this cognitive pitfall. And then I would add b) generally speaking, the further people are away from us, culturally and geographically, the less we actually know about them, and the easier it is to fall into this trap of thinking of people as perpetually suffering victims with no agency.
With the Nigerian conflict, there is no perception of inequality. In fact, the Islamists are probably the weaker party, all things considered. Nigerians in general aren't part of anybody's ingroup or outgroup, and Americans in general don't understand the conflict well enough to empathize with the thoughts or feelings of an party to the conflict, and so its mostly just ignored.
>has killed well over 50k people since it began over a decade ago
Yeah so it's flying under the radar, just like how Israel had been slowly occupying and ethnic cleansing Palestine until the mask came off
>nobody, left or right, seems to mind much. Why is that?
When was Nigeria claiming to uphold western values and position itself as a member of the western elite? People obviously care more about something that their supposed ally is doing. Especially if they're acting in direct contradiction to what they espouse
>nobody bats an eye if people die by the thousands at the hands of Islamist thugs?
What, so nobody batted an eye at 9/11?
Have you even thought this through at all? This is an absurd comparison
"Our sample included 64 liberals, 31 moderates, and 36 conservatives, and participants were only included in analyses if they completed the study in full."
These were recruited through Mechanical Turk. I leave it to the reader to assess whether this is a representative sample.
Barry's point is more about power dynamics versus closeness. The waiter is below you, in the power hierarchy (that's why they're your "server"), and how you treat a person that you have power over is more revealing of your general character than how you treat the person you are on a first date / business meeting / etc with, since you are either equals or are below that person, powerwise. And obviously you are going to modify your behavior to give a more positive impression of yourself.
On the more general point I think the most parsimonious explanation is Hanania's "based ritual." It's more about vice-signaling by putting down groups and people who are "far," showing you are willing to draw tight boundaries of moral exclusion. That's where the telescopic altruism accusations are really coming from - Gaza is full of brown muslims, and if you think it's cool when they suffer that shows you're down with the national/race/local-centric view of politics and morality held by the populist right.
> The waiter is below you, in the power hierarchy (that's why they're your "server")
I don't see it that way. They're a person paid to provide a service to me, just like my plumber or my accountant or my dentist or the pilot of the plane I'm travelling on today. Maybe tomorrow I'll be paid to provide them a service. That's not a power gradient, that's just a transaction.
> Do you think they’d care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten?
Someone kept for their entire life in a cage won’t be friends with anyone outside.
"Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who ‘only’ care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say “Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get ‘em!” in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier."
I don't think they're doing anything malicious. They're just thinking about stuff emotionally, and from the point of view of someone who cares about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans, it feels like someone who cares 1,000x as much about their neighbors cares more about Gazans than their neighbors.
If I can be snarky about a comment higher up, "You're not starving, you just want a slightly nicer school lunch".
That one did annoy me, because currently in Ireland we're having a debate about school lunches, where yes some parents *are* looking for "slightly nicer", but the main choice is between "a school lunch of any kind at all or none", not "okay food or slightly nicer food".
First I encourage everyone to read (at least skim... look at other graphs) the nature paper Scott linked to. I'm then going to both agree with you. People make too big a thing of the telescope thing. But disagree, because I feel it's somewhat real, and simply the result of the politicization of everything. And it's signaling on both sides. To be right leaning is to care more about family and friends and to be left leaning is to care just as much about the earth and future. And it's a dumb division like most political divisions.
I think what annoys those of us on the conservative side is the implication that we don't care *at all* about "the earth and the future". The nice, smart, moral, superior liberals can care about both, but we dumb knuckle-draggers only care about us and our kinfolks and prefer to point our shotguns at the Revenuers and chase 'em offa our porches.
Conservatives *do* donate to good causes abroad and do care about other things, but the idea is "help those in need nearest first, then look after the rest". If we didn't, there wouldn't be (for example) the likes of the annual Trócaire Lenten campaign:
Yeah, everything about the political divide of -everything, is stupid. Abortion, either never or anytime. I find either pole ridiculous, and it requires a much more complicated and distinct discussion to hash out any issue. And why can't we have opinions that disagree with whatever our tribe thinks. It seems like the whole tribal thing is being used against us. And we should resist the tribal thing, just on those grounds. (Sorry several beers into the evening, and I don't have to 'work' tomorrow. :^) (I work as a prep cook at the local tavern/ restaurant. I am looking forward to Dyngus day. Polish owner and population here in WNY. I'm totally getting the polish platter, which includes: Home made polish sausage (sides of sauerkraut and home made mustard) Potato pancakes, (sour cream and apple sauce) Golumkies(sp) (stuffed cabbage roll) and of course pierogies. I'll have an Irish Guinness to wash it down. With all my blessing to Jesus. For such a wonderful life.
Edit: I just clicked on your link, and yeah when I was a member of a local church there were always outreach campaigns that spread the globe from local to Africa (far away.)
I think a good deal of the attitude Scott is criticizing is not about people who do things for distant people instead of for those closer but about people who could help those close to them and don't and instead express concern for people distant from them who they don't, perhaps can't, do anything for. That would be the steel man version.
Consider, from a poet Scott and I are both fond of:
Dang, I mean you gotta love your next door neighbors, even when they may be assholes. And yeah you don't always 'win' when you think that way, but long term it's a big win. IMHO
I think you make a good point that the argument that people care more about equivalent things happening far away is wrong, and they'd be more upset by the same things happening close by. But I also think you're strawmanning in some cases.
'Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.” This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”' - I highly doubt anyone would say that being nice to a waiter is a red flag. So you must be mischaracterizing their actual position.
I laughed at your ending comment that a lot of the annoying activist types do care about improving their own lives, but are just absolutely terrible about it. That must be true for some people, but not everyone. I think a stronger version of the telescopic altruism criticism isn't that they are putting more focus on deaths elsewhere than they would on deaths close by, but that they are putting too much focus on deaths elsewhere.
Additionally, focusing on terrible things happening often has a bad instrumental effect of making people feel depressed and thus be worse at managing things close to them. If the primary effect of being upset about terrible things happening elsewhere is to make you less happy and less good at your day-to-day life while having essentially no effect on the actual situation, I think that's a strong argument that you should care less. If someone is actually making a difference then this doesn't apply, but I think people in general vastly overestimate the degree to which they are. I like following and discussing politics myself, but I also think it's basically a complete waste of time and one of the lowest possible marginal utility things I could be doing.
Also, focusing on the Gaza example is kind of a weird choice I feel because it's obviously going to distract a lot of people from the actual argument.
>Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!” You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.
A waiter isn't a far-off group, he's a literal, flesh-and-blood human being standing directly in front of you. Being nice to him isn't an example of TA; it's an example of being nice to those in your immediate surroundings, which is what anti-TA people say they support. The TA position would be to talk about how important it is to give service staff better conditions, and then treat your actual waiter like dirt.
There are a LOT of examples where liberals want good things for people further from them and not for people close to them; and also a lot where they actively advocate for resources to be taken from themselves and given to people further away. It's, like, the most common, everyday thing in the world. Here are four that come quickly to mind:
White liberal parents prefer that their own children be racially discriminated against by college admissions committees in favor of black children. The idea that their own children should be treated as equal to black children makes them furious.
Liberal citizen legislators give the privilege of special leniency in criminal sentencing and plea deals to non-citizen defendants in California Penal Code 1016.3 and 18.5 (specifically designed to avoid mandatory federal deportation). The legislators don't want these privileges for themselves and other citizens; they're reserved for non-citizens. (Judges frequently use California Penal Code 1385 for this as well.)
Perhaps the most obvious example of telescopic altruism is the wealthy liberals (one of whom I've chatted with on the ACX comment section) who advocate for higher taxes on themselves to fund programs they don't benefit from. They fervently wish more of their own money would be taken and given to other people.
When the covid vaccine first came out, my state divided our allotted doses into two piles. One pile was allocated on the basis of health condition, with the most at-risk people getting first access. The other pile was allocated on the basis of zip code, with the poorer zip codes getting access first. Any liberals who supported this plan and lived in wealthier neighborhoods were in favor of life-saving medicine being denied to their own family and given to others. I actually got access to the covid vaccine maybe a month before some of my equally healthy liberal friends, because I lived in a pretty poor neighborhood at that time.
Look up Stolen Bike Meme. It's a celebration of the proper attitude of a good liberal: you or those close to you are harmed, and somebody distant who you don't know is helped thereby. This is good, it makes you happy.
I mean, is it even _altruism_ if it isn't telescopic? If you called it "altruistic" to help people close to you, wouldn't you be fooling yourself? Matthew 5:46 -- even tax collectors love those who love them back. And what good is that? Wouldn't we be mad at wealthy people who created a covid vaccine distribution scheme that privileged their own wealthier neighborhoods?
I don't think they're hypocrites, I think they're acting from deeply held values. They would rather schools A, B and C be racially diverse, and their own kid goes to not-as-good school B, than that their kid gets into school A, which might be stronger academically but it's full of white and Asian people.
Understand that their authenticity makes them more dangerous, not less. It means it is impossible to reason with them by pandering to their self-interest. They would rather throw away their lives defending those who do not deserve to be defended.
This article actually seems kind of insulting to (particularly, white) liberals. Liberals perceive a system that, for whatever reason, seems unfairly biased against non-white people (and various other marginalized groups) and they respond to that by putting in huge amounts of political capital and time and sweat and money to create programs and institutions and policies and every sort of effort imaginable to try and create the opposite unfairness, to counteract it.
There aren't enough black poets? White liberals altruistically create poetry prizes that only black people are eligible for. Immigrants are having a hard time with the law? White liberals altruistically create a charity that hires lawyers for them. There are *so many* things like this, and every single one is transferring resources, in some way, from the liberals themselves, and their families and communities, to these marginalized people who they see as outsiders. Like, that's the whole liberal thing.
And Scott comes in and he's like, hey, that thing you've been doing that you clearly care a lot about? That actually never happens. You never help a disadvantaged group at the expense of your own group. Scott doesn't believe the conservative propaganda that says that liberals prefer to help marginalized groups over dominant groups. But that's not propaganda! That's their stated goal!
I would say that these are prioritising groups in terms of need (and maybe some other things like loudness) rather than in reverse order of proximity.
The primary problem with what they're doing is not the order of prioritisation, it's the treatment of people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals. There's nothing wrong with prioritising giving things to the needy, but there's something wrong with prioritising Group A over Group B based on a statistical analysis that Group A is needier than Group B, at least when the groups are heavily overlapping.
I do think there's something to be said for the idea that "people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen" due to something along the lines of a reduction of surprise.
I don't have the scientific background to justify it (and I'd be grateful if people could point me towards some papers), but it seems like there's something going on where we become used to particular types of pain and/or death; because we already account for those (i.e. we're oddly "used to them"), they're a less surprising sort of harm. Under this lens, it makes sense that humans would want to rapidly communicate and focus on new "unexpected" harms like 9/11, as compared to more expected harms like deaths from opioids. Rapid communication about unexpected deaths results in a reduction of surprise / a better world-model.
We can also see an adjacent version of this where sometimes stuff that's very common as a statistic, but we don't know anyone who is currently suffering, *becomes* unexpected when someone close to us becomes afflicted (e.g. cancer). We can predict the general trends, but can't predict the exact people it will impact, so once we do know the exact people it impacts, it becomes something that we talk about more.
Opioids is a bad example, because almost everyone who dies of opioids bears moral culpability for their own demise. Almost nobody dies of opioids which they obtained legally.
If a hundred thousand people a year were dropping dead of, say, contaminated broccoli then people would be more outraged.
I see a few practical benefits, from a utilitarian perspective, for biasing oneself against distant causes:
1. Local knowledge and defense against Pascal's Mugging. All else being equal, closer issue are considerably more legible to you, so you are better able to confirm that the problem actually is what is claimed and that the remedy is actually likely to improve things.
2. Schelling Points. Just about every problem is local to someone, so focusing your efforts on local issues saves a lot of duplication of effort and attention. This only goes so far, though, for problems that are large enough in scope that non-local resources are needed to deal with it.
3. You probably have somewhat better tools to do things about local problems than distant ones, and the difference between actually doing something about it vs merely signaling that you care is more visible to your peers which makes the incentives to productive action vs slacktivism somewhat better.
You sort of acknowledge this, but these arguments work best for a situation of rough parity in capability between 'around here' and 'over there'. Add in a causal link between here and there, and a sense of responsibility, and, well...
The best way to help people is often not to give them more money but helping them manage their own problems. Take a drug addict who is throwing their life away. What helps more: the taxpayer funded rehab program or the family members who push them to admit they have a problem and offer a place to stay while they get clean? That’s the kind of thing that isn’t captured well in statistics.
> there’s a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen.
This characterization drives me a little batty, because as far as I'm concerned, there's a *much better* better explanation: people (or at least I) care about deaths which could be prevented straightforwardly by a smallish number of people not doing the thing whose *primary objective is to cause death* more than I care about deaths that arise from complex social and economic forces, messing with which would undoubtedly lead to unintended consequences that could end up costing more lives on net. (I *do* still care about the latter; I'm not a monster. But not to the degree that I care about the how-about-not-bombing-civilians deaths.)
If I can reflect this lens in the opposite direction, there is a left-against-right argument that is somewhat similar to Telescopic Altruism:
"Pro life people only care about babies before they are born." I'm sure that (nearly?) everyone who is rabidly pro-life, and equates abortion with murder supports equally harsh penalties for infanticide as they do for abortion. The fact that most of them also are opposed to many forms of social safety nets (for children or otherwise), is somewhat orthogonal.
The school lunch issue comes to mind. The big school district in my former city troubled to contact the news media to make a plea that any parents still sending their child with a lunch packed at home, please stop.
I found this really funny. At the very least, it seemed to face a stiff headwind in good liberal parents’ tendency to curate their children’s food to an extreme degree, weather due to their pickiness or perceived, probably imaginary health reasons, the same ones that had got them talking about leaky gut or whatever the diet du jour.
The district’s pleas as I recall was twofold - so there would be no stigma against the free lunch, and so that it could scale up so that they get more money from the federal government. I think they already had like 70% of the kids getting a free lunch.
And of course, people who are pro-life do not want a child to have no lunch, but of course, that is what would be meant by the above-referenced reddit-beloved cliche.
And of course, also, there is no good faith admission that there may be something to the idea that parenting should reach the low bar of providing food - at the very least breakfast - for kids, because a social expectation like that creates a better world for children overall: parents being held to having an obligation to their kids, and those obligations having an organic role perhaps in family planning, rather than government effectively breeding people via what it now likes to call “feeding sites”.
There's a Talmudic phrase that is often brought up in Israel in the context of "Telescopic altruism": "Your city's poor come first."
Suggesting people donate to more malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa? "Your city's poor come first." Always in the sense of "What, there aren't enough poor people in this country to take care of first?"
But few can cite the rest of the Talmudic passage, which state a variety of such "priorities," one of which is "poor people related to you versus your city's poor-- those related to you come first." It's not especially controversial that, all else equal, you should help your relatives before a random person on the street. But nobody would claim that you're not allowed to give to charity for your city's poor if your relative hasn't paid down their entire credit card debt. The priority is not infinite.
And this always seemed obviously beneficial from a utilitarian perspective because of information. Every other criticism of foreign aid boils down to "you don't know how to help the person who is geographically/socio-economically/culturally/politically far." These gaps are smaller the "closer" the other party is to you, where generally you'll be best and most effective (all else being equal) at helping family members. But again, to a point-- I still generally can't save my relative's life for a couple thousand dollars (thankfully!).
It's interesting what "circle" people tend to care about. The geographic circle ("your city" versus "another city") no longer has real weight I think, but the national one has major bite. The people who tell me "Your city's poor come first" almost surely do not care if I give to poor people in my home city of Haifa versus Jerusalem versus the Negev, but what they do care about is that it's to Israelis versus people in other countries.
The twist here is that because the US is so much richer than, say, Liberia, it's quite plausible that spending $100 in Liberia does many times as much good for the people there as spending it in the US. Even if you put a higher value of well-being of Americans than non-Americans, you might still prefer saving the life of a non-American to giving an American a slightly nicer school lunch.
For sure, and that's what I'm saying about this priority not being infinite (which is what Scott wrote about as well). And I'm just adding that this is obvious to everyone when comparing helping your family versus giving to charity, or helping people in your city versus other cities. The criticisms tend to coalesce around the national grouping specifically.
> It's interesting what "circle" people tend to care about. The geographic circle ("your city" versus "another city") no longer has real weight I think, but the national one has major bite.
Great point! Different country, same principle: caring about people 500 km away is okay, even morally required, as long as they are within the same borders. But such care becomes silly when the people are behind the invisible line.
I think the actual rule is: "The circle you should care about most is the smallest circle around you that includes *me*. The smaller circles are too selfish; the larger circles are silly."
This is my first time hearing about the telescope altruism, but I actually find it intuitive. As a left-wing person, most volunteers I know (especially back in my 20s) were involved in organizations fighting for global environmental or social issues, and no one was volunteering at the local soup kitchen. I associate the nitty gritty volunteerism for poor people in our own city with churchgoers.
Perhaps everyone treats their friends equally well (though I don’t know, conservatives seem more loyal, and less likely to cancel their friends) but my sense is that conservatives, and especially churchgoers, are more likely to volunteer in things that matter to their own city. Maybe I am thinking too much in terms of archetypes - let me know if my thinking is off.
What about them? They're not thinking in terms of 'birds are more deserving than humans'. They're thinking in terms of 'the meta-principle of preserving biodiversity competes with and sometimes outweighs the meta-principle of flourishing through infrastructure construction', or something like that.
In general, the telescopic altruism framing already concedes too much to a worldview centered on individuals or, at best, tribes. To a principled egalitarian, it's perfectly logical to demand that they themselves (or those like them) be disadvantaged in favour of others until parity is achieved. You may think being a principled egalitarian is stupid or naive, but at least grant the coherence of their convictions.
If it were simply a matter of fetishising the faraway, we'd be seeing unhealthy concern with the destitute underclass of, say, South Korea. We don't, because everyone knows they'll be mostly fine compared with the population of Burundi.
I grew up in a city where it would snow a lot in the winter. When that would happen I would wake up early and shovel in front of my house, as would everyone else. The result was all the sidewalks were clear by midday. This wasn’t because I thought my sidewalk was more important than others, but because it was my personal responsibility. If I, and everyone else, tried to work from first principles which sidewalks were most important to shovel, that would not have worked out.
Care as a thought is not zero sum, but care as a verb is. As an operating principle, caring more for those closer to you yields a better world than applying a uniform distribution. This can be framed as a Confucian critique of telescopic altruism (society depends on you performing your duties) or a Hayekian one (action should be localized to information).
So you're saying that white liberals pushing DEI admissions and hiring quotas that explicitly harm other white people to the benefit of other races are simply mistaken? Not true liberals? Please.
You have an amazing capacity for rhetorically framing an idea while completely ignoring its central claim.
What's the positive valence version of this title? You seem to have gotten ... some current events debate into your comments section. Seems pretty reasonable to say "people can see up close things more better than far things", which, you know, has implications for idealization and so on. Legibility of pores improves the closer I get to my wife's face. Doesn't mean that our moral imagination can't outstrip our capability. That's what sin is, right? I'm curious about what direction feels like a stretch for the LHS heat map.
There was a in interesting 2009 trolley problem study that gets to the heart of the issue more than the heat map graph:
If a runaway trolley were about to smash into a bus containing 100 trapped members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra, would you push a wholly innocent man named Chip Ellsworth III onto the tracks to stop the accident? What if the bus held 100 members of the New York Philharmonic and the guilt-free man’s name was Tyrone Payton?
Would your politics have any relevance to whether you'd prefer to kill the white man to save the black musicians or to kill the black man to save the white musicians?
In a fascinating 2009 academic paper by four social psychologists, "The motivated use of moral principles," UC Irvine students who identified as politically conservative were found to be racially evenhanded. When given the scenario about killing Chip to save 100 Harlemites, conservatives were no more or less likely to agree it’s the right thing to do than when told to ponder killing the man with the cornerback’s name to save 100 classical musicians.
In striking contrast, liberal students displayed greater bloodthirstiness when presented with the scenario that gave them an opportunity to kill the WASP to help the blacks. This liberal desire to shove a white man to his death to salvage blacks rather than a black man to salvage whites was extremely statistically significant (p = .002).
Granted, these types of studies carried out on college students always raise countless questions.
For example, did you even notice that Chip Ellsworth III is supposed to be a WASP and Tyrone Payton an African American? ...
The authors report that among adults surveyed, 79 percent guessed that Chip is white and 64 percent assumed Tyrone is black. In other words, sizable fractions completely missed the academics’ implication. ...
And can we safely assume that UC Irvine undergrads are white? Currently, 55.7 percent are Asian. Perhaps they don’t major in psychology quite as much as this Orange County college’s white minority, but shouldn’t the study break out responses by race? Perhaps some Asian students saw rescuing classical musicians as their duty to their race. ...
The authors carried out a second study on Cornell undergrads and Southern California adults, this time asking if it were morally justified to throw a mortally wounded Chip/Tyrone off a sinking lifeboat to save the other passengers from drowning. Once again, liberals were relatively enthusiastic about snuffing the WASP compared to killing the fellow with the basketball guard’s name (p = .03). As the psychologists report:
"In particular, political liberals tended to be more likely to endorse a consequentialist justification for sacrificing an innocent White man compared to sacrificing an innocent Black man."
In a third study, even when shown both scenarios, liberals remained enthusiastic about shoving somebody to his death if the first person they had an opportunity to kill was poor old Chip.
While liberals tend to be racist, conservatives tend to be citizenist. (By the way, Microsoft Word’s spellchecker reports that there is no such word as “citizenist.”)
Two additional experiments reported in this paper found that conservative students felt that civilians being killed as a side effect of military action is less OK when the collateral damage strikes down American citizens rather than Iraqi citizens. On the other hand, liberals did not distinguish between the welfare of foreigners and their fellow citizens.
Authors Eric Luis Uhlmann, David A. Pizarro, David Tannenbaum, and Peter H. Ditto report that their best guess for the anti-white racism of liberals is:
"A more likely explanation is that antipathy toward anti-Black prejudice played a greater role in liberals’ judgments."
An alternative way to phrase this is that anti-white animus is the hallmark of the contemporary liberal. Being anti-white is the KKKrazy glue that keeps the diverse Obama coalition together. And among whites, publicly hating your own race is proof of your moral and cultural superiority.
While conservatives tend to have natural concentric allegiances, white liberals pride themselves on their leapfrogging loyalties.
The term “anti-whitism” hardly exists today, but not because blacks are so powerful. Blacks are mostly totems in power games played by whites against other whites. Instead, anti-whitism is highly useful to white elites. You get ahead in this world by shoving white people out of your way. If you can rationalize your aggression in the name of your burning desire for racial justice for blacks, well, you get to shove away.
Funny coincidence, I have just finished reading a detective novel in a long-running series, continued after the death of the author because it is such a reliable cash-cow for the publishers, and the current (ghost) writer was describing two minor goons who were muscle for one of the protagonists.
One of them was white and the other guy black. But excuse me, no. One of them was a white guy and the other guy was a Black guy. It really stuck out on the page every time it was "white guy" and "Black guy". My immediate response (well, second response after immediate response which was "this is dumb") was "why not be consistent? White and Black, or white and black?"
Naturally the series is impeccably liberal and current author is, as you might tell, also impeccably liberal (villain or thereabouts of this novel is a podcast host who is anti-immigrant as his brand and generally MAGA-coded, though this is never stated in those terms. Of course, all the Good People in the novel detest and despise him).
Much of Institutional American Media adopted the obviously racist "Black" vs. "white" standard of capitalization in the weeks following George Floyd's demise. I'm not aware of any who have given it up during the vaunted Vibe Shift.
In contrast, my impression is that no more than 10% of Scott's commenters follow this double standard.
War or 9/11 vs opioid crisis: I think one critical difference is the perceived degree of agency of the victims. No one chooses to have their home bombed but taking or not taking drugs involves agency. I generally am more concerned about people harming others than about people harming themselves, and I might be committing a Typical Mind fallacy but I do indeed think it's fairly common to make this distinction.
> Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes?
Well, they would certainly object to anybody killed by anybody Israeli. But if they were killed by somebody else - and if they were "bad people", e.g. designated oppressors and ideological enemies - then what I have seen recently over the last several years, however I would wish it was otherwise, no, I do not think the answer is "probably yes".
Or Tyler Robinson. Or Thomas Crooks. Or all those "we can't tell oppressed people how to resist" and "by any means necessary". They are not exactly hiding it, it's all in public.
> Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
How about a person that is flamboyantly, performatively, explosively not nice to you - to the point they express a burning desire to physically eliminate you (and some of them act on that desire too, so you know it's not empty words) but at the same time are spending maximum effort to be nice to a complete stranger who isn't even a waiter but who by some of that person's internal criteria just can do no wrong, no matter what? Is that a nice person? What if they also declare themselves to be the standard of niceness and aggressively attack anybody who tries to argue maybe it's not how niceness should actually work - is that still the nice person?
> People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group,
Empirically, this is wildly untrue, unless you replace "group" with "in-group". But then it's pointless - of course everybody is nice to in-group, that's what the in-group is!
For those "moral units" that are limited and zero-sum - You could make the argument that they kind of do exist. They exist in the form of your time and your money. Or even your attention span (which we see has been increasingly commercialized).
Every Gaza protest you attend takes up your limited time, reducing it for protests for animals or time with your family. Every local Church bake sale you donate to takes money out of the mouths of starving Africans. Every documentary about the plight of rocks in Haiti is time you're not spending fostering your friendships. (I'm being deliberately obtuse but you get the idea).
TIL that the term "Telescopic Philanthropy" was coined by Dickens in "Bleak House" when describing Mrs. Jellyby, the ur-example of the humanitarian whose concern is for those far away rather than those near to her. So it's been around longer than the specific grouping of Effective Altruists!:
The chapter title there clearly comes from the saying "charity covers a multitude of sins" and the sins would seem to be the neglect Mrs. Pardiggle exhibits towards her own children while boasting of all the good she (and they) do for others.
Mrs. Pardiggle differs from Mrs. Jellyby in that she concentrates her efforts in the locality, rather than Africa, but the damage she does is just as bad:
"Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five young sons.
She was a formidable style of lady with spectacles, a prominent nose, and a loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal of room. And she really did, for she knocked down little chairs with her skirts that were quite a great way off. As only Ada and I were at home, we received her timidly, for she seemed to come in like cold weather and to make the little Pardiggles blue as they followed.
“These, young ladies,” said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility after the first salutations, “are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form.”
We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled—though they were certainly that too—but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.
“You have been visiting, I understand,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “at Mrs. Jellyby’s?”
We said yes, we had passed one night there.
“Mrs. Jellyby,” pursued the lady, always speaking in the same demonstrative, loud, hard tone, so that her voice impressed my fancy as if it had a sort of spectacles on too—and I may take the opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less engaging by her eyes being what Ada called “choking eyes,” meaning very prominent—“Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and deserves a helping hand. My boys have contributed to the African project—Egbert, one and six, being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means. Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course with MY young family. I take them everywhere.”
I was afterwards convinced (and so was Ada) that from the ill-conditioned eldest child, these words extorted a sharp yell. He turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.
“They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half-past six o’clock in the morning all the year round, including of course the depth of winter,” said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, “and they are with me during the revolving duties of the day. I am a School lady, I am a Visiting lady, I am a Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; I am on the local Linen Box Committee and many general committees; and my canvassing alone is very extensive—perhaps no one’s more so. But they are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business in general—in short, that taste for the sort of thing—which will render them in after life a service to their neighbours and a satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my direction; and they have attended as many public meetings and listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on that occasion after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of the evening.”
Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the injury of that night.
“You may have observed, Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “in some of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F.R.S., one pound. That is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation, under my direction; and thus things are made not only pleasant to ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others.”
The heatmap image (like the image of the aeroplane with the red dots) is something I mostly see as a comment on a news story or on a post by some influential person, with the implication being "here's another example of this common phenomenon."
Both things can be true: that the original study was about the outer limits of circles of concern, and that many individuals do care more about distant strangers and wildlife than about their families and neighbours and this happens often enough for the heatmap image to have become a shorthand for referring to it.
Also, the study doesn't actually contradict the claim you're rebutting, but is compatible with it, and is (IIUC) Bayesian evidence for it.
Seems like the difference is in what people think this "common phenomenon" is: whether it is "liberals care *nonzero* about strangers" or "liberals care about strangers *more* than about their own family and friends".
Big problem with this argument: your assuming utilitarianism, but I think the only people who would make this argument are *not* utilitarians!
Consider a typical EA scenario: an EA is buying ice cream with sprinkles, and when asked if they want to donate to the local art museum they answer "No". The reason they answer no is that they have better causes to give their money to.
Virtually every utilitarian agrees with this choice — in what world do local art museum donations maximize utility? At least a local food bank or giving gifts to your children would be better!
But to non-utilitarians, this just looks like you hate the art museum! Saying "I do love the art museum but *will never in 100 years support it*" is nonsequitur to a non-utilitarian.
In defense of the non-utilitarians, the endpoint the EA has reached is a bit hard to understand even from what a quick utilitarian calculation. Their actions seem to suggest that sprinkles for yourself are higher utility then the art museum! A non-utilitarian might say "even if your utilitarian morality is true, your actions imply you selfishly value sprinkles over art! I could understand you valuing lives over art in a trolley problem, but sprinkles? Sprinkles! Clearly, you are secretly selfish."
Telescopic altruism may be rare in its most extreme forms, but here in the UK it is all too real in the minds of our mad Labour regime, and, to be fair, former Conservative ministries.
Every week a thousand or more illegal immigrants cross the English Channel in dinghies, and these are currently housed and cared for at vast taxpayer expense. The population must then endure a constant crime wave, including so-called grooming gangs, which the government seems powerless and reluctant to combat effectively ("human rights" dont'cha know)
Labour recently announced five new towns to be built over the next few years, on the ever dwindling area of available land. But at the present rates of illegal immigration, let alone legal immigration, all these entire towns or their housing equivalent will be occupied by immigrants. The native population who can't afford to buy a property will have to wait for literally decades to be allocated a dwelling from the public housing stock.
A lot of us are pinning our hopes on a new political party called Reform, which everyone expects to give Labour (and the former failing Conservatives) a sound and well-deserved thrashing in some local elections due in May!
That's not telescopic altruism - that's sadism. They want to hurt the people they care about and they don't even regard the tools they're using to do it as human.
" But would they care about a pandemic that affected ordinary Americans? Yes - the COVID pandemic was only five years ago, and most Democrats supported stronger anti-pandemic measures than most Republicans."
Scott pretends to not understand that the interpretation of the "anti-pandemic measures" was that their aim was to hurt people and not to prevent disease.
When there was a possibility of preventing disease back in January and February of 2020 liberals were going with "hug a Chinese person".
This is pretty directly what the problem with the "liberals don't care" interpretation is - they care but they're driven by hate. SF "cares" so much about the homeless and the plight of the drug addicted that it's a public venue for seeing the most miserable people alive that makes the residents miserable - hey, everyone gets to care a lot though!
This is similar to a concept The Zvi talks about in moral mazes. If the interventions that liberals (or people generally) argue for are practical or effective, then arguing for them does not signal ingroupness or virtue. It’s only by arguing for nonsense that you can prove you are a team player.
Progressives support things that make problems worse because they get moral credit for "caring" and because "solutions" to problems cause money and power to flow to leftists.
"Hug a Chinese person" when for all we knew this could be a deadly pandemic wasn't just nonsense - it was maximally damaging.
In the UK, liberals often refer to right wingers as "gammons". I presume this word is meant to bring to mind an image of a red-faced (the color of gammon) choleric type of person raging against anything progressive. But in truth, most right wingers are fairly laid back, and it is hate-filled lefties to which the term gammon would be better suited!
The concept of "correlated altruism" provides a vital data point for what I suspect is a deeper biological reality.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the only form of "true" altruism may be the telescopic variety. Most "local" altruism—caring for family or neighbours—is effectively a refined form of Genetic Reciprocity. It is the Selfish Gene operating with a longer fuse, governed by the cold logic of kin selection and future favours. It is only in Telescopic Altruism—the act of caring for a stranger from whom no reciprocity is possible—that we see the biological firewall truly breached.
If we accept that our behaviour is a product of genes sculpted in the crucible of our environment, then "choice" is largely an illusion. In this regard, empathy isn't a menu of moral options we select from; it is a universal sensitivity to the pain of others. If an individual is biologically "wired" to be highly sensitive to suffering, that sensitivity is system-wide. It doesn't have a "local-only" switch that flips off just because the sufferer is on the other side of the planet.
Consequently, it is extremely unlikely to see a true altruist who is indifferent to those nearby while showing empathy to a stranger. If that gap exists, the "altruism" is usually just a mask for social signalling—a different biological drive altogether.
As an NHS physician, I’ve explored these diagnostic premises and their impact on our species' trajectory in my debut book, The Theory of Us: The Final Diagnosis of the Human Species. The data highlighted here regarding the limits of concern provides a compelling corroboration of how these deterministic "vital signs" play out in the modern world.
> If an individual is biologically "wired" to be highly sensitive to suffering
But they are not wired to be sensitive to suffering itself. They are sensitive to the 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 of suffering. So if they were to, say, simply assume that the outsiders were distinctly inhuman and not capable of real suffering, that would solve the practical issues of people empathizing with things they shouldn't. And we do seem to see a lot of that in practice.
You’re correct that our biology reacts to the perception of suffering. Dehumanisation is effectively a software patch for the "Legacy Code" of our tribal past—it allows the brain to categorise outsiders as non-sentient to prevent the empathy hardware from firing.
However, from my perspective as a clinician, this highlights the "Malleable Middle" of our species. While most people’s empathy can be toggled via this Us-vs-Them conditioning, there is a small percentage of the population whose sensitivity is so high that it bypasses these tribal filters entirely. They are the "Universal Altruists" who cannot un-see the humanity in the stranger, regardless of the narrative.
The real question is why our current systems are so effective at selecting for the filters of the former rather than the sensitivity of the latter.
Because dehumanization is useful? It's not "legacy code". Dehumanization is useful for the exact same reasons it was useful back in the day. (In fact, I'm very impressed that it managed to scale well to the level of nations.) It allows people to hurt and kill people that need to be killed: serial killers, dangerously mentally ill liabilities, parasitic psychopaths, and most importantly, other groups that are dehumanizing 𝘺𝘰𝘶. If you had empathy for the enemy but they didn't, that leaves you at a massive psychological disadvantage. That's why the groups without limits for empathy can't survive in the long term. It's not just because they can't deal with liabilities, it's because they'll simply be murdered.
One version of "telescopic altruism" that does seem to actually exist is "externalized patriotism" -- people who are (or at least express) disdain for their own country and admiration for almost all others. As Disraeli said, "Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own"
I recently spoke to one of these “telescopic altruism” believers (a good friend of mine, with whom I have deep disagreements). He frames the problem in the fixed-points framework by using government dollars as the currency of caring.
Approximate quote: “I don’t think we should give a single dollar to anyone outside this country when we still have starving kids here.”
When I explained that there are basically no starving kids here, only food insecurity (genuinely bad of course), he doubled down: no foreign aid until we’ve solved all such problems at home.
I was pretty surprised but I think he genuinely meant it.
The aside about the "moral units" distribution question in Section 2 glossed over the issue and I think it is the exact strongest case against the argument of this post. It's fine to vent about the obnoxious bad-faith criticisms of internet reply guys but this article does not feel like an effort to steelman what it's criticizing.
Moral consideration (thinking/feeling about others) is a free internal feeling in someone's brain and is effectively infinite as long as you have waking hours. In contrast real material charity (medicine, food, or even policy changes) is limited in the real world. We live in the scenario where we only have so many "moral units" (capturing the cost/time/political capital of charitable outreach) to distribute between all the causes.
Telescopic causes, by definition, are far away and as such we tend to have less influence on them. If it costs me 5x "moral units" to effectively distribute a vaccine to someone in Uganda, but only 1x moral unit to fund a vaccination program for rural people in my state, then yes, I would be a telescopic altruist if I prioritized the smaller number of Ugandans my money would help than the larger number of people in my hometown who could be helped at the same cost.
The unstated steelman is: "we're less effective at enacting change for distant/minority causes, and we should spend our limited charity budget on causes we think we can achieve real change on and not get distracted by remote/less-tractable issues which are highly salient because of moral or status reasons".
We should criticize this because we're seeing a disaster of "telescopic altruism" on the left in the US. The priorities of the privileged people who increasingly make up the Democratic electorate, insulated from kitchen table problems by their own elite standing, increasingly shift the party's focus further away from those of working class Americans and toward high-salience but remote or niche issues which are tightly bound to contests of status, clout, and influence.
The Blueprint poll showing that Israel, Palestine, Socialism, and LGBTQ issues are the worst-performing issues for dem/ind voters (even as these remain core areas for the left!) is the most solid proof for this mismatch: https://blueprint-research.com/polling/build-a-dem-workshop/
The disastrous and accelerating loss of support from the working class, who universally say that they don't believe the Democrats care about issues which matter to them, is the direct result of the telescopic altruism as practiced by elites and the best example of the costs of excusing that behavior today.
I think the main point may be correct but you made a wrong argument. Deciding who to donate money or your time is a zero sum game. Money you donate to cause A will not be donated to cause B.
Furthermore, whenever I read arguments like the one you describe it’s mostly: “this cause is really idiotic especially when compared to a reasonable cause here” (eg donating to Gaza is donating to Hamas, nobody should care about shrimp welfare, etc).
Another side argument that come with this when the cause is worthy is that you are donating “incorrectly” because you don’t understand the problems in the remote place or that donating to them is actively harmful. I’m not saying I agree, just that this is the common form of the argument.
I think, this is a bit of a strawman argument. My definition of telescopic altruism is one with no skin in the game; no personal consequences for doing more harm than good, no accountability and insufficient knowledge of the supposed beneficiary’s true needs and preferences. It is a very potent force for evil in the world, paving superhighways to hell with good intentions.
Another common attribute of telescopic altruism is being motivated by whatever is shoved in the face of the telescopic altruist by his/her preferred media channels.
People fall into quite a few different broad categories on these dimensions. There's power to the idea of a person who cares deeply about their own family and community and then uses their knowledge and resources to spread that circle of concern out more broadly and care for larger and larger numbers of people near and far. It's messianic in the best possible way at the limit and some people are built for these things. But these people are quite rare.
Being able to effectively manage a marriage and children is difficult enough. Based on the number of strained and dysfunctional families it's very difficult. If you then start to extend out and try to effectively fill a meaningful role in an extended family, in a group of friends, in a community, most people are stretched to the limits of their time and energy quickly. Most people don't get to this point. And this isn't neutral. Strong families and strong communities are central to every compelling vision of the good. Not having those things because people aren't meeting their potential is a huge loss, and everyone has a part to play, everyone could be better than they are now, and it always matters.
When people have trouble managing themselves and managing their immediate surroundings many distractions become tempting. There are distractions that are obviously bad like overindulging in drugs and alcohol and other addictions. But there are lots of other distractions that are even more dangerous in a way because they're kind of good. One of them is getting involved in politics. There are millions of people who are eaten alive by the day to day political discourse. And they feel like they're making a difference by being informed but they're really just distracting themselves from problems in their own lives. Real problems that are difficult to solve but would make their lives and lots of other lives a lot better if they were solved. And the world is just a big web of people who can pull each other up or drag each other down based on actual personal relationship.
There are certain people who are called to something much larger. The way a president or a general thinks about people across the planet matters quite a bit and they should care deeply about these issues even if it distracts them from their personal responsibilities. There are many other people with power and influence that should be doing the same thing. But this is a spectrum, and most people could improve the world much more by unplugging and logging off and playing with their kids and calling their moms and reconciling with their brothers.
The character of Françoise, the fascinatingly lower-class housekeeper in the early parts of “In Search of Lost Time”, is accused of telescopic altruism:
“I had taken note of the fact that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself. The tears which flowed from her in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her, in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more accurate mental picture of the victims.”
I think the issue with the telescopic altruism isn't necessarily that it's long distance but the nature of the "telescope" they use, aka the media. Most people who are the target of the telescopic altruism criticism tend to be concerned because they read or saw something that told them bad thing was bad (remember kony 2012?). They don't really verify if the cause is either legitimate or has been resolved, they just assume that the media told them what they needed to know and do the activism.
The issue with the gaza activism is that most people who are engaged in it don't have much stake in gaza or it's outcomes, or in the conflict in general. That's not to say that they're right or wrong in their criticisms, just that caring requires a level of engagement and follow through that the activists don't tend to have. They just know it's a problem because some media told them so. It's also why the activism tends to go nowhere in the first place.
You can contrast this with zionists, who care about Israel much more genuinely and tend to get a lot more done politically as a result. Now that has its own issues as well, but I'm talking about the effectiveness of the engagement specifically.
Have to quibble with the Covid bit. It drifted pretty far into overreaction and I think a sizeable, measurable amount of that overreaction is hypochondriac narcissism being framed as concern for the well-being of others. It also doesn't really track on an international level - Pakistan and North Korea being some of the most aggressive "zero-tolerance" nations out there, altruistic and liberal Sweden having no distancing policies whatsoever.
You also had obvious examples of "masks and distance for thee, not for me" with Gavin Newsom attending an indoor party at a swank French restaurant while forbidding commoners from going on beaches and public park trails, and that absolutely unforgettable photograph of Stacey Abrams sitting in the front of a bunch of masked elementary schoolers, her own mask nowhere in sight (not even around her chin).
I think it's much more illuminating to view state-by-state Covid policies through the lens of urban vs rural states than liberal vs conservative states. Still not perfect (lockdown Vermont vs back-to-work Florida), but the underlying reasoning seems a lot less shoehorned-in.
One (and to be fair only one) effective altruist told me I should feel guilty because I donated to a local charity, rather than a charity focused on international aide, as my dollars would have greater impact abroad.
I don’t mean to use that person as a straw man, but when I think telescopic altruism, I think of folks so focused on maximizing a metric that they imply that personal bonds should play no role in how we invest our generosity and kidness.
If you feel that is the underlying position of the other person, then lashing out with accusations of telescopic altruism is probably because it feels like your loyalty to your loved ones is being assaulted.
That heat map is a major chart crime. The paper says that the heat map shows that "liberals’ moral circles are more likely to include nonhumans (even aliens and rocks) as well." Well, the heat map makes it looks like some people are including rocks in their moral circle but no-one did. What has happened is that the averaging filter they used for the heat map has smeared colour from circle 14 (plants and trees) into circle 15 (rocks). I downloaded the data and plotted it myself and nobody clicked on circle 15 or circle 16.
Very poor form. The core idea of "telescopic altruism" is that the amount of good you do in the world is the cross product of how much you care about things and how close you are to them. The secondary idea is that it's a lot easier to fake caring about distant people than it is to fake caring about nearby people, since you're much less likely to be called on it by those you claim to be helping. Instead of addressing either of these very basic points, the article consists solely of ad hominem attacks and self-congratulatory statements along partisan lines.
This author used to be a lot better about that sort of thing.
My personal experience is that some people look for causes as a way to belong to a community or find purpose. That the interest in Gazans is superficial, even if felt deeply, and the real motivation is to be part of a movement. This comes from seeing the some of the same people jump from cause to cause, some of which are somewhat consistent (Ukraine, Gaza) and some which seem totally disconnected (5G antennas, GMO food). Some of these protestors aren’t very informed when engaged in conversation, nor do they have a clear idea of what the desired outcome looks like.
I don’t think they’d care less about a family member or neighbor. But I think they often care more about whatever is fashionable to care about. And this hop from cause to cause makes it look more superficial than a life long commitment to family or church or similar.
> But I think they often care more about whatever is fashionable to care about.
Sounds like they care a lot about the opinions of their friends. That is a narrow circle of concern, something that conservatives should approve of, in principle, even if they do not approve of the specific opinions of the specific friends.
The ones who care about foreign causes *consistently* are the weird ones.
I identify as liberal and generally do not understand altruism or philantropy - I support a strong social safety network because I and my child might need it one day, and not as a gift to others. It is entirely sure we are never going to get rich, but we might get poor. I am not sure how long I will be able to work, maybe I will burn out. AI might replace me. My child seems to be too ADHD for a serious career, clever but "random", I am not sure yet.
Even if we had like 1% chance of getting rich, the logic of diminishing marginal utility means high taxes would not really make us much worse off, I mean it would mean just going on five cruises a year, not six, come on? No big deal.
I am neutralish on racism or trans issues, basically if other people want to make it part of the liberal package, I am okay with that, it does neither cost me nor benefit me. I don't see life as a competition, so other people being better off does not make me worse off. Ovarlly low-key in support, because if one can help others without cost to self, it is generally a decent thing to do.
Feminism does make me as a man better off. The correct kind of feminism, the kind that insists on splitting the bill, easier on my wallet :)
Regarding the Dave Barry waiter quote, it could easily be the reverse where the other person is nicer to the waiter than they are to you. I have a friend who generally means well, and is polite to strangers, but he likes to mess with people he's close to or wants to get close to, and sometimes takes it too far. As a result he occasionally gets in trouble with both myself and the girls he dates. By the same token, I find it harder to be patient with him than with strangers who reach similar levels of annoyance. The phrase "familiarity breeds contempt" comes to mind.
Also, I think a better "telescopic altruism" response to the Dave Barry quote is "Of course being mean to a waiter is an obvious red flag, but being NICE to a waiter isn't exactly the pinnacle of noble sacrifice". I recall in the old Slate Star Codex you once posted a link to a reddit page asking for anecdotes of personal encounters with Donald Trump. The vast majority of stories were positive ones. I've seen his supporters bring up stuff like this and say that this is the "real" Trump, while the one we see on the cameras is just a performance. I wonder if it's more the other way around. The average celebrity knows that you want to please the fans, and every positive interaction is another person who'll tell everyone "You're not gonna believe who was at my table tonight, and he was just the nicest guy!" Then there are the times you have a bad day and have difficulty being pleasant with anyone. I guess the point I want to make is that you can't always judge a person's character by one interaction. You have to observe patterns of behavior in the context where they happen.
Sending food to Ethiopia isn't really the problem; the problem is that there is a civil war there (or was and perhaps soon will be again). There is also a genocide just to the north in Sudan.
At some point, possibly already now, the biggest problem in world (measured by qalys or whatever) is lack of security. I've never heard an EA talk about security issues (in a real way, not like in the toy example of Gaza given here).
I had a slightly hard time reading this because I interpreted it as ~"microscopic altruism". It didn't occur to me the particular focal length of the lens was conducive to the metaphor.
Post-embarrassment (of the red face hot blooded kind), in re-read, in what must assumedly be a kind of irony, it was mostly the same.
Since I indulged this silly notion I guess "I" should indulge a thought as well, in recompense.
...uh, abstracted suffering is probably something close to a constant.
I had never heard this term before, so I haven't thrown the term around, and I won't start now. But one aspect of it relates to what I believe to be the most important part of effective altruism. I only spend my money helping people and causes when I can directly verify that the money is spent well. Giving money to a friend who you know for a fact is a good person usually has more impact than giving money to a charity organization that has lots of administrative overhead. Shrieking at someone who's physically attacking someone you care about usually has more impact than shrieking online about the latest thing involving people far away whose religions, governments, and motivations you probably know nothing about.
The “reptilian” idea mainly comes from a mix of science fiction, ancient myths, and modern conspiracy theories.
One of the biggest reasons it became popular is a writer named David Icke. In the 1990s, he claimed that a race of shape-shifting reptilian beings secretly controls world leaders and wealthy elites. His ideas spread through books, interviews, and later the internet.
But the roots go even deeper:
Ancient myths: Some old civilizations, like those in Mesopotamia, had stories about serpent-like gods or creatures. These were symbolic, not literal aliens.
Science fiction influence: Shows like V featured alien reptiles disguised as humans, which made the idea more vivid in pop culture.
Psychological factors: Humans are naturally drawn to big, hidden explanations for complex problems (like inequality or power). Conspiracy theories can make the world feel more understandable or give a sense of “secret knowledge.”
Internet spread: Social media and forums helped these ideas travel fast, even without evidence.
In reality, there’s no scientific proof that reptilian beings exist or that any humans are secretly non-human. The theory persists mostly because it’s dramatic and taps into distrust of powerful people.
If you want, I can also explain why conspiracy theories in general feel convincing to people.
There's a simpler way to see why "telescopic altruism" fails as a concept: it assumes moral concern is a *positional good* — that caring about Gaza necessarily means caring less about your neighbor, the way owning a luxury car signals status precisely because others can't also own it. But empathy doesn't work like that. It's not positional. It's generative.
The neuroscience here is unambiguous in a way that's rarely cited in these debates. Compassion training studies (Klimecki et al., 2013) show that deliberately extending care toward strangers *increases* affective resonance toward those already close — not the reverse. The hydraulic model the telescopic framing assumes — finite moral resources, zero-sum allocation — maps onto how *money* works, not onto how *character* works.
What critics are actually tracking is something real but narrower: performative altruism that substitutes visibility for action. But that's a failure of authenticity, not proximity. And crucially — the same people who perform concern for distant causes tend to perform concern for nearby ones too. Which is consistent with Scott's correlated altruism: the underlying variable is character, not distance.
The most honest version of the telescopic altruism critique isn't moral at all. It's aesthetic: *these people are annoying*. Which, granted. But "annoying" and "hypocritical" are different accusations, and collapsing them is doing a lot of quiet work in most of these arguments.
I explore the neuroscience of moral cognition — and why our intuitions about empathy systematically mislead us — at The Reflective Mind: https://laurentiulupumd.substack.com. The gap between what compassion feels like and what it actually does in the brain is stranger than most people expect.
I'm sure you've actually met people making that exact argument, so I accept that this is a good refutation of that. However, I don't think that is the most common version of this concern. There is a sense in which abstract 'care' for people far away does not translate into actual care for those near you, and is a failure mode of some people who struggle with interpersonal relationships. Making 'number go up' in terms of donations to charities does not mean you will be a caring husband, father, or friend, or even a generally good person. IE, see Sam Bankman-Fried. I think people feel distrust for abstract caring for this reason, and I think it is well founded. First care about and support those close to you, then if you have the emotional bandwith, expand your circle of compassion to the rest of the world.
As a cynic, I expect that most complaints about "telescopic altruism" are attempts by the complainer to get a bigger slice of the redistribution. And if you perceive that you are closer to the affluent from whom the redistribution flows, arguing that those further away should get less of it is the first step to arguing that one should get more of it.
Where this gets interesting is if those further away are in worse condition than one's self. E.g. it may be that the redistribution feeds starving children in Ethiopia whereas laid-off factory workers in the US get no subsidy so they can continue to buy new cars. It would be rational for the laid-off worker to complain of "telescopic altruism", arguing that the altruism of affluent Americans should end at the border of the US, and they, being one of the worse-off categories of Americans, should get more redistribution.
Trying to find any worthwhile content on this platform while wading through an endless parade of self-gratifying clickbait nonsense makes me wonder if I had been transported back in time to the 1970s, and left in a suburban shopping mall.
> The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness.
It is you who doesn't understand niceness... niceness may seem infinite but one does, in fact, have a limited ability to be nice and there is indeed a threshold at which one falls under suspicion of not caring about their own child enough due to demonstrating excessive niceness to others.
This is a cogent point to make.
This paper came to the same conclusion wrt caring for future generations.
"Longtermists consistently value future generations, present generations, outgroups, and nature more than the general population does, as measured by the Moral Expansiveness Scale (MES)."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13684302241242115
I should hope so!
Isn't that the point?
Depends. How much of the current world population are you willing to murder to ensure your great grandchildren have a world at all? One Third? More or less? (If less, and you believe in "saving the environment" you might as well peg it to zero, as you aren't fixing anything, and being willing to kill some people to do jack-all is dunderheaded).
I don't see what that has to do with my post; however much the average person cares, longtermists are supposed to care more. Otherwise, what makes them longtermists?
Perhaps you mixing them up with the True Scotsmen?
No, Philippe is right. That summary of the study is as informative as one telling us that people considered "tall" on average have a higher measured height than the general population.
its not immediately intuitive to me that people who care more about future generations also care more about current generations
That article is behind a paywall. The Abstract mentions the Longtermism Beliefs Scale (LBS). According GOOG's AI, "The Longtermism Beliefs Scale (LBS) is a 7-item psychometric tool developed by researchers (Syropoulos, Law, Kraft-Todd, & Young) to measure the extent to which individuals align with the philosophy of long-termism, which advocates for the protection and welfare of distant future generations." But I can't find the online test. I would consider myself to be a neartermist, but I'd like to see where I'd score.
If I'm interpreting the graph correctly, I think that means the average liberal - not the average guy on EA forums, the average normie liberal - places the limit of their circle of concern at "paramecia and amoebae".
Really?
Maybe just a random artifact of people answering something more generic like "I care for all living beings". Even though perhaps if pressed they might admit that they don't in fact meaningfully care about E. Coli or a random lichen.
(that said, "a priori, I don't want these species to go extinct" is some amount of care. And it's an amount that I'd extend to almost any living being - if there are good reasons I might be ok with it but generally I'd be strongly against causing extinctions, though it's probably more for a "fear of upsetting poorly understood ecological equilibria" reason than thinking the individual members of some species hold much moral worth)
Wow, if I'm reading this very blurry chart right (why the hell is it a mostly-blank circle?), 13 and 14 were the most very popular for libs, c.f. 12 for "paramecia and amoebae". So the generic question would have to be even more all-encompassing than "all living beings" unless 14 is still in the realm of life.
I notice some people say "the world would be better without humans in it!" and seem to care a lot about "pristine" nature, which may explain those people giving moral concern to rocks.
As an EA it seems weird that such liberals are "more altruistic" than me on this metric, whatever the exact metric may be. But rocks don't feel anything. They don't care if they're "pristine" or not, nor do the paramecia and amoebae, so I don't care about them in turn, for there is no suffering to remove (or, even if a rock can suffer, I cannot know its likes and dislikes; there's no reason to think it prefers "pristine nature" over a blast furnace). So what does it mean to "care" about them―to say "oh this human-free world with pristine rocks would be morally better"?
Wild animals are regularly torn apart by other wild animals, or slowly consumed by parasites, and often experience awful diseases and famines, just as humans once did (and sometimes still do). You don't hear pop-liberals expressing concern about that. Given this dichotomy, no doubt another study with a different methodology could give very different results.
Occasionally, I bet you do hear people complaining about the Black Death in America (probably just hikers though), regardless of whether it's in rats or humans, and also regardless of whether or not its treatable (it is).
I imagine you have some aesthetics involved here: Some people like Skyscrapers and treat them like awesome human-made cliffs. Others have the idea that skyscrapers are inherently less awesome than nature-made cliffs, because humans made them (and hence would be upset if you removed a cliff to make a skyscraper somewhere else).
The outer rings on the survey task were listed as:
11- all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds
12- all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae
13- all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms
14- all living things in the universe including plants and trees
15- all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks
16-all things in existence
TY. And this makes the flaw in survey design clear. I'd say alien creatures are "at least maybe" on par with earth creatures, morally, while I give zero moral consideration to earth amoebae (except instrumentally, the same way a Monet painting has no intrinsic moral value but I don't want it to be destroyed). A good survey would detect and record such "holes" and put them on the heat map, and even split morality along multiple axes.
Seems bad that amoebae are two layers *closer* than trees. Lots more people care about trees than amoebae.
I want to complain about paramecia and amoebae being listed as "animals" in the first place, but I'll rather complain about them being ranked before hypothetical sentient aliens.
(Though I could imagine a biosphere chauvinist valuing even prokaryotes from their own planet more than fully sapient beings from another)
Yeah, I refuse to believe that is meant in anything like the way people use the word "care" or "concern" in regards to their family or even strangers.
Could be useful ecologically or academically to humans? Sure, sure, keep some pond scum around. Will go out of their way to sacrifice for the well-being of a particular instance of pond scum for its own sake?
Nah. Virtue signalling or misunderstanding the question. (Or I am misunderstanding)
Just so you know - because I'm uncertain - but there are people who care about (some) things irrespective of their usefulness for humans. (I'm one of them.)
For me, this level of care is though reserved for beings with a reasonable possibility of sentience, but maybe it's different for others.
I think there can be a reasonable level of concern of non-human things, sure. Like wanting to preserve an old building out of love of beauty, even if no human was around to appreciate it, is a legible perspective.
That's why I tried to specify that care or concern is used in a similar way as to humans. One can say they aren't equal levels of care, that the supposedly telescoping liberal has for their child and amoeba, but honestly this are so *radically* different that I think using the same word at all is misleading. Or else seriously disordered.
I would sacrifice approximately all the amoeba in the world for the child of a stranger (assuming doing so doesn't cause some ecological collapse). So even if I want amoeba to stick around on some level, it feels dishonest to use the same word for both.
I have no trouble believing such sincere people exist, like you or that woman Scott wrote about once helping worms off the sidewalk when it rained.
I have a hard time believing such people sincerely form enough of the "liberal" population to produce the results of the survey, while I have a much easier time believing that many "liberal" people profess such beliefs for social signaling reasons.
Is it really so unusual to help worms off the sidewalk? I could see giving up after 20 in the same day, or skipping it in a rush, but are there really people out there who wouldn't help even one, even if they were stuck waiting there anyway?
Yes, that appears to be most people
Scott seemed to think it was unusual but that may be his bubble or a rhetorical flourish.
I'll try to split the difference by saying yes, I have helped the worms off the sidewalk- and while planting flowers last week, I taught my kid to help make sure the worms get back in the dirt and out of the sun- but I don't conceive of it as a *moral issue* like I think was Scott's implication.
Maybe I'm being nitpicky or inconsistent about what to call a moral issue because I'd still call it a good thing to do, even the right thing to do, but I'm not going to get Repugnant Conclusioned by insect suffering, either.
Considering that morality is entirely about what is good and right, I think you already view it in practice as a moral issue, even if you don't define it that way or are inconsistent on the topic. (No one has consistent morals. I doubt it's even possible.)
I suspect you don't want to view it as a moral issue because not saving them might be morally bad then, but that's not necessarily the case. Saving them could be simpy good while not saving them could be neutral. (Although intuitively, if you put them into the position where they need saving it's indeed bad to not save them.)
I don't disagree. I never meant to imply that my stance is normal. I'm very well aware that it's (sadly) not. I just wanted to inform the previous poster that people like me exist.
By the way, I usually don't help worms off the sidewalk when it rains. There's usually simply too many of them - it would take the entire day - and there's nothing from preventing them from crawling right back on the sidewalk. I would have to take them far away, into the woods, which again, is a crazy amount of effort. I do my utmost to not step on then when it rains though and feel horrible when I do.
It's like that time (rationalist celebrity) said "don't you dare accuse leftists of caring about issue X involving fargroup for political reasons, I cry myself sobbing to sleep literally every night over this" and then proceeded to not care about it very much as soon as the regime keeping issue X alive swapped to the other political side.
There's morality(abstract) and morality(practical), where morality(abstract) produces the correct list of things to say/think, and morality(practical) produces the correct list of things to *do* and actually motivates a person to do them.
I'm capable of thinking a person "cares" about the suffering of single-celled organisms, but the baseline minimum to get me to consider them is some action pursuing goals related to that which costs them something. Just saying it only proves morality(abstract), which doesn't actually do anything.
"It's like that time" sorry, what time was that?
Kelsey Piper and the carefully constrained unit of caring: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php?topic=4106.0
I suspect that "caring" (as an emotion) is an artifact of identification with one's personal model of the entity. The graph results are probably an artifact of insisting that there be a limit rather than a gradation. Step functions are often artifacts of the method used to measure.
FWIW, I care, slightly, for "paramecia and amoebae". But I care a lot more for those that I know. And yet more for closer relatives. When we raised chickens, I was reluctant, but willing, to kill them for the table. (I actually made a phrase "a chicken is a vegetable" to console myself, even though it was clearly false.)
OTOH, I'm not yet sure how much I care about various AI's. (I don't have any specific experiences with the current versions outside of browser-based internet search assistance.) But it's definitely not nothing. Even Eliza was worth a tiny fraction of care. (Eliza was clearly less "animate intelligence" than a paramecium, but was more personally familiar. I'm not sure how many dimensions the "gradient of caring" has, but personal familiarity is clearly one of them.)
Those damned parameciaphobes. Why? What did those little things do to you???
Give me a few million years to figure out what they're saying/calculating. Until then, they're CREEPY. (Actually, I think this is bacteria, trading genes around).
It might be an artifact of "all living things in the universe including plants and trees" being placed further out, at circle 14. Lots of people care about plants and trees.
The circles are intended to be nested, so that the plants-and-trees circle (14) also includes alien lifeforms (13) and paramecia and amoebae (12), but I don't think that's the usual ordering of concern, so it may have confused and misled people.
Nice catch on this one! Yeah, I can easily see someone finding it bad to clearcut a forest (or burn one down).
Imagine that no higher life existed in the universe.
Would you rather have a universe that included paramecia and amoeba?
Or a universe that included no life of any kind whatsoever?
I would not care either way. Those tiny self-replicating bio-machines sure appeal to s.o. into organic-chemistry. I would like those stars and galaxies in both.
The limit is the point beyond which you have literally no concern whatsoever. If you have literally *any concern at all* for something, it should be within the limit.
The people sharing the heatmap are incorrectly reading the survey, but the survey itself sucks (as most surveys do) and should not be taken as displaying anything "real," certainly not anything the designers (or Scott) wants it to be saying.
Let's also not rule out that most of the people who answered the survey had no idea what paramecia and amoebae were.
you should look at the paper.
>If a conservative’s map is “hottest” at friends, that means the conservative only cares about their friends (and doesn’t care at all about countrymen, foreigners, or animals).
So, it seems like people are just wired differently, and from their perspective their opposites are simply moral mutants with incomprehensible preferences that certainly don't suggest either good judgement or good character. I haven't heard about this study before, but I have always suspected that something like this has to be true, and Science obliges (until failed replications, at any rate).
I agree that this tracks with basically two foundationally different worldviews. Liberals tend to be pluralist, global, relational, and seek to expand the circle of moral concern. Conservatives tend to be insularist, local, atomistic, and seek to contract the circle of moral concern. Part of this is captured by the openness to new experience personality trait axis, which goes all the way back to amoebas. Some amoebas will seek out new sources of food, while others will hang around in the safe spot, where food is guaranteed. Both strategies are necessary for population survival. Sometimes, the food runs out and the population that sat still dies out. Sometimes, exploring new areas ends up being a bad risk, and the explorers die out, while those that stayed will survive.
The long-term evolutionary trend, however, favors expansion. This includes expanding the sphere of moral concern. That is what has happened throughout history and what we call progress. That's why it seems like the conservatives are always, as Buckley said it, yelling at history to stop.
I doubt the "long term evolutionary trend" favors expansion. I think the longterm evolutionary trend favors Han Chinese Racism, honestly. I don't think Pax Americana is likely to be re-established, and I think that China is more likely to be ascendant than a more open-seeking place like Russia (who is very proud to be a mutt-nation like America)
If you look at the history of the human race, it's obvious that the trend is expansion - from Africa to even remote islands such as Easter Island.
Haiti. Eat the white guys, then start starving, in desperation ask the French to come back, and be surprised when "they said no way".
How open do you need to be here?
This. I cannot believe that more people are not seeing this.
Seen their birth rates? Or shall I say: 'death' rates aka 'extinction rates'. East-Asian conformism/"racism" is going full Dodo. India has around 3 times as many kids (up to 5) than China. https://populationpyramids.org/compare/china-vs-india
>seek to expand the circle of moral concern
With a few notable exceptions where the expanding circle interacts with other moral priorities, like women's bodily autonomy or anything that might even faintly resemble xenophobia.
>seek to contract the circle of moral concern
I think I get what you mean on social scale as the tug of war of society goes, or the gas/brake political model, but this phrasing could be a bit misleading. "Do not want the circle to expand" is not the same as "seek to contract," and I would say conservatives are more about holding a steady circle of concern.
Conservatives believe in alternatives to government, in using Other Institutions like Religion and Family. This is strikingly opposed to your modern liberal, who disbelieves in Religion And Family. That Conservatives will now say "yes to family and family bonds" and Liberals will no longer, should be striking.
Conservatives now say "You know, Texas BBQ is pretty damn cool. I like that South Carolina's BBQ is different." Liberals (or should I say your metro-urban elite?) say, "Everyone's gotta love the Other Food (Mexican around here, which is striking, because all the Mexicans leave after our dreary winter. SAD == Seasonal Affective Disorder, very bad news)."
It is no longer part of the Liberal model to treasure your own town, your own neighborhood, any of that. Everything must be the same. This big unending sameness.
I want Laotian cuisine where there's Laotians! Pizza where there's Italians (and different pizza where there's Sicilians!) The list goes on. And I like Dirty Water Pizza!
>The long-term evolutionary trend, however, favors expansion.
But it doesn't particularly care which species will get to expand. Nether do certain progressives these days it seems, proclaiming that they are happy to see robots succeed us in the Great Chain of Being.
I think you're correct that they're different worldviews, but let me try to articulate the right side a bit better.
"Pish posh, says the conservative. "I don't believe that you do genuinely care about all living things, or even all humans, on an emotional level. Maybe you think you do, but you can't -- the human mind cannot do this any more than it can simultaneously visualise all the atoms in a block of cheese.
"What you are doing, when you _think_ you're caring about all humans, is to deeply care on an emotional level about whoever is currently being placed in front of you with a good sob story, to the exclusion of everyone else. This makes you eminently manipulable, and leads you to support all sorts of objectively bad things because they'll benefit the loudly pathetic.
"Conservatives understand that the correct way to deal with the billions of other humans is not emotionally-mediated empathy, but through rules and abstract principles of justice and consistency. When I see a stranger on the street I don't really care about him one way or the other, but I also don't rob him to steal his shoes -- not because I care about him as a person but because I care about the abstract principle of justice.
"I get upset at injustice, you get upset at suffering. This often leads us to agree on things, but in the cases where we disagree it's often because someone is suffering justly, like a criminal suffering the consequences of their crime."
If the conservative doesn't believe that the liberal's feelings are genuine, why should the liberal believe that the conservative is telling the truth? It would go something like this:
"What you are doing, when you _think_ you're caring about rules and abstract principles of justice, is to deeply care on an emotional level that those rules and principles of justice are applied to benefit conservatives, to the exclusion of everyone else. This makes you eminently manipulable, and leads you to support all sorts of objectively bad things because they'll benefit those that pay lip service to those rules and principles.
Liberals understand that the correct way to deal with the billions of other humans is through emotionally-mediated empathy, and not through rules and abstract principles of justice and consistency that can be interpreted and manipulated by those in power. When I see a stranger on the street I don't really care about what rules and principles of justice are applicable in the situation, but see him as a person that deserves the same consideration I expect from others.
"I get upset at suffering, you get upset at injustice. This often leads us to agree on things, but in the cases where we disagree it's often because someone is suffering unjustly, like a person accused of being a criminal through rules put in place by the ruling class to exploit the lower classes."
But justice is by definition righteous, that's what the word and concept represents. Anything that is considered just by society would also be considered to be good. The fact you don't think it's good is 1. just your opinion, and 2. makes you evil in the eyes of the just.
I am confused as to where you think I said justice is not good.
You claim that conservatives would use the pretense of justice to do "objectively bad" things. But if they believe it is just, then they believe it is good. Your personal opinion that their actions are immoral is irrelevant to their morality. If the rules are being followed, nothing else matters.
edited. removed multiple examples.
So, when a black man in Africa tries to give his 3 year old daughter to a white man (benefactor) to be his wife (eventually), with the expectation that the white guy is going to give his 3 year old daughter a better life than she'd get with her own parents, is the white guy being unjust by not accepting the kid? (Does your answer change if the white guy is going to continue to live in Africa, versus come back stateside?)
I would say that you continuing to be here is unjust in the eyes of this community.
Oh, I have no doubt that the liberals are FEELING truly. I just think they're damn easy to manipulate, and that given the right pictures, they'll be just as FEELING about the opposite viewpoint (women will do anything to make the crying babies go away)
I say this having talked with ad-men who have manipulated (successfully) the Iowa Caucus. They talk about how easy women (and yes, feelings and all of this stuff is women-coded) are to get to do things "because they're nice" rather than "because they make any damn fiscal sense." (I was in Seattle, and they literally said the monorail had zero emissions, completely disregarding any emissions the power used to run it makes. And expecting us to eat that propaganda with a SPOON, not start laughing at the complete idiot writing it.)
Good sob stories are a dime a dozen. You can even take things that people ought to Chesterton's Fence, and watch people merrily tear it down, set it on fire.
Remember when Obama started putting kids in cages down at the border? Did you ever figure out why that was? (try asking someone in Border Security. O-man had damn good reasons for what he was doing. Or maybe the "blood tests before we return the children" makes it kinda obvious what was going on, if you just think about it.)
Wimbli my man you have to try to hide it
Sometimes things hide better in plain sight.
See: Trailer Park Boys and Mr. Lahey's breathalyzer speech.
(Was actually a real, if drunken, speech* given to the Joint Chiefs).
*a rather good one, it's worth a listen.
>Was actually a real, if drunken, speech* given to the Joint Chiefs
How do you know?
"Pish posh, says the conservative. "I don't believe that you do genuinely care about all living things, or even all humans, on an emotional level. Maybe you think you do, but you can't -- the human mind cannot do this any more than it can simultaneously visualise all the atoms in a block of cheese."
Liberal: so h iw is the human mind able to care about God, Who is vastly greater than the entire physical universe?
What do you mean? The right wing is just as expansionist. Just look at Venezuela! The difference is whether they believe the interests of the native population are at all relevant.
I dont know what the percentiles are here but the glass half full reading is that the yellow rings overlap.
Your approach is interesting because its the opposite to the one I would have taken. You start with the assumption that we should fix our communities before we fix the world.
As I see it, the emphasis already defaults to fixing your community, and I would question that default and suggest that we should rather default to systemic issues first. In other words most people will give bread or change to the hungry guy in the street, but in my opinion we would do better to address hunger and homelessness systemically. Why should we prioritise helping those that happen to be in our direct view? Why are they more deserving that the hungry people we don't see?
One could argue, albeit crudely, that by directing our charity to those that happen to be in our view we're simply placating our guilt and incentivising begging. Then we give ourselves a pat on the back and forget about looking at the real underlying problems which are usually not in our direct view.
We simply have more control over the situation with people in the direct view. I mean, assuming control is good - I think it is. So for example we can pack help together with addressing their wrong decisions, or make help conditional on paying it forward and so on. I am basing it on the assumption that it is rarely just the lack of resources, but also a more complex thing, from wrong decisions to mental health stuff.
More control, and also, more knowledge. Say I hear about some oppressive third-world dictator and start protesting to get him removed -- I don't actually know about the situation, and so don't know whether there's any plausible better person to replace him, whether his brutality is the only thing stopping the various ethnicities of the country genociding each other, what repercussions his fall would have for the wider region, etc. In other words, I'm quite likely to find myself supporting a cause which, if successful, would make things worse rather than better. Conversely, when it comes to, say, the government of my own town, I'm in a better position to know what the alternatives are and whether the current lot are doing a good job, so my opinions are more likely to be correct.
Yes. Or, it is hard to say what the long term outcome of all the efforts Bill and Melinda Gates do against malaria will result in, maybe overpopulation and resource wars, maybe a more terrible illness...
But to make it clear I am not defending a conservative position, I am defending a centrist position. Basically, do no harm abroad. Have enough moral concern for foreigners and animals to not make things actively worse for them. But don't assume you can fix a situation you don't fully understand.
A few years ago, aid to Uganda was cut and children went hungry. That was because they made a law against "aggravated homosexuality" and most people just read the title only, so this led to a huge scandal. It is the death penalty for raping children, the disabled and the elderly. Although the law had a stupid name, they were not simply killing people for being gay. They were killing people for being rapists. This is usually the level of how well we tend to understand these things...
The title wasn't stupid; it accurately sums up the law's purpose. The law doesn't require proof that the offender has raped a person in the protected groups; it simply defines any homosexual activity with these groups to be "aggravated," with consent explicitly *not* being a defense. It also criminalizes regular homosexuality (ie gay sex) with up to life in prison and defines "aggravated" homosexuality to include *any repeat offense* of regular homosexuality. If the popular view of this was that it imposed the death penalty for being gay, that was a bit simplified but not too far off. It's not accurate to characterize this as an anti-rape law.
So, about like Gaza then? Should we also cut all aid to Gaza? Including all the aid Bibi wants Europe to send?
As I understand it, Gaza's anti-gay laws are less strict and less often enforced, though still bad. In any case, I don't have a strong opinion on where the threshold for cutting off international aid should be. I'm saying that whether Uganda gets aid or not, the law in question is a severe human rights violation and shouldn't be presented otherwise.
>But to make it clear I am not defending a conservative position, I am defending a centrist position. Basically, do no harm abroad. Have enough moral concern for foreigners and animals to not make things actively worse for them. But don't assume you can fix a situation you don't fully understand.
TBF I think most conservatives would agree with that position. Full-on "Trample everyone else to benefit my country" believers are a very small minority; during the last Greenland crisis, for example, polling showed that only around 8% of Republicans (vs. 4% of Americans in general) support the idea of taking Greenland by military force.
I don't think most people understand the level of force necessary to take Greenland. I think if they did, you'd get more people saying "Holy shit! That sounds fun!"
(Actual strategic planner was told to "go back to DARPA", so perhaps that isn't the one that would get approved).
Yeah, but as Scott and others have pointed out, the problems of the developing world are sometimes more straightforward. The drunks in my neighbourhood are undoubtedly receiving lots of social services but are still drunk and dysfunctional. Not at all sure how to help them. Meanwhile giving AIDS medicine to pregnant moms with HIV will block maternal transmission, cheaply and with no serious downside. Hence I would rather the marginal dollar go to HIV+ moms in Africa than to care for drunks in my neighbourhood.
Obviously there are eight billion foreign aid failure stories, but we can worry about that after everyone has food and medicine.
Exposure to fewer atrocities would probably help the drunks* (maybe my neighborhood is weird?)
I think most people would rather the marginal dollar for aids go to the Ukraine, since we were responsible for infecting many of their soldiers with HIV... yes?
*"Ladies and genitals..."
What are you talking about?
Oh, that Ladies and Genitals is referencing the guy who gave a (drunken) speech to the Joint Chiefs... explaining how he was using a breathalyzer to keep at the optimal level of drunkenness throughout his worktime.
Someone thought that speech was good enough they televized it (in some sort of trailer park show).
Turns out watching atrocities all day isn't very good for the liver.
I think this sort of thing is overrated, at least if you're taking about the EA version of altruism: EAs explicitly have "tractability" (which I think is pretty close to "control"--there are accessible actions you can take to get the outcomes you want) as one of their key points.
And plenty of "local" problems are actually very hard to "control"! The opioid crisis involved legal opioids being overprescribed, cheap and easy to manufacture new synthetic opioids, and the complicated social phenomenon of addiction all bundled up in complicated ways.
For anyone who thinks that America ought to have been "solving" the opioid crisis: do you have any actions that could have been taken in mind, that are as simple and directly lead to their desired result as vitamin A supplementation for poor foreign kids does? Does anyone think there was a "one weird trick for ending the opioid crisis" that would be comparably effective/cheap as bed nets are a "one weird trick to prevent malaria"?!
Prohibition. If we can get the same amount of aid to someone without the narcotic (vicodin) with NSAIDs, then we can probably do the same thing for opiods.
And if not? There was a reason we didn't want to become China, rife with opium dens.
Part of it is the issue of competence and leverage - you can correctly diagnose what is needed to fix your community more easily than what is needed to fix society as a whole, and you have more direct and powerful ability to affect your community than society as a whole.
We could have 100,000,000 cooks in the kitchen of 'fixing society', most of them with little real expertise or knowledge on the topic and with 100,000 conflicting viewpoints represented in a way that creates inescapable gridlock and zero-sum competition.
Or we could have 100,000,000 people each trying to fix small, local issues that they understand well and can actually make progress on alone or in small like-minded groups, and that would actually solve a lot of problems, everywhere across the nation.
Of course, the real answer is that you have to do both - pay enough attention to elect good representatives to address systemic issues, and agitate for reform when that's failing; work in your community to fix the things you actually have vision and leverage on.
This assumes most people are competent at solving problems, and actually WANT to solve problems. I don't think either of these are the case. Most small businesses Fail, after all. And solving problems means you now have to have "a new thing to do" (lifestyle if you will), and for people that don't generally do that a lot, it can be a scary thing. Far better to get plaudits for "helping" someone, instead of making sure they can stand on their own.
Give'em free fentanyl. To solve the issue "systemically" and very cheap. (Sorry, aspiring Asperger speaking here)
" Why should we prioritise helping those that happen to be in our direct view? Why are they more deserving that the hungry people we don't see?"
Because helping the hungry guy near me helps me more. If he's not hungry he's less likely to steal food from me. And if he becomes productive that is better for our community.
Thats valid from an practical, self-serving point of view. But I'm looking at it from perspective of normative ethics. The default ethical norm is that its "wrong" to ignore the hungry people around you, so you should give them something (even if its not really helpful in addressing the problem), whereas its sort of "okay" to ignore real issues that are far away.. That the default moral framework I'm addressing
I think most people would agree with you on principle (I do!) but my guess is that the conservative person's gut reaction would be to think that it is hubris from you to think you can *fix* or treat the issue at a higher level and would suspect it of being a way to escape your (more local) moral obligations. I can hear Peterson in my head screaming in a broken voice "Think again, sunshine"
I don't have that personality myself and I favor the systemic approach whenever possible even though I do take the accusation of hubris seriously nowadays (humhum, really existing communism) but it's funny you should take the example of homelessness because one (maybe more?) article on this blog about how a lot of smart people *have* tried to tackle the issue of homelessness at a systemic level and how the issue has resisted to those solutions.
With white progressives' kneejerk tendency to use "white" as a pejorative (eg. "It was just a bunch of old white guys" to describe most things in European history, or "white women's tears" as a sneered-at concept, ESPECIALLY by progressive white women themselves), I think the boot fits more than you concede.
This also has more complexity to it than just "people hating their neighbours". It's misguided IMO but it's born out of the contrast with white self-aggrandizement and what it has historically produced - a sort of attempt to roughly compensate for arrogance via humbling. Of course it doesn't really work insofar as it also turns itself in a form of arrogance (sneering of the white-who-knows-better at the white-who-does-not, which is not an ethnic line but it's still an in/out group split).
Firstly, progressives often use "white X" as a pejorative in contexts that have nothing to do with self-aggrandisement.
Secondly, progressives let far less justifiable attempts at non-white self-aggrandisement slide.
So, I don't think it's really about self-aggrandisement at all, I think they just hate white people.
*it's born out of the contrast with white self-aggrandizement*
Is it?
But wherever it's born, it's clearly not used that way.
Originally, clearly yes, but I mean in a historical sense. It's kind of a backlash to "hey until X years ago whites considered themselves hot shit so now it's important that we all take ourselves down a peg".
I'm not saying this is particularly effective or useful, it's probably not. But that's the vibe.
No, it isn't. It's simply a way to be racist.
>It's kind of a backlash to "hey until X years ago whites considered themselves hot shit...
A behavior that literally every culture on Earth has always engaged in, probably always will, except for this one bizarre exception.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which this was deliberate self-abnegation rather than something much weirder.
I mean, this is really not that weird or strange. "I act self-deprecating towards my own group as a way to project humbleness while also actually subtly suggesting my own superiority as one of the few aware and enlightened ones who see how bad by own group is" is quite common; I see it a lot more with nationality, but it happens also within all kinds of subcultures. This was just a racial spin on it.
If that were the case then you'd only expect to see whites use it in that way, but it's used by non-whites on that side of politics too.
Outgroups adopt the language of ingroups and twist the meaning/use constantly. That's probably a key mechanism for linguistic evolution.
I could also imagine cultural backflow causing some of you to experience this in a self-hating way rather than some mix of humble bragging and virtue signaling. I'll never forget the first time I heard a Tumblr-addicted Pinay friend (with whom I shared many progressive/centrist white friends) unironically state that you couldn't be racist towards whites. It's funny how jarring the internet bleeding into reality like that felt just a decade ago.
As a non-white living through the era where this sort of speech peaked (at least among coastal university crowds), when it came from a Euro/Euro-descended it always landed as a modern form of "white man's burden" thinking. Like the speaker was doing me a kindness by ensuring I knew just how little they suspected their race of being superior to mine (nevermind that they must have been internally wrestling with the idea enough to need me to know which side won the debate).
One positive shift across the years since is that the times where I have to suppress a cringe or urge to fuck with a person I otherwise respect over this behavior has dropped sharply.
Scott talked about this in "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup." Basically, when white people talk about how terrible "white people" are, most of them don't literally mean everyone with European ancestry. They're using it as a code word for the Red Tribe. Most of the white women sneering about "white women's tears" would be outraged if anyone took the same attitude towards their tears, or anyone they care about. I think progressives who talk like that are being annoying and needlessly inflammatory, but I don't think it proves anything about their deep-seated moral priorities.
Doesn't "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup" serve as a rebuttal to this whole post?
I don't think so. To liberal EAs, people on another continent are the fargroup, not the outgroup.
I don't think Zhas was saying they're the out-group, but that this post replicates the dynamic. Telescopers care about the fargroup, but not the outgroup.
And I think that's true some of the times. And other times people just care about big attention grabbing wars far away more than boring health crises at home.
I think the counterpoint that this article would make is that everyone hates the outgroup more than the fargroup, so there is again no unique telescopic altruism dynamic - that's just how all groups behave.
But isn't the "telescoping" dynamic they're describing a critique that blue team people are treating those outside the "society/community" as part of the ingroup and some of those inside the "society/community" as the outgroup, whereas that's not how a society should work?
In red team's view, of course. In reality a society can work any way it wants to or not work at all... or not exist, as the case may be.
The supposed unique telescopic altruism dynamic is treating the fargroup better than the ingroup.
You say "I don't think so", except that you then go on to say that "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup" makes exactly the claim that its author is attempting to discredit here.
This article claims that just because people care about the fargroup doesn't mean they care less about their family and friends. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" says that people can feel friendly towards the fargroup and hostile towards the objectively more similar outgroup, but they'll be friendliest of all towards the ingroup, which usually (but not always) includes their family and friends. The two don't seem contradictory to me.
> "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" says that people can feel friendly towards the fargroup and hostile towards the objectively more similar outgroup
That is what "telescoping loyalties" means.
*This* article is an exercise in extremely clumsy sophistry, with Scott hoping that no one will notice he's intentionally misinterpreting the argument he claims to disagree with.
Not really? I can care more about people close to me, and simultaneously WILL care more (in the negative sense) about people close to me that I perceive as threatening my and my family's/friends' well-being. Just like your brother is more important than a random shepherd from Afghanistan, the governor who's passing bad laws that affect you both (or the voters who elected him) are more important than some random warlord in central Africa.
A decent one, yes.
It definitely comes from tribalism rather than deep-seated *philosophical* moral principles. But I think I would say it still cashes out as someone's moral priorities.
It's what allows a keffiyeh-wearing college liberal to wish death on their fellow countrymen who don't believe in gay marriage, but simply ignore Hamas's regular executions of gay people.
Actually, I guess that example can be viewed in either direction. If you focus on the "aggressors" (Hamas/US conservatives), they give much grace to the foreigner and none to their countrymen; but if you focus on the victims (gays in both countries), they seem to care much more about their countrymen than foreigners. Maybe this specific example is orthogonal to the claim.
The current Republican President constantly says that the greatest threat to America is the radical left communist Democrats, not some foreign enemy, so it applies to both sides that their nearby enemy is more important to them than their far-away one.
Similarly, I struggle to imagine Democrats as an organization actively killing multiple US soldiers and Trump trying to squirm his way out of the conflict rather than going all in, too.
The "radical left communists" are being trained in Cuba, and the President has taken action in Venezuela to cut off oil to them. BLM pissed off a ton of people, and antifa during BLM pissed off a whole lot more.
It's not just about countrymen, as an abstract concept; the keffiyeh-wearing college liberal's conservative opponent who doesn't believe in gay marriage has way larger an opportunity to directly affect the concrete personal life of the liberal, their friends and potentially their family than the gay-executing Hamas member.
In those cases, I would look at whom they wanted the right to hate.
> simply ignore Hamas's regular executions of gay people.
It is inability to accept that underdogs can be villains.
In my experience, most American liberals, especially college-age ones, cannot wrap their heads around the fact that someone can be militarily weak, repeatedly defeated, and still be morally abhorrent.
This. I suppose you could call it the Unjust World fallacy, a flipped Just World fallacy. If you lose, you must be virtuous and unfairly oppressed. If you win, you must be evil and tyrannical.
When people complain about, say, English literature curricula including too many whites, I don't think they're saying that Shakespeare and Chaucer were proto-MAGA Republicans.
I forget whether it was Oxford or Cambridge that removed a course studying English literature as "decolonization," when of course it was colonization.
I wonder if it had the Nobelprizewinning play in it? You know the one... (how many uses of the n-word in it?) I'm not sure "of course that was colonization" is appropriate there. (nor for the brer rabbit stories).
You should go lie down until you feel better.
You are feeling better when you stop gibbering about some play as if it were a response to refusing to let the English study English literature at their English university and calling it "decolonization."
Oh, misread what you were saying. My bad! I thought someone had actually created an English literature course and called it "decolonization" (which, given what I was citing, might actually be a fun course.)
Chaucer had some rather infamous jew-baiting, as did Shakespeare(with presumably fewer direct experiences, as Jews had been banned from England for quite some time).
Is "Jew-baiting" the correct word then?
Shakespeare writing Shylock was just trying to imagine what a Jewish merchant would be like, just as he imagined what an Ancient Roman or a medieval Dane or a fairy queen would be like. None of those groups got a wholly positive portrayal either, but nobody who identifies with these groups is around to complain today.
Am I supposed to police words now? I'll note that I'm apparently friends with a "self-hating" Jew (that other Jews disapprove of, for refusing to be wholeheartedly in favor of the whole Zionism thing).
I'm going to tap out on the subject, it's nunnamybeeznis. (I continue to believe that if someone's willing to take a punch to be called something specific, we should honor that, and if that was "capital-N" Negro, we should use it to this day. I am in the minority, sadly.)
Shakespeare's Danes weren't made like the stereotype of the "danegeld" would say.... I believe the fairies were eventually murdered (or rather the tribe that was legendized into fairy). There's enough Ancient Romans to have heroes and villains alike.
Jew-baiting has nothing to do with being a Trump supporter. If anything, Trump supporters are probably slightly more philosemitic than average, because they're more likely to be Evangelicals.
(Also, as a point of historical fact, Jews were banned from England several decades before Chaucer's birth, so he probably didn't have much first-hand experience either.)
Of course not. I'm just laughing at Israel's tendency to blackmail everyone in sight, and their ongoing puzzlement that Don Trump, who they do not have blackmailed, actually likes them.
In that case I think most of them actually do mean "white people" literally and want to read more literature by non-white authors. (Either that or they just don't like classic literature but would feel stupid saying so outright.) But the England of centuries ago is a foreign culture to English-speaking countries today, so I wouldn't accuse people of telescopic thinking for rejecting those authors.
>But the England of centuries ago is a foreign culture to English-speaking countries today, so I wouldn't accuse people of telescopic thinking for rejecting those authors.
They reject them specifically because they're white, which is a category they share with white progressives today. Though granted, the whole thing is probably better analysed through the lens of internalised racism rather than telescopic altruism.
Is this a comment on the article I just read? If so, how?
An insult to the people near you, with no corresponding insult to people far away from you, means that you're being nicer to the Far than the Near.
Self-deprecation isn't the same as moral contempt. It's an emotional stance a lot of people seem to have a hard time wrapping their mind around, but it's pretty standard among people who want to have some humility and aren't trying to maintain their place at the top of some social hierarchy.
Self-deprecation is a fine social shortcut. Try misspeaking in ways that are obvious, and still slightly wrong (mispronounce gauche, find new and creative ways to say Kamala). Some people have this Absolute Need to wreck the conversation in order to correct you. Such people can go on the ignorables list.
Living in a suburban metro Boston, I reflexively both agree and disagree. As it appears to me here, the progressive tendency is to downgrade the sympathy-weight of the white tribe (to which almost all of them belong), but that doesn't extend to smaller tribes they are in that are almost all white. E.g., there's immense pressure against building housing in nice suburbs, presumably because that would reduce the house equity of the current residents and allow poorer (mostly white) people to move in and so their children would go to school with children of lower socioeconomic status.
Indeed, there seems to me to be a considerable chunk of the current white angst that is due to a reorganization of the sympathies of the affluent: it used be that the (white) affluent did have a sense that they owed some solidarity with poorer white Americans. Now it's clear that the mostly-white affluent are willing to throw poorer Americans to the wolves. (E.g., all the good paying factory jobs have been offshored.) If you're a non-white American you probably gain on the whole, because employment discrimination has diminished faster than foreign competition has hurt you. But the non-college-educated whites know that they're being abandoned.
This is excellent, and it strikes me as a normal pattern with conservatives in the Trump era.
1) Your side is morally awful
2) To make your side seem more defensible, exaggerate or make up traits about the other side.
So if you discuss Trump's lies and corruption, they'll pretend that Democrats have had comparable levels of corruption and dishonesty, which is so disconnected from reality it is a sign that a person's entire informational environment is deeply corrupted.
In this case, conservatives don't show basic concern for foreigners and non-humans, even at the level of "don't torture and kill them." Instead of acknowledging that's their view, they pretend like liberals only care about foreigners and would let their children starve in order to give a chicken a higher quality of life. When obviously, if you look at liberal priorities, they're spending a lot more time trying to give fellow Americans healthcare than fighting factory farms or increasing the foreign aid budget.
This particular conservative trait seems to be most popular with techbros and the angry anonymous twitter accounts they all look to for spiritual guidance.
Hey Rick glad you found the blog. A note: It's generally not allowed to troll here, even if you think you're really good at it and follow up by claiming you're sincere. It's supposed to be a good blog for discussing things with a minimum of open hostility, and Scott's written on the virtue of not pushing people away before. Hope this helps.
There's no danger of Scott thinking I'm trolling here, since he actually has good reading comprehension skills.
Guys stop fighting your are harshing the vibe
Not seeing any trolling here myself- is it possible you need to update on RH’s views? What am I missing?
I think when Alex saw the phrase "Your side is morally awful", he thought Richard was addressing Scott directly. When in reality by "you" he meant conservatives in the Trump era.
In fairness to Alex when someone is so obviously playing both sides it can get a bit disorientating.
Geesh you want me to 'defend' Trump? I'm just going to get dog piled on. There seem to be so many distortions of Trump it's hard to know where to start. (And I also try not to pay too much attention, so most of them I don't even know about.) There was the whole Russia-gate thing. And then all the lawfare. But what stands out most recently was Trumps phone conversation with the men's olympic hockey team. What my liberal friends told me he said was one thing. When I went and listened to the 2 minute conversation it was something else.
Do you ever listen to Joe Rogan? Have you ever read anything about him written from the left's POV? You'd think it was two different people.
I think some nuance is called for here. For example, I personally do care about the lives of some foreigners (arguably many), and some non-humans (i.e. my friends' pets). But I will happily eat fried shrimp, and I don't care about their suffering or lack thereof one iota. In fact, if I could consign a trillion shrimps to an eternal torture chamber in order to save one human, I'd do it in a heartbeat; and in fact people are indeed doing just that, when they emulate nervous systems of worms and fruit flies in order to further our brain studies.
Perhaps this makes me a monster, I don't know, but I doubt that I am in the minority. This doesn't make me right, but it does mean that you must engage with people like me on a deeper level if you (hypothetically) wish to advance your shrimp-saving policy.
Noting that the vast majority of not-conservatives also don't particular care about shrimp. I'm not sure this is a meaningfully distinguishing factor
> and in fact people are indeed doing just that, when they emulate nervous systems of worms and fruit flies in order to further our brain studies.
To my understanding the emulated nervous systems are less "trillions for eternity" and more on the order of "solo individual for less than a subjective hour." Also, aiming to approximate relatively normal operating conditions, rather than maximal suffering, and the plausible long-term benefits are considerably more than preventing one statistical human death.
So, yes it's in the same general category, but I think more people than you realize might disagree on exactly how far to chase diminishing returns.
Fair enough, but still, I personally care about the suffering of virtual shrimp (hypothetically speaking) about as much as I care about the suffering of biological shrimp, namely epsilon. I think this does put me on the opposite side of the fence of many long-termists, but I could be wrong.
The real problem with shrimp is that an enormous amount of the shrimp we import (and the US at least imports 90% of its shrimp) is processed through literal, not-figurative-or-exaggerated but genuine 'people sold from place to place, locked in sheds, forced to work', slavery. https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/uncategorized/2015/global-supermarkets-selling-shrimp-peeled-by-slaves/
(I know this is not really directly relevant to your comment, but I thought it was interesting you chose to use shrimp as an example when I just learned this about the shrimp supply chain - thanks Baader-Meinhof)
From my point of view both sides do your steps 1.) and 2.) . It's political all the way down, which makes me dislike it.
What examples of 2 would you provide. The biggest one I see establishment dems doing is accuse anyone who advocates for a tax cut to just wanting to line the pockets of rich people. But even though thats a super annoying framing, it is in fact consistent with the dem view on behind the veil moral tax policy and so not made up altogether. So it still doesnt seem the same as for example equating hunter bidens corruption with the trump familys.
Here's an example:
> conservatives don't show basic concern for foreigners and non-humans, even at the level of "don't torture and kill them." Instead of acknowledging that's their view, ...
Or maybe they don't acknowledge it as their view because it's not their view at all, but an uncharitable misinterpretation.
Yet many liberals get excited over Obama's droning of Anwar al-Awlaki on the grounds of Awlaki being an American citizen.
I never found a satisfactory answer to the question whether Obama was justified in droning non-Americans. To these liberals apparently no American may be executed without due process but non-Americans are fair game.
While I'm sure there are liberals who don't care about the executions of non-american's, my experience on the left left is that Obama's drone strikes in general are universally considered atrocities. The focus on his striking US citizen is mainly to show that ultimately the US government will kill anyone they want. Not even citizens are safe.
It is definitely a shame when people exaggerate and make things up about their outgroup.
I wonder how much the criticism of telescopic altruists has been confused with strategic alliances with the fargroup against the outgroup.
- My outgroup is Red Americans, so I will form a strategic alliance with their enemy: Middle Eastern terrorists.
- War in the Middle East is big, dramatic, and newsworthy, so it attracts more of my supply of cares than boring opioid crisis in the neighbouring state.
Can look similar from a distance, especially with outgroup homogeneity bias merging those two together. Both people definitely exist.
And to state the obvious, if someone sides with Middle Eastern terrorists against their home country of the USA, that is extremely telescopic.
Very few progressives are siding with Middle Eastern terrorists against American civilians. More of them are siding with Middle Eastern civilians against the American government, which makes sense if you think the American government's policies are harming civilians for no good reason.
I do see people carrying banners with Khamenei's face on them in protests, so at the least its not enough to get you shunned by the movement.
Even if those American civilians are Zionists?
Yes. Of course there are exceptions, but the progressives who complain about the bombing of Gaza would mostly also complain if American Zionists were bombed.
Counterpoint: the last two and a half years of rampant hate against American Jews, which progressives have said little and done less than nothing to oppose.
The ADL broadened what they count as antisemitic after Oct 2023 (mostly by counting more anti-Zionism as antisemitism), so their numbers aren't directly comparable to earlier years.
2018 and 2019 *each* had more killings from antisemitic attacks in the US than every year since then combined. But this is probably too small a sample size to draw conclusions from since there are only about 0 to 2 fatal antisemitic incidents (with sometimes multiple deaths per incident) per year in the US.
I feel, at this point, a substantial subset of them would be suspiciously silent if the bombing would not have been carried out by a rightwinger.
I didn't hear much complaining when Zionists were doused in gasoline and set on fire in Colorado
That's because the perpetrator was immediately arrested and charged with 130 criminal charges. He will almost certainly never be let out of prison. There's nothing left for protests to achieve. On the other hand, the Gazan genocide is still ongoing, the perpetrators have still not been punished, and the US continues to provide Israel with billions in military aid every year.
They are not actually siding with the civilians if they said nothing while those civilians were being attacked by terrorists and their own governments…
Depends on whether the US government was funding those terrorists and governments. American progressives are so outraged by the actions of Israel because we give them billions in military aid, and progressives want us to stop doing that. If we already aren't funding a terrorist group, there's less for Americans to be outraged about.
I think this is a perfect illustration of my point. They're protesting _against_ their outgroup (the American government). They're not protesting in _support_ for their fargroup (the middle east).
An innocent in the middle east being killed by the American or the Iranian government should be equally outrageous if what you care about is that person's life and dignity.
And if you don't think there's anything you can do by protesting, go to a protest run by the Iranian diaspora, they have a clear list of demands some of which are quite practical.
>An innocent in the middle east being killed by the American or the Iranian government should be equally outrageous if what you care about is that person's life and dignity.
Sure, but the question is, will your outrage do anything? The American government might listen to American protestors. The Iranian government definitely won't.
>go to a protest run by the Iranian diaspora, they have a clear list of demands some of which are quite practical.
Like what? All I can find on Google is that most of them seem to support the war. I still hold that the war is probably not going to have any effect in Iran besides killing even more civilians.
America forced elections in Gaza, which the Israelis blamed the Republicans for. Post said elections, the rather confused* Hamas guys murdered all the PLO governmental people.
*had not expected to win. caught tiger by tail.
ME civilians including 9 million plus Indians are being protected by US military. It is the Mullah-cracy that progressives have been in love with for 50 years that is attacking them.
These are real people, but I don't think these are people who are really "telescopic altruists": some of them are people for whom middle eastern terrorists are more "neighbourly" than for other Americans (because of religious or ethnic or cultural ties), or they explicitly have an ideology that centers "imperialism" or some such, and will usually _reject_ certain kinds of altruism for not focusing on the "real problem" of capitalism/imperialism. Such people often would/will deliberately _downplay_ catastrophes happening in Assad's Syria, China, Sudan, etc. It's not really a case of telescopic altruism so much as a manichean worldview where some people are worthy of altruism and others not that so happens to have some far away people on the "deserving" list.
That's fair. Though I think a telescopic altruism could explain how someone could arrive at an ideology where they view everything through the eyes of international death-to-America advocates.
Once the worldview has set in, then they have to awkwardly explain away bad things that happen from their chosen side. But don't we all...
Yeah, I don't mean to suggest that there's no connection to telescopic altruism, but I think it requires more work to show how closely the phenomena are linked
Better: my outgroup is Red Americans, so I'm going to form a strategic alliance with genocidal neoconservatives.
Wait, Utah has more divorce than California?
Also, as a non-American, is Montana different from Idaho? I'd always assumed they were kind of identical.
>Wait, Utah has more divorce than California?
Yes. This surprised me when I first looked into it, but in practice, the pattern in culturally conservative states is "marry early, then divorce if it doesn't work out", while the pattern in California is "live together for a good long while first" so most splits in serious relationships take place before the courts get involved. The "marriage generation" rate is still higher in Utah, or was last I checked.
>Also, as a non-American, is Montana different from Idaho? I'd always assumed they were kind of identical.
A little bit. Montana is much flatter, and if you go there, you will definitely be killed by bears. (Sorry, can't resist. I have lots of friends from there.) But in practical terms, I think the difference here is basically down to reporting standards/how effective Montana CPS is rather than a difference in the actual rate of treating children badly.
There's also a distinct black/white split, where black people often just don't get married at all. 4 years dating? In Utah, that's half a year dating, marriage, and then divorced 3 years later. (Kid in both relationships).
Not necessarily.
In Montana you might dodge the bear and be killed by a moose.
You'd probably expect the first-marriage generation rate to be correlated with the first-divorce rate, right? Since the marginal extra marriages are disproportionately the ones that are more so-so in quality. In California you just date and cohabitate with your "meh" boyfriend for a few years and then break up; in Utah the same couple will marry, live together for a few years, then divorce.
Yeah, that's basically my thesis. You only need a second trip to the courthouse if you made a first one, and the timing of that first trip is going to be heavily socially determined.
(Although note that "marriage generation" was a bad choice of words. I was trying to say that the net marriage rate in Utah was significantly higher than in California, which I think undermines a lot of the criticism of a higher divorce rate.)
Idaho is a heavily Mormon state, like Utah, while Montana is not. There are a decent number of things where Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming pattern together, which always surprised me because I don’t think of Wyoming as very Mormon, but I don’t know of ones where Idaho and Montana are more similar than either is to Wyoming or Utah or the Dakotas.
I'm not well-read on Confucian philosophy and similar arguments can somewhat straightforwardly be derived in other virtue ethical traditions and at least tenuously in consequentialist ones (through rule utilitarianism, etc), but I understand Confucian view could be described as "role ethics", and see it as a good lens to tackle this particular issue: people occupy various social roles based on birth, kinship, citizenship and voluntary choice among other reasons, and these determine our moral duties. Typically, our duties as e.g. parents and partners outweigh our duties as members of the cosmopolis.
To provide an example that seems to be in contradiction with (at least naive) consequentialism and I reckon aligns with the majority of people's intuitive grasp of morality, I would argue consequentialism suggests that if outright mutiny is unlikely to result in success, Russian officers should deliberately send troops under their command to Ukrainian ambushes in which they are certain to be killed or captured: the way Russian war machine is chewing through their mobiks, they were going to become casualties anyway, but at least this way they would be disposed in such a way that they won't be in a position to hurt innocents. But I believe most people would consider such a person monstrous: in his role as an officer, he has a duty towards his subordinates that trumps his duty towards trying to achieve world peace in his role as a human being.
So, I think the steelmanning argument would not be that EA types "care more about x", but that they are failing in their duties as (say) daughters and friends and neighbours (in comparison to their conservative peers). Which, of course, remains to be shown.
One of my thoughts on this is that the role of a parent is partly to provide moral education and guidance to their child. While in some sense a parent having broader concerns about the world around them takes away resources from their child, you definitely could argue that a parent without those concerns is failing in their duty to act as a moral example to their children. As long as a parent doesn't neglect their children, a child may actually benefit from their parent spending some time feeding the homeless or serving at their local church or protesting in favor of a political cause or (insert any other cause you regard as morally worthy) - it teaches them a very important lesson about how to live in the world.
I guess if you think the role of a parent is to be solely focused on the welfare of their children then perhaps you'd regard inculcating these values to be bad, I just don't think many people are actually that self centered, although since most of the conservatives I know are religious that may be skewing my perspective. I'm definitely sympathetic to virtue or role based ethics as a practical guide to life, but I think most people would conceptualise that as a hierarchy of obligations, and those systems generally include some duty to neighbours and strangers that is less pressing than meeting the needs of close family, but not to the extent that those obligations can be totally disregarded just because you have a elderly parent or a dependant child - the concept of guest friendship across many different cultures is a particularly fascinating example of this to me, because people really did take it seriously.
While the specific example of a treacherous commander seems pretty repellant to me, in most conflicts one side's traitor can be the other side's heroic defector, so I don't think our moral intuitions here are particularly clear.
The thing is, the children need to be raised by individual parents. A diffuse social structure is quite unable to do anything except assist the parents.
There are actually numerous cultures that raise, or have historically raised, children communally.
There are a lot of claims of this, but what it means is a lot more support. Those cultures are in fact less suited to it because they have no way to record what has been done for the child, still less automate reminders.
Even if they did, that the community is responsible means that NO ONE is actually responsible, so if it's time for THIS child to be fed, and he isn't, well, no one's on the hook.
The love and support a child needs to develop properly are, at that, impossible to administer communally.
Not bad, here I would like to quote Freda Utley: "If you refer to the government as we, not they, you are one of the ruling class."
I mean, I keep being weirded out by the "political we". What kind of role does that imply? Literal democracy as some kind of a distributed kingship? Do people really think their opinion matters? Will people with actual power ever care about it? Or maybe I am the weird one, because the distributed kingship is a necessary illusion?
You don't talk to people who literally have input in laws, and get small things passed the US Congress much, do you? I think "backup cameras in vehicles" and other small things like that warrants a "we".
This connects to the thought that this is more about loyalty than altruism. When people say they are “citizens of the world” or express the wish that their poor dumb red-state neighbors could be replaced with nice striving immigrants, this is more of a failure to understand and enact loyalty than of where to put your altruism points. You don’t stand with your family or your neighbors or your fellow citizens purely out of altruism. You stand with them because when the chips are down—as in war—you want them to stand with you. That nice H1B I’m the next cubicle may in fact be a better, more deserving person than the trailer park person in the MAGA hat, but when a major war starts and we institute the draft, H1B is going home, while you live or die with trailer park. So not prioritizing trailer park is both disloyal, and stupid, because it weakens the blood and soil bonds we depend on. Altruism doesn’t enter into it.
You can go a whole lifetime without that "major war" happening
True, especially if your country is strong. Or it can happen and you can wind up living in rubble, raped, enslaved, or dead. It’s what is known as an existential risk.
Where most sensible moral systems differ from naïve utilitarianism, it's to correct for the inability of mere mortals to actually predict what the consequences of their actions will be. Since we can't possibly predict the consequences of our actions upon the geopolitics of the next century, but we can reasonably predict the consequences of our actions upon those close to us, we should focus on doing predictably-good things for the people close to us first.
I don't expect a Lieutenant to be able to actually predict whether it's better for the world in a utilitarian sense if his side wins or loses. Heck even with the benefit of hindsight I would not hazard a guess on which side's victory provides more total utils for 90% of the wars in history. But I do expect him to have an idea of what's better for the men under his command. (The fact that in wars the best interests of some people are so diametrically opposed to the best interest of other people is what makes wars so horrible.)
> I would argue consequentialism suggests that if outright mutiny is unlikely to result in success, Russian officers should deliberately send troops under their command to Ukrainian ambushes in which they are certain to be killed or captured: the way Russian war machine is chewing through their mobiks, they were going to become casualties anyway, but at least this way they would be disposed in such a way that they won't be in a position to hurt innocents.
That doesn't really hold up, because I can readily think of Pareto improvements on such a plan. For example: take advantage of the horribly mismanaged supply chain to requisition a batch of nonfunctional ammunition, tell the soldiers that the batch they were already issued is likely to be nonfunctional while the new batch is good (when in fact the reverse is true), insist on swapping everything out accordingly. Then, once everyone under your command has been de facto disarmed, call the Ukrainian "I want to live" surrender hotline and tell them you've got a whole platoon (or whatever) of customers lined up.
Afterward, ideally, return to the Russian lines, claim all the soldiers whose clean capture you just arranged were actually killed, ask for a new set, and repeat the process. More drain on the overall war machine, fewer fatalities among the troops you're responsible for, without needing to convince them to agree to an explicit mutiny.
Okay: let's step back and look a little bit at the history of the idea of "telescopic altruism".
The original and archetypal "telescopic altruist" is Mrs. Jellyby, in Dickens's Bleak House (Dickens uses the phrase "telescopic philanthropy" of her). The problem - as Dickens sees it - is that Mrs. Jellyby's devotion to saving people in Africa (though her "saving" is more in the form of beneficent colonialism than directly giving food to the hungry, which doesn't look good to modern eyes for other reasons) prevents her from noticing that her marriage, children, and family are collapsing around her.
In other words, the idea is that we have greater responsibilities to those around us, such that we should save them from even lesser problems, even if it means not helping more distant people who are suffering far worse. We should of course save our family (friends, fellow countrymen) from starvation, but we should also make sure that, even if they are not in danger of starvation, they have rich and fulfilling lives - and we should do so at the expense of starving people who are more distant from us. We shouldn't treat all lives as equally deserving of equal support.
Now, that is an idea that is surely repugnant to a lot of people, not only effective altruists. But that, I think, IS the basic idea, and a lot of people hold it, even if in a less extreme form; and I think any argument against the concept of "telescopic philanthropy" needs to address it. But I didn't really feel that Scott's essay here engaged with it or responded to it.
Scott did kinda address it - "If you distribute moral units to your cousin, you have fewer for your own child - does this make you a “telescopic altruist” who hates everyone close to him? Is this even wronging your child in any way?" His point, as I see it, is that after doing your reasonable duty to your friends and family, you are likely to still have plenty of slack to engage in philanthropy of some sort.
If Scott intended that as a response, it is a very vague and not very effective one, because he doesn't really explain what a "moral unit" is, and does not address the idea that one might owe not just "more" of them to our closest family, but different KINDS of duties, which might - as in Mrs. Jellyby's case - take time and effort and money which would be taken away from even more serious problems faced by more distant people.
>he doesn't really explain what a "moral unit" is
Has anybody in the history of moral philosophy ever done an adequate job at that? As far as I'm concerned, that is a history of miserable failures, but as far as having reasonable takes goes, Scott has few rivals.
I'm not sure if anyone in the history of moral philosophy has tried to quantify morality in this particular way.
I agree that Scott's rebuttal was uncharacteristically weak and hand-wavy. The concern is obviously limited attention, not limited morality.
I think the colonialism is part of the problem with Ms Jellyby as Dickens sees it, but not the way we would think of "problem with colonialism."
The problem is that there is no feedback mechanism: it's not only that she's entirely focused on the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, and should focus on her family: it's that she has no way of knowing, and doesn't really care about, whether all her efforts on their behalf are actually helpful at all.
I'm not sure that's the root of the problem, for Dickens. The final twist in the story is that her project is a total failure, because the local king turns out to want to sell the colonists for rum ... so she takes up the cause of women's suffrage instead, which takes even more time away from her family. It's clear that Dickens thinks of these as equally undesirable pursuits, even though the women's suffrage question doesn't suffer from a lack of feedback mechanism.
True.
But the pervasive impression I get of Mrs Jellyby is that she is very busy, but not usefully busy - she's endlessly sending/reading/losing/finding letters, but there's no way for her to tell "is this actually accomplishing anything at all?". And I think the same is true of her involvement with women's suffrage.
I think that's right, yes: and suggests another kind of distinction that Scott could have reasonably made (but really didn't). There is a difference between caring about dying foreigners in a way that makes you give money to an effective charity which gets food to them, and caring about dying foreigners in a way that makes you go on protests and occupy university buildings. The former can demonstrably accomplish something, the latter is arguably just "being busy".
As CS Lewis said, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others -- you can tell the others by their hunted expressions."
It's been a long time since I read it, but I don't think Dickens is expressing a view on the comparative merits of the enterprises. Mrs Jellyby justs casts around for some cause to take up, which allows her to construct a self-image of herself as a virtuous person.
I doubt colonialism was a concern for Dickens at all; while not a straightforward imperialist he was definitely out of step with other liberals of the time when it came to colonial atrocities like the response to the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, or the Sepoy uprising in India.
Which I think is a good thing to keep in mind: just because Dickens presents an unflattering stereotype of a person focused on helping foreigners in a book shouldn't be taken as a strong argument against a positive attitude towards helping foreigners in general: it is very plausible that his feelings on the matter are partly the result of too little concern about foreigners.
I think telescopic altruists generally want a cause or group to champion which most others care little about, because that way they can feel or be seen as superior in their tender feelings and thus virtue. So T.E. is often, if not usually, a back-handed form of conceit.
If you step back even further, and look at telescopic philanthropy from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist like Robert Trivers, it does not make sense as a form of altruism. I think Trivers would say philanthropy directed toward remote strangers is likely motivated by social factors. If that is the case it should rarely be anonymous.
That Mrs. JellyBelly's concern for Africans manifested itself in colonialism I think illustrates what is a more salient point about telescopic altruism.
Namely, that our work is more likely to be *effective* when we engage those closest to us and can see whether our efforts are having the intended effect, and if they are causing unintended negative consequences.
Dickensian England was a largely laissez-faire state with little in the way of welfare for its own poor. Dickens didn't have much of a political program, but he did tend to elicit sympathy for England's poor among his readers,
Thank you!!! For making the point about that chart from That One Study! I have been saying to people for years it Does Not Mean What They Think it Means. I will now just link to this article, whose Ethos should save me a lot of toil in the Logos Mines.
No one using it cares about the study - the image is used to express an idea unmoored from the study.
If the study correctly recognizes the reality that people recognize from experience then good for the study and if it does not then more worse for the study but no one wants or needs "a study" to tell them about the attitudes of people who write and speak quite a lot.
But many people I have spoken do DID think the study showed something that it did not. They, I don't necessarily, claim that studies can tell us something about people's attitudes.
I think the post is being too charitable, there are some EAs and religious people who are trying to help. But the vast majority of the time you see someone take action it is part of a status game. There is low interest in making charity effective or directing it properly.
In the worst case, there is interest in keeping the charity ineffective and directing it improperly, so as to preserve the problem.
While you are certainly correct in many points, I do think you are fighting a strawman or at least a week man. It’s true people complaining about telescopic altruism are often imprecise and talk as if people who care about those far away, actually care about the far away people more than their friends or family. But when you dig into their complaints, it’s obvious that the actual complaint is that they care about people far away in comparison to their friends or family, far more than they ought to in the view of the complainer.
In my experience, a lot of complaints and arguments that appear to be about the facts are often complaints and arguments about what ought to be. For example, people arguing over whether academia has a liberal bias or a white supremacist, or otherwise conservative bias are actually arguing over where academia is relative to to wear it ought to be, not about the actual position of academia.
Now, obviously, you can disagree with the people saying that telescopic altruism prioritise far away. People more than people should, but that is your actual disagreement. Nobody actually thinks that liberals care more about people far away more than people close to them. At the very least a lot of the people complaining don’t actually think that.
Also regarding the correlated altruism point, keep in mind that resources are finite and trade-offs are real. If you spend your money giving to charity or spend time and effort helping people far away, that is time and effort and money, you could have spent on your friends and family. Any money that you donate to people who use it to fight malaria in Africa is money that would have been inherited by your children or otherwise spent at least in part on them. I find it unbelievable that, for example, people who donate 10% of their income would spend exactly the same amount on their children or other friends and family if they were not spending the 10% helping other people far away since after all, if they weren’t spending it on charity, they be spending it on something else, and most people spend at least a little of their resources on friends and family. Caring about everything is the same as caring about nothing. At the end of the day all utility comparisons are relative to other things. Multiplying your desire for everything by 10 times, doesn’t change anything and so caring about other people will inevitably be trade of resources against caring about friends and family.
I do not mean any of this as a criticism of telescopic altruism. Since I actually think this is an admirable tendency, but rather my comment is meant as criticism of your post, which I think makes your opposition look weaker than it is by either creating a straw man or at least not dealing with the obvious steel man of the position. Since I think that even if everyone holding this criticism is under the misapprehension that liberals care more about people far away, the actual core of their complaint is quite easy to see.
"Nobody actually thinks that liberals care more about people far away more than people close to them."
I think it. In fact, I've seen it. I have seen an abusive mother get more worked up about something that happened to blacks in the 1950s than her daughter's suicidal depression.
Leaving aside the point that I was talking about liberals in general, not saying no liberal has ever done this I did qualify myself by noting that what Scott is doing is at least a week man which is to say that actual people may in fact hold this view, but it isn’t a strongest possible representation of the view he is attacking or even engaging with the stronger version of the view advocated by actual people like for example, Mencius who, when criticising the Prodo-consequentialist Mohists and their doctrine of universal Love, argued that treating the whole world as your family is tantamount to renouncing your family. Although I also do think that most people who in fact hold this view when they introspect about it will quickly realise that this model very obviously does not fit with the behaviour of actual liberals. Note I said most people it’s entirely possible. You might not be one of them, but I think it’s pretty clear that at least if they are thinking about the matter calmly, 90% of people who share your view will quickly realise it doesn’t actually match liberal behaviour given most liberals very obviously spend way more on their family. Then they do on say strangers in Africa and the political platforms of liberal political parties, reliably spend far more on helping people in their home country compare to helping people abroad. Liberal parents are obviously much more willing to finance their children’s education compare to the education of the children of strangers and obviously are much more willing to let their friends and family stay in their houses compare to letting strangers stay in their houses since it’s quite obvious that most of them wouldn’t even let the strangers stay there if they were not paying rent whereas they make no such demands of their children when they are growing up and are in fact, willing to finance food and other things for the children which they would obviously not be willing to do for a stranger at least to anywhere near the same extent. In any case as Scott complains about these kind of arguments, your example is not an apples to Apple‘s comparison because blacks in the 1950s was a group containing millions of people, whereas the daughter is one person so it doesn’t follow that the mother would care about an individual black person more than the daughter. In any case, I’m pretty sure that what is in your opinion, true of the mother is obviously not true of most actual liberal people.
As for liberals in general, that mother was the extreme case. Since many liberals use their purported concern for those far-away to act abusively toward those who are near -- down to and including felonies such as false imprisonment -- I would say that yes, it does match liberal behavior in general.
Which specific instance of false imprisonment motivated by concern for faraway people are you thinking of? In any case given how Trump keeps weaponising the government to try to go after his political opponents and other people he doesn’t like for example, just look at what he attempted to do to anthropic. I think it’s obvious that when you follow Scott’s advice and compare apples to apples, liberals aren’t actually doing worse than conservatives on this dimension. In fact, I would argue that they are doing much better than Trump.
Whenever they block roads, they take all the people in all the cars they stop captive. They commit false imprisonment *on random strangers*.
Blocking the road is obviously not false imprisonment, unless you think not building a road there would have been false imprisonment. Blocking a road obviously restricts your mobility much less than locking you in a building. In any case often blocking the roads is not about helping far away people, it’s about helping people right there or even sometimes about helping themselves. Not to mention that it’s not like conservatives are not similarly willing to take political protest actions that similarly cause inconvenience to other people, just look at January 6. So I find it really doubtful that blocking roads has anything to do with telescopic altruism, or would not take place if liberals did not indulge in telescopic altruism. It is not as if people in other countries who absolutely do not indulge in telescopic altruism, like the trucker’s protest in Canada a few years ago are not equally willing to block roads.
I think this is vastly overstating your case. AWFLs may be awful, but that is more like "I go to a store and inhabit their seats, and do not buy enough to keep them in business, thus driving them out of business." (this is one part "lack of foresight" and about tenparts "being too toxic for anyone else to want to inhabit the same space as").
Scott acknowledges that there is a debate that could be had about the correct multiplier to apply to neighbor vs gaza concern. But that instead of doing this one side is just accusing the otherside of having the multiplier on the wrong side of 1. So as you say he is not attacking the steelman. I read this and the AI post as a complaint that the weakman is dominating the discourse and so attacking it has become worthwhile. See also if it's worth your time to lie.
If there is a specific policy being debated, then engaging the steelman is perhaps a requirement even if the otherside isnt making it. But when the complaint is about the discourse itself, then targetting the actual arguments being made is appropriate.
At the time I wrote my comment, I did not actually believe that this obviously ridiculous argument had actually taken over the discourse. Also, I thought that over 90% of the people making this argument would pretty much immediately agree that the steel man is what they actually meant. Once you push them a little because of their position is so obviously ridiculous.
However, after getting replies from a couple people who appear to treat the idea that liberals have the multiplier on the wrong side of one as actually true in complete seriousness I have changed my mind about how reasonable Scott’s post is. Obviously, getting replies from two people out of a sample of God only knows how many readers isn’t really good statistical evidence of how prevalent these views are, but if Scott encounters such responses often the post becomes a lot more justified.
Basically, I was implicitly assuming that obviously this idea could not really be genuinely widespread. I really need to learn to stop overestimating the intelligence of the discourse as this is the second time in the last 10 days that I have been shocked by the stupidity of what has taken over the discourse. As such, I have changed my mind and no longer think Scott was being unreasonable in writing an entire post against this argument.
Thanks for the response. I often dont know what the discourse is and try not to be so online as to discover it. So I tend to give Scott the benefit of the doubt about it, but bloggers can also attract a lot of trolls so you never quite know.
I don't think either of those maps means quite what you think it means. Yes, conservative states have much higher divorce rates, but this comes on top of much higher marriage rates, to the point that it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the California equivalent of a typical Oklahoma divorce is two people who have lived together for a couple years splitting up, but without the courts getting involved. I'm not sure that shows different levels of care there.
As for the child abuse one, that one is a combination of cases of actual child abuse/neglect and how good the state agencies are at catching them/what counts for reporting standards. I simply do not believe that Kentucky has ~twice the abuse rate of Tennessee. They're not that different as states. Also, when you look, there's something like 23-24 states which are above average, 17 of which are in the 140%+ group. That implies there are some states which are way, way below average, to the point that it becomes simply implausible that we're seeing real data here.
Yes, this. It does make me feel better about not reporting abuse in my state, however (it was very unlikely to be prosecuted).
This article is good, but I do want to nitpick the child abuse map.
States vary widely in how well they capture abuse and neglect data, and how well they report it to the feds. Realistically you could probably label a decent number of those white states as not having enough information to determine. Massachusetts may have a higher rate just because they actually capture and report the information.
and overreport. The state sent people to investigate my family and threatened to take me away if my family didn’t send me to ABA.
(I am a masshole, for reference)
You can't compare favors of people far away from you to favors to people close to you on equal value. As the article recognizes, nearly everyone favors more people closer to them.
When someone talks about "Telescopic Altruism", the effect might be real on their moral terms.
For a lib, caring so much about animals that kids ends up malnourished is Telescopic Altruism (You can nourish a kid through suplements. But if you couldn't or you can't afford it, the tradeoff would be very questionable). Even if the suffering if the animals is much greater than the kid's.
For a conversative, caring so much about africans that you end up encouraging less donations to local churches and more taxes, is Telescopic Altruism.
These are just examples. Everyone cares more about people close to them than further away. So for everyone, we could come up with an example of Telescopic Altruism.
If the point of the article is to say conservatives are evil. That could be, but it's a different conversation.
How do you square the view that charity isn’t zero sum with the roughly stable charity as a percentage of gdp before and after the rise of the EA movement?
Anecdotally, during the Bloomberg administration, rich New Yorkers felt a noblesse oblige to keep the city clean and safe for the average guy. Now, it feels to me like the causes rich New Yorkers feel strongly about are more telescopic—high-minded national politics, social justice initiatives that make them feel better, and yes, further afield donation.
> How do you square...
EA unfortunately remains a negligible fraction of charitable giving, so not seeing movement in national/global numbers doesn't really tell us anything.
But I think you're right that many EAs would give more to things closer to home if not for the opportunity to have 100x more impact elsewhere. I don't see that this undermines Scott's point though. Basically everyone cares way more about their own community than those far away, even in the small niche group organized around (among other things) impartiality. Even hardcore EAs only spend something like 3-10% of their resources on 'impartial' goals, typically, with the other 90%+ spent on themselves, families, communities just like everyone else.
Scott writes: "The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness."
This is right for niceness, but not for charity, which is the question at hand. It seems to me that social appetite for charitable giving is zero sum.
Of course expressly-EA is not a big portion of charitable giving. My point is that farsighted charity has become much more popular in many different spheres--national vs local, international vs national, social justice vs local institutions. ChatGPT says that international charity went from 3 to 6% of the pie over 25 years--my guess is this is an undercount due to a classification problem of what counts as "international", but that's a big move!
> Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
I believe there's a non trivial difference between caring about group X and being nice to group X. I see caring as a form of signaling. It allows us to say: I will do something nice to help others if the opportunity to do so presents itself. It could be genuine (will actually help others if/when possible), or just performative signaling with no real intention to help (this is not necessarily bad though).
Being nice implies actively making other people's lives easier or better. Which brings me to this:
"[A different study] gives people a limited supply of 100 “moral units” to distribute... The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness."
If being nice and caring are different, then this is wrong. This is how the study refers to the moral units used: "We analyzed separately participants’ ideal and personal allocations of moral regard"; "forcing participants to distribute moral concern in a zero-sum fashion"; "such that liberals distribute empathy toward broader circles". I understand "regard", "concern" and "empathy" as caring, not as a commitment to help others (niceness).
Also, I think this is wrong: "When the paper actually looks at who cares more about their friends, liberals or conservatives, the liberals win very slightly on friends and conservatives very slightly on family". It references study 1a. These are the questions that were asked as part of study 1a:
- love for friends (e.g., “My friends and I look out for each other”)
- love for family (e.g., “My siblings and I love each other “warts and all”—we don’t censor ourselves around each other”)
- love for all others (there are times in my life when I’ve felt strong feelings of love for all people, not just the specific people I’m close to”).
Loving each other “warts and all" and not censoring each other is not what I would describe as caring (also, how would you look out for a friend that lives far away).
>> Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
I think this is where we run into the distinction between morality and etiquette again.
Being polite to waiters is about etiquette, not morality. I am nice to waiters, not because I care deeply about them as human beings, but because I've been socialised to follow a basic social script that keeps casual transactions polite and pleasant for everybody.
I think the classic example of "telescopic altruism" is Mrs Jellyby, from Dickens' "Bleak House"
Ninja'd: comment on David's post
>Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home?
Maybe it's an outlier, but during Covid, I saw a lot of people who were completely in favour of foreign aid but also in favour of restricting medical resources to their own countrymen who refused to get vaccinated.
You're rigging the comparison by taking wildly different levels of granularity.
The equivalent of "in favour of foreign aid, generally" is "in favor of subsidized healthcare, generally", which liberals obviously are. The equivalent of "deprioritizing healthcare access for the unvaccinated (eg lower in the waitlist for organ transpants)" is "deprioritizing the African Tribe who throws flour into the river to please the River God for flour shipments", which I'm sure plenty of liberals would have no problem with
Well, I think you're dead wrong. I think the overwhelming majority of American progressives would offer preferential treatment to their fargroup (no matter how odious) over their outgroup. And what saddens me is that the author of this blog post was the very person who crystallised this pattern for me.
It's a falsifiable belief, and it's false. American progressives care much more about giving their outgroup free healthcare, free school lunches, labor rights and other things they believe, right or wrong, to be good than they are about anything else.
I also noticed you dropped the vax vs foreign aid, bc it's pretty obviously incomparable and the fact that you could only ever interpret it through culture war lenses seems maybe an indication that if everything looks like a nail, you should seek tools different from hammers, no matter how "crystallised " the hammer is in your toolbox.
I have no idea what you're trying to say.
I don't know why you're criticising me for interpreting this topic through a culture war lens when this is literally an article about the culture war.
While I agree with the point of this post, I feel like Gaza was close to the worst possible example to illustrate it with. Almost without exception, the people upset about 50,000 killed in Gaza are *not* similarly upset about much larger numbers killed in Sudan, Syria, Yemen, or other horrible conflicts around the world, and with vastly less justification (ie, we’re talking in those cases about deliberately targeted innocents, not either combatants or collateral damage in a defensive war being fought against attempted extermination). This is enough to show that those upset are *not* operating on any defensible utilitarian heuristic, of worrying about people killed in violent explosions however far away they are and whomever they might be. Instead, whether consciously or unconsciously, they’re effectively operating on a conspiracy theory about what tiny group is responsible for nearly all of the world’s evil. In their defense, that particular conspiracy theory has been massively popular for millennia.
There were, in fact, considerable numbers of people very upset with people being killed in Syria back when the Arab Spring kicked out, which was a major reason for Westerners recognizing the then-rebel, now-current government (and aiding even more in the case of Libya). This evidently didn't help in stopping the killing, which was a major reason why that furor abated.
In any case, in those cases the West intervented *against* the murderous governments. In case of Gaza, the West continues to support, implicitly or explicitly, the country doing the lion's share of the killing, which rather changes the calculus. It's no longer just an abstract demand of justice but has the important "not in my name" factor in it.
"Very upset" with the propaganda that told them to be upset, and very supportive of the color revolutions. I don't think this is very well supporting your actual thesis, which is that these people care regardless of who's shooting whom.
I don't think that these people, or anyone, really, cares regardless of who's shooting whom, I'm responding to ScottA's specific point.
Yeah, and look how things have changed. After seizing power, previously-rebel, now-current government of Syria murders ethnic and religious minorities with impunity, and the West no longer feels the need to intervene.
There's a more charitable explanation: Israel is America's ally and we sell them lots of military equipment and give them billions in military aid. So there are obvious steps the US can take to help Gazans, namely stop giving Israel military aid and start putting pressure on them not to kill civilians. Whereas Sudan was never our ally and the US government has already sanctioned them and accused them of genocide, so Americans are less likely to feel like the things that happen there are our problems.
That “charitable” position is naive and will get civilians killed.
Hamas hides behind civilians precisely because they know experientially that progressives will blame Israel for it and not Hamas.
Saying “well we’re in practice closer to Israel, that’s our lever to influence the conflict” guarantees that many forces that themselves as weaker will put civilians in harm’s way.
If you actually care about civilians, you have to punish the people actually putting them in harm’s way, regardless of how effective your influence is over them.
>Saying “well we’re in practice closer to Israel, that’s our lever to influence the conflict” guarantees that many forces that themselves as weaker will put civilians in harm’s way.
It also incentivises other countries not to be friendly, since apparently being the US' friend gets you worse treatment than being neutral.
You're making reasonable consequentialist arguments. But I think Madeleine's point was that there are reasons other than Jew-hatred that could cause an American to focus on criticizing Israel over other regimes. "Not in our name" may not be a *good* reason to focus on Israel, but I do think it's a significant part of the reason for some people, and so some people's *reasons* for focusing on Israel aren't entirely antisemitic--even if, as you argue, this focus is antisemitic in *effect*.
I’ve heard that as a possible explanation, but too many US allies (Saudi Arabia and Türkiye come to mind) do nefarious stuff that the public doesn’t care about to a percent of the same degree for me to be convinced that’s the whole story.
Let me put it another way. For everyone who gives that explanation, ask them if Jews are White and then ask them if Jesus was. If their answers differ, I’m going to suggest there’s a different explanation.
There is no way to fight in urban warfare not putting civilians in harm's way. So the blame actually lies on the side of invader, and Israel is the one who invades other countries territory at the moment.
Do you believe that Israel started the war, rather than Gaza? What do you believe Israel should have done in response to Oct 7?
No, Hamas started the war, Israel continued it after having repealed the initial attack. I think it was reasonable either to give some short but strong response, destroy some military facilities and kill some of the leadership. Or if Israel was willing to eradicate the problem once and for all, then it should have occupied and intergated the territory, giving its population citizenship rights, perhaps initially limited in some ways but still. Prolonged bombing campaign with mass destruction but taking no responsibility for the fate of Gaza that actually took place was pointless from any point of view, it only made sense if genocide was actual purpose.
I'm not sure what greater citizenship rights Israelis could give Gazans than than when they performed a complete, unilateral withdrawal in 2005, followed by internationally monitored elections. These elections unfortunately resulted in a victory for Hamas, and their aggressive militant stance led to Israel attempting to halt weapons imports (the infamous blockade / sanctions).
What you're describing sounds like conquest, which I don't think is a good move for either side.
I suggest that Gazans take responsibility for the fate of Gaza. If they didn't want Hamas, they would not have elected Hamas. Hamas remains popular, both in Gaza and the West Bank, and would likely win elections there if they happened today. Many of the worst atrocities on Oct 7 were committed by "lucky" Gazan civilians who were near the breach and took advantage to go on a rampage.
If genocide were Israelis' goal, they could have killed way more Gazans. A commonly cited figure is the number of dropped bombs exceeds the number of dead Gazans. One could argue that destroying empty buildings is a form of indirect ethnic cleansing, but if the goal is genocide, why empty the buildings before destroying them?
“The US should stop fighting Japan after Midway, they repelled the Kido Butai and now they’re just continuing the war.”
That’s your logic. It is, to put it mildly, foolish on the face of it. You would not hold anyone else to that standard.
Moreover, that’s why Hamas took hostages; because they knew Israel would feel an obligation to rescue its citizens.
And it was Hamas and the hostages in Hamas’s tunnels, not Gazan civilians. That tells you everything you need to know about who engineered the conflict, and who was trying to end it.
Do you think that there's even a slightest possibility that even some of the civilians killed in Gaza and elsewhere may have, in fact, not been killed because of "Hamas hiding behind civilians" and because the IDF either does not care about killing civilians or indeed may see it as a positive thing? It would certainly be very odd for the both common Israelis and those in the highest echelons of power (Ben-Gvir) to constantly keep spouting bloodthirsty rhetoric and *not* have it show up any way in civilian casualties.
In any war, there will be war criminals, just as in any society, there will be regular criminals.
If Gazans don't like war, maybe they should try not starting a war.
Motte and Bailey non sequiter. Try again.
?
Truly one of the rationalist comments of all time
Turkey also received billions in aid from the US and EU. Unlike Israel, Turkey also has formal security guarantees from the US and other NATO members. How many people in the US and Europe protested the ethnic cleansing of Greeks in Northern Cyprus and the colonization of their lands by the Turkish settlers?
Concerning amount
But Americans are not the only ones who care much more about what goes on in Palestine than in Sudan or wherever, so an explanation that only applies to them seems unparsimonious.
Or just getting distracted (as perhaps Scott is too) by which conflict is getting the most attention from the media at the moment?
>deliberately targeted innocents, not either combatants or collateral damage in a defensive war being fought against attempted extermination
Plenty don't see it that way. The narrative that Gaza is an open-air prison camp that Israeli citizens are complicit in perpetuating isn't exactly unpopular (thought I don't expect the other Scott to agree with it).
I think people are upset about the wars in Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
There is possibly some Toxoplasma of Rage effect here. It's uncontroversial that the civil war in Sudan is terrible: I've never seen anybody try to argue that the actions of the RSF (or the SAF) are justified. I'm sure some such people exist, but they're outside my social group.
I don't think most people pay enough attention to Yemen to know about the war. If you think most people in your circle do, ask them about khat hour, and see what they say.
I know about Yemen but I don't know what Khat Hour is. Googling suggests its a dialy social event where politics can be discussed and factions can recruit. Is it something more?
In Syria, the United States had military bases in Syria during the civil war and actively intervened and aided the rebels. Outside of a full-on invasion, I do not know what you want them to protest. This sort of thinking obscures rather than reveals, because you are defaulting to the assumption it is because Israel is Jewish rather than:
- Israel is part of "the first world" and thus held to a higher standard than random African countries
- Israel is actively being aided by the United States, with weapons, etc, being given, whereas nobody in the US is handing over bullets to the Houthis or RSF
- There are far more cameras and recordings of what is happening in Gaza. There was a viral image of satellite-captured mass slaughter in Sudan that got around, getting 15 million views, showing people would be perfectly happy to get upset about what's happening in Sudan - but it was actually a bunch of cows, not genocide victims.
This "Jewish explanation" can't meaningfully explain the large changes in opinions on Israel before and after the war, including in countries with no particular historical antisemitism like Korea and Japan.
But several hundred times more coverage, of a smaller conflict, does seem to align with the “Jewish explanation”.
It’s much safer and more pleasant to report on Israel during a life or death conflict than it is to report on Syria or Sudan when they’re at peace. This seems like the simplest explanation
Is it just me or does every argument revolve around some sort of ‘moral’ issue? Is it because progressivism is nothing more than a “good person/bad person” ideology?
The whole Gaza thing is so tiresome. All it takes is a simple thought-experiment. Imagine a country the size of Gaza as your neighboring State. Now imagine its occupants are all ISIS/Al-Qaeda terrorists. Would you be advocating for a 2 state solution, removing the walls & to stop the “oppression”?
Yes.
People -- and not just Jewish people -- also care a lot more about bad things happening _to_ Israel. They also care a lot more about things happening in New York City than in some random US town. Almost as if saturation media coverage and dramatic photos have some effect on people's feelings.
*Some* of them are not similarly upset about much larger numbers killed in other horrible conflicts *because they are not aware of the latter*. (I've seen someone commenting a line chart of the world death rate *ending in 2022* pointing at the COVID uptick at the end saying "You can see Gaza here", and they didn't sound like they were joking. Never underestimate the power of Hanlon's razor.)
Well yeah, but what does any of that have to do with his point? Like he said with the 9/11 example, there are differences in caring about an issue but that comes from other factors
Personally, I am quite upset about Gaza and now Lebanon, and I have been much less upset about ethnic cleansing events (I don’t want to use the g-word here because that is not the kind of debate that, in my opinion, would be worth having over here) of a similar magnitude taking place elsewhere. Being upset is an emotional reaction, but if I have to come up with a reason, I think it’s mainly that Israel is undeniably a first world country and as such it should be held to a high standard. When France engaged in international terrorism in New Zealand I was likewise upset, even if they did not kill anyone. Otherwise there are no rules and it’s a free for all. Killing journalists in deliberate drone strikes, sneaking explosives in pagers… this is first world capability but it’s not coming with first world responsibility. This is not some insurgency butchering people in the jungle with machetes, it’s a nuclear state behaving in such a ruthless and reckless way that it makes you doubt if their leadership is sane.
Scott,
Tying this blog back to USAID and others on related foreign charity concerns.
I admire the sincerity, intellect, and clarity. That said, I see an unaddressed gap in the general political view. Your views strike me as inconsistent with the Founders (not just on obvious issues of slavery, woman’s suffrage, etc., but) on foundational principle of limited government. I’ve never seen you address this.
At Founding and for much of the 19th century, total government (fed + state + local) was ~2% of GDP. We’re now at ~40%. We’ve shifted from a constitution and government designed to minimize the (federal) government’s role in citizens lives to extremely expansive scopes. Taxes are now so broad-taxation and touch virtually every element of our lives that we can be taxed simply for existing (SCOTUS/Obamacare). If, to the point of your recent posts, we can justify federal spending on international humanitarian aid (not because of leverage for domestic benefit, but simply because it helps international recipients as a good unto itself), there’s effectively no limit on what we can justify spending on. Restated – there’s effectively no limits on tax (type/amount) nor spending (type nor amount).
The Constitution and founding were a bold experiment in minimizing (federal) government's role. Your view may be largely self-consistent with a coherent utilitarian/effective altruist position but doesn’t clearly call out that, vis-à-vis our Founding, this is a revolution and apparently you think the Founders were wrong about limited government.
We can argue various political perspectives’ merits, but the fact that this utilitarian/EA-like story seems so inconsistent with our founding documents strikes me as a partial refutation on its own. American exceptionalism and the success of the Western liberal experiment seems to have a fair amount of truth to them, and if so, seem likely to be tied to a cause. I’d have pinned a large part of that cause to limited government. Perhaps a utilitarian/EA-system could be contended practical, but it has to at least argue against the thought that the shoulders we stand on were attributable to a very contrary perspective.
Am I missing key parts of your thinking here? Have you discussed this elsewhere and rejected it? Are EA’s sidestepping it because it risks framing their views as “anti-American” in a foundational sense?
Would love to hear your clarity and candor on something that otherwise seems a gaping hole in the story.
> this is a revolution
Was. The revolution happened long ago. America has not been the "limited government" of its Founders in almost a hundred years.
Largely agree but I'd probably go back even further! Look at the Whiskey Excise Tax (and corresponding rebellion) - It took very little time to start ramping up the taxes. One can argue it was needed revenue source, but the takeaway here is that you can *always* find a justification for taxes. A lot of good to be said about some of the Founding principles but the circle always seems to widen.
The revolution never died. Sure, they may have killed us, but they ain't licked us yet!
(Jokes aside I think there's a very relevant series of essays debating each other from Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke about how much it matters what's been happening for a hundred years.)
>I’d have pinned a large part of that cause to limited government.
The limited government that caused that was almost certainly things like rule of law, not the failure to provide education, health care or police and fire services (a huge pct of the government spending you refer to).
What’s that got to do with the price of charity in China?
There’s nothing wrong with foreign aid in principle. A limited government is perfectly able to send some of its wealth outside the country. Sometimes comparative advantage even demands it.
If it’s a matter of degree—perhaps you’re barking up the wrong tree. Total U.S. foreign aid came out to ~$70B, which is somewhere less than a tenth of the interest payments on our outstanding debt. Those, in turn, are a tiny fraction of GDP, income, outlays, you name it.
Come to think of it, I’m not really convinced that GDP or tax burden really represents anything like limits-of-government. One could imagine a minarchist commune where no member *owns* anything, distributing all income to the collective. It wouldn’t scale easily, but it would be extremely limited. Conversely, we have plenty of historical examples of dictatorships which failed to capture much of their GDP, even when they absolutely trampled natural rights.
The important thing is, as always, consent of the governed. Right now the governed can’t decide between different flavors of populism. One of those flavors performatively shredded an effective, relatively cheap program. You’re witnessing another step in the debate over whether that was irrational or obligatory. I don’t see why that debate needs to go back to the Founding.
> foundational principle of limited government
Yeah, but the percentage of Americans who are deeply concerned with "limited government" *as a principle* (rather than as an excuse to demand government cease doing *some specific thing* they don't like) is about the same as the fraction of progressives, a bit less than 10%.
Just look at MAGA (about 33% of the population) which really loves all sorts of government intervention, just as long as they see it beneficial to themselves. As Megan McArdle (who really does like the idea of limited government) griped "It has been true for some time that the small-government conservatism that GOP candidates used to tout hasn't much of a constituency in either party."
It seems like you're treating humanitarian aid as exceptional here - if you can justify spending on that, you can justify spending on anything. Why put the division there? Why not say if the government can justify spending on seatbelt enforcement, it can justify spending on anything? Or education? Or a standing millitary?
As for experiments in minimizing federal governemnt's role, we have plenty. Look at South America, for instance. Their federal government is so minimal it doesn't exist at all, and there are only states.
(I fully agree the current tax levels are ridiculously high. But neither side's politicians want to scale down spending.)
Economically, it seems like foreign humanitarian aid (not foreign aid to build defense/self-interest positions, simply humanitarian aid) seems logically as distant from the social contract to form a federal government as possible. If you can find an economically more distant spending provision, then I'd simply like to ask the EA/rationalist crowd if that is also justifiable and simply move the benchmark out to that new point. My point, really, is that this crowd seems to recognize no limits to the scope of government and the power of a majority (supermajority/etc.), and that this is foundationally counter to the principles upon which the government was founded. They should have the intellectual courage to call that out, and say the foundation was wrong (not just for slavery, women's votes, etc.) but foundationally wrong and that they are consciously rejecting those principles.
I think the most useful framework here is the OCEAN/Big Five personality model. What’s termed telescopic philanthropy here tracks with Openness – people take a special interest in immigrants, Palestinians, and others who are different or far away. The thing is that this doesn’t really correlate with other traits, so high-Openness people can be low in conscientiousness or high in neuroticism, making them less pleasant to people in their direct orbit. This doesn’t always happen – again, these traits are largely independent. But with progressives averaging higher Openness and higher Neuroticism, there’s a type that the telescopic altruism critique is getting at.
And with this model, of course, the disconnect is between the larger, society-wide level that high Openness works on and the interpersonal level of Conscientiousness and Neuroticism, not the ingroup/outgroup dynamics of free lunch at American schools/helping children in Gaza.
And notably, trait openness is the strongest OCEAN predictor of politics! Liberals are, unsurprisingly, much more likely to be high in openness. I bet that trend is even stronger if you compared right-populists vs. people on the left.
This is true, but many of my peers worry so much about political and global crisis so much that they become depressed. It is usually beyond their control. If they ocused on building relationships with the people closest to them it would be a net positive for the world imo.
This sentence contains a slight error:
> Conservatives can take heart in a different study in the paper, which gives people a limited supply of 100 “moral units” to distribute.
because as far as I can tell the heatmap plot in fact comes from this same "moral units" study (not a different study in the paper).
Overall, the study seems well-designed, since zero-sumness is central to the anti-telescopic-altruist position. No "microscopic altruist" would object to the life of a distant foreigner being improved in a tradeoff-free way. But there is always a tradeoff: improving the conditions of animals in factory farms increases the price of food for humans; sending aid money to a distant country means not spending that same money to improve lives locally; short-term aid sometimes disincentivizes growth and harms long-term prosperity; etc.
The heatmap plot seems completely reasonable as well. Perhaps max(group_with_nonzero_coefficient) is not the only way to visualize the data, but it seems a decent enough summary statistic.
I'm surprised you are trying to refute this angle by quibbling about the details of the study, rather than owning it. Don't you feel that it is genuinely correct to be much more concerned about helping people in distant moral circles than is typical? Is this not a central tenet of EA/longtermism?
It's a central tenant because the global poor are around 1000x poorer than the median American, not because it was declared by fiat. 5 million dollars is around the threshold where American government institutions can save an American life. With malaria nets, deworming or vitamin a supplementation, it's around 5.5k. If the numbers were reversed, they'd flip their position.
Exactly -- so shouldn't the argument be something like: "western liberals prefer to allocate more aid (vs conservatives' preference) to people at a greater distance from themselves, and this is good + correct because aid given in that fashion is higher leverage"
vs the way it is currently written, which is more like "this study might look at first glance like western liberals prefer to allocate aid more distantly, but if you look at the details..." as though this conclusion were something to be ashamed of
The graph is misleading. Even if you accept the zero sum framing, the vast majority of ppl read it as a sum(coefficients) rather than max(nonzero coefficient). That’s not a quibble
ETA: The comment below yours is someone confused about the graph even after Scott explained it. Sorry but as a data scientist if you make a graph that ~everyone misunderstands at first glance and many misunderstand even after it’s explained, that’s a failure of visualization that’s on you, lol
"this graph is valid and points to an interesting conclusion, but some people misinterpret it at first glance when it appears without context" is as quibbly as it gets
It's not some, it's >90%. Ppl who see the graph are on net ending up less informed than they were before.
"It isn’t. The heatmap was just a poorly-designed attempt to represent the limit of concern. If the liberal map is “hottest” at animals, that means liberals say animals are worthy of at least some care. If a conservative’s map is “hottest” at friends, that means the conservative only cares about their friends (and doesn’t care at all about countrymen, foreigners, or animals)."
Can someone explain this to me? It seems like Scott is saying that the heat map is saying 2 opposite things. For liberals it means you have some care for X, but for conservatives it means you ONLY care for X? Unless the map is 2 completely different maps I'm not sure how this is an accurate description.
The heat map shows the "limit of concern," i.e. the thing furthest away from the center that the respondents cared about.
So if it says that liberals' "limit of concern" is more likely to be at shellfish, that doesn't mean they don't care about their families. They care about their families and about shellfish, but their families aren't at their "limit."
I *think* the implication is that each dot of heat in the heatmap is a person whose concerns extend up to that point but no further. So among the conservatives surveyed, there were plenty who had concerns for circles 1-3 but not 4+; plenty who had concern for circles 1-4 but not 5+; etc. And a few who cared about 1-8 but not 9+, or 1-9 but not 10+, etc. Among the liberals, there were more who cared about circles 1-8 (but not 9+) or 1-9 (but not 10+), and comparatively fewer who only cared about 1-3 but no higher, or 1-4 but no higher.
The question asked was:
>On this page, we would like you to indicate the extent of your moral circle. By moral circle, we mean the circle of people or other entities for which you are concerned about right and wrong done toward them. This depiction demonstrates that people have different types of moral circles. At the innermost circle, some people care about their immediately family only, and at the outermost circle, people care about the entire universe--all things in existence. Please use the following scale and select a location that depicts the extent of your moral circle.
See supplementary material here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6763434/
According to the paper the respondents checked yes/no to whether they were concerned with entities in the different circles. Then the authors, for reasons that are entirely opaque, multiplied concerns in the center x 1, the next circle x 2 and so on up to x 16 for things in the outside circle, then added these all up by circle. So while the respondents were *not* assigning weight, the authors *did* assign weights, to make the map. It's a totally obtuse way to display the results.
I usually see the telescopic altruism discourse (and the heat map) around issues of race/migration and violent crime.
The accuser will post a juxtaposition between a "do gooder"/telescopic altruist celebrating how proud they are of refugees Zaid and Fahim* for making good in their new home and joining hte local cricket team (often celebrated by a school, or church group) and then a headline of the two being charged with rape or sexual assault. This is almost always in the UK or Germany.
Then the accuser will point at this and show "see, this suicidal empathy is another example of libs having mental defects in their altruism detectors".
The other example that jumps to mind is that video of the German police officer trying to arrest the vigilante rather than the stabbing migrant at the market, with predictable results.
*a real case, although they were acquitted a year later...
Or the scottish police arresting the 14 year old girl with a knife, rather than the adult males she was trying to defend her 12 year old sister from. With Predictable Consequences Afterwards.
As someone that generally cares about all three: diabetes, Gaza, and the opioid crisis. Perhaps the difference lies in the moral culpability each group has. A woman that started using heroin because a guy in a band offered it to her or a man that can't be bothered to put down the king size fries and chips are both way different cases than the child born next to Israel.
Even if the former cases got that way because of economic opportunities removed by coastal elites.
Most arguments about telescopic philanthropy are actually about "Billions for space, pennies for the hungry" signs from 1969. Yes, Your countrymen are fed, but how much are you investing in their hopes and dreams? That's an infinite money sink and there are often decisions between feeding starving children outside your country or creating amazing projects that make life more meaningful for the people now living there.
Cultivating ambition and glimmering dreams in your population is an infinite moneysink, and you have to make the decision on how much care you want to give in that respect versus how much you want to spend on basic subsistence for people a world away.
Hmmm, I just checked and Google says food stamps get $100G per year and NASA gets $25G per year.
I love that analogy because, well, that sign was really dumb. Not only the NASA budget was always a tiny fraction of the welfare one, but the greatest expansion of welfare post-FDR came at the height of the Space Race and during the heyday of state mecenatism.
Almost like Scott is right and a society that believes in itself enough to go to space will believe in itself enough to systemally help its least fortunate, while a society of recriminating, petty, spiteful "protest voters" will do neither.
Please say "Progressive" instead of "Liberal" :V
(Cool post, Scott!)
I strongly agree with this post. And suspect it's not correctly applying the charitable principle.
A weird note, and I might be shooting down a blind psychological alley here. But the same thing happened when I had my kid. Before I was pretty content to disagree but try and understand where people were coming from, give them the benefit of the doubt, etc. After I had much stronger emotional responses to evil people doing evil things, and was much less interested in trying to figure out whether the evil things they were doing were actually evil. The reaction to people screwing up the world because they were misguided went from annoyance to visceral disgust, essentially overnight.
An obvious point about the Gaza example is that the people angry at libs caring about the people in Gaza instead of their friends and neighbors do not really give the impression of wanting the lib to care about their friends and neighbors, just as long as they stop caring about the people of Gaza (because that caring leads them to take positions contrary to Israeli policy and the Western policy to support Israel, etc.) Whether this leads to the reallocation of "units of caring", insofar as they even exist, to some other target, is ephemeral.
I'm not entirely sure if that's really the case. As I see it, the "anti-telescopic altruism "people (usually right-wing conservatives) feel that those who care about Gaza etc. to be "disloyal" to what they feel should be their ingroup (e.g. their own nation and its citizen, along with other culturally close (other people from Western countries in the Western World) people), and thus they are angry at what they feel is a betrayal of the social contract by the people who don't show loyalty to those who are supposed to be closer to them in the view of the "anti-telescopic altruism people".
“When I look out in the world, I see more evidence for the correlated altruism hypothesis than the telescopic one.” I think a lot of these arguments are based on anecdotal evidence that for many on the Right, family members on the Left are meaner and less helpful to them than family members on the Right, so they look at these graphs and assume that everyone on the Left is mean to all their family members. In actuality, the Left are probably very kind to their other Left Wing Family members, but they don’t see that happening.
You can go above and switch every left and right around, and you’ll see how many on the left think that everyone on the right is mean and uncaring to everyone, including their closest family members, even though they probably help family on the Right.
Cf. 'Overriding Virtue' (2019) - https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAOV
"Impartial beneficence... seems an important component of a broadly cosmopolitan moral outlook. But it fits uneasily with common sentimentalist intuitions about moral virtue. For example, we typically think that a good person must be sensitive to those around them. We expect the good person to be motivated by moral emotions, such as sympathy and empathy, which are most easily engaged by those who are nearby or otherwise salient. But the most objectively pressing moral needs tend not to be found on our doorsteps. Impartial beneficence may thus direct us to override our natural moral sentiments in pursuit of the greater good. Is doing (the most) good thereby in tension with being a good person? The challenge may be amplified by considering the popular adage, “charity begins at home.” We may well look askance at a moral point of view that seems to uphold Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, with her neglected family and “telescopic philanthropy”—able to “see nothing nearer than Africa”—as a paragon of virtue. There would at least seem something a bit morally awkward or uncomfortable about ignoring the homeless on our doorstep so as to instead donate a greater amount to global poverty relief.
On the other hand, it would seem excessively complacent to just assume that our evolved psychologies and emotional dispositions are entirely above reproach. It isn’t as though we could plausibly hold that needy individuals who are salient to us are thereby objectively more deserving of aid, or that those who are out of sight thereby deserve to be neglected. This may be taken to suggest that the traditional conception of virtue requires modification, and that true benevolence may at times require us to override or redirect our natural sympathies. Or so I will argue in this paper. The challenge is to develop a conception of moral virtue that fits with a modern cosmopolitan moral outlook, without thereby valorizing the neglectful, callous character of Mrs. Jellyby."
To steelman the idea of telescope altruism, I think people have lots of trouble being altruistic to those who are close to them and have bad/threatening/gross qualities. When we deal with people in near mode we often have reactions that overwhelm our altruism. Indeed, I see friends on the left who find it easier to feel altruism for theocratic make chauvinists across the globe than republicans at home. Same way it is often easier to feel bad for the romantic troubles of distant men than that gross creepy guy (even if you know intellectually they are perfectly nice) or feel sympathy for the elephant man but not the woman with warts all over at your job.
I think this is almost the opposite of what the telescope altruists usually have in mind -- it's more just that in near mode other reactions can overwhelm altruism -- but worth mentioning.
There is a conversation in The Brother’s Karamasov where Ivan despairs to Alyosha that perhaps one can love humanity in the abstract, but the real human is unlovable. “It’s exactly one’s neighbors, in my estimation, that it’s impossible to love, though one might love one’s more distant neighbors.” “To love a man, it’s necessary that he be hidden from view; once he’s shown his face, the love vanishes.”
Nemo iudex in causa propria. Ultimately a society in which everyone cares for some comfortably-removed individual enough to help them is better off than a society which talks a big deal about loving your neighbor but then gets the ick and y'know, your neighbor should learn to help themselves.
I also disagree with the characterization of pro-Palestine protests (liberals protested in favor of more conservative social groups much closer to home, for much lesser mistreatment, eg American Indians) but overall agree with your point
As someone who only donates to GiveWell recommended charities that go to the third world, I will say this in defense of critiques of my behavior: it's easier to personally evaluate the effect of your actions on more local causes that you can observe.
An alternative interpretation is that since "other-ism" demands concern for the least advantaged and most distant from one's self, rather than admit to being hypocritically immoral and that the lib is behaving more consistently and is more true to a shared moral code, the anti-lib deflects to whataboutism rather than challenge the actual premise both sides are acting on.
Son: OK, here's an example. Charley's dad knows somebody who owns a tenement. And he never lets a family with children in. He asks everybody whether they're planning to have a child. But in his room he has lots of pictures of a huge family in South America, where he always sends money, and they write to him. He knows some kind of monk there.
Father: That'll be not a monk but a catholic padre who cares for the poor, and they are far, far worse off than some family here.
Son: May be. But Charley says his father says, what he does is really schizo.
Father: That's not schizo, but logical. The nearer your "loved neighbours" are, the more they get on your nerves. And that's where the natural instinct of self preservation kicks in. When you're older, you will notice that, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dKWo0_TORU&t=610s
And then the son goes on to mention that he has invited some Turkish children into their garden, and the telescopic father gets angry.
notes:
1) that's a guy who's probably been burnt by someone with children before (landlords have Stories, boy howdy).
2) it's a lot cheaper to save children in the 3rd world than children in America. Always will be. I fully support letting children emigrate to Mexican orphanages, if they consent to such things (where they can learn a trade). it's gotta be better than living in cages!
Yes, and I agree with the father that what he does is logical. It's more convenient to do your good deeds as far away as possible.
Whether you were burnt by children before or you just don't like the noise they make, you are not required to support children on your doorstep just because you support children in another continent.
It is easy to show care about someone you can do nothing for. You cant get higher moral status by doing easy things.
Tbf if you're from developed countries, problems of developing countries may be easier to solve than problem at home.
I think the average person in a developed country would have a much easier time helping the homeless in their city than in a far away country, just because of proximity.
However it is much easier to care about the people from far away, because nobody will question not helping. If someone cares about those nearby they end up having to actually help.
I guess the main argument is that homeless people in poor country may only need money to raise their SoL by considerable amount, while homeless people in rich country may have other things holding them back other than money. I don't know if this is true, but I've seen this argument a lot.
It may be true. If the person saying it has actually moved to a developed country to go use their money and connections to help the poor I would have a lot of respect for them.
If not then I would say it's a convenient belief that allows them to feel good while helping neither those at home nor far away.
Every time the subject of PEPFAR comes up I think about how there are about 170 million working adults in America, so a billion federal dollars is really just $5 from each of them. For the typical taxpayer, PEPFAR comes out to maybe $20 once you adjust for the progressivity of the system.
Do a lot of conservatives genuinely think that it's morally reprehensible to care so much about Africans that you're willing to pickpocket $20 from your countrymen to save their lives? Probably not. I think for the most part, average people have a poor idea of what the relevant tradeoffs really are, and would expect more serious harm to come to them if they allow the conniving telescopic empathy libs to get their way.
The majority of people are unwilling to pay a dollar a month more on the electricity bill to fight climate change so paying 20 dollars to help hypothetical people sounds widely unpopular.
Maybe if they were getting the $20 back but the $20 is now being spent somewhere else.
Can't speak for conservatives, but as a right-winger: Yes, that is absolutely reprehensible. The duty of the American government is to the American people; that is its raison d'etre. Sacrificing the interests of the American people (without their consent) to serve the interests of foreigners, in even the smallest and most highly leveraged degree, is wrong.
Your perspective only makes sense on the view that governments are moral agents in exactly the same sense that individuals are. But that is not the right-wing view at all.
You missed one major criticism of "telescopic altruism"—that "telescopic altruists" don't give enough attention to the effectiveness of their attempts to help far-away people, precisely because they are easy to forget about. Think about Western "liberals" who have supported far-away socialist revolutionaries from Russia to Cambodia out of supposed concern for the suffering of their oppressed peoples, only to turn a blind eye to the suffering and oppression under the new regimes. It's not the most widespread criticism of the phenomenon online today, but I do remember reading it on Unqualified Reservations at some point. It doesn't really serve the ends of conservatives today because the natural conclusion is not to stop caring about foreigners but rather to care about them even more attentively.
This is actually a serious problem, because it is much more difficult to evaluate the success of your efforts when they take place far away. When I spend $10 to buy my child an ice cream, I can immediately see the smile on her face (and perhaps measure her increasing weight in the future, there are tradeoffs). When I spend $10 on mosquito nets, I need to run studies and trust third-party sources (or visit Africa in person, perhaps). When I spend $10 to improve the lives of far-future shrimp, what can I do ? At some point, I'm just spending $10 based on little more than faith and hope.
When enough people spend money on mosquito nets, you should be able to track the movement of anti-malarial medicine, right? That is arguably easier, and quicker, than tracing the equivalent amount of smiles (which you have to be right there for, as they're fleeting, and then the kid is crying again).
I can track the number of smiles by myself, armed with little more than a notepad. I can't track the movement of global anti-malarial medicine disbursements by myself; to do that, I'd need to collate data from several large organizations and determine to what extent (if any) it is trustworthy.
It was my understanding that most of those are publically available documents (from say Merck/etc) -- I was speaking more in terms of "how much is made per year" rather than "how much is getting disbursed" (which is a trickier problem to measure).
Yes, it's still several large organizations, but a quick google is a quick google.
Right, I can quickly google a lot of things, but the complexity increases exponentially. Can I trust Google ? Can I trust the data published by these organizations, who demonstrably a). are large and unwieldy and b). have an agenda of their own ? The answer isn't "yes" or "no", but a number between 0 and 1. Sure, I can now apply some Bayesian reasoning and maybe get a coherent answer -- but it's a lot more difficult and less certain than counting up tally marks in my notebook.
Now, consider evaluating the well-being of billions of shrimp hundreds of years from now...
Given that the producers would rather not show a decrease in money-making medicines, I'd lean towards "more trustworthy" -- but far be it from me to say Stop when someone is putting uncertainty into their calculations!
(Good lord, I suggested the Americans might not believe the Ukrainian reports of how well their drones were doing, and were thus doing a "test drive in the Iranian theater" before buying... and people started saying "but the Ukrainians wouldn't exaggerate that!" -- always there is uncertainty!)
Ok do you see the smile, but do you also the glycemic spike? /s
In all seriousness toh, I think the icecream example is a perfect encapsulation of how people conflate two very different axes: near vs far altruism, and emotional vs systematic/spreadsheet altruism. If we're going by spreadsheet altruism, it's not particularly obvious that buying icecream to a kid who, by mere virtue of being an US kid, is at elevated risk of obesity, is a good idea. If we go by emotional altruism, every middle upper class kid who went to volunteer in Africa has plenty of pictures with smiley children (even if their flight ticket alone could have paid for locals to do a lot more work and make many more children smile).
I find that those willing to support socialism abroad also support it at home. So again there isnt a misplaced overweight on foreigners. Their views on socialism can be debated empirically with evidence from both foreign and domestic experiments. These ppls problem is not telescopes, its poor analytical skills.
Furthermore, opposing their domestic socialist agenda is far more important than opposing their foreign agenda. Right my fellow anti socialist non telescope fallacy comitting compatriot?
I missed the Waytz et al. study when it came out, but the critique here seems warranted. The study is basically collapsing complex, context-dependent moral reasoning into a small number of dimensions — an intrinsically lossy compression. "Correlated altruists" seem more common than "telescopic altruists" to me anyway. I'm less confident about the suggestion that liberals make more of a mess at home though, although I believe I understand the intuition.
What all of these puzzles cry out for is an understanding of mechanisms. So much of what we do in psychology, sociology, economics, and law is story-telling supported by thin slices of data about the behavior of specific people (or groups) at specific times. I know it's hard to do, but I believe we would all be better served by thinking through what the actual mechanisms behind a theory of "telescopic altruism" (or "correlated altruism") might be.
Biology is, after all, also a complicated field that ultimately (and hopefully) grounds whatever we believe about human behavior. And in biology (chemistry, physics, math) an understanding of mechanism is not negotiable. Even if we can't be certain, we should at least try to be definite.
I am a huge fan of your writing and thinking, but disagree with this *hard*. I have known too many people - and, if I am honest, I have been one of those people - for whom “right action” is only possible toward people in in theory, toward the idea of people. Being kind to people close to you requires things like patience, forgiveness, and humility, attention to a human face; being kind to people in theory can be done from the safe remove of your laptop as long as you have time and/or money and a sense of your own moral righteousness.
And there's no feedback if you do it wrong.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/g__k__chesterton/poems/6724
I'm not disagreeing with this post, but FWIW there is some evidence for *a variety of* this effect. People who are full-time professional caregivers who need to use a lot of empathy in their work sometimes seem to appear "drained" and less able to turn their empathy on in their home life:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SMziBSCT9fiz5yG3L/notes-on-empathy
> Empathy can be emotionally wearying, especially in the case of distressing emotions or situations. Medical caregivers for example may need to suppress empathy in order to avoid burnout.[69] It seems people only have so much empathy to give, and so they need to ration it. If you use up your empathy at work (or in fretting over the benighted people of Borrioboola-Ghâ)*, you might not have any left for your family.[70]
[69] Ezekiel Gleichgerrcht & Jean Decety “The Costs of Empathy among Health Professionals” in J. Decety, ed. (2012) Empathy: From bench to bedside p. 255
* "Character analysis: Mrs. Jellyby" from Charles Dickens's "Bleak House" -- the literary prototype of "telescopic altruism" https://www.litcharts.com/lit/bleak-house/characters/mrs-jellyby
[70] J. Halbesleben, et al. “Too Engaged? A conservation of Resources View of the Relationships Between Work Engagement and Work Interference with Family” Journal of Applied Psychology 94.6 (2009)
>If there’s a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven’t met them
There are in fact parents who endanger their children by bringing kids to very dangerous “protests”=riots or by getting in fights with law enforcement at said “protests” and leaving their children orphaned. I guess “bad parents exist” isn’t news, but these are some clear examples of people who take their supposed duty to strangers more seriously than their obvious duty to their children.
Being a good parent doesn't let you flaunt your virtue.
Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
What if the waiter is rude to you?
Leave a smaller tip (or zero), or mention to the manager.
I wasn't asking "what to do," I was asking "what does that make you?"
How do you track cases of child abuse across states when the legal definitions and de facto standards for enforcement and who counts as a mandatory reporter all vary so much?
I'm sure there is correlation between compassion to people far away and compassion to close ones. But it is also true that people tend become more parochial and less idealistic as they get children, family and other dependents. People working hard to support family and relatives and people donating 10% of their income to charity should both be celebrated.
The issue here is that for the first two issues, these are people imposing costs on one group of people to benefit another group, neither of which they know. The school lunch people want taxpayers to pay for the lunches they like. The Gaza protestors want Israelis to pay the cost of being bombed or tortured to death in tunnels instead of fighting back, they're certainly not volunteering to do it themselves.
The reason this is important is that people setting policy for other people's tradeoffs off faraway signals tend to be both bad at it and biased in favor of visible misery, which creates some awful incentives about trying to look visibly miserable to strangers.
(There's some excuse for that with animal welfare, since animals can't speak for themselves, and arguably for school lunches since kids can't vote and the ones who need school lunches often have neglectful parents who won't vote in their interests. But these are rare exceptions).
It's telling that the exception here (the ea supporting bednets and paying for them himself) is usually also the only one who's actually done the research on being cost effective. That's what you'd expect for a case of legitimately caring rather than empty virtue signalling. I'll generalize this to cases where people have done research or actually have a plan that could work, but most cases aren't this.
Worse, it create awful incentives to make other people try to look visibly miserable to strangers.
Then you appropriate the money not only because you want it for yourself, but because otherwise it might make the other people look less visibly miserable, and that's your cash cow.
Not all deaths are equal.
We care far more when innocent people are killed by others (be they murders or massacres) then we do about people dying by suicide or opioid overdoses or voluntary euthanasia.
We also care more about young people dying preventable deaths than about old people dying of old age diseases which is unavoidable.
I think when I think about this kind of stuff part of what sticks out to me is that what I'm really thinking about is failure states of the positioning. So for non-failure states, imagine:
1. A liberal rationalist EA guy who gives his 10% to people he doesn't know, but doesn't think this absolves him of duties of compassion and help to people he can see. He doesn't do the hobbyist low/no contact thing, helps friends and family who are in trouble, etc.
2. A conservative religious guy who is very good to those near him and considers that his primary duty (those are the people assigned to him, so to speak) but who also has at least some level of care for those distant, gives to charity, etc.
Then there's moderate failure cases:
1. A liberal rationalist EA guy who gives his 10% to people he doesn't know, considers utilitarianism satisfied, and has no significant motivating morality for those in need near him.
2. A conservative religious guy who takes care of his family and those he can see really well, but has no concern at all for people elsewhere he can't physically see and interact with.
And extreme failure cases:
1. A liberal rationalist EA guy who doesn't give at all, near or far, but who knows exactly how those who do give are doing it wrong, tells them, and considers his moral duties satisfied.
2. A conservative religious guy who states he doesn't care at all about people who are far away but who on examination turns out to not care about people close to him in any tangible way either.
And everything in-between. I think when people talk about other groups with the goal of criticizing them, they are mostly looking at failure states.
There's a sense in which things would be better if everything started off with "I'm not talking about the problem with liberals, I'm talking about *problem liberals* ", but it's usually not going to happen. Instead, you get something like a conservative talking about a liberal who takes no action to help others at all outside of the tiny effect their tribal-affiliation-satisfying vote has on tax policy, or the liberal talking about the conservative who only helps people when he expects that help to selfishly improve his local environment.
I think ideally nobody wants either failure state, that we should instinctively separate out "helps local/allies, helps distant/enemies-or-unassociated, that these two things should have separate budgets that don't interact. Like you don't want "gives money to mosquito nets" to pull from a zero-sum budget that also includes "will help you move" or "feels compassion and will listen and offer advice".
It's just tough to mesh these things when the discussion around it is so heavily this-is-how-I-talk-about-my-enemies-to-make-them-look-like-villains. I want people like me (local good-and-duties oriented) to think more about souls that aren't near them, but "you are bad for focusing locally" will never get me to do it, in isolation.
> Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?
--------------------------------------------
The problem is that the vast majority of people who are outraged by those killed in Gaza show near-complete indifference in cases where far greater numbers of people are dying, but where the killing is done by Muslims or left-wing governments. This suggests that the driving force behind the supposedly altruistic attitude is not actual compassion for Palestinians. For most, it’s solidarity with a global left-wing agenda or simple animosity toward Israel or Jews. For many American Jews, however, it is the desire to demonstrate a lack of ethnic bias and show unwavering commitment to the current blue-tribe agenda.
The problem with most people having ulterior motives for supporting a supposedly altruistic cause is that their efforts tend to be optimized toward those ulterior motives rather than the stated goals. In the case of Palestinians, international support has often ended up severely hurting rather than improving their quality of life. In fact, the reason that Hamas organized the October 7 attack was specifically to trigger Israeli reprisals, which would in turn provoke international condemnation of Israel. The 50,000 people killed in Gaza would most likely still be alive if not for “altruistic” people who claim to care about them.
Similar types of problems are commonly observed with other charity projects driven by telescopic altruism.
I think alternative motives is a problem for everything and not just telescopic altruism.
(And Gaza was a terrible example because Palestinian activism has got an atypically high amount of alternative motives)
I think the real criticism of the telescopic altruists isn’t that they are inherently more evil (though some lazy commentators often make that claim), it’s that putting telescopic altruists in charge of society will result in civilization careening towards the repugnant conclusion.
Take, for example, refugees from an unspecified war-torn East African country. Bringing these refugees into the United States would not be good for net contributions to the public purse, social cohesion, or really much of anything the native population cares about. However, it would be really really good for the refugees, as they now get to live in a nice first-world country with generous welfare and public funding instead of a war-torn malaria-ridden failed state. The lives of the original citizens of America are worse, but that’s “okay”, because even scaled by a whatever proportional ratio you give countrymen over foreigners, net utility has been increased.
This is a very good point.
Its perfectly ethical to spend your own money on helping people far away. And its extremely respectable to make sacrifices to help others.
For the government to spend its citizens money and demand sacrifices of its citizens, that requires a mandate from the people and I don't think they have one.
I don't just mean if you got the votes you can do what you want. I think that if people voted against the other guy and now you get to do whatever. That's a failure of the system itself. You should only be getting to spend people's money if they actually voted for your policies.
>For the government to spend its citizens money and demand sacrifices of its citizens, that requires a mandate from the people and I don't think they have one
The evidence implies otherwise. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/05/01/majorities-of-americans-support-several-but-not-all-types-of-foreign-aid/
Foreign aid is generally popular; mass immigration is wildly unpopular basically everywhere it's been tried.
But, mass immigration is not the issue I was responding to.
Little Librarian was responding to a post about "refugees from an unspecified war-torn East African country", so it seems probable that "or the government to spend its citizens money and demand sacrifices of its citizens" was in reference to such a scenario.
I took him to make a much broader point, since he prefaced it with a reference to "spend[ing] your own money on helping people far away."
Something seems wrong about this.
"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
Okay. So is a liberal or conservative more likely to speak politely to the waiter serving him? To tip generously?
Is a liberal or conservative more likely to greet by name the guy coming to empty his office trash can at the end of the day?
Is a liberal or conservative woman more likely to be kind to the dweeby coworker trying to screw up the courage to embarrass himself?
I a liberal or conservative more likely to invite an immigrant family to share Thanksgiving Day dinner?
My point isn't even that conservatives win on these metrics. My point is that none of these are actually measuring what people are trying to get at by the concept of "telescopic altruism". Which, as an aside, I had never heard of. Steve Sailer uses the term "concentric circles of loyalty" https://www.unz.com/isteve/concentric-circles-of-loyalty/.
This quote from Thomas Babington Macaulay is particularly insightful. Other Brits making similar criticisms of moral universalism in the same era were Dickens ("telescopic philanthropy") and Thackeray.
You know what it’s about, though.
The left has an underdog fixation, it’s the core of their morality. They believe moral concern should be based on need, and America, which has tons of resources, should be criticized for not using theirs for others. This can be pushed very far as agenda or policy, and failure to live up to perceived moral responsibilities constantly puts them in a state of bad faith with their own powerful figures and institutions.
The right’s alternative to intensity of need driving priority of concern is localism, and the circles of interest. It’s not really about whether the left gives a shit about others next door, although one could imagine a leftist seeing American problems as first world and petty versus the *real* problems elsewhere.
Undifferentiated communalism is legitimately a bad moral model of responsibility. Being a responsible, social adult shouldnt mean you have to keep up with and help everyone, that’s unrealistic and stupid and puts you at the mercy if people who report news. Other societies should be dealing with their own issues, not adapting to the availability of western altruism.
>The left has an underdog fixation, it’s the core of their morality. They believe moral concern should be based on need, and America, which has tons of resources, should be criticized for not using theirs for others.
Reminds me of Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary (basically a very senior civil servant) under Tony Blair, saying the purpose of the British government should be to promote global welfare, not the welfare of British people specifically.
Plus one for this analysis: left, moral concern based on need; right, moral concern based on circles of interest.
The one thing I’d add is that for me (on the right) moral concern =\= proper allocation of resources. I have a proper moral concern for foreigners or shrimp, which includes how I should treat them and how I think others should treat them. But I have no obligation to provide for them, and no obligation to take on the role of their protector.
This is more or less what I was thinking. Mainly that right-leaning individuals, as per Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, are more concerned about loyalty and authority than left-leafing ones, who are mostly concerned about fairness and care/harm. Thus it looks like a "betrayal" to rightists if those in authority and others who they feel should be concerned more about who they feel should be seen as being their "own people" (e.g. citizens of the same nation), are (seemingly) more concerned about those who are not part of that same "in-group", such as people in other nations. The left, because its moral intuitions rest on less factors (mainly care and fairness according to Haidt at least), tend to not see a major problem with this since they tend to be universalist in their POV anyway, and see the right's feel of "betrayal" as something more akin to Xenophobia and/or racisms.
Right. That doesn’t factor in the motivating drives of being responsible for yourself or your people, which are absolutely necessary. Imagine trying to care for people who don’t feel any need to care for themselves, or claim to be wronged when any little thing doesn’t go as expected. The right does those things, “clings” to tribalism, because without it, the basic expectation of responsible behavior is unsustainable.
Scott, this is mostly a strawman. You define telescopic altruism in such an extreme form that it only exists if someone cares more about foreigners than their own family. But the serious version of the critique is about revealed priorities under tradeoff.
It is easy and costless to say you care about everyone and everything. The real question is what happens when concern for a distant cause conflicts with proximate goods or obligations. At that point, there are clearly people willing to accept meaningful local costs for the sake of a faraway conflict. One can argue that this is morally correct in some cases. But it is not true that the pattern simply does not exist. There was an entire left-Democrat movement devoted to this kind of thinking less than two years ago.
Agreed, revealed preference under scarcity is the real issue.
Espoused caring and revealed preference caring are not the same thing, and conflating them is the central error in this piece.
Espoused caring is real. But revealed preferences under genuine scarcity aren't the same mechanism operating at different distances — they're qualitatively different things that happen to share a label.
The moral question worth arguing about isn't whether distant caring exists. It's what weight it should carry under genuine scarcity. A good model for human revealed preference caring under scarcity approximates as a direct function of Reciprocity, Interaction, Similarity (experiential, genetic, cultural), and Aesthetic Appreciation. In humans, caring ≈ f(RISA).
Singer and Communism share a core failure: building systems that ignore this basic fact about human beings. Ideologies that mistake espoused caring for revealed preference caring when designing institutions don't just get the philosophy wrong — history is fairly clear about what happens next.
That last graphic, showing per-capita child abuse or neglect cases by state, shows a strong correlation with rural population distributions. Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Alaska, West Virginia are all heavily-rural states; so are Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Indiana; both Michigan and Illinois have urban metros in one corner and then rural belts larger than a lot of whole states; etc.
But then Massachusetts and to a lesser degree New York State don't fit the above correlation at all....something sociologically different going on the Northeast maybe?
Surely the problem with the Mrs Jellyby's is not whether they care but what they actually do. Mrs Jellyby spend huge amounts of effort on stuff she couldn't really help with while ignoring those she could. She was an example of a massively ineffective altruist when the means to be an effective one (on a less heroic scale) were right in front of her (and in danger of falling into the fireplace). So the accusation against people who care about the Gazans (apart from the suspicion they didn't seem to care about the people killed on 7 September) is not that they wouldn't care if the same thing happened to their fellow citizens, it is that they don't actually do stuff that is available for them to do right in front of them.
It feels like you're doing something sneaky here by using telescopic altruism as a springboard to argue against a core tenet of conservative values. I don't know whether concerns about telescopic altruism are actually as naive as what you've presented here (probably, it's the internet after all), but the framing feels pretty bad faith, like you're arguing against a straw man.
Telescopic altruism seems like a vessel for 'sphere of influence' type thinking. Moral units are the wrong measure because morality isn't scarce, it's our attention that's limited. There's an opportunity cost for the attention you spend overseas, and it's not as simple as discrete, fungible units of attention.
Global geopolitical issues are fundamentally low-touch and hard to reason about; the information ecology is typically indirect, low-signal and engineered for limbic capture. My friends that seem deeply concerned with far-flung events tend to have perceptibly worse mental health (anxiety, depression, etc.). Their news feeds function as malignant brain worms, rooting in their consciousness and inducing persistent low-key dread.
Ideally, broadly-scoped empathy would inspire people to take action, but it doesn't seem to work that way in practice most of the time. Anecdotally, people who compulsively empathize with strangers are more easily captured by sensationalist news media that parasitizes their attention, leeching their sense of empowerment and decreasing their overall agency.
There is something empowering/immunizing about the belief that it is actually morally superior in some sense to pay attention first-and-foremost to that which is more immediate.
Personally I think the Israel-Palestine conflict proves the opposite of what you say. Palestine was an Arab Muslim country, and had been for hundreds of years, but then Jewish people started immigrating, initially peacefully, but by the 1940s they were numerous enough to take control and set up their own Jewish state, which they did. The previous inhabitants were driven out and, if we may trust progressive claims, herded into a giant open-air prison where they're denied their human rights and periodically subjected to genocide. In other words, Israel-Palestine is exactly the sort of thing people are worried about when they talk about a "Great Replacement" in a Western context. And how do progressives generally react to this sort of talk? "Why do you care so much about whiteness? Sounds kinda racist if you ask me. And white countries have done bad things in the past, so maybe they deserve to be replaced. And besides, who really is 'indigenous' anyway? If you go back far enough, aren't we all descended from immigrants?" IOW, progressives support Palestinian Muslims' right to a homeland run by and for Palestinian Muslims, whilst denying that any such right exists for white Westerners -- just the sort of double-standard people are referring to when they complain of telescopic altruism.
It wasn't a matter of Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting until Jews suddenly became numerous enough to overthrow the Arab state. For one thing, Palestine hadn't been under Muslim rule since Britain took over the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1917. For another, there had been rising ethnic violence in Palestine since a few years after Britain took over and Jewish immigration began in earnest, and as far as I can tell the violence was first instigated by Arabs. And the Palestine War didn't start because Jews outnumbered Arabs, it started because Britain withdrew from the region and left a power vacuum. If we can draw any lessons from the Israel-Palestine conflict, I would say they are "colonialism tends to leave a region worse off than it was previously" and "starting ethnic conflicts is a bad idea."
I see no reason to think that current waves of immigration into America will be any different from previous ones -- the immigrants live mostly peacefully, some Americans spend a few decades panicking about how those filthy Papists/Italians/Chinamen are going to overrun our civilization, and then cultural exchange works its magic and everyone forgets they ever had a problem with that group.
> IOW, progressives support Palestinian Muslims' right to a homeland run by and for Palestinian Muslims, whilst denying that any such right exists for white Westerners
I can't speak for other liberals, but I support Palestinian Muslims' and white Westerners' right to the exact same things: protection from human rights violations, and a government that represents their interests. I don't particularly care about the race or religion of the people in that government.
>It wasn't a matter of Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting until Jews suddenly became numerous enough to overthrow the Arab state.
It's true, my two-sentence summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simplified matters and omitted a lot of nuance, but I don't think it affects the point I was making.
>I see no reason to think that current waves of immigration into America will be any different from previous ones -- the immigrants live mostly peacefully, some Americans spend a few decades panicking about how those filthy Papists/Italians/Chinamen are going to overrun our civilization, and then cultural exchange works its magic and everyone forgets they ever had a problem with that group.
That's a bad counter-example for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that the policies used to make previous generations of immigrants assimilate -- drastically reducing immigration for several decades and applying strong social pressure to make minority groups adopt the norms and culture of the majority -- are roundly denounced as racist by modern-day progressives.
>I can't speak for other liberals, but I support Palestinian Muslims' and white Westerners' right to the exact same things: protection from human rights violations, and a government that represents their interests. I don't particularly care about the race or religion of the people in that government.
And what if the Palestinians said "Well, we do care about the race and religion of the people in our government. We want them to all be Palestinian Muslims like us"? Would you support their right to such a government? What if white Frenchmen or Germans said the same?
I think the differences are important. In particular, I think it matters that the government of Mandatory Palestine wasn't replaced or overthrown by Jewish immigrants. They left. Since America isn't a colony, it's highly unlikely the US government will ever do the same, no matter how many immigrants arrive or where they're from.
>drastically reducing immigration for several decades and applying strong social pressure to make minority groups adopt the norms and culture of the majority
As far as I can tell, all the immigration restrictions we had in the 1800s only affected non-whites. (And illegal immigration was common, just like today.) The white Catholics the Know-Nothings were so worried about poured across our borders with no restrictions. And the social pressure can't have worked that well, since their descendants are mostly still Catholic.
>Would you support their right to such a government?
If Palestine were a democracy, the people could vote for whomever they wanted. If everyone they ever elected was a Palestinian Muslim, so be it. Same with France and Germany. In the phrase "by and for," it's the "for" part that I really object to. When a state claims to be run by and for ethnicity X, it usually means that people who are not members of ethnicity X will have their human rights violated to varying degrees.
>I think the differences are important. In particular, I think it matters that the government of Mandatory Palestine wasn't replaced or overthrown by Jewish immigrants. They left.
A big part of the reason they left was that it was getting too hard to keep a lid on all the constant ethnic conflict. And of course, without Jewish immigration to Palestine, the result of them leaving (when they eventually did) would have been a Palestinian state, not a Jewish state.
>As far as I can tell, all the immigration restrictions we had in the 1800s only affected non-whites.
I was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
>And the social pressure can't have worked that well, since their descendants are mostly still Catholic.
Yes, even in a situation much more conducive to assimilation than the present, assimilation efforts were only partly successful. That should make us more wary of current and future mass migration, not less.
>In the phrase "by and for," it's the "for" part that I really object to. When a state claims to be run by and for ethnicity X, it usually means that people who are not members of ethnicity X will have their human rights violated to varying degrees.
Of course, one way of avoiding that problem would be to not bring in loads of people from different ethnicities.
>A big part of the reason they left was that it was getting too hard to keep a lid on all the constant ethnic conflict.
No, they were always going to eventually leave. According to the League of Nations, Britain would only control Palestine "until such time as [it is] able to stand on its own." (Which obviously never happened.)
Also, something I should have mentioned in my previous post: one of the very last things that happened before Britain left Palestine was the United Nations Partition Plan, which would either displace or place under Jewish rule most of the Arabs living in the territory. Again, that wasn't a result of Jews outnumbering and outvoting or overthrowing Arabs (they did not outnumber Arabs at the time). That was imposed on the region by other governments.
Nativist panic about immigration to America predates the Immigration Act of 1924 by many decades.
>That should make us more wary of current and future mass migration, not less.
Why? None of the Know-Nothings' dire predictions came to pass.
>Of course, one way of avoiding that problem would be to not bring in loads of people from different ethnicities.
That didn't help the German Jews, or the Tutsi, or the [insert ethnic group from former Yugoslavia], or...
Just preventing immigration of different ethnicities won't prevent ethnic violence. All it means is that people will kill each other over smaller genetic and cultural differences.
>No, they were always going to eventually leave. According to the League of Nations, Britain would only control Palestine "until such time as [it is] able to stand on its own." (Which obviously never happened.)
They were eventually going to leave, but the reason they left as and when they did was influenced by local ethnic conflicts.
>Again, that wasn't a result of Jews outnumbering and outvoting or overthrowing Arabs (they did not outnumber Arabs at the time).
Yes, you don't need an absolute majority to dominate a region; a sufficiently determined and organised minority can do it as well. Again, this doesn't actually affect the point I was making.
>Nativist panic about immigration to America predates the Immigration Act of 1924 by many decades.
OK, and?
>Why? None of the Know-Nothings' dire predictions came to pass.
Some of them did: for example, immigrant communities really did bring problems with organised crime (the Mafia) and political corruption (Tammany Hall). And they were generally coming from societies which were more functional, and more similar to the US, than modern third-world countries.
>That didn't help the German Jews, or the Tutsi, or the [insert ethnic group from former Yugoslavia], or...
Yes, ethnic conflicts can happen even where the ethnicities in question have lived there for a long time. That's no reason to import ethnic conflicts to places which don't currently have them.
>Just preventing immigration of different ethnicities won't prevent ethnic violence. All it means is that people will kill each other over smaller genetic and cultural differences.
The rate of ethnic conflicts is not uniform across countries, so this is obviously untrue.
That is an incredibly twisted view of history.
> Palestine was an Arab Muslim country, and had been for hundreds of years
There had literally never been a sovereign Palestinian state. A series of foreign empires had controlled the area going all the way back to the earlier Jewish sovereignty.
If you have a better way of describing a country inhabited by Arab Muslims than "an Arab Muslim country", I'm all ears.
Referring to it as a country seems misleading. "Region" would make more sense to me.
An Arab Muslim region, then. It doesn't really change the main point, which is that you had a group immigrating there and eventually getting so numerous that they were able to become dominant over the previous inhabitants.
This post, though useful, does not actually address the accusation of telescopic altruism in real life. In actual use the context in which this is nearly always used is right-wingers in the white world accusing left-wingers in the white world of helping the colored world and its scions in the white at the expense of the prosperity and/or existence of the white world and the white race as a collective (i.e. it's not about individual whites). This is the actually existing context for "telescopic altruism."
I don't think conservatives in real life are actually against telescopic altruism in general. For example, concern about issues affecting the other side of the Atlantic (depending on if the conservative is American or European), other people's children being surgically transgenerated, and of course abortion are all issues that would seem to belong to this concept, but which are never understood through the lens of telescopic altruism. This is because it's not a real thing that people think about in other situations.
The idea of "Telescopic altruism" is totally irrelevant at all times and places that are not a right-winger accusing left-wing whites of betraying white (racial) civilization. Thus, all attempts to argue about it in general are missing the point. Of course, many conservatives who use this concept probably are not aware of this fact.
Do you think American right-wingers actually care that much about the "white race"? I didn't think that was a mainstream concern since the 1970s at the latest.
in the 1970s that was a concern of the Democrats as well.
It seems that the modal American right-winger does not, but the ones on the Internet talking about telescopic altruism do
>I don't think conservatives in real life are actually against telescopic altruism in general. For example, concern about issues affecting the other side of the Atlantic (depending on if the conservative is American or European), other people's children being surgically transgenerated, and of course abortion are all issues that would seem to belong to this concept, but which are never understood through the lens of telescopic altruism. This is because it's not a real thing that people think about in other situations.
Telescopic altruism isn't just doing things to help strangers, it's doing things to help strangers *at the expense of making those closer to you msierable*.
So, for example, supporting mass immigration is an example of telescopic altruism, because, whilst it's good for immigrants, it's bad for the people already in the country. Conversely, being against abortion doesn't make your own children worse off, which is why it's not considered an example of telescopic altruism.
Abortion supporters would say that it makes not your own children but "your own women" in a sense (the women who are in your political tribe. Liberals would never say those words but that's what is being understood) worse off by restricting their choices. I agree that transgeneration is not an example that fits that condition, because the disagreement there is entirely about whether transgenderism is true. But plenty of conservative, especially socially conservative, policies are telescopically altruistic in the above sense.
In my experience, the most committed anti-abortion activists are disproportionately women, so even if we assume that banning abortion makes women worse off (which they presumably wouldn't agree with), they'd just be regular altruists, not telescopic altruists.
When you noticed people saying "crime in increasing", went into the details, came back with "no, they don't", you didn't stopped here and concluded "therefore you are stupid".
You correctly concluded that unskilled people awkardly tried to communicate something the best (which was not very good) way they could. You tried to imagine what it could be, like "disorder". It probably helped that you had the same wordless intuition that "something feels wrong, can't tell what exactly".
It is exactly the same here, except you stop at "therefore you are stupid" (or rather: "therefore you are bad")
People talking about "telescopic altruism" are trying to communicate something. They are not very good at communicating it. "Therefore you are bad" is unlikely to help/convice anyone.
In epistemics, you have a model of the world, sense data from reality, and try to update your model of the world from sense data, to orient your beliefs and actions. In the moral world, you too have a model of "what is right/wrong". You do not have sense data. You instead have very strong "moral intuitions" that act as "basic datum". People are trying to communicate: "it is a moral datum, or close to a moral datum, this not caring about Gazeans does not make me a bad person".
What happen, psychologically :
* You don’t care about poor starving orphans in Gaza ?
(chain-of-thoughts: this is a gotcha question, "have you stopped beating your wife style" ; if I answer that I care, then I am forced to adopt the whole liberal package of universal altruism ; if I don’t, I will pass for a monster that don’t care about starving orphans… and outside of tactical-rhetorical considerations, I notice I don’t really care about those particular starving orphans, and I don’t want to accept the implicit assumption that it makes me a bad person, it’s a bullying framing, something’s weird going up, oh I must answer something quick, time’s up, my thinking tokens budget is running out…)
* You monstrous Telescopic Altruist that don’t care about your own family !
What happen is, basically, there is three kind of people :
* You, who think you can cleanly split "moral duty" and "good person" and "better person", such that you must be a good person and discharge your moral duty by helping your family, then can (but without any obligation) be a better person by going beyond. You are in the minority and in my opinion obviously wrong. "Good", "bad", "better" are social tools to shape expectations, superego and such. If you say that something is "good" but not "dutiful", things like Social Desirability Bias and various Purity Spirals kicks in and it will soon be dutiful.
* Some others, who can’t split the two, and bite the bullet in accepting infinite duty, "you are a bad person if you don’t care about Gaza" (and if you don’t help you don’t care).
* Some others, who can’t split the two, and bite the bullet that you’re not a bad person if you don’t care about very distant starving orphans, and it’s even suspicious to care.
Group 3 is centrally correct IMO, but alas the margin is too small to explain in more details. Let just me picture in broad brushes the (coherently extrapolated) moral world of the third group :
* (repeat from earlier) "moral duty" and "moral good" are inseparable
* in the case of altruism, that means we have two ways of saying the same thing : "X has the moral duty to help Y", "Y deserve to be helped by X"
* in that framework, the actual identity of X and Y and their relationship are absolutely important and load-bearing. "X has the moral duty to help" is ill-defined. "Y deserve to be helped", similarly, is ill-defined
* (liberals tend to disregard _both_ X and Y, and say : if Y suffer, that is sufficient ground to conclude that Y should be helped, and anyone that can has a duty to — that is, in essence, communist ethics : "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs")
* virtue ethics is correct. And virtue of Y absolutely matters to determine the truth of "Y deserve to be helped by X".
* responsibility and power also matters. batman (was it batman ?) is right that responsibility and power are two sides of the same coin ; you have responsibility to the same degree you have power. Parents have the highest degree of power over children ; they have the highest degree of responsibility. Citizens have some degree of power over the state in a democracy, it come with responsibility
* So, important parts that determine "Y deserve to be helped by X" are : how virtuous is Y ? (how much of Y misfortune is his own damn fault ?) how morally responsible is X for Y ? If I cross a sick drunkard in the street, the fact he’s drunk is bayesian evidence he’s not very virtuous ; that diminishes my moral duty towards him. If my best friend start to heavily drink, that un-virtuousness-evidence is clearly offset by the duty coming with that social bond. In power parlance : being friends means he ascribe some degree of trust and influence to me, and I must use it to help him get over his issues.
* naive individualism is wrong ; communities and societies can be unvirtuous ; and by being born/part of that community/society definitely reduce my moral duty towards you. I agree that part in very counter-intuitive even to most conservatives, but I believe it to be correct too.
* therefore, someone has a priori close to zero moral duty towards distant persons in distant, unvirtuous societies
Or, to put it even more bluntly :
* "If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm"
* You obviously have close to zero power over Gazeans
* You have, therefore, close to zero responsibility towards Gazeans.
* You have, therefore, close to zero moral duty towards Gazeans.
* Therefore, the Way opposes your caring. In some sense, your caring is objectively pathological/incorrect/a misfiring from an heuristic.
This is a lot of work to debunk something I couldn’t even imagine someone having argued!
People argue it all the time, at least re that specific study. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/moral-circles-heatmap#fn1
*A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”*
No, it's a red flag that he's being nice to you because you are in position to make him pay if he's nasty. Nothing to do with telescopic altruism.
Right, that was not at all a good example to use.
*Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home? Yes - most Democrats support programs like free school lunches (used as a way to ensure poor kids get at least one good meal a day), and most Republicans oppose them.*
Both of those are telescopic altruism. The correct comparison is that conservatives are much more likely than liberals to donate to food banks.
Notice which of these three directly result in the poor getting food.
Do you have a source for the food bank claim?
The main driver of conservatives donating more is religious people donating to their church. Controlling for that, the differences between liberals and conservatives disappear.
You should have picked a line and gone with it. Given that you know that it's true, you have no need for a source.
As for your second claim -- so what? The conservatives ARE in fact feeding the poor. The liberals ARE in fact in favor of a third party forcing other third parties to pay for something they think will feed the poor.
> You should have picked a line and gone with it. Given that you know that it's true, you have no need for a source.
Are you snarkily admitting you have no source on food bank donations?
> As for your second claim -- so what? The conservatives ARE in fact feeding the poor.
First, donations to the church are mostly not feeding the poor. Churches have operational costs. This is basically a pay-what-you-want membership fee. I'm asking for a source that shows conservatives donate more to food banks specifically. That was your claim.
Second, if conservatism is correlated with donating to charity but not causative, then so what? A nonreligious liberal and nonreligious conservative would give equally, as would a religious liberal and religious conservative. Making someone more conservative would not affect their charitability. There's no argument for conservatism here. Only an argument for religiosity.
Are you snarkily trying to pretend you don't have one yourself? Are you claiming your assertion about religion was pulled out of thin air?
Also, you are certainly lying here. Conservatives give more to food banks and donate more blood.
When the claim is that conservatives give more, your claim that it is merely correlated is -- irrelevant.
I have never seen a study showing conservatives give more to food banks. That is why I asked. I have no idea why this is confusing for you.
What I have seen is that conservatives donate more to charity, but only if you count paying for church, and once you control for religiosity, liberals give slightly more to charity. Church donations are not donations to the poor.
Do you have a source for the food banks or did you make it up?
Selective demand for rigor.
Do YOU have a source, or did you make it up? Because I have never seen a study that showed that it was churches, but I have certainly seen leftists, on being confronted with the notion that right-wingers give more, claim that it must be that they give it to churches.
I do note that leftists give more to some charities. Those that benefit those already well-off, such as schools their children are attending.
Walter Russell Mead goes into some detail about conservative charities and missionary movements in his book _Special Providence_. Conservatives spend billions of dollars both at home and abroad, in part to help spread their religious views - people with unreliable access to clean water, medicine, shelter, and so on seem more receptive to people who go out of their way to help them get that. It's been common knowledge for generations.
The flip side of altruism is often outrage. Selective outrage (e.g., high levels of anger over the Israeli government’s killing of Palestinian children coupled with indifference or worse over Hamas’ killing of Israeli children or, vice-versa, outrage over Hamas’ killings and indifference to Israel’s) seems to be pretty common. Haven’t seen any protests condemning both sides. So when tribal identities get triggered, which now happens with a lot of issues in the US ("Opioids aren't killing our tribe, what is there to get upset about?"), the telescopic view looks pretty accurate.
Thank you for correctly titling this "against the concept of telescopic altruism" rather than "against telescopic altruism". :P
I think "telescopic altruist" describes a person who is misanthropic, hates their family, hates their coworkers, hates the oppressive structure and bottomless evil of society as they see it, but still wants to think of themselves as a good person and so identifies with the virtuous oppressed in some faraway place, like the Gazans. They may or may not donate to causes and attend marches, but their attention to these causes is not motivated by altruism; it's a way to reinforce the oppressors/oppressed narratice that is propping up their whole sense of self. It's common on the left, but you can imagine a groyper in Seattle feeling the same way about "white genocide" in South Africa as they glare at their blue-haired waiter. I do think it is a real thing, but it shouldn't be confused with any kind of altruism.
Note: Do you know how many liberals/progressives say "I no longer celebrate thanksgiving with my relatives?" Or people who say "I am no longer friends with anyone who voted for Trump?"
By making this a debate about "altruism" you've assumed away the most interesting parts of the question in a way which further polarizes the debate.
By analogy: consider the people who go around using slogans like "billionaires shouldn't exist". Much of the time, I expect that these people are motivated less by altruism for the poor, and more by a memeplex driven by envy and fear of billionaires.
Similarly, a significant proportion of the pro-Gaza left are motivated less by altruism for Palestinians, and more by hatred of Israel.
We could debate which proportion is which, and how much control each group has over the overall movement. But the most productive thing seems to be to try to disentangle the actual altruism-based parts from the fear-and-envy based parts, so that right-thinking people can support (or at least tolerate) the former while opposing the latter.
In this post, you do the opposite: you lump them together under a term that I've never seen actual right-wing advocates use, and which seems designed to conflate toxic and healthy motivations under the heading of "altruism". In response to this, the right can try to do the disentangling itself, or it can just get further negatively polarized towards being anti-altruism. Obviously I would prefer the former, but it's a difficult move to make under adversarial pressure, and this post doesn't help.
I agree with the post. I do note that there is an adjacent pitfall though, as described in the Screwtape Letters:
"The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
Espoused caring and revealed preference caring are not the same thing, and conflating them is the central error in this piece.
The Gaza protester and the ProLife absolutist both genuinely feel something — but in both cases the motivation is substantially about signaling ideological membership in a tribe that cares about that thing. Push comes to shove, I doubt either would evidence revealed preference caring anywhere near commensurate with even an anonymous stranger sitting beside them in the same room.
Espoused caring is real. But revealed preferences under genuine scarcity aren't the same mechanism operating at different distances — they're qualitatively different things that happen to share a label.
The moral question worth arguing about isn't whether distant caring exists. It's what weight it should carry under genuine scarcity. A good model for human revealed preference caring under scarcity approximates as a direct function of Reciprocity, Interaction, Similarity (experiential, genetic, cultural), and Aesthetic Appreciation. In humans, caring ≈ f(RISA).
Singer and Communism share a core failure: building systems that ignore this basic fact about human beings. Ideologies that mistake espoused caring for revealed preference caring when designing institutions don't just get the philosophy wrong — history is fairly clear about what happens next.
Of note, the waiter example is not revealed preference caring... Courtesy is not a scarce resource. Also the waiter and the patron clearly share Reciprocity and Interaction... Caring≈ f(RISA)
I've never heard the term "telescopic altruism" before, but still, I think this article is a bit of a strawman. The most common complaint conservatives raise against liberals is not that liberals care too much about African lives in some abstract philosophical sense; rather, it's that liberals allocate a disproportionate amount of *funding* to supporting African lives, instead of spending those funds to improve lives at home. The exact meaning of "disproportionate" depends on the situation and the speaker, but sometimes does evaluate to "any" (and it definitely evaluates to "any" when we start talking about amoebae).
Conservatives see funding and effort as a zero-sum game. Every dollar you spend on mosquito nets in Africa is a dollar you do not spend on e.g. supporting American farmers. At this point, abstract philosophical ideas do come into play: for example, if you believe that an African farmer's life is worth the same as an American's, but $1 can save 10 Africans or only one American, then it would be logical to spend money abroad. But the ultimate debate is still about money, not philosophy.
Conservatives, however, tend to be kind of "minus" on the idea of supporting American farmers. They're not in general in favor of food stamps, for example...
>instead of spending those funds to improve lives at home
But conservatives tend not to support that, either. At least not the ones making the argument in question.
I think that most conservatives *do* support improving the lives of Americans, and spending money and effort on doing so; they just disagree dramatically on what "improving lives" looks like.
They do disagree on what improving lives looks like, but an aversion to government spending has been a central tenet of conservatives forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
I think it depends on what kind of conservatives you ask. Mainstream Republicans are not averse to spending money on all kinds of government programs such as farm subsidies, various morality-enhancing programs, and of course the military (to name a few).
People who hold that position generally hold that letting people spend their own money does more good on net than the government spending it for them. So, they still believe that "We should be spending that money to make things better at home," it's just that the "we" in question refers to spontaneous individual action rather than centrally-coordinated programmes.
Yeah. Saying that opposing government action means you don't care is stealing *lots* of bases here.
While I largely agree with this analysis it fails to cover two important countervailing points:
1. Helping people is hard and often counterintuitive. Handouts can lead to fatherless children, drug abuse, and delays in the acquisition of skills.
2. Helpers tend to have more skin in the game when they’re close to the people they attempt to help
How does the data on "circles of care" compare to actual giving? While I don't think speech/self-reporting is meaningless, it needs to be combined with looking at how much people actually give. My understanding is that conservatives give more to charity than liberals. The dated stats are in Arthur Brooks, Who Really Cares; more recent stats are here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/
Religiosity explains a lot of the gap. But the gap is real. Interesting that liberals seem to self-report more concern for others, but conservatives donate more money.
Important to acknowledge: I salute EAs in particular for donating a lot to charity. But most liberals (and also most leftists) are not EAs.
> Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter.
Typo, I think? Or math I don't understand. 9-11 killed 2,996 people, which is 0.05992% of the ~5 million people killed by a hundred opioid crises. You can include the couple thousand people who died later due to the toxic dust, but that doesn't fix the percentage. I thought you might be including the whole war on terror, but that still doesn't work, then they would be about even.
Every time I see arguments about caring levels, I keep noticing that the arguments don't appear to take difficulty of care into account.
For example, you might express more care for animals than for your meat-eating neighbors, because you can do something about the animals by supporting some local animal rights campaign more easily than you can do something about your neighbors by trying to persuade them of something they don't want to be persuaded of or forcing them until they call the cops.
Conservatives care for nearby people more than far people because they've set up their support structures to work better for nearby people. Part of this is the rural-urban divide: conservatives correlate more with rural residents who have a natural dependency on neighbors for everything from playdates for the kids to lookouts for emergencies. So, their support networks focus more on said neighbors, which brings more familiarity with their challenges and what to do about them. Conservatives in urban environments don't have this strong dependency, so their care network works differently and often resembles that of an urban progressive - urban conservatives will depend more on public infrastructure, and have more opinions about things like foreign policy or federal-level issues. And even there, your typical American will express more care for N people killed in a part of the world they're familiar with than for N+M people killed in a part they're not (and where they presume less influence).
Generally, I would expect anyone to express more care for something they can help than for something they cannot. Moreover, they'll express more care for something they _think_ they can help; we find misplaced care in situations where people think an issue is more (or less) tractable than it actually is.
There are other confounding factors as well (e.g. level of perceived threat; level of perceived gain; status earned from appearing to have sophisticated concerns), but this is one of the big ones.
"Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?"
Would they care about someone killing 50,000 people in Sudan? Simple observation suggests not so much, which raises the question as to why.
But that is not telescopic morality so much as "my enemies enemy". If Conservatives like X, their opponents will like not-X. If Conservatives started denouncing Israelis as evil Christ-killing Jews, liberals would probably swing back into loving Israelis.
I have practical issues with:
"You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place."
I think most people need to make the world "playable" to live in it. The average person playing a turn-based strategy game like Civilization or SimCity for example does not attempt to manage every single facet of the game, which is enormous, they will choose a manageable amount of those in-game sliders to care about despite the fact that it's turn based and nothing is stopping you from doing so. I could manage every single minor league promotion or demotion in OOTP Baseball, but instead I pick the players I estimate most likely to matter to my game and do so only for them.
In the case of a real-time strategy game it's worse, most people lack the dexterity or brainpower to monitor every unit-pathing mistake in StarCraft and are lucky if they can manage a build order and resource flow. In either case, you are playing the game better if you limit it in whatever fashion makes it actually comprehensible to you.
To make life "playable" I have to either A) limit the number of things I care about, or B) lower my standards of play and do more things less coherently and competently. If I am to take ethics and virtue seriously as part of the game, I simply cannot be worrying too much about children captured by Boko Haram or the welfare of shrimp. I'm sure the same ability to have compassion for family or friends would let me conscientiously manage the in-game sliders that handle African warlords and crustaceans, but the game becomes unplayable for me well before I get to that point.
Complaints about people who seem to care about Gaza and not the opioid epidemic are in practice really accusations of bad faith. Caring about something you have no practical ability to affect in any noticeable way is cheap and meaningless, it asks you to do basically nothing, maybe send money or levy taxes (on someone else primarily), but that just outsources the work to somebody else who is the one solving it and requires no mental load on your part other than expressing care. Nearly always the accusation is that the person is avoiding problems they could do something about by focusing on far off ones, or shifting blame for local problems to far off institutions over which they have no power. I don't think the people saying that really believe you care more about shrimp than people, they think you are lying that you care about shrimp or that "care" means something different to you than it does to them.
This piece primarily argues that the phenomenon of caring more about people farther away is not real in any meaningful numbers. I think that's right.
But the more interesting question to me is if you steelman the opposing position a bit and address something like this: "People should care more about their family than their friends, and so on. Fortunately, most people do this. However, there exist people who think I should donate to a shrimp charity even though some people I know could use my help on the premise that I should care nearly as much about shrimp as myself. And some people say I should donate to GiveWell instead of my local museum. Those people say they don't think people farther away matter more but only the same amount. But that's not the way I think people should live - good things require that you care more about people closer to us. Again, I understand that everyone does this, but I'm sick of people telling me I should care about everyone equally."
Another version: "Some people, while absolutely caring about their children more than strangers, don't give their children enough additional weight. For example, there are EA people with children who don't own cars because of their giving pledge. That's wrong - they should weight their children relatively higher and strangers relatively less."
I think the above are what people discussing this actually mean - I doubt anyone really thinks that a material number of people would be more likely to save a stranger's life than their own child's.
So conservatives confuse competency with care? And liberals confuse care with competency?
Liberals don’t have a core competency because they stretch themselves thin trying to care about everything, and end up making everything worse. Conservatives focus on their family and their business and can be quite successful at that. Liberals interpret that success as evidence that they don’t care enough about others and want to redistribute that success. This seems like the basic conservative vs liberal debate
Of course, liberals would disagree with "end up making everything worse." I also know from experience that liberals can be quite successful with their families and businesses.
I'm a liberal centrist, and I recognize that my family and friends have a greater claim on my support than do people I am more distantly connected to. I think what is actually happening is that a smallish segment of conservatives observe that liberals complain more about neglecting vulnerable populations, feel guilty about this, and defensively resolve the cognitive dissonance by claiming "Well I care more about my family than they do theirs!"
If liberals care more about there family and friends more than strangers why do they advocate for lenient sentencing for rapist, pedophile, ect. even when those people are strangers targeting their friends and families.
I think there is a special kind of telescopic altruism, that has existed but which the US just has been lucky enough not to know: Totalitarianism.
The German who cares so much about the glorious Aryan future that he reports his neighbor to the Gestapo.
The soviet commissar caring so much about the proletariat while starving the actual peasants he happens to be among.
The idea of totalitarianism is that the concern for the future generations makes you commit crimes against currently living people. It is rather lucky that this actually doesn't seem to be a real thing in the US, let us all pray that it stays that way.
Would you find it preferable if we killed people for the sake of the present? I don't understand what you're trying to say.
I mean that there definitely did exist a kind of telescopic altruism in the 20th century, where young smart people killed millions because they thought it would help more distant people. It was called Stalinism and Maoism.
And no, I actually prefer we don't kill people.
So your issue is with killing people, not long-termist ideology. Practically every ideology has some long-term goals, including the ones that do not personally murder millions. "The American who cares so much about the future of their community and environment that they enact regulations to prevent pollution" is operating on the exact same mindset. On the other hand, killing a mentally ill homeless person for immediate benefit to society would not directly benefit future generations, but I'm assuming you would be against that.
There is a rabbinic proverb: “He who is merciful to the cruel will ultimately be cruel to the merciful”, which refers to a story about Saul defying the lord command, and sparing the Amalek ("But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle" [1 Samuel 15:9]) but later ordering the destruction of the israeli city Nob ("He also put to the sword Nob, the town of the priests, with its men and women, its children and infants, and its cattle, donkeys and sheep." [1 Samuel 22:19])
In modern Israeli discourse, it is used to bash left-wingers who express concern for the lives of Palestinians in Gaza.
I think there's a related, more reasonable position (mis)informed by that study in that many conservative types feel that liberals harp on about moral systems but are bad people. I think this has some truth to it. There are plenty of liberals who will work themselves into a frenzy at a rights protest and then spend their free time browbeating and emotionally blackmailing their social circle to get things, or doxxing someone, or shouting someone down that they disagree with in public. I think a lot of right wing people feel like the whole human rights discourse is a hypocritical con and that they should get to be purely, even self-defeatingly, self-interested. It's sort of a reverse of the left/right dynamic around conservative christianity in some spheres.
Also, though unrelated, wtf is up with poor whites and child neglect those graphs are crazy.
>Also, though unrelated, wtf is up with poor whites and child neglect those graphs are crazy.
One option is those states are better at *detecting* child neglect than others, but it would be an unusual correlation. That said, until fairly recently West Virginia and Mississippi did have the highest rates of childhood vaccination in the country, so there could be something weird going on about unexpected attention of certain social services.
Possibly also some methodological confusion in how "neglect" is defined.
The map is unsourced (unless I missed a link?) so it kind of looks like Scott doing a very similar thing to The Heat Map of using any possible data to shit on people he doesn't like.
Perhaps the worst thing the culture war does long-term is polarize people against any virtues or moral principles on which their rivals have an apparent rhetorical or status advantage. See also all the recent toddler-brained "sin of empathy" talk, as well as progressives' endless mocking of "productivity culture" (which is both trad-masc- and tech-bro-coded).
> See also all the recent toddler-brained "sin of empathy"
Should that be so easily dismissed? The source of all leftist motivation is sympathy for the undeserving. If their culture is to be destroyed, that requires destroying the source of their motivations as well.
If the source of leftist motivation is empathy, a ~universal human quality, and destroying leftism requires destroying empathy, then I think you should probably reconsider whether destroying leftism is a desirable or achievable goal.
Empathy for the undeserving is by no means a universal trait. All love is conditional, all value is subjective. Some people deserve to be hurt.
*slowly turns toward camera*
On the contrary, "telescopic altruism" is a real and acute phenomenon, and a bad one, even if the meme version expresses it poorly.
I would express the matter in terms of a critique of utilitarianism, as exemplified by Peter Singer's (very bad) "drowning child" analogy.
Most versions of utilitarianism entail an claim that one should abstract away from proximal social relations in regard to action, giving different people the same consideration without regard to those relations. This is false and bad.
Instead, one should embrace a form of virtue ethics in which proximal social relations are a first-class consideration. (And please let's skip the strawman attacks suggesting that this would imply being hateful to distant people.)
I spent years in left wing circles and eventually exited because I felt the activists in those circles were externalizing their personal problems onto far-away political situations and wouldn't extricate themselves for long enough to do one jot of introspection. It was frustrating to see people get angry over interpersonal issues, while claiming they were actually angry about Palestine/whatever and then ignoring the people closest to them who could have helped them talk through their personal situation.
I'm writing this to highlight an emotional avoidance mechanism I've seen play out dozens of times. From the outside, it does indeed look like lefties caring more about anonymous overseas people than they care about their own friends. From the inside though, it's obvious that they are just ordinary people playing out their avoidance. Therapy might go a long way here, assuming anyone was open to it.
Two C.S. Lewis quotes might better illustrate the concerns one could have about telescopic altruism.
(1) "The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
I'm sympathetic to the idea that selflessly caring for people far away need not be anticorrelated with selflessly caring for people nearby, but it remains true that: (i) caring is zero-sum; (ii) caring about people close by *generally* imposes greater obligations and creates more opportunities for virtue.
It would be strange to say that you care about your children, but that you don't spend much time with them. It would be strange to say you care about the homeless in your community, but that you don't help them when they ask for it. It would *not* be strange to say you care about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza, but you haven't done anything about it.
When Scott cites support for school lunches and anti-pandemic measures as examples of how caring about people far away/nearby might be *positively* correlated, it doesn't ameliorate our concern, only exemplifies it: support for policy X is virtually costless to the supporter.
(2) "Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?"
I'm sure there a tons of people around who would literally jump for joy if it were revealed that the estimates of the death count in Gaza were overstated. But in my experience, there are a lot of people who seemed almost to relish in how high the Palestinian death count got as the number grew larger and larger, and who clung on to the worst versions of Israeli bombing stories even as the evidence changed; for some, it seems that caring about Palestine is less about mourning tremendous loss and more about indulging in the "pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible".
When demonstrating care for things far away, there is an ever-present danger that the numbers cease to represent flesh-and-blood human beings in one's mind, and instead become abstractions he uses to intensify the characters and heighten the stakes of his own personality morality play.
> When Scott cites support for school lunches and anti-pandemic measures as examples of how caring about people far away/nearby might be *positively* correlated, it doesn't ameliorate our concern, only exemplifies it: support for policy X is virtually costless to the supporter
Agree. And it's further shown by the fact that what's demanded is that *other people* (government usually, funded by *more of other people's dollars*) do something different. Not that *they* do something different. Or sacrifice.
In my experience, those who talk loudly about how much they care actually don't, when it comes down to it, care that much *in practice*. They care with their lips and their meaningless and pointless protests (which are more of a social/"look at me" opportunity than anything else) than with actions that could actually, in practice, do something.
I think Effective Altruists are, generally, *wrong* about what's most effective, because they look for effectiveness where it can be measured most easily (lamp-post error). But I wouldn't claim that they're Telescopic. No, they're just wrong. But most liberals are not Effective Altruists. And many of them are advocating for *other people* to sacrifice so *they* can feel like they care. And others of them are actively advocating for utterly horrific ideologies (such as Communism; many communist flags were present at lots of the high profile No Kings rallies).
Just a +1 for this. Throughout all of Scott's piece I kept thinking of Jenny's abusive boyfriend from Forrest Gump, "It's just this war, and that lying sonofabitch Johnson."
"Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?"
Because it turns out not all 50k deaths are created equal. For one, there is the I Can Tolerate Everything But the Outgroup Factor, where I'm not sure many "libs" in red states would feel anything but schadenfreude if 50k of their neighbors died as long as they happened to be Trump voters or owned a gas guzzling pickup or an AR-15 or didn't support a local plastic bag ban or a hundred other reasons someone on the left will toss people into the general category of 'outgroup.'
But then there's also the Moral Dyad factor. For comparison, the Islamist insurgency in Nigeria, for one example, has killed well over 50k people since it began over a decade ago, but nobody, left or right, seems to mind much. Why is that? Why does it matter when the IDF kills people in Gaza as part of a campaign of legitimate reprisal after an attack that left 1,000 Israeli civilians dead, but nobody bats an eye if people die by the thousands at the hands of Islamist thugs? Because of the perceived disparity in capabilities between the two groups, which manifests as the Moral Dyad:
"Wegner and Gray say that we use two different approaches for trying to enter the minds of others. When we try to understand their feelings, we use simulation. We try to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. When we try to understand their actions, we use theorizing. We try to imagine the chain of reasoning that someone used in order to arrive at an action.
It seems that often we can understand either feelings or motives, but not both. When we perceive only feelings, we see a moral patient. When we see only motives, we see a moral agent.
Wegner and Gray conclude that when we perceive that an entity falls short of having a mind of the same nature as our own, we tend to categorize it in one of two ways. An entity could lack the ability to experience feelings; or it could lack the ability to make intentional decisions.
Wegner and Gray see a baby and a robot as occupying opposite ends of the spectrum of incomplete minds. The baby lacks the ability to plan and make choices. The robot lacks the ability to feel sensations and emotions. "
https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2021/klingtheoriesofmind.html
Do read the whole thing, but basically the idea is that we empathize with people one of two ways, via what we imagine their feelings to be or what we imagine their thoughts to be; not both. When we imagine people's feelings, we tend to focus solely on those feelings and conceive of them....essentially as babies; that is, they can feel, but they do not think or act. When you start conceptualizing people as completely vulnerable and without agency, you strip away any moral ambiguity or nuance to their plight, and then you fall into the cognitive trap of thinking of Jews as perpetual unfeeling transgressors and Palestinians as perpetually suffering victims, and the result is to be outrage on behalf of the Palestinians.
My contention would be that a) the perceived disparity in military capabilities between the two groups primes people, especially liberals, into using this perpetual victimhood framework. In general, perceptions of inequality seems to nudge people on the left towards this cognitive pitfall. And then I would add b) generally speaking, the further people are away from us, culturally and geographically, the less we actually know about them, and the easier it is to fall into this trap of thinking of people as perpetually suffering victims with no agency.
With the Nigerian conflict, there is no perception of inequality. In fact, the Islamists are probably the weaker party, all things considered. Nigerians in general aren't part of anybody's ingroup or outgroup, and Americans in general don't understand the conflict well enough to empathize with the thoughts or feelings of an party to the conflict, and so its mostly just ignored.
>has killed well over 50k people since it began over a decade ago
Yeah so it's flying under the radar, just like how Israel had been slowly occupying and ethnic cleansing Palestine until the mask came off
>nobody, left or right, seems to mind much. Why is that?
When was Nigeria claiming to uphold western values and position itself as a member of the western elite? People obviously care more about something that their supposed ally is doing. Especially if they're acting in direct contradiction to what they espouse
>nobody bats an eye if people die by the thousands at the hands of Islamist thugs?
What, so nobody batted an eye at 9/11?
Have you even thought this through at all? This is an absurd comparison
Regarding the heat maps:
"Our sample included 64 liberals, 31 moderates, and 36 conservatives, and participants were only included in analyses if they completed the study in full."
These were recruited through Mechanical Turk. I leave it to the reader to assess whether this is a representative sample.
Barry's point is more about power dynamics versus closeness. The waiter is below you, in the power hierarchy (that's why they're your "server"), and how you treat a person that you have power over is more revealing of your general character than how you treat the person you are on a first date / business meeting / etc with, since you are either equals or are below that person, powerwise. And obviously you are going to modify your behavior to give a more positive impression of yourself.
On the more general point I think the most parsimonious explanation is Hanania's "based ritual." It's more about vice-signaling by putting down groups and people who are "far," showing you are willing to draw tight boundaries of moral exclusion. That's where the telescopic altruism accusations are really coming from - Gaza is full of brown muslims, and if you think it's cool when they suffer that shows you're down with the national/race/local-centric view of politics and morality held by the populist right.
> The waiter is below you, in the power hierarchy (that's why they're your "server")
I don't see it that way. They're a person paid to provide a service to me, just like my plumber or my accountant or my dentist or the pilot of the plane I'm travelling on today. Maybe tomorrow I'll be paid to provide them a service. That's not a power gradient, that's just a transaction.
> Do you think they’d care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten?
Someone kept for their entire life in a cage won’t be friends with anyone outside.
"Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who ‘only’ care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say “Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get ‘em!” in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier."
I don't think they're doing anything malicious. They're just thinking about stuff emotionally, and from the point of view of someone who cares about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans, it feels like someone who cares 1,000x as much about their neighbors cares more about Gazans than their neighbors.
Surprised you didn't link to this one:
https://www.amiiillustrates.com/shop-home/p/starving-print?srsltid=AfmBOooq9d5zL_znInYpty1agH4KfKAMZ24VExIUyNt0Bbabnzr62x8R
If I can be snarky about a comment higher up, "You're not starving, you just want a slightly nicer school lunch".
That one did annoy me, because currently in Ireland we're having a debate about school lunches, where yes some parents *are* looking for "slightly nicer", but the main choice is between "a school lunch of any kind at all or none", not "okay food or slightly nicer food".
https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2026/0114/1552967-hot-school-meals-committee/
First I encourage everyone to read (at least skim... look at other graphs) the nature paper Scott linked to. I'm then going to both agree with you. People make too big a thing of the telescope thing. But disagree, because I feel it's somewhat real, and simply the result of the politicization of everything. And it's signaling on both sides. To be right leaning is to care more about family and friends and to be left leaning is to care just as much about the earth and future. And it's a dumb division like most political divisions.
I think what annoys those of us on the conservative side is the implication that we don't care *at all* about "the earth and the future". The nice, smart, moral, superior liberals can care about both, but we dumb knuckle-draggers only care about us and our kinfolks and prefer to point our shotguns at the Revenuers and chase 'em offa our porches.
Conservatives *do* donate to good causes abroad and do care about other things, but the idea is "help those in need nearest first, then look after the rest". If we didn't, there wouldn't be (for example) the likes of the annual Trócaire Lenten campaign:
https://www.trocaire.org/our-work/working-in-ireland/parishes/lent-2026/
Yeah, everything about the political divide of -everything, is stupid. Abortion, either never or anytime. I find either pole ridiculous, and it requires a much more complicated and distinct discussion to hash out any issue. And why can't we have opinions that disagree with whatever our tribe thinks. It seems like the whole tribal thing is being used against us. And we should resist the tribal thing, just on those grounds. (Sorry several beers into the evening, and I don't have to 'work' tomorrow. :^) (I work as a prep cook at the local tavern/ restaurant. I am looking forward to Dyngus day. Polish owner and population here in WNY. I'm totally getting the polish platter, which includes: Home made polish sausage (sides of sauerkraut and home made mustard) Potato pancakes, (sour cream and apple sauce) Golumkies(sp) (stuffed cabbage roll) and of course pierogies. I'll have an Irish Guinness to wash it down. With all my blessing to Jesus. For such a wonderful life.
Edit: I just clicked on your link, and yeah when I was a member of a local church there were always outreach campaigns that spread the globe from local to Africa (far away.)
I think a good deal of the attitude Scott is criticizing is not about people who do things for distant people instead of for those closer but about people who could help those close to them and don't and instead express concern for people distant from them who they don't, perhaps can't, do anything for. That would be the steel man version.
Consider, from a poet Scott and I are both fond of:
“The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.
This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens—
The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And to hate my next-door neighbor.”
GKC
Dang, I mean you gotta love your next door neighbors, even when they may be assholes. And yeah you don't always 'win' when you think that way, but long term it's a big win. IMHO
I think you make a good point that the argument that people care more about equivalent things happening far away is wrong, and they'd be more upset by the same things happening close by. But I also think you're strawmanning in some cases.
'Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.” This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”' - I highly doubt anyone would say that being nice to a waiter is a red flag. So you must be mischaracterizing their actual position.
I laughed at your ending comment that a lot of the annoying activist types do care about improving their own lives, but are just absolutely terrible about it. That must be true for some people, but not everyone. I think a stronger version of the telescopic altruism criticism isn't that they are putting more focus on deaths elsewhere than they would on deaths close by, but that they are putting too much focus on deaths elsewhere.
Additionally, focusing on terrible things happening often has a bad instrumental effect of making people feel depressed and thus be worse at managing things close to them. If the primary effect of being upset about terrible things happening elsewhere is to make you less happy and less good at your day-to-day life while having essentially no effect on the actual situation, I think that's a strong argument that you should care less. If someone is actually making a difference then this doesn't apply, but I think people in general vastly overestimate the degree to which they are. I like following and discussing politics myself, but I also think it's basically a complete waste of time and one of the lowest possible marginal utility things I could be doing.
Also, focusing on the Gaza example is kind of a weird choice I feel because it's obviously going to distract a lot of people from the actual argument.
>Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!” You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.
A waiter isn't a far-off group, he's a literal, flesh-and-blood human being standing directly in front of you. Being nice to him isn't an example of TA; it's an example of being nice to those in your immediate surroundings, which is what anti-TA people say they support. The TA position would be to talk about how important it is to give service staff better conditions, and then treat your actual waiter like dirt.
There are a LOT of examples where liberals want good things for people further from them and not for people close to them; and also a lot where they actively advocate for resources to be taken from themselves and given to people further away. It's, like, the most common, everyday thing in the world. Here are four that come quickly to mind:
White liberal parents prefer that their own children be racially discriminated against by college admissions committees in favor of black children. The idea that their own children should be treated as equal to black children makes them furious.
Liberal citizen legislators give the privilege of special leniency in criminal sentencing and plea deals to non-citizen defendants in California Penal Code 1016.3 and 18.5 (specifically designed to avoid mandatory federal deportation). The legislators don't want these privileges for themselves and other citizens; they're reserved for non-citizens. (Judges frequently use California Penal Code 1385 for this as well.)
Perhaps the most obvious example of telescopic altruism is the wealthy liberals (one of whom I've chatted with on the ACX comment section) who advocate for higher taxes on themselves to fund programs they don't benefit from. They fervently wish more of their own money would be taken and given to other people.
When the covid vaccine first came out, my state divided our allotted doses into two piles. One pile was allocated on the basis of health condition, with the most at-risk people getting first access. The other pile was allocated on the basis of zip code, with the poorer zip codes getting access first. Any liberals who supported this plan and lived in wealthier neighborhoods were in favor of life-saving medicine being denied to their own family and given to others. I actually got access to the covid vaccine maybe a month before some of my equally healthy liberal friends, because I lived in a pretty poor neighborhood at that time.
Look up Stolen Bike Meme. It's a celebration of the proper attitude of a good liberal: you or those close to you are harmed, and somebody distant who you don't know is helped thereby. This is good, it makes you happy.
I mean, is it even _altruism_ if it isn't telescopic? If you called it "altruistic" to help people close to you, wouldn't you be fooling yourself? Matthew 5:46 -- even tax collectors love those who love them back. And what good is that? Wouldn't we be mad at wealthy people who created a covid vaccine distribution scheme that privileged their own wealthier neighborhoods?
> White liberal parents prefer that their own children be racially discriminated against by college admissions committees in favor of black children
Isn't it more that they want other white children to be racially discriminated against? They would be outraged if it happened to their own children.
I don't think they're hypocrites, I think they're acting from deeply held values. They would rather schools A, B and C be racially diverse, and their own kid goes to not-as-good school B, than that their kid gets into school A, which might be stronger academically but it's full of white and Asian people.
Asians don't count as racially diverse? 😁 But yeah, I understand what you're saying.
Even the liberals don't see them as worthy of pity.
East Asian's don't. Southwest Asians are free to import their toxic culture with honor killings, FGM, and first cousin marriages.
Understand that their authenticity makes them more dangerous, not less. It means it is impossible to reason with them by pandering to their self-interest. They would rather throw away their lives defending those who do not deserve to be defended.
This article actually seems kind of insulting to (particularly, white) liberals. Liberals perceive a system that, for whatever reason, seems unfairly biased against non-white people (and various other marginalized groups) and they respond to that by putting in huge amounts of political capital and time and sweat and money to create programs and institutions and policies and every sort of effort imaginable to try and create the opposite unfairness, to counteract it.
There aren't enough black poets? White liberals altruistically create poetry prizes that only black people are eligible for. Immigrants are having a hard time with the law? White liberals altruistically create a charity that hires lawyers for them. There are *so many* things like this, and every single one is transferring resources, in some way, from the liberals themselves, and their families and communities, to these marginalized people who they see as outsiders. Like, that's the whole liberal thing.
And Scott comes in and he's like, hey, that thing you've been doing that you clearly care a lot about? That actually never happens. You never help a disadvantaged group at the expense of your own group. Scott doesn't believe the conservative propaganda that says that liberals prefer to help marginalized groups over dominant groups. But that's not propaganda! That's their stated goal!
I would say that these are prioritising groups in terms of need (and maybe some other things like loudness) rather than in reverse order of proximity.
The primary problem with what they're doing is not the order of prioritisation, it's the treatment of people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals. There's nothing wrong with prioritising giving things to the needy, but there's something wrong with prioritising Group A over Group B based on a statistical analysis that Group A is needier than Group B, at least when the groups are heavily overlapping.
I do think there's something to be said for the idea that "people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen" due to something along the lines of a reduction of surprise.
I don't have the scientific background to justify it (and I'd be grateful if people could point me towards some papers), but it seems like there's something going on where we become used to particular types of pain and/or death; because we already account for those (i.e. we're oddly "used to them"), they're a less surprising sort of harm. Under this lens, it makes sense that humans would want to rapidly communicate and focus on new "unexpected" harms like 9/11, as compared to more expected harms like deaths from opioids. Rapid communication about unexpected deaths results in a reduction of surprise / a better world-model.
We can also see an adjacent version of this where sometimes stuff that's very common as a statistic, but we don't know anyone who is currently suffering, *becomes* unexpected when someone close to us becomes afflicted (e.g. cancer). We can predict the general trends, but can't predict the exact people it will impact, so once we do know the exact people it impacts, it becomes something that we talk about more.
Opioids is a bad example, because almost everyone who dies of opioids bears moral culpability for their own demise. Almost nobody dies of opioids which they obtained legally.
If a hundred thousand people a year were dropping dead of, say, contaminated broccoli then people would be more outraged.
I see a few practical benefits, from a utilitarian perspective, for biasing oneself against distant causes:
1. Local knowledge and defense against Pascal's Mugging. All else being equal, closer issue are considerably more legible to you, so you are better able to confirm that the problem actually is what is claimed and that the remedy is actually likely to improve things.
2. Schelling Points. Just about every problem is local to someone, so focusing your efforts on local issues saves a lot of duplication of effort and attention. This only goes so far, though, for problems that are large enough in scope that non-local resources are needed to deal with it.
3. You probably have somewhat better tools to do things about local problems than distant ones, and the difference between actually doing something about it vs merely signaling that you care is more visible to your peers which makes the incentives to productive action vs slacktivism somewhat better.
You sort of acknowledge this, but these arguments work best for a situation of rough parity in capability between 'around here' and 'over there'. Add in a causal link between here and there, and a sense of responsibility, and, well...
Yes, I definitely think there is room for distant altruism as a backfill in those sorts of situations.
The best way to help people is often not to give them more money but helping them manage their own problems. Take a drug addict who is throwing their life away. What helps more: the taxpayer funded rehab program or the family members who push them to admit they have a problem and offer a place to stay while they get clean? That’s the kind of thing that isn’t captured well in statistics.
> there’s a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen.
This characterization drives me a little batty, because as far as I'm concerned, there's a *much better* better explanation: people (or at least I) care about deaths which could be prevented straightforwardly by a smallish number of people not doing the thing whose *primary objective is to cause death* more than I care about deaths that arise from complex social and economic forces, messing with which would undoubtedly lead to unintended consequences that could end up costing more lives on net. (I *do* still care about the latter; I'm not a monster. But not to the degree that I care about the how-about-not-bombing-civilians deaths.)
Otherwise, excellent post, as usual.
If I can reflect this lens in the opposite direction, there is a left-against-right argument that is somewhat similar to Telescopic Altruism:
"Pro life people only care about babies before they are born." I'm sure that (nearly?) everyone who is rabidly pro-life, and equates abortion with murder supports equally harsh penalties for infanticide as they do for abortion. The fact that most of them also are opposed to many forms of social safety nets (for children or otherwise), is somewhat orthogonal.
The school lunch issue comes to mind. The big school district in my former city troubled to contact the news media to make a plea that any parents still sending their child with a lunch packed at home, please stop.
I found this really funny. At the very least, it seemed to face a stiff headwind in good liberal parents’ tendency to curate their children’s food to an extreme degree, weather due to their pickiness or perceived, probably imaginary health reasons, the same ones that had got them talking about leaky gut or whatever the diet du jour.
The district’s pleas as I recall was twofold - so there would be no stigma against the free lunch, and so that it could scale up so that they get more money from the federal government. I think they already had like 70% of the kids getting a free lunch.
And of course, people who are pro-life do not want a child to have no lunch, but of course, that is what would be meant by the above-referenced reddit-beloved cliche.
And of course, also, there is no good faith admission that there may be something to the idea that parenting should reach the low bar of providing food - at the very least breakfast - for kids, because a social expectation like that creates a better world for children overall: parents being held to having an obligation to their kids, and those obligations having an organic role perhaps in family planning, rather than government effectively breeding people via what it now likes to call “feeding sites”.
There's a Talmudic phrase that is often brought up in Israel in the context of "Telescopic altruism": "Your city's poor come first."
Suggesting people donate to more malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa? "Your city's poor come first." Always in the sense of "What, there aren't enough poor people in this country to take care of first?"
But few can cite the rest of the Talmudic passage, which state a variety of such "priorities," one of which is "poor people related to you versus your city's poor-- those related to you come first." It's not especially controversial that, all else equal, you should help your relatives before a random person on the street. But nobody would claim that you're not allowed to give to charity for your city's poor if your relative hasn't paid down their entire credit card debt. The priority is not infinite.
And this always seemed obviously beneficial from a utilitarian perspective because of information. Every other criticism of foreign aid boils down to "you don't know how to help the person who is geographically/socio-economically/culturally/politically far." These gaps are smaller the "closer" the other party is to you, where generally you'll be best and most effective (all else being equal) at helping family members. But again, to a point-- I still generally can't save my relative's life for a couple thousand dollars (thankfully!).
It's interesting what "circle" people tend to care about. The geographic circle ("your city" versus "another city") no longer has real weight I think, but the national one has major bite. The people who tell me "Your city's poor come first" almost surely do not care if I give to poor people in my home city of Haifa versus Jerusalem versus the Negev, but what they do care about is that it's to Israelis versus people in other countries.
The twist here is that because the US is so much richer than, say, Liberia, it's quite plausible that spending $100 in Liberia does many times as much good for the people there as spending it in the US. Even if you put a higher value of well-being of Americans than non-Americans, you might still prefer saving the life of a non-American to giving an American a slightly nicer school lunch.
For sure, and that's what I'm saying about this priority not being infinite (which is what Scott wrote about as well). And I'm just adding that this is obvious to everyone when comparing helping your family versus giving to charity, or helping people in your city versus other cities. The criticisms tend to coalesce around the national grouping specifically.
> It's interesting what "circle" people tend to care about. The geographic circle ("your city" versus "another city") no longer has real weight I think, but the national one has major bite.
Great point! Different country, same principle: caring about people 500 km away is okay, even morally required, as long as they are within the same borders. But such care becomes silly when the people are behind the invisible line.
I think the actual rule is: "The circle you should care about most is the smallest circle around you that includes *me*. The smaller circles are too selfish; the larger circles are silly."
This is my first time hearing about the telescope altruism, but I actually find it intuitive. As a left-wing person, most volunteers I know (especially back in my 20s) were involved in organizations fighting for global environmental or social issues, and no one was volunteering at the local soup kitchen. I associate the nitty gritty volunteerism for poor people in our own city with churchgoers.
Perhaps everyone treats their friends equally well (though I don’t know, conservatives seem more loyal, and less likely to cancel their friends) but my sense is that conservatives, and especially churchgoers, are more likely to volunteer in things that matter to their own city. Maybe I am thinking too much in terms of archetypes - let me know if my thinking is off.
What about environmentalists that try and stop construction of a new project because of some bird habitat?
What about them? They're not thinking in terms of 'birds are more deserving than humans'. They're thinking in terms of 'the meta-principle of preserving biodiversity competes with and sometimes outweighs the meta-principle of flourishing through infrastructure construction', or something like that.
In general, the telescopic altruism framing already concedes too much to a worldview centered on individuals or, at best, tribes. To a principled egalitarian, it's perfectly logical to demand that they themselves (or those like them) be disadvantaged in favour of others until parity is achieved. You may think being a principled egalitarian is stupid or naive, but at least grant the coherence of their convictions.
If it were simply a matter of fetishising the faraway, we'd be seeing unhealthy concern with the destitute underclass of, say, South Korea. We don't, because everyone knows they'll be mostly fine compared with the population of Burundi.
I grew up in a city where it would snow a lot in the winter. When that would happen I would wake up early and shovel in front of my house, as would everyone else. The result was all the sidewalks were clear by midday. This wasn’t because I thought my sidewalk was more important than others, but because it was my personal responsibility. If I, and everyone else, tried to work from first principles which sidewalks were most important to shovel, that would not have worked out.
Care as a thought is not zero sum, but care as a verb is. As an operating principle, caring more for those closer to you yields a better world than applying a uniform distribution. This can be framed as a Confucian critique of telescopic altruism (society depends on you performing your duties) or a Hayekian one (action should be localized to information).
So you're saying that white liberals pushing DEI admissions and hiring quotas that explicitly harm other white people to the benefit of other races are simply mistaken? Not true liberals? Please.
You have an amazing capacity for rhetorically framing an idea while completely ignoring its central claim.
What's the positive valence version of this title? You seem to have gotten ... some current events debate into your comments section. Seems pretty reasonable to say "people can see up close things more better than far things", which, you know, has implications for idealization and so on. Legibility of pores improves the closer I get to my wife's face. Doesn't mean that our moral imagination can't outstrip our capability. That's what sin is, right? I'm curious about what direction feels like a stretch for the LHS heat map.
There was a in interesting 2009 trolley problem study that gets to the heart of the issue more than the heat map graph:
If a runaway trolley were about to smash into a bus containing 100 trapped members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra, would you push a wholly innocent man named Chip Ellsworth III onto the tracks to stop the accident? What if the bus held 100 members of the New York Philharmonic and the guilt-free man’s name was Tyrone Payton?
Would your politics have any relevance to whether you'd prefer to kill the white man to save the black musicians or to kill the black man to save the white musicians?
In a fascinating 2009 academic paper by four social psychologists, "The motivated use of moral principles," UC Irvine students who identified as politically conservative were found to be racially evenhanded. When given the scenario about killing Chip to save 100 Harlemites, conservatives were no more or less likely to agree it’s the right thing to do than when told to ponder killing the man with the cornerback’s name to save 100 classical musicians.
In striking contrast, liberal students displayed greater bloodthirstiness when presented with the scenario that gave them an opportunity to kill the WASP to help the blacks. This liberal desire to shove a white man to his death to salvage blacks rather than a black man to salvage whites was extremely statistically significant (p = .002).
Granted, these types of studies carried out on college students always raise countless questions.
For example, did you even notice that Chip Ellsworth III is supposed to be a WASP and Tyrone Payton an African American? ...
The authors report that among adults surveyed, 79 percent guessed that Chip is white and 64 percent assumed Tyrone is black. In other words, sizable fractions completely missed the academics’ implication. ...
And can we safely assume that UC Irvine undergrads are white? Currently, 55.7 percent are Asian. Perhaps they don’t major in psychology quite as much as this Orange County college’s white minority, but shouldn’t the study break out responses by race? Perhaps some Asian students saw rescuing classical musicians as their duty to their race. ...
The authors carried out a second study on Cornell undergrads and Southern California adults, this time asking if it were morally justified to throw a mortally wounded Chip/Tyrone off a sinking lifeboat to save the other passengers from drowning. Once again, liberals were relatively enthusiastic about snuffing the WASP compared to killing the fellow with the basketball guard’s name (p = .03). As the psychologists report:
"In particular, political liberals tended to be more likely to endorse a consequentialist justification for sacrificing an innocent White man compared to sacrificing an innocent Black man."
In a third study, even when shown both scenarios, liberals remained enthusiastic about shoving somebody to his death if the first person they had an opportunity to kill was poor old Chip.
While liberals tend to be racist, conservatives tend to be citizenist. (By the way, Microsoft Word’s spellchecker reports that there is no such word as “citizenist.”)
Two additional experiments reported in this paper found that conservative students felt that civilians being killed as a side effect of military action is less OK when the collateral damage strikes down American citizens rather than Iraqi citizens. On the other hand, liberals did not distinguish between the welfare of foreigners and their fellow citizens.
Authors Eric Luis Uhlmann, David A. Pizarro, David Tannenbaum, and Peter H. Ditto report that their best guess for the anti-white racism of liberals is:
"A more likely explanation is that antipathy toward anti-Black prejudice played a greater role in liberals’ judgments."
An alternative way to phrase this is that anti-white animus is the hallmark of the contemporary liberal. Being anti-white is the KKKrazy glue that keeps the diverse Obama coalition together. And among whites, publicly hating your own race is proof of your moral and cultural superiority.
While conservatives tend to have natural concentric allegiances, white liberals pride themselves on their leapfrogging loyalties.
The term “anti-whitism” hardly exists today, but not because blacks are so powerful. Blacks are mostly totems in power games played by whites against other whites. Instead, anti-whitism is highly useful to white elites. You get ahead in this world by shoving white people out of your way. If you can rationalize your aggression in the name of your burning desire for racial justice for blacks, well, you get to shove away.
Funny coincidence, I have just finished reading a detective novel in a long-running series, continued after the death of the author because it is such a reliable cash-cow for the publishers, and the current (ghost) writer was describing two minor goons who were muscle for one of the protagonists.
One of them was white and the other guy black. But excuse me, no. One of them was a white guy and the other guy was a Black guy. It really stuck out on the page every time it was "white guy" and "Black guy". My immediate response (well, second response after immediate response which was "this is dumb") was "why not be consistent? White and Black, or white and black?"
Naturally the series is impeccably liberal and current author is, as you might tell, also impeccably liberal (villain or thereabouts of this novel is a podcast host who is anti-immigrant as his brand and generally MAGA-coded, though this is never stated in those terms. Of course, all the Good People in the novel detest and despise him).
Much of Institutional American Media adopted the obviously racist "Black" vs. "white" standard of capitalization in the weeks following George Floyd's demise. I'm not aware of any who have given it up during the vaunted Vibe Shift.
In contrast, my impression is that no more than 10% of Scott's commenters follow this double standard.
War or 9/11 vs opioid crisis: I think one critical difference is the perceived degree of agency of the victims. No one chooses to have their home bombed but taking or not taking drugs involves agency. I generally am more concerned about people harming others than about people harming themselves, and I might be committing a Typical Mind fallacy but I do indeed think it's fairly common to make this distinction.
> Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes?
Well, they would certainly object to anybody killed by anybody Israeli. But if they were killed by somebody else - and if they were "bad people", e.g. designated oppressors and ideological enemies - then what I have seen recently over the last several years, however I would wish it was otherwise, no, I do not think the answer is "probably yes".
See all the "Luigi did nothing wrong" online types.
Or Tyler Robinson. Or Thomas Crooks. Or all those "we can't tell oppressed people how to resist" and "by any means necessary". They are not exactly hiding it, it's all in public.
+1. A bunch of this piece felt circular - assuming virtue, then using it to refute accusations of vice.
> Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
How about a person that is flamboyantly, performatively, explosively not nice to you - to the point they express a burning desire to physically eliminate you (and some of them act on that desire too, so you know it's not empty words) but at the same time are spending maximum effort to be nice to a complete stranger who isn't even a waiter but who by some of that person's internal criteria just can do no wrong, no matter what? Is that a nice person? What if they also declare themselves to be the standard of niceness and aggressively attack anybody who tries to argue maybe it's not how niceness should actually work - is that still the nice person?
> People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group,
Empirically, this is wildly untrue, unless you replace "group" with "in-group". But then it's pointless - of course everybody is nice to in-group, that's what the in-group is!
> at the same time are spending maximum effort to be nice to a complete stranger
What happens the first moment this complete stranger says something that contradicts that persons ideology?
>What happens the first moment this complete stranger says something that contradicts that persons ideology?
Depending on the person, either turn against them with all the fury of a jilted lover, or ignore/explain it away (Queers for Palestine et al.).
For those "moral units" that are limited and zero-sum - You could make the argument that they kind of do exist. They exist in the form of your time and your money. Or even your attention span (which we see has been increasingly commercialized).
Every Gaza protest you attend takes up your limited time, reducing it for protests for animals or time with your family. Every local Church bake sale you donate to takes money out of the mouths of starving Africans. Every documentary about the plight of rocks in Haiti is time you're not spending fostering your friendships. (I'm being deliberately obtuse but you get the idea).
TIL that the term "Telescopic Philanthropy" was coined by Dickens in "Bleak House" when describing Mrs. Jellyby, the ur-example of the humanitarian whose concern is for those far away rather than those near to her. So it's been around longer than the specific grouping of Effective Altruists!:
CHAPTER IV
Telescopic Philanthropy
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1023/pg1023-images.html#c4
There is also a second specimen of the type, Mrs. Pardiggle, who forces her children into 'philanthropy' whether they wish to give or not:
CHAPTER VIII
Covering a Multitude of Sins
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1023/pg1023-images.html#c8
The chapter title there clearly comes from the saying "charity covers a multitude of sins" and the sins would seem to be the neglect Mrs. Pardiggle exhibits towards her own children while boasting of all the good she (and they) do for others.
Mrs. Pardiggle differs from Mrs. Jellyby in that she concentrates her efforts in the locality, rather than Africa, but the damage she does is just as bad:
"Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five young sons.
She was a formidable style of lady with spectacles, a prominent nose, and a loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal of room. And she really did, for she knocked down little chairs with her skirts that were quite a great way off. As only Ada and I were at home, we received her timidly, for she seemed to come in like cold weather and to make the little Pardiggles blue as they followed.
“These, young ladies,” said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility after the first salutations, “are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form.”
We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled—though they were certainly that too—but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable.
“You have been visiting, I understand,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “at Mrs. Jellyby’s?”
We said yes, we had passed one night there.
“Mrs. Jellyby,” pursued the lady, always speaking in the same demonstrative, loud, hard tone, so that her voice impressed my fancy as if it had a sort of spectacles on too—and I may take the opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less engaging by her eyes being what Ada called “choking eyes,” meaning very prominent—“Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and deserves a helping hand. My boys have contributed to the African project—Egbert, one and six, being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny halfpenny, being the same; the rest, according to their little means. Nevertheless, I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her treatment of her young family. It has been noticed. It has been observed that her young family are excluded from participation in the objects to which she is devoted. She may be right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course with MY young family. I take them everywhere.”
I was afterwards convinced (and so was Ada) that from the ill-conditioned eldest child, these words extorted a sharp yell. He turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.
“They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half-past six o’clock in the morning all the year round, including of course the depth of winter,” said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, “and they are with me during the revolving duties of the day. I am a School lady, I am a Visiting lady, I am a Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; I am on the local Linen Box Committee and many general committees; and my canvassing alone is very extensive—perhaps no one’s more so. But they are my companions everywhere; and by these means they acquire that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing charitable business in general—in short, that taste for the sort of thing—which will render them in after life a service to their neighbours and a satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they expend the entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my direction; and they have attended as many public meetings and listened to as many lectures, orations, and discussions as generally fall to the lot of few grown people. Alfred (five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on that occasion after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of the evening.”
Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the injury of that night.
“You may have observed, Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “in some of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F.R.S., one pound. That is their father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, according to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in his limited donation, under my direction; and thus things are made not only pleasant to ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others.”
The heatmap image (like the image of the aeroplane with the red dots) is something I mostly see as a comment on a news story or on a post by some influential person, with the implication being "here's another example of this common phenomenon."
Both things can be true: that the original study was about the outer limits of circles of concern, and that many individuals do care more about distant strangers and wildlife than about their families and neighbours and this happens often enough for the heatmap image to have become a shorthand for referring to it.
Also, the study doesn't actually contradict the claim you're rebutting, but is compatible with it, and is (IIUC) Bayesian evidence for it.
Seems like the difference is in what people think this "common phenomenon" is: whether it is "liberals care *nonzero* about strangers" or "liberals care about strangers *more* than about their own family and friends".
Yes, the reason the heatmap image got traction in the first place was because it fitted with people's experiences.
Useful. Thank you.
Big problem with this argument: your assuming utilitarianism, but I think the only people who would make this argument are *not* utilitarians!
Consider a typical EA scenario: an EA is buying ice cream with sprinkles, and when asked if they want to donate to the local art museum they answer "No". The reason they answer no is that they have better causes to give their money to.
Virtually every utilitarian agrees with this choice — in what world do local art museum donations maximize utility? At least a local food bank or giving gifts to your children would be better!
But to non-utilitarians, this just looks like you hate the art museum! Saying "I do love the art museum but *will never in 100 years support it*" is nonsequitur to a non-utilitarian.
In defense of the non-utilitarians, the endpoint the EA has reached is a bit hard to understand even from what a quick utilitarian calculation. Their actions seem to suggest that sprinkles for yourself are higher utility then the art museum! A non-utilitarian might say "even if your utilitarian morality is true, your actions imply you selfishly value sprinkles over art! I could understand you valuing lives over art in a trolley problem, but sprinkles? Sprinkles! Clearly, you are secretly selfish."
Does this mean utilitarianism is out?
Telescopic altruism may be rare in its most extreme forms, but here in the UK it is all too real in the minds of our mad Labour regime, and, to be fair, former Conservative ministries.
Every week a thousand or more illegal immigrants cross the English Channel in dinghies, and these are currently housed and cared for at vast taxpayer expense. The population must then endure a constant crime wave, including so-called grooming gangs, which the government seems powerless and reluctant to combat effectively ("human rights" dont'cha know)
Labour recently announced five new towns to be built over the next few years, on the ever dwindling area of available land. But at the present rates of illegal immigration, let alone legal immigration, all these entire towns or their housing equivalent will be occupied by immigrants. The native population who can't afford to buy a property will have to wait for literally decades to be allocated a dwelling from the public housing stock.
A lot of us are pinning our hopes on a new political party called Reform, which everyone expects to give Labour (and the former failing Conservatives) a sound and well-deserved thrashing in some local elections due in May!
That's not telescopic altruism - that's sadism. They want to hurt the people they care about and they don't even regard the tools they're using to do it as human.
" But would they care about a pandemic that affected ordinary Americans? Yes - the COVID pandemic was only five years ago, and most Democrats supported stronger anti-pandemic measures than most Republicans."
Scott pretends to not understand that the interpretation of the "anti-pandemic measures" was that their aim was to hurt people and not to prevent disease.
When there was a possibility of preventing disease back in January and February of 2020 liberals were going with "hug a Chinese person".
This is pretty directly what the problem with the "liberals don't care" interpretation is - they care but they're driven by hate. SF "cares" so much about the homeless and the plight of the drug addicted that it's a public venue for seeing the most miserable people alive that makes the residents miserable - hey, everyone gets to care a lot though!
This is similar to a concept The Zvi talks about in moral mazes. If the interventions that liberals (or people generally) argue for are practical or effective, then arguing for them does not signal ingroupness or virtue. It’s only by arguing for nonsense that you can prove you are a team player.
That's most naive interpretation.
Progressives support things that make problems worse because they get moral credit for "caring" and because "solutions" to problems cause money and power to flow to leftists.
"Hug a Chinese person" when for all we knew this could be a deadly pandemic wasn't just nonsense - it was maximally damaging.
In the UK, liberals often refer to right wingers as "gammons". I presume this word is meant to bring to mind an image of a red-faced (the color of gammon) choleric type of person raging against anything progressive. But in truth, most right wingers are fairly laid back, and it is hate-filled lefties to which the term gammon would be better suited!
The concept of "correlated altruism" provides a vital data point for what I suspect is a deeper biological reality.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the only form of "true" altruism may be the telescopic variety. Most "local" altruism—caring for family or neighbours—is effectively a refined form of Genetic Reciprocity. It is the Selfish Gene operating with a longer fuse, governed by the cold logic of kin selection and future favours. It is only in Telescopic Altruism—the act of caring for a stranger from whom no reciprocity is possible—that we see the biological firewall truly breached.
If we accept that our behaviour is a product of genes sculpted in the crucible of our environment, then "choice" is largely an illusion. In this regard, empathy isn't a menu of moral options we select from; it is a universal sensitivity to the pain of others. If an individual is biologically "wired" to be highly sensitive to suffering, that sensitivity is system-wide. It doesn't have a "local-only" switch that flips off just because the sufferer is on the other side of the planet.
Consequently, it is extremely unlikely to see a true altruist who is indifferent to those nearby while showing empathy to a stranger. If that gap exists, the "altruism" is usually just a mask for social signalling—a different biological drive altogether.
As an NHS physician, I’ve explored these diagnostic premises and their impact on our species' trajectory in my debut book, The Theory of Us: The Final Diagnosis of the Human Species. The data highlighted here regarding the limits of concern provides a compelling corroboration of how these deterministic "vital signs" play out in the modern world.
> If an individual is biologically "wired" to be highly sensitive to suffering
But they are not wired to be sensitive to suffering itself. They are sensitive to the 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 of suffering. So if they were to, say, simply assume that the outsiders were distinctly inhuman and not capable of real suffering, that would solve the practical issues of people empathizing with things they shouldn't. And we do seem to see a lot of that in practice.
You’re correct that our biology reacts to the perception of suffering. Dehumanisation is effectively a software patch for the "Legacy Code" of our tribal past—it allows the brain to categorise outsiders as non-sentient to prevent the empathy hardware from firing.
However, from my perspective as a clinician, this highlights the "Malleable Middle" of our species. While most people’s empathy can be toggled via this Us-vs-Them conditioning, there is a small percentage of the population whose sensitivity is so high that it bypasses these tribal filters entirely. They are the "Universal Altruists" who cannot un-see the humanity in the stranger, regardless of the narrative.
The real question is why our current systems are so effective at selecting for the filters of the former rather than the sensitivity of the latter.
Because dehumanization is useful? It's not "legacy code". Dehumanization is useful for the exact same reasons it was useful back in the day. (In fact, I'm very impressed that it managed to scale well to the level of nations.) It allows people to hurt and kill people that need to be killed: serial killers, dangerously mentally ill liabilities, parasitic psychopaths, and most importantly, other groups that are dehumanizing 𝘺𝘰𝘶. If you had empathy for the enemy but they didn't, that leaves you at a massive psychological disadvantage. That's why the groups without limits for empathy can't survive in the long term. It's not just because they can't deal with liabilities, it's because they'll simply be murdered.
One version of "telescopic altruism" that does seem to actually exist is "externalized patriotism" -- people who are (or at least express) disdain for their own country and admiration for almost all others. As Disraeli said, "Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own"
From The Mikado,
"...Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own..."
I recently spoke to one of these “telescopic altruism” believers (a good friend of mine, with whom I have deep disagreements). He frames the problem in the fixed-points framework by using government dollars as the currency of caring.
Approximate quote: “I don’t think we should give a single dollar to anyone outside this country when we still have starving kids here.”
When I explained that there are basically no starving kids here, only food insecurity (genuinely bad of course), he doubled down: no foreign aid until we’ve solved all such problems at home.
I was pretty surprised but I think he genuinely meant it.
The aside about the "moral units" distribution question in Section 2 glossed over the issue and I think it is the exact strongest case against the argument of this post. It's fine to vent about the obnoxious bad-faith criticisms of internet reply guys but this article does not feel like an effort to steelman what it's criticizing.
Moral consideration (thinking/feeling about others) is a free internal feeling in someone's brain and is effectively infinite as long as you have waking hours. In contrast real material charity (medicine, food, or even policy changes) is limited in the real world. We live in the scenario where we only have so many "moral units" (capturing the cost/time/political capital of charitable outreach) to distribute between all the causes.
Telescopic causes, by definition, are far away and as such we tend to have less influence on them. If it costs me 5x "moral units" to effectively distribute a vaccine to someone in Uganda, but only 1x moral unit to fund a vaccination program for rural people in my state, then yes, I would be a telescopic altruist if I prioritized the smaller number of Ugandans my money would help than the larger number of people in my hometown who could be helped at the same cost.
The unstated steelman is: "we're less effective at enacting change for distant/minority causes, and we should spend our limited charity budget on causes we think we can achieve real change on and not get distracted by remote/less-tractable issues which are highly salient because of moral or status reasons".
We should criticize this because we're seeing a disaster of "telescopic altruism" on the left in the US. The priorities of the privileged people who increasingly make up the Democratic electorate, insulated from kitchen table problems by their own elite standing, increasingly shift the party's focus further away from those of working class Americans and toward high-salience but remote or niche issues which are tightly bound to contests of status, clout, and influence.
The Blueprint poll showing that Israel, Palestine, Socialism, and LGBTQ issues are the worst-performing issues for dem/ind voters (even as these remain core areas for the left!) is the most solid proof for this mismatch: https://blueprint-research.com/polling/build-a-dem-workshop/
The disastrous and accelerating loss of support from the working class, who universally say that they don't believe the Democrats care about issues which matter to them, is the direct result of the telescopic altruism as practiced by elites and the best example of the costs of excusing that behavior today.
I think the main point may be correct but you made a wrong argument. Deciding who to donate money or your time is a zero sum game. Money you donate to cause A will not be donated to cause B.
Furthermore, whenever I read arguments like the one you describe it’s mostly: “this cause is really idiotic especially when compared to a reasonable cause here” (eg donating to Gaza is donating to Hamas, nobody should care about shrimp welfare, etc).
Another side argument that come with this when the cause is worthy is that you are donating “incorrectly” because you don’t understand the problems in the remote place or that donating to them is actively harmful. I’m not saying I agree, just that this is the common form of the argument.
I think, this is a bit of a strawman argument. My definition of telescopic altruism is one with no skin in the game; no personal consequences for doing more harm than good, no accountability and insufficient knowledge of the supposed beneficiary’s true needs and preferences. It is a very potent force for evil in the world, paving superhighways to hell with good intentions.
Another common attribute of telescopic altruism is being motivated by whatever is shoved in the face of the telescopic altruist by his/her preferred media channels.
People fall into quite a few different broad categories on these dimensions. There's power to the idea of a person who cares deeply about their own family and community and then uses their knowledge and resources to spread that circle of concern out more broadly and care for larger and larger numbers of people near and far. It's messianic in the best possible way at the limit and some people are built for these things. But these people are quite rare.
Being able to effectively manage a marriage and children is difficult enough. Based on the number of strained and dysfunctional families it's very difficult. If you then start to extend out and try to effectively fill a meaningful role in an extended family, in a group of friends, in a community, most people are stretched to the limits of their time and energy quickly. Most people don't get to this point. And this isn't neutral. Strong families and strong communities are central to every compelling vision of the good. Not having those things because people aren't meeting their potential is a huge loss, and everyone has a part to play, everyone could be better than they are now, and it always matters.
When people have trouble managing themselves and managing their immediate surroundings many distractions become tempting. There are distractions that are obviously bad like overindulging in drugs and alcohol and other addictions. But there are lots of other distractions that are even more dangerous in a way because they're kind of good. One of them is getting involved in politics. There are millions of people who are eaten alive by the day to day political discourse. And they feel like they're making a difference by being informed but they're really just distracting themselves from problems in their own lives. Real problems that are difficult to solve but would make their lives and lots of other lives a lot better if they were solved. And the world is just a big web of people who can pull each other up or drag each other down based on actual personal relationship.
There are certain people who are called to something much larger. The way a president or a general thinks about people across the planet matters quite a bit and they should care deeply about these issues even if it distracts them from their personal responsibilities. There are many other people with power and influence that should be doing the same thing. But this is a spectrum, and most people could improve the world much more by unplugging and logging off and playing with their kids and calling their moms and reconciling with their brothers.
The character of Françoise, the fascinatingly lower-class housekeeper in the early parts of “In Search of Lost Time”, is accused of telescopic altruism:
“I had taken note of the fact that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself. The tears which flowed from her in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her, in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more accurate mental picture of the victims.”
I think the issue with the telescopic altruism isn't necessarily that it's long distance but the nature of the "telescope" they use, aka the media. Most people who are the target of the telescopic altruism criticism tend to be concerned because they read or saw something that told them bad thing was bad (remember kony 2012?). They don't really verify if the cause is either legitimate or has been resolved, they just assume that the media told them what they needed to know and do the activism.
The issue with the gaza activism is that most people who are engaged in it don't have much stake in gaza or it's outcomes, or in the conflict in general. That's not to say that they're right or wrong in their criticisms, just that caring requires a level of engagement and follow through that the activists don't tend to have. They just know it's a problem because some media told them so. It's also why the activism tends to go nowhere in the first place.
You can contrast this with zionists, who care about Israel much more genuinely and tend to get a lot more done politically as a result. Now that has its own issues as well, but I'm talking about the effectiveness of the engagement specifically.
You want a clear, brazen example of telescopic altruism? I'll give you a clear brazen example of telescopic altruism.
https://www.jodrellbank.net/explore/stories/making-space-for-autism
Have to quibble with the Covid bit. It drifted pretty far into overreaction and I think a sizeable, measurable amount of that overreaction is hypochondriac narcissism being framed as concern for the well-being of others. It also doesn't really track on an international level - Pakistan and North Korea being some of the most aggressive "zero-tolerance" nations out there, altruistic and liberal Sweden having no distancing policies whatsoever.
You also had obvious examples of "masks and distance for thee, not for me" with Gavin Newsom attending an indoor party at a swank French restaurant while forbidding commoners from going on beaches and public park trails, and that absolutely unforgettable photograph of Stacey Abrams sitting in the front of a bunch of masked elementary schoolers, her own mask nowhere in sight (not even around her chin).
I think it's much more illuminating to view state-by-state Covid policies through the lens of urban vs rural states than liberal vs conservative states. Still not perfect (lockdown Vermont vs back-to-work Florida), but the underlying reasoning seems a lot less shoehorned-in.
One (and to be fair only one) effective altruist told me I should feel guilty because I donated to a local charity, rather than a charity focused on international aide, as my dollars would have greater impact abroad.
I don’t mean to use that person as a straw man, but when I think telescopic altruism, I think of folks so focused on maximizing a metric that they imply that personal bonds should play no role in how we invest our generosity and kidness.
If you feel that is the underlying position of the other person, then lashing out with accusations of telescopic altruism is probably because it feels like your loyalty to your loved ones is being assaulted.
That heat map is a major chart crime. The paper says that the heat map shows that "liberals’ moral circles are more likely to include nonhumans (even aliens and rocks) as well." Well, the heat map makes it looks like some people are including rocks in their moral circle but no-one did. What has happened is that the averaging filter they used for the heat map has smeared colour from circle 14 (plants and trees) into circle 15 (rocks). I downloaded the data and plotted it myself and nobody clicked on circle 15 or circle 16.
When you think journalism is bad, it turns out it is actually even worse.
Don't blame journalism. This appeared in a peer reviewed journal with an impact factor of 15.7 (which is high impact!).
Ouch!
That's evil
Very poor form. The core idea of "telescopic altruism" is that the amount of good you do in the world is the cross product of how much you care about things and how close you are to them. The secondary idea is that it's a lot easier to fake caring about distant people than it is to fake caring about nearby people, since you're much less likely to be called on it by those you claim to be helping. Instead of addressing either of these very basic points, the article consists solely of ad hominem attacks and self-congratulatory statements along partisan lines.
This author used to be a lot better about that sort of thing.
My personal experience is that some people look for causes as a way to belong to a community or find purpose. That the interest in Gazans is superficial, even if felt deeply, and the real motivation is to be part of a movement. This comes from seeing the some of the same people jump from cause to cause, some of which are somewhat consistent (Ukraine, Gaza) and some which seem totally disconnected (5G antennas, GMO food). Some of these protestors aren’t very informed when engaged in conversation, nor do they have a clear idea of what the desired outcome looks like.
I don’t think they’d care less about a family member or neighbor. But I think they often care more about whatever is fashionable to care about. And this hop from cause to cause makes it look more superficial than a life long commitment to family or church or similar.
> But I think they often care more about whatever is fashionable to care about.
Sounds like they care a lot about the opinions of their friends. That is a narrow circle of concern, something that conservatives should approve of, in principle, even if they do not approve of the specific opinions of the specific friends.
The ones who care about foreign causes *consistently* are the weird ones.
I identify as liberal and generally do not understand altruism or philantropy - I support a strong social safety network because I and my child might need it one day, and not as a gift to others. It is entirely sure we are never going to get rich, but we might get poor. I am not sure how long I will be able to work, maybe I will burn out. AI might replace me. My child seems to be too ADHD for a serious career, clever but "random", I am not sure yet.
Even if we had like 1% chance of getting rich, the logic of diminishing marginal utility means high taxes would not really make us much worse off, I mean it would mean just going on five cruises a year, not six, come on? No big deal.
I am neutralish on racism or trans issues, basically if other people want to make it part of the liberal package, I am okay with that, it does neither cost me nor benefit me. I don't see life as a competition, so other people being better off does not make me worse off. Ovarlly low-key in support, because if one can help others without cost to self, it is generally a decent thing to do.
Feminism does make me as a man better off. The correct kind of feminism, the kind that insists on splitting the bill, easier on my wallet :)
Maybe ‘antisemitic altruism’ better explains the reaction to Gaza.
Opposing genocide = antisemitic
Minor typo
"Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding (only needs ine verb) that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia"
Regarding the Dave Barry waiter quote, it could easily be the reverse where the other person is nicer to the waiter than they are to you. I have a friend who generally means well, and is polite to strangers, but he likes to mess with people he's close to or wants to get close to, and sometimes takes it too far. As a result he occasionally gets in trouble with both myself and the girls he dates. By the same token, I find it harder to be patient with him than with strangers who reach similar levels of annoyance. The phrase "familiarity breeds contempt" comes to mind.
Also, I think a better "telescopic altruism" response to the Dave Barry quote is "Of course being mean to a waiter is an obvious red flag, but being NICE to a waiter isn't exactly the pinnacle of noble sacrifice". I recall in the old Slate Star Codex you once posted a link to a reddit page asking for anecdotes of personal encounters with Donald Trump. The vast majority of stories were positive ones. I've seen his supporters bring up stuff like this and say that this is the "real" Trump, while the one we see on the cameras is just a performance. I wonder if it's more the other way around. The average celebrity knows that you want to please the fans, and every positive interaction is another person who'll tell everyone "You're not gonna believe who was at my table tonight, and he was just the nicest guy!" Then there are the times you have a bad day and have difficulty being pleasant with anyone. I guess the point I want to make is that you can't always judge a person's character by one interaction. You have to observe patterns of behavior in the context where they happen.
Sending food to Ethiopia isn't really the problem; the problem is that there is a civil war there (or was and perhaps soon will be again). There is also a genocide just to the north in Sudan.
At some point, possibly already now, the biggest problem in world (measured by qalys or whatever) is lack of security. I've never heard an EA talk about security issues (in a real way, not like in the toy example of Gaza given here).
I had a slightly hard time reading this because I interpreted it as ~"microscopic altruism". It didn't occur to me the particular focal length of the lens was conducive to the metaphor.
Post-embarrassment (of the red face hot blooded kind), in re-read, in what must assumedly be a kind of irony, it was mostly the same.
Since I indulged this silly notion I guess "I" should indulge a thought as well, in recompense.
...uh, abstracted suffering is probably something close to a constant.
I had never heard this term before, so I haven't thrown the term around, and I won't start now. But one aspect of it relates to what I believe to be the most important part of effective altruism. I only spend my money helping people and causes when I can directly verify that the money is spent well. Giving money to a friend who you know for a fact is a good person usually has more impact than giving money to a charity organization that has lots of administrative overhead. Shrieking at someone who's physically attacking someone you care about usually has more impact than shrieking online about the latest thing involving people far away whose religions, governments, and motivations you probably know nothing about.
The “reptilian” idea mainly comes from a mix of science fiction, ancient myths, and modern conspiracy theories.
One of the biggest reasons it became popular is a writer named David Icke. In the 1990s, he claimed that a race of shape-shifting reptilian beings secretly controls world leaders and wealthy elites. His ideas spread through books, interviews, and later the internet.
But the roots go even deeper:
Ancient myths: Some old civilizations, like those in Mesopotamia, had stories about serpent-like gods or creatures. These were symbolic, not literal aliens.
Science fiction influence: Shows like V featured alien reptiles disguised as humans, which made the idea more vivid in pop culture.
Psychological factors: Humans are naturally drawn to big, hidden explanations for complex problems (like inequality or power). Conspiracy theories can make the world feel more understandable or give a sense of “secret knowledge.”
Internet spread: Social media and forums helped these ideas travel fast, even without evidence.
In reality, there’s no scientific proof that reptilian beings exist or that any humans are secretly non-human. The theory persists mostly because it’s dramatic and taps into distrust of powerful people.
If you want, I can also explain why conspiracy theories in general feel convincing to people.
I was going to comment on this post, but the comment got too long so I put it here:
https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/telescopes-need-good-lenses/
Yes, I think it's unusual. But the odds are stacked against worms specifically. Many people find them gross and would not want to touch one.
Even amongst ethical vegans who try to live according to consistent morals it's hard to fight the inbuilt bias towards cuteness and beauty.
There's a simpler way to see why "telescopic altruism" fails as a concept: it assumes moral concern is a *positional good* — that caring about Gaza necessarily means caring less about your neighbor, the way owning a luxury car signals status precisely because others can't also own it. But empathy doesn't work like that. It's not positional. It's generative.
The neuroscience here is unambiguous in a way that's rarely cited in these debates. Compassion training studies (Klimecki et al., 2013) show that deliberately extending care toward strangers *increases* affective resonance toward those already close — not the reverse. The hydraulic model the telescopic framing assumes — finite moral resources, zero-sum allocation — maps onto how *money* works, not onto how *character* works.
What critics are actually tracking is something real but narrower: performative altruism that substitutes visibility for action. But that's a failure of authenticity, not proximity. And crucially — the same people who perform concern for distant causes tend to perform concern for nearby ones too. Which is consistent with Scott's correlated altruism: the underlying variable is character, not distance.
The most honest version of the telescopic altruism critique isn't moral at all. It's aesthetic: *these people are annoying*. Which, granted. But "annoying" and "hypocritical" are different accusations, and collapsing them is doing a lot of quiet work in most of these arguments.
I explore the neuroscience of moral cognition — and why our intuitions about empathy systematically mislead us — at The Reflective Mind: https://laurentiulupumd.substack.com. The gap between what compassion feels like and what it actually does in the brain is stranger than most people expect.
I'm sure you've actually met people making that exact argument, so I accept that this is a good refutation of that. However, I don't think that is the most common version of this concern. There is a sense in which abstract 'care' for people far away does not translate into actual care for those near you, and is a failure mode of some people who struggle with interpersonal relationships. Making 'number go up' in terms of donations to charities does not mean you will be a caring husband, father, or friend, or even a generally good person. IE, see Sam Bankman-Fried. I think people feel distrust for abstract caring for this reason, and I think it is well founded. First care about and support those close to you, then if you have the emotional bandwith, expand your circle of compassion to the rest of the world.
As a cynic, I expect that most complaints about "telescopic altruism" are attempts by the complainer to get a bigger slice of the redistribution. And if you perceive that you are closer to the affluent from whom the redistribution flows, arguing that those further away should get less of it is the first step to arguing that one should get more of it.
Where this gets interesting is if those further away are in worse condition than one's self. E.g. it may be that the redistribution feeds starving children in Ethiopia whereas laid-off factory workers in the US get no subsidy so they can continue to buy new cars. It would be rational for the laid-off worker to complain of "telescopic altruism", arguing that the altruism of affluent Americans should end at the border of the US, and they, being one of the worse-off categories of Americans, should get more redistribution.
This really ended before it got going, I feel. We were just getting into the thick of it and then it was over.
Trying to find any worthwhile content on this platform while wading through an endless parade of self-gratifying clickbait nonsense makes me wonder if I had been transported back in time to the 1970s, and left in a suburban shopping mall.
> The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness.
It is you who doesn't understand niceness... niceness may seem infinite but one does, in fact, have a limited ability to be nice and there is indeed a threshold at which one falls under suspicion of not caring about their own child enough due to demonstrating excessive niceness to others.