One problem with non-x-risk-risks is that it's harder to know whether preventing them is ultimately good.
It's possible that the agricultural revolution should've been considered a serious medium-term risk at some point, but preventing it from happening would ultimately have been very bad; it's possible that the Black Death helped bring forth the Renaissance and eventually the Industrial Revolution, etc. I'm not sure either of those things are true (probably not), but I think something in that direction could definitely be true, and it's hard to know beforehand.
Focusing on existential risks is a way to get around some of that uncertainty, since it's a terminus for us humans.
For a consequentialist, whether or not we should lie about basic moral principles is a strictly empirical question. Has anyone ever attempted to answer it?
> we should lie to people about basic moral principles and obligations in hopes of increasing adherence. That seems like a rather questionable strategy to me.
I'm a moral antirealist, that's morality functioning as intended.
> Why define "good person" at all? That term is simply irrelevant to a consequentialist analysis of which actions are right or wrong (or rather, which actions are better than others and by how much).
It's obviously a simplistic binary, sure. I'm a big believer in supererogation being a thing, so if people are going to attach any meaning to that binary I can work with it.
> Consequentialism explicitly rejects universalizability. Did Scott just become a Kantian?
The general point here is right on. There is not really any reasonable reason to point at 10 instead of 1, or 5, or 20 or 50 other than that is what X personally feels is reasonable. Which leaves you in a pretty impoverished place when trying to convince someone that say 5 (or 1) is not reasonable.
>A person who genuinely values all lives equally by definition places no special value on the lives of his or her friends, family, spouse, children. We're right to view such a person as a horrible person, because they would not be a good friend or parent etc.
I think it's very reasonable to follow this statement with this query: do you view Siddhartha Gautama, Jesu bar Joseph, those adherents of their teachings called arhats, bodhisattvas, or saints, and their adherent monks as horrible people? Or likewise for any other teaching that espouses universal compassion, regarding those who sincerely follow it?
And I think that stepping over the starving man in the street without even a glance to get home to your wife and child is not laudable. Even the cruelest butchers in history had wives and children they loved. Even the man who may one day kill you or I did that. What merit is thus generated, to say "so long as you reach the bar that even a total monster can reach, you are a good man?"
If all men lived as Bodhisattvas, there would be no suffering in the world at all. I suspect your fundamental objection is that you do not believe there are any Bodhisattvas, that the Pure Land is empty, and there is nothing that can be hoped for or attained beyond the charnel ground of reality, and any who say otherwise are just trying to get you to lower your guard so they can slit your throat- in summary, that actual altruism or benevolence is impossible and everyone who claims to be so is merely a hypocrite. That is a very normal thing for people to believe. It is also a belief that creates immense suffering both for people far away from you and people close to you. Things can be both normal and bad.
EDIT: I would also point out in the specific case of Buddha and monks in general that the goal is not "personal fulfillment" it's "the salvation of all living beings", including one's family. Thus, to a sincere Buddhist, one could very easily make the argument that becoming a monk is a superior display of filial piety than merely being an obedient son (indeed, this is a point raised repeatedly in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist schools).
>If all men lived as Bodhisattvas, there would be no suffering in the world at all.
Perhaps, but not because everyone's material needs were being satisfied. Maybe such a world would be better, but it wouldn't be better in the way most people care about today.
I would not say they were horrible *people*, because I think applying such labels is very rarely if ever useful. I would, however, say they were people who caused the widespread dissemination of horrible ideas.
Is there anything stopping you from going to church? I'm agnostic, but attend church for the community. The pipe organs are pretty cool, the sermons are frequently interesting from a philosophical and anthropological perspective, and at least where I live the food and socializing afterward are quite nice!
Q: All possible forms of assistance, financial and otherwise, just make recipients worse off, for extremely complicated reasons. There are literally no exceptions to this. I promise I’m not just looking for an excuse not to do charity, I would love to do charity, it’s just that literally every form of charity is counterproductive. Weird, isn’t it?
It's a neat quip but misses the point. I'm confident that a drink consumed by myself (or presumably C. S. Lewis) won't make anyone's life significantly worse. I can't say the same for a randomly chosen beggar, who is more likely to become an alcoholic, or get drunk and violent, or get drunk and abusive, or get drunk and arrested, or simply get drunk and miss an opportunity to make his life better.
I like this. I mean, in general I have had better experiences with this kind of personal giving than giving to organizations, in spite of the common criticisms. It just feels more human or something.
This would be a better response if EA didn't have a substantial set of people saying 'don't worry about donating now, just study hard and become a doctor and you can give when you are a rich doctor' OR if EA didn't subscribe to Peter Singer's ethical framework.
Or even if I could recall organ donation being brought up in an EA sense before - which could easily be my faulty recall.
>Or even if I could recall organ donation being brought up in an EA sense before - which could easily be my faulty recall.
Anecdotally, I've seen kidney donation come up multiple times before in EA circles. It's definitely not as common as the GWWC pledge, but some people are doing it and a lot are probably aware of it.
I feel like this is kind of drifting away from the point that started this thread: Some people claim that they don't donate to charity because it's ineffective, but a lot of them are partially motivated by the fact that they just don't want to (because extremely reliable, direct interventions like blood donation do exist). FWIW, I do think that speculating about peoples' unstated motivations is pretty sketchy and I don't 100% endorse Scott here, but I also understand where Scott's annoyance comes from (some people spend a lot of time criticizing EA despite not actually caring much about charity + a lot of the disagreements that people bring up aren't actually fundamental, they just apply to one specific cause area or intervention instead of the actual EA philosophy itself, like people who equate EA with longetermism (or even E-risk with longtermism)).
But to address your comment, I think that blood/bone marrow donation are sometimes brought up in EA but not all that common. If your point is that a maximally ethically consistent EA would be doing all of those things on top of donating, most of the responses that you'll get from EAs will probably boil down to this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/
I think it's also worth asking how often donated blood is a bottleneck in availability. I used to donate blood fairly regularly. Although I mainly stopped for other, more idiosyncratic reasons, it did feel less pressing after I did a bit of searching and found that there's rarely a blood supply shortage to begin with. Money has unlimited fungibility, but if you donate blood in a non-shortage scenario, the limited shelf-life means your donation may not have any marginal value.
Personally, I have seriously considered donating a kidney, since even back before I became aware of the EA community. But it turns out that, at least as of the time I looked into it, things aren't really set up for convenient untargeted organ donations, where you just give a donation to be retained for the most appropriate recipient. Besides that, my most determining objection was that I decided it would just cost me personally too much paranoia, because I'm the sort of person who, if I only had one kidney, would spend too much of my life worrying about the prospect of something happening to it.
I may not be explaining myself well,, but it was Scott that brought up kidney donation as a mike drop.
The notes about the marginal effectiveness of blood donation is fair enough...but it doesn't hold for bone marrow registration. Nor does it apply to things like egg or embryo donation.
My point is still that EA as an organized philosophy is more about the E than the A.
Ironically, it's harder to donate blood as an EA since following an EA-endorsed diet (low in animal products) will make it more likely that you'll be medically disqualified. I've tried to donate blood three times and failed every time.
Also, extremely anecdotally, the people I know who identify at least loosely as EA are quite a bit more likely to give blood, be nice to strangers, and generally be kind. This idea that people will use giving to charity as an excuse to be terrible in other parts of their lives is profoundly untrue in my experience.
I've followed both their work for a long time, and both Satel and Postrel are very remarkable women. I remembered that Postrel had donated a kidney somewhat randomly, but I didn't know for some reason that it was to Satel. Good choice.
I believe there’s also some EA institutional funding going to orgs like Wait List Zero, which promotes organ donation. Personally I’m an EA who was convinced by the arguments for kidney donation so I’ve donated mine.
I’m actively exploring the idea of giving away one of mine too. I’ve always sort of embraced the idea on a philosophical level, but I had my gall bladder removed a while ago and the experience demystified organ removal surgery a bit for me and made it feel more like “oh yeah, this is a thing I can actually do.”
I recall hearing a Canadian EA complaining about how much of a hassle it was to donate a kidney because he had to take a vacation day from work and pay for everything himself (due to a law against any and all forms of compensation for donating organs). I might donate a kidney someday though it's not top-of-mind atm.
In the US, at least, they finally changed this. Everything is paid for, lost wages are covered. It’s much better now, I had to travel to a hospital and they paid for my flight and hotel
>Q: All possible forms of assistance, financial and otherwise, just make recipients worse off, for extremely complicated reasons.
That's not how I'd put it, however. Charity is a tax/sink of resources on the <caring/my ingroup/whatever>, at the benefit of, at best, anyone, and, realistically, disproportionately of the <uncaring/my outgroup/whatever> (if only because those that donate rarely benefit from charity themselves, thus culling themselves from the pool that can potentially benefit from it). Which seems <evil/perverse/self-destructive> to me. It hardly matter how much it benefits the recipient, because it's the giver that end up worse off.
P.S: there's of course a bit of motte-and-bailey going on at my side, since one can hardly argue against "you should help people if it makes you happy", but EA, and charity at large, relies on a general injunction and social pressure toward giving help, which is what i object to. Helping others is like smoking a cigare: I can enjoy doing it when I feel like it, but if someone tells me "well you're smoking very inefficiently, here's a device that will help you go through 10 of them in 15 minutes, so you can pump up your game", it turns an activity that exchange a small negative for a small positive into one that exchange a larger negative for a larger negative.
That argument gets weaker when there's strong and pervasive social pressure to give, such as would happen if there's broad acceptance of this proposed social norm of donating at least 10% of your income to charity.
Money almost certainly has diminishing marginal utility for individuals though. Do you think a million dollars to Jeff Bezos or one of the Waltons has as much personal value as it does for an individual struggling with unpaid debt?
Even if we assume that donors get no personal sense of fulfillment from it (which may sometimes be, but certainly isn't always the case,) the core argument is that the money has more utility to the recipients than the donors. That might not be the case for some specific charities, but it seems fairly extraordinary for it to not be the case for all charity in general.
1. What makes you think utilitarianism is remotely correct? When you see repugnant conclusions at the end of every line you look it might be time to rethink the basic premise.
2. Jeff Bezos having more money isn't just about Jeff Bezos getting fulfillment from his marginal dollars. Money in Jeff Bezos's hands tends to grow and create further value. When Bezos was merely a rich executive you could have made the same argument and then his marginal dollars would have went to bed nets and there would be no Amazon.
The only people that should be involved with anything like EA are people who have no vision and no use for their money (which is plenty, but titans of industry aren't going to be in that list).
>1. What makes you think utilitarianism is remotely correct? When you see repugnant conclusions at the end of every line you look it might be time to rethink the basic premise.
I think that if the repugnant conclusion is a legitimate extrapolation of our intuitions of goodness, then maybe we should rethink how repugnant it actually is, but if it's not, then the problem lies in our assumptions about what we actually value than in the idea that it's best to maximize the total level of goodness.
There are different flavors of utilitarians, which differ in where they get off at the end of the lines, but agree most of the way to their destinations-
I think that I would be much, much happier in a society where the basic assumptions of people's moral framework were utilitarian than our current one. Like, really overwhelmingly. It's almost impossible for me to overstate the degree of my current level of satisfaction which could be addressed by more utilitarian organization, it's like being a devout Christian living in a society organized around worship of Huitzilopochtli, complete with mass human sacrifice. The Christian might have disagreement with other Christians about the correct interpretation of Christianity, but the difference between their positions, and how they would actually organize a society given the option, is only a tiny fraction of what it is between them and the Huitzilopochtli worshippers. Most utilitarians wouldn't implement Repugnant Conclusion style outcomes if they could, and if they end up destroying the world or something in some extreme eventuality, it's only at a point where they have such a vast degree of power and resources that I think non-utilitarians probably would have failed to avoid destroying the world as well anyway.
>2. Jeff Bezos having more money isn't just about Jeff Bezos getting fulfillment from his marginal dollars. Money in Jeff Bezos's hands tends to grow and create further value. When Bezos was merely a rich executive you could have made the same argument and then his marginal dollars would have went to bed nets and there would be no Amazon.
I actually didn't think Jeff Bezos was an ideal example for pretty much this reason. Most of his wealth isn't cash which he can do anything in particular with, it's valuation of Amazon, which he has a large stake in. But if I searched for the name of a billionaire with a high net-wealth valuation and low plausible utility of their business (maybe a cigarette company magnate or something?) you wouldn't have recognized their name. The Waltons are probably a better example than most who people have a reasonable chance of at least recognizing in aggregate. You can do this sort of thing with some wealthy people, where you assume that the purposes from which they derive their wealth are even more valuable than effective charity, but the idea that you can do it with all of them is frankly pretty absurd. If you want to make a case for that, why not start with the *least* societally valuable wealthy person you can come up with? If you can argue in the extreme case that even the most unworthy personal uses of extreme wealth are more valuable to society than charity, it would be a lot more meaningful than arguing that for the most unusually valuable ones.
In short, not-having-the-entire-discussion form, I explored a whole bunch of ideas for things I might care about, and felt it was the only one that made sense.
Which one? There's an uncomfortable fact that many of the "neediest" people in our society are functionally black holes of self-destruction and pathological bad choices. Money to Jeff Bezos at least probably doesn't have a negative marginal utility, or generate terrible moral hazard.
Sure, but that's still a dodge of the broader moral issue when many are not. I have a close friend who's been struggling with a hand-to-mouth existence for years now, and I've given her money on a lot of occasions so she'd be able to make ends meet. If there were a straightforward solution to her financial woes within the powers of my best judgment and her abilities, she'd actually take my advice on it.
The existence of people to whom charitable donations would be badly targeted isn't an argument against the value of carefully targeted charitable donations.
Sure. My point and hobby horse is more "beware of second order consequences and utility holes". The "carefully targeting" part is a very non-trivial issue.
I have a position that the better you know the recipient of charity, the more effective the charity can be. I think EA activists are going to learn (as many NGOs and government entities have) that a large portion of their giving ends up wasted. I have seen Scott reference several such examples, so I know EAs are somewhat aware at least.
I very much like the form of local giving that is exhibited by you giving money to help a friend. You can gauge the level and timing of need to best target improvement, and you can also determine if she's able and willing to positively use it. I think trying to aggregate that approach into a large organization giving out lots of money loses too much in that process and has far less value.
There's also the unintended consequence, such as destroying local economies. The one I first heard about was farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa abandoning farms due to being undercut by Western food charity. They could not sell their food due to the abundance of temporary free food available, and did not have the capital to wait out the process. This made Africa less resilient locally, and therefore dependent on future charitable giving in order to survive. In other words, worse off in a long term sense. I can't help but wonder if bed nets are no longer something that Africans can economically create for themselves, and therefore foreign donations are the only source for them.
>Do you think a million dollars to Jeff Bezos or one of the Waltons has as much personal value as it does for an individual struggling with unpaid debt?
As Ichonochasm remarked, that individual sounds like someone who consume more than he creates, leaving the bill to the rest of mankind. So yeah, even if the margical utility of Bezos's dollar drops to 0, I'd rather he keeps it.
Consider the possibility that the general social good that will come from a million dollars in the hands of Jeff Bezos might exceed that which will come from a bunch of individuals struggling with unpaid debt.
After all, there is such a thing as the wise and foolish use of capital, and without knowing anything further, it would be not unreasonable to assume that Bezos spends his money more wisely than J. Random Struggling With Debt. There's a good chance that's why Bezos is rich and Mr. Debt poor, after all (allowing that weird exceptions like extreme good or bad luck do sometimes happen).
To take an extreme example, if Bezos would invest that million in a start-up working on a drug for Alzheimer's, which succeeds, that would have immense social value. And if all 100 (say) of the recipients of Bezos's money, were he to donate that million, were to spend it all on Thunderbird and playing Lotto until they were quickly broke again -- then we can easily see it's better, even on social grounds, even on the grounds of maximizing group utility, for the money to stay in Bezos's hands.
That's an extreme example, but there's no a priori reason to think the general principle is obviously unsound, so it's by no means obvious that social utility is maximized by transferring money from he who has a diminished *personal* (consumption) utility to he who has an enhanced personal utility. I mean, unless the pleasure of consumption is the *only* measure one is going to make of social utility, which seems....cramped.
If you make the scenario maximally convenient for the supposition that the money might have more utility in the hands of a rich person, and maximally inconvenient for the supposition that it might have more utility in the hands of a poor person, then it's not surprising if you find that the money has more utility in the hands of a rich person in that situation. I could also perfectly well come up with situations where a country would be better off if the head of state were a stupid person who didn't know anything about political administration than a smart person who's knowledgeable about political administration. Would you then agree that, although I deliberately picked extreme examples, there's no a priori reason to think that the general principle that it's not better for heads of state to be intelligent and politically knowledgeable than unintelligent and politically ignorant is unsound?
The point of my picking an extreme example was to point out that it's not at all implausible -- which tells you where the general trend lies. If you can pick out an example *that is equally plausible* by which the money is better off in the hands of J. Random Debtor than someone who has succeeded in life and in business, go ahead. Then your equivalence will not be specious.
So, if I understand this correctly, you're conceptualizing charity as some kind of video game , playing the game alone whenever you feel like it with no strings attached is fun, but playing it on multiplayer sucks all the fun out of it and makes it too competitive and demanding.
That's... Not How Ethics Work. There is a reason they're called Moral *Obligations*.
I don't really get your analogy. Giving shit away for my self-satisfaction is a, let's say, "sin" I indulges from time to time, and like most sin, it's fun in moderation, absolutely destructive when addicted to it.
I also don't see the point of labelling as "moral obligation" something I'm not, in fact, obligated to do in any way.
Your "sin" way of thinking about charity does closely resemble my video game analogy : the sin is the game, indulging in it in moderation is playing the game on single-player in a chill way, being addicted to the sin is playing the game on multiplayer in an addictive and resource-consuming way. It's a mapping, but not a stretching one.
>I also don't see the point of labelling as "moral obligation" something I'm not, in fact, obligated to do in any way.
But, you see, there is no point to talking about being "obligated" without specifying the framework for obligation, or - if you will -, a theory of What We Owe Each Other. I technically don't owe you anything, not even leaving you and\or your property safe and inviolable. I'm not *obligated*, by any obvious mechanism that can make me, to not take your shit or enslave you. You can make me by using the Laws of Physics, which is the ultimate authority all of the universe answers to and all other obligations eventually has to be translated to, but those Laws seem to be neutral, I can equally well use them against you as you against me.
One way of solving the above conundrum is playing it out till one of us lose, potentially a life. Another way is getting as far from each other as possible in an environment full of more low-risk/high-return targets for our desires than each other, such as deep space. Both of those solutions have pros and cons, I personally prefer the second, but they are often impractical for several reasons. A third way is for us to agree on a joint framework that specifies what each one of us owes the other, in a way that (hopefully) require little or no violence to enforce and keep.
This framework is ever-changing and sometimes unfair to some parties (which is why I prefer the second impractical solution of us leaving others alone and them leaving us in deep space, but alas, it can't be done yet), imagine buying a bunch of blacks to serve you and your farm lands in the 1850s only to be forced to give them away barely a decade after. I don't say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, taking slaves away from slave-owners who bought them out of legitimate money is really unfair, especially when no one told them to not buy slaves before they did and everybody was buying slaves around them. But, the joint framework has to accommodate the blacks, and so we must commit to this unfairness.
All of those words summarized : Ethical Obligations exist, and they compel you to do far more than you currently think. If you think they're unfair, well fair point, but they are also sometimes unfair in your favor as well. If you don't follow them when they work in others' favors, why should others (who very much can harm you and take your shit) follow them when they work in yours ?
What if I told you I don't believe in moral obligations?
OK, I believe you're morally obliged to do things that you have explicitly agreed to do -- if you make a deal with someone then you're obliged to hold up your end of it. But I don't believe you have any moral obligations to random strangers simply by virtue of having been born on the same planet and of the same species.
If you pass a drowning child, you are not morally obliged to save it. It's a very good thing to save it, and I reserve the right to criticise you if you don't, but you're not obliged to.
If you say you _are_ morally obliged to save the drowning child, then it follows by arguments presented earlier, that you're obliged to save millions of others who need help. And you can't possibly save them all. And it's unreasonable to tell people that they're obliged to do things that they can't possibly do. Therefore you're not obliged to save anyone.
One... interesting (to use a polite word) consequence of your views is that all crimes are morally A-OK. I have never explicitely agreed, in spoken or written words, to not steal, to not kill, to not rape. I live in a city of 20 million inhabitant, what do I owe all those random strangers ? according to you, nothing. Why shouldn't I rape a woman just because I happened to be born in the same "country", an even more fictional and arbitary entity than "Planet" or "Species" ?
Maybe you will say something like that rape or murder or theft is forbidden by my country's law, and that I explicitly agreed to that law whenever I sign any government paper work ? I would disagree because that's not how "explicitly" work, but you know what ? I can simply kill and rape people from other countries. There, I don't have any obligations towards *those* randos right ? including the obligation not to kill or rape them.
You think this is a self-consistent way to live through life ? Do you want to live according to it ? Do you want *me* to live according to it in close proximity as you ?
>you're obliged to save millions of others who need help
Chad-Yes.jpeg
>it's unreasonable to tell people that they're obliged to do things that they can't possibly do.
Which is why all humans are morally guilty of any terrible thing they could have changed but didn't. Seriously, that's the far simpler method of confronting the horribleness of life, just accept that you're a flawed being who's commiting thousands or millions of crimes each day by inaction and move on, trying to fix what you can. This is, while not trivial, is far more defensible and self-consistent thing to do than your "Akshually moral obligations are not a thing unless I agree to them".
Oh, it's not fair to be guilty without doing anything ? But nothing is fair. A person who worked as an atlantic ship's cook in 1750 is a profoundly guilty human, merely because they cooked food for slavers. Is that fair ? no, is the solution to declare slavery ok because nobody actually agreed to not enslave africans (including modern people) ? no.
I think this is semantics; I was talking about positive obligations (the obligation to do something) rather than negative obligations (the obligation not to do something). Obviously I believe that there are things you should _not_ do, I wouldn't use the word "obligation" here but you can if you like.
Here's a fun question: by your standards, is a slave who chooses to have children, knowing that they too will be born into slavery, profoundly guilty?
Haha I think the favorite excuse I've used to not give to charity has been:
Q: "If I give now, while I'm relatively poor myself, then I'll basically be giving hardly any money away at all/ helping hardly anyone! But if I just focus on myself *for now* and try to get rich, then really help people AFTER I've accumulated a large amount of capital, then I could help those in need so much MORE!!!
A: But you're obviously never going to get rich so this is just an excuse to do nothing. Also, if everyone assumed that fame and fortune were prerequisites for doing anything "truly good", then our world would be a pretty selfish/ lonely place. Oh wait...
So yeah, what I mean to say is that your arguments are basically just rock solid, and I feel pretty called out. It's so much easier to "wish that we did more to help the poor" when this means "someone else doing something that I tell them to do down the road when I'm dictator" rather than "me parting with a chunk of my paycheck right now."
Well, the general assumption is that well-directed charity has a "social compounding" aspect. e.g. if you donate $30 to buy a malaria net some sickly Sudanese 2-year-old doesn't get malaria and die, and then grows up to invent a cure for cancer or at least become a sainted leader that transforms Sudan into a peaceful prosperous democracy.
I mean, people are generally pretty negative about charitable giving that has *no* compounding, only some immediate effect, like you give $100 to the street person and he buys himself a nice dinner for $25 and spends the rest on a fresh supply of meth, so that your donation has only a short-lived temporary effect. People hate that. So they usually assume there's a fair amount of social "compounding" going on (the bum buys himself a nice dinner for $25, a shower for $5, and a used but clean suit for $60, and with that he gets a job, sticks with it, moves into an apartment...invents a cure for cancer...).
Yeah, I'm very familiar with these compounding arguments, because I've used them :). And I mean, I don't think they're all wrong. In general, I really don't think we should all feel obligated to save the world anyways. Unless we're super rich and powerful, then we should. But I do think we should feel obligated to do *something* "good" now, rather than just focusing on accumulating wealth and power so we can eventually do good. But I don't think that good needs to be something grandiose or even in the realm of charities/ "altruism." I think we should just all treat each other better/ be more kind and thoughtful. I think we should try to have honest careers that at the very least don't make the world worse. And if, within our tiny spheres of influence, we're giving back rather than being parasitic, I think that's probably enough to make us decent human beings. Giving ten percent might be a bonus, but first off I think we should just try to not be parasites. If we achieve that, we're already pretty awesome.
If you're very early in your career and you expect to make a lot more money later (even if you don't "get rich") then it probably does make more sense to focus on how you can optimize your career than on donating right now. I agree you should do *something* good now, not least because it will help you get in the habit.
That's completely reasonable. It's a lot easier to be broke and to say "hey, people with money should be giving more, I just happen to not have any" than to actually build a successful career. And building a successful career that's honest/ positive could be seen in some ways as a "good deed" in and of itself as well, there are more ways to do good in this world than dishing up soup for the homeless. I think "different stages of life" fits into all this somehow as well.
If it helps, I did that. Waited a long time before donating more than trivial amounts, realized I'm actually in a life moment where I have extra cash, made a sizeable donation to a charity I considered effective.
Now I'm back in no-donate mode, but I'm somewhat more chill because I know that next time I have considerable extra funds, I'll most likely do it again. Which btw is one of the best reasons to donate regularly regardless of income - it's building a habit.
Why don't I do it? Because I just don't like donating - the act itself. I'm selfish and stingy and it doesn't feel good to give my money to anything other than possibly causes I feel something about. This is a personality trait and has nothing to do with my goals and values, so making money and donating more occasionally suits me just fine.
Whoever your friends are who are telling you not to post this spicy essay, you should know that they are being very unaltruistic. They have had the chance to behold it in all its glory, and are refusing to share that same transcendence with the world.
Put those friends aside. Listen to your soul. You want to post it.
And if that's too-spicy-for-real-life... I dunno... I think we should then pray for an x-risk to kill us all and let nature rebuild with something better than us.
Ask someone who can take the reputational hit (a Joe Rogan-like figure) - to post it under their name and see what happens. Link to it...with a comment like, "Man, I wish I could have written something so spicy like this!"
What was that, about utilitarism or, basically, any logical system/philosophy leading to absurd conclusions if it was taken to extremes/if you were looking for edge cases?
There are many ways kidney donation become problematic if all people would be required to donate their kidney to random strangers. If donated kidneys are cheap, we *would* get stuck in an inadequate equilibrium where there is less effort to come up with a better, permanent solution (such as, replacement kidney grown from patient's own cells that don't require immunological medication nor deprive anyone of their spare kidney). Like we have become stuck with everything that we have cheap availability of.
Some limited amount of philanthropists donating money or their kidney's to random strangers -- and a bit more donating to their close relatives -- probably isn't too problematic. An universal rule would be.
One could defend oneself saying that one isn't suggesting it to everyone, but it doesn't apply here: your Q/A is targeted at generic you, that is, the public at large, that is, everyone.
Q: "Well, if hypothetically, every human being got together to cure all the world's ills, the marginal value of charity would decline to zero!"
A: "Cool, I would love to teleport to this imaginary universe you are talking about! Over in this one I just donated ~10% of my net worth after failing to altruistically donate a kidney (ruled out by the hospital due to previous kidney stones), while approximately 99.99% of the population failed to do the latter (situation unclear on the former). The situation seems highly resistant to change, too."
Once we are in the universe where we're all ants chasing each other's asses in endless charity, I promise we can have this discussion. Hell, even once we get, I dunno, halfway there, we can start talking about slowing down. But here in the actual, real world, this is such a ridiculous criticism it belongs in the same category as Pascal's mugging.
I literally can't understand how you can not understand this? Your comment appears very straightforwardly to be the Q. If you intended something completely different then you did not communicate this.
My argument was that donated kidney is suboptimal way to fix a broken kidney, but if donated kidneys become "cheap" by demanding everyone with healthy one to give it away for free citing ethical rules (or frankly, probably even demanding everyone to sell by going market rate, because some people are desperate), we are stuck in an inadequate equilibrium:
- sick people get subpar replacement technology and become immunologically compromised
- donators are worse off
- if donated kidneys are cheap, there is less investment in better technologies
I don't believe kidney donation is a step towards curing world's ills, except maybe in some very local context that wouldn't generalize. More over, the generalized solution would not be described as "everyone coming together" but more like "after a sizeable vocal minority comes together they can bully the rest of us" . (Both are all part of your Q but all assumptions on your part.)
As an another example, volunteer work can achieve some good locally. However, demanding that everyone should do volunteer work is effectively demanding an universal conscription. Such system can be grossly inefficient way of using affected individuals' time.
In general, universally enforced ethical demands to give valuable stuff for free are a form of subvention. This was to argue that all claims of form "people should do stuff" should come with an off-ramp if serious (I admit that conclusion I didn't write upfront).
Kidney donation isn’t an effective refutation of charity’s ineffectiveness. Physically weakening the most altruistic among us to strengthen the median needed kidney recipient has a very obvious utilitarian downside: kidney donation comes with many risks and the decrease in the donor’s overall life utility output that comes with it could very well outweigh the median kidney recipient’s gain in utility. In a model where overall societal progress is disproportionately driven by a small subset of individuals(a view that I think you endorse), it's just a matter of tweaking your model parameters until promotion of kidney donation is no longer a net gain in utilitarian terms.
On a less devil's-advocate note, this is my obligatory criticism of EA - they don't commit to the bit. Where's the utilitarian evaluation of the average gain in the Sub-Saraharan country that is receiving donations of bed nets in comparison to countries that aren't? Where's the EA research paper on the net effects of cash transfer to the poor on support ending up in the pockets of local warlords? Why isn't EA grappling with the fact that Sub-Saharan Africa is actively regressing in GDP development despite their attempts at helping alleviate poverty in those countries?
If you're gonna commit to utilitarian principles, then commit damn it! Don't stop at assuming that every human life is equally valuable just because it's morally unpalatable to consider otherwise, that defeats the entire purpose of utilitarianism! Clearly EA is comfortable being Utilitarian absolutists about their weird woo-woo stuff like AGI and longtermism, but they shy away from using the same logic on their more conventional pursuits.
What COVID? According to worldometers data, almost every sub-Saharan country other than South Africa (which is a weird case in many ways) has had less than 5000 COVID deaths total, in the past two years. That's noise on their typical mortality counts.
That's actually a good point. I would consider donating a kidney to a relative or a dear friend; but I would not donate a kidney to a random child in Africa or to some unspecified number of future humans. In other words, my kidney would be a personal gift, not systematic charity.
I don't agree with the viewpoint that organized charity always makes people worse off, but answering that with "what about kidneys" is IMO not going to be persuasive for people who do subscribe to this view.
Technically, kidney donation is one of the standard examples where donations make recipients worse - having a heavily regulated but paid market for organs would be a hell of a lot better. Probably even paid organ harvesting from dead people would up the numbers by some factor.
With free donation only we keep wallowing in a local maxima of charity and serendipity.
Adding some TDT and coordination to fill the gap from the individual decision to the final outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.
My problem might be similar to this, or deeper: I don’t even know how to tell what’s right, what goals to work toward. Different people say different things about questions like whether to give aid to (potentially) dangerous people. That doesn’t mean there are no good forms of charity, it’s just that _I_ can’t be sure enough that any particular form won’t be bad. When (over a decade ago) I asked questions about François-René Rideau’s post “Why indiscriminate charity is immoral” (https://fare.livejournal.com/104397.html), he said “Giving without discrimination is worse than not giving”.
He also said “Regarding stem-cell donations to anonymous recipient, I think it's a great idea […]”, and I hope his logic also applies to kidneys. But others might oppose giving kidneys to strangers, so much so that it’s not even possible where I live. Anyway, I hope the “human-compatible kidneys in pigs” that Melvin mentioned will make such questions irrelevant in a few years.
Just re-reading this as I ruminate on the FTX situation; this comment makes it seem like you probably missed KidneyGate, aka "this white woman donated a kidney and wanted her friends, who are women of color, to care about it, what a bitch". So for at least some types, kidney donation is problematic white-saviorism now
That’s not anti-charity. You should be devoting 10% of your income to efforts to subvert charity (e.g., politicians who want to revoke the 501(c)(3) status of churches) and remove/defund welfare programs. If you actually believe that charity and handouts are bad for people, then you have a corresponding moral obligation to work to stop the handouts.
It isn’t his argument that handouts alone are bad. It’s that giving other people money, unless it’s for things you want, is on net just distorting the world and adding noise.
Not saying I agree but I can see where this comes from.
It appears though that his argument *is* that most handouts are bad because they are mostly targeting and advancing the causes of his outgroup and therefore things he does not want.
I don’t think there’s a way to reconcile this without discarding the idea of moral obligations, which really discards the idea of ethics at all.
Revoking the special tax-status of churches - and much more the defunding of all government "welfare"-programs plus a major part of other "welfarers" (red cross!, oxfam, greenpeace!, amnesty ...) - should be your aim in any case. As EA, cuz they are ineffective. As any kinda altruist., as their results are over all: usu. negative. As Uncle Scrooge - as your money is taken and no value produced. Even if you have a plush job at this misleading burners of charity-money. ( A good school-system might be an "investment", not welfare. The one you and we have is: sadism. The one Indian parents pay a few bucks for privately: affordable. Education ministry: "idi na chui!" - 24.8.2022 Slava Ukraina!)
Basically everyone investing in a company exploiting humans or harming the environment is doing so. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a relevant overlap with people donating to charities.
Yea I'm not sure why rationalists struggle to see the abject failure of non profit incentive structure. The kidney example below is obviously not effective altruism - lots of people in kidney donation are responding to financial incentives! And you'd get even more kidney donors if financial compensation was allowed.
The real question is whether it's easier to fix the non profit complex or to fix capitalism where it's failing.
> The real question is whether it's easier to fix the non profit complex or to fix capitalism where it's failing.
I see it as the Profit/Non-Profit incentive structure, since there is an interplay between the two and they do not necessarily exist in a vacuum without the other.
Particularly true in healthcare, where a transition from non-profit to profit has resulted in a myriad of issues (from higher costs to decreased access to care). Others can note that the transition to profit has spurred even more advanced drug technology (e.g. in cancer care). Weighing these pros and cons is subjective, though the conversation tends to end at "is healthcare a human right?" If it is, a non-profit incentive structure is more aligned and a profit one is less aligned. However, since profit incentives have a stronger short term reward function and humans are humans, there would still be a degree of bias in favor of profit structures by a subset.
To wrap it up, there are some areas where non-profit structures could be more favorable (e.g. healthcare delivery) and others for profit structures (e.g. drug development), and they tend to coexist in a larger ecosystem together (e.g. healthcare). Despite whatever balance there is, I think there is an inherent bias towards responding to profit incentives even when non-profit may be preferable.
I have a tough time disentangling the immense role of the government in your healthcare & health science examples. Of course the government exists in every industry but healthcare is just overwhelmingly dictated by regulation to the point where the prices for identical goods and services can vary about 100's of %.
And this is going to sound like a nit pick but it honestly isn't: Non-Profit isn't the same thing as "Not for profit". I'm guessing your examples of high quality healthcare delivery are "not for profits", as in, they run a business that's generally cash flow neutral. Maybe you're thinking of Providence or Intermountain, both of whom have done really well. That business model is super duper distinctly different than a foundation which relies on donations to fund their activities rather than customers who willingly cough up money for the services they receive. The donation:customer earned revenue ratio matters a lot in how an organization behaves.
Markets are just really good at allocating resources, aligning incentives, and validating what consumers actually want. Non profits really struggle to do that and I've never seen a counterexample - though I'd be interested in hearing about one!
I would argue that "Effective Altruism" as a distinct entity only starts at maybe the "Cause Prioritizations" level of your tower of assumptions. The two layers below are shared by so many others -- ranging from for-profit insurance companies to government bureaucracies to religions -- that they can't be fairly claimed to be part of EA. "Cause Prioritizations" is also the level of the tower at which people start to raise serious objections to EA. That is not a coincidence.
If all you want is for people to do more from the lowest two levels of the tower, that's fine. But that is not EA, and claiming it is so is very close to a motte and bailey fallacy. People can donate 10% or do charity work in less developed countries because they are observant Christians or the government gives tax incentives or whatever without touching anything resembling EA at all.
If you want my spicy take on this, I think you added those lowest two levels purely as a defensive measure to protect EA. Why not add layers underneath? There are even more foundational assumptions like "Suffering exists", "Cause and effect exist and we have free will to affect it" or "We exist". These are also necessary. But you stopped there because the motte would be too obvious then.
Charities and charitable giving often don't go beyond the "we should help other people" bullet on the bottom. Seriously considering how much effort to put in, and actually thinking about the opportunity cost, is not common. Imagine asking almost anyone in your life detailed, probing questions about how much effort/resource they expend for other people, or tell them that St Jude, while good in isolation, is not a good recipient of their donations compared to other opportunities. Do they get mad?
You guys/gals crack me up. Why does everyone nowadays need a cause? Why do You all need a movement to feel self-important?
I live on $29 or $30K social security because I inherited enough money to buy a house. Since that time I've given the money I was spending on a condo to charity. That's about 20%. Actually, it's 20% this year because I'm cutting *back*.
This is nothing new. I've been giving 10% since I started making good money. When I wasn't making good money, I cut back. Then I inherited the money and went forward.
You guys and gals that live by "shoulds" are, unfortunately, rule by "shoulds." Do what You can and feel good about Yourself. No movement required.
"Do what you can and feel good about yourself" is a "should," jt, and you're advocating it on a public forum, pointing to yourself as an example. I'm not knocking what you do, which certainly seems good to me; I just think it's a little ironic that you chose to be snarky in describing it.
It's the prioritisation (or at least equal prioritisation) of people far away versus people close to you. And this intuitively doesn't feel right to a lot of people.
Which major religion does not have a version of what Christians call the Golden Rule? "Love thy neighbour as thyself" "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" What allows EA to claim this idea as theirs when it is so ancient and widespread?
I'd say that it's not the idea itself that's particularly new, but it just recently became plausible that your donation of $5k (or whatever) can save a life in some African hellhole, but still dubious. The more radical idea is that saving 20 of those lives is obviously better than a donation of $100k to a museum/university/library/animal shelter near you, which people would likely agree with if asked directly but don't tend to think of on their own. Ironically, now that AI alignment non-profits are supposedly even higher priority than that, EA's potential appeal to normies is even less straightforward.
One problem with non-x-risk-risks is that it's harder to know whether preventing them is ultimately good.
It's possible that the agricultural revolution should've been considered a serious medium-term risk at some point, but preventing it from happening would ultimately have been very bad; it's possible that the Black Death helped bring forth the Renaissance and eventually the Industrial Revolution, etc. I'm not sure either of those things are true (probably not), but I think something in that direction could definitely be true, and it's hard to know beforehand.
Focusing on existential risks is a way to get around some of that uncertainty, since it's a terminus for us humans.
"Nobody Is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable" is one of my favorite of Scott's pieces for a number of reasons, and it's worth reading in its entirety. It's 5-10 minutes, and it addresses that specific question at some length: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/
For a consequentialist, whether or not we should lie about basic moral principles is a strictly empirical question. Has anyone ever attempted to answer it?
> we should lie to people about basic moral principles and obligations in hopes of increasing adherence. That seems like a rather questionable strategy to me.
I'm a moral antirealist, that's morality functioning as intended.
> Why define "good person" at all? That term is simply irrelevant to a consequentialist analysis of which actions are right or wrong (or rather, which actions are better than others and by how much).
It's obviously a simplistic binary, sure. I'm a big believer in supererogation being a thing, so if people are going to attach any meaning to that binary I can work with it.
> Consequentialism explicitly rejects universalizability. Did Scott just become a Kantian?
"If". But more interestingly: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/16/you-kant-dismiss-universalizability/ Sophisticated decision theories has been a recurring topic going back to the old LW days, and universalizability still has a place in consequentialism even if only on instrumental grounds.
The general point here is right on. There is not really any reasonable reason to point at 10 instead of 1, or 5, or 20 or 50 other than that is what X personally feels is reasonable. Which leaves you in a pretty impoverished place when trying to convince someone that say 5 (or 1) is not reasonable.
Scott already wrote a much better post that deserves that title: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/
You only see the spicy essay if you subscribe to Scott's substack *and also* his Onlyfans.
>A person who genuinely values all lives equally by definition places no special value on the lives of his or her friends, family, spouse, children. We're right to view such a person as a horrible person, because they would not be a good friend or parent etc.
I think it's very reasonable to follow this statement with this query: do you view Siddhartha Gautama, Jesu bar Joseph, those adherents of their teachings called arhats, bodhisattvas, or saints, and their adherent monks as horrible people? Or likewise for any other teaching that espouses universal compassion, regarding those who sincerely follow it?
And I think that stepping over the starving man in the street without even a glance to get home to your wife and child is not laudable. Even the cruelest butchers in history had wives and children they loved. Even the man who may one day kill you or I did that. What merit is thus generated, to say "so long as you reach the bar that even a total monster can reach, you are a good man?"
If all men lived as Bodhisattvas, there would be no suffering in the world at all. I suspect your fundamental objection is that you do not believe there are any Bodhisattvas, that the Pure Land is empty, and there is nothing that can be hoped for or attained beyond the charnel ground of reality, and any who say otherwise are just trying to get you to lower your guard so they can slit your throat- in summary, that actual altruism or benevolence is impossible and everyone who claims to be so is merely a hypocrite. That is a very normal thing for people to believe. It is also a belief that creates immense suffering both for people far away from you and people close to you. Things can be both normal and bad.
EDIT: I would also point out in the specific case of Buddha and monks in general that the goal is not "personal fulfillment" it's "the salvation of all living beings", including one's family. Thus, to a sincere Buddhist, one could very easily make the argument that becoming a monk is a superior display of filial piety than merely being an obedient son (indeed, this is a point raised repeatedly in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist schools).
>If all men lived as Bodhisattvas, there would be no suffering in the world at all.
Perhaps, but not because everyone's material needs were being satisfied. Maybe such a world would be better, but it wouldn't be better in the way most people care about today.
I would not say they were horrible *people*, because I think applying such labels is very rarely if ever useful. I would, however, say they were people who caused the widespread dissemination of horrible ideas.
I'm going to avoid continuing this further. I don't see the point trying to defend my earlier arguments after having already deleted them.
Fair enough.
And what is it about Buddhism and Christianity that you find so horrible?
I am a Buddhist. Give me the best pitch you have for me to stop being Buddhist.
I made a similar, shorter, angrier critique in a comment of my own, and I'd like to commend your cool.
Is there anything stopping you from going to church? I'm agnostic, but attend church for the community. The pipe organs are pretty cool, the sermons are frequently interesting from a philosophical and anthropological perspective, and at least where I live the food and socializing afterward are quite nice!
I hear there's EA meetups, have you tried those?
Generally churches will ask you to donate TO THEM, rather than just in general. That's the big difference between something like EA and a tithe.
Charity is bad, ergo Effective Altruism is a net negative compared to the counterfactual.
Also from my spicy essay:
Q: All possible forms of assistance, financial and otherwise, just make recipients worse off, for extremely complicated reasons. There are literally no exceptions to this. I promise I’m not just looking for an excuse not to do charity, I would love to do charity, it’s just that literally every form of charity is counterproductive. Weird, isn’t it?
A: Even kidney donation?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CSLewis/comments/3ciw8k/can_someone_find_a_source_for_this_supposed_lewis/
I thought it would have been Chesterton, but you were right, it was Lewis.
I have frequently done this myself.
It's a neat quip but misses the point. I'm confident that a drink consumed by myself (or presumably C. S. Lewis) won't make anyone's life significantly worse. I can't say the same for a randomly chosen beggar, who is more likely to become an alcoholic, or get drunk and violent, or get drunk and abusive, or get drunk and arrested, or simply get drunk and miss an opportunity to make his life better.
I like this. I mean, in general I have had better experiences with this kind of personal giving than giving to organizations, in spite of the common criticisms. It just feels more human or something.
This would be a better response if EA didn't have a substantial set of people saying 'don't worry about donating now, just study hard and become a doctor and you can give when you are a rich doctor' OR if EA didn't subscribe to Peter Singer's ethical framework.
Or even if I could recall organ donation being brought up in an EA sense before - which could easily be my faulty recall.
>Or even if I could recall organ donation being brought up in an EA sense before - which could easily be my faulty recall.
Anecdotally, I've seen kidney donation come up multiple times before in EA circles. It's definitely not as common as the GWWC pledge, but some people are doing it and a lot are probably aware of it.
Cool, that is good to know.
How universal is blood donation and bone marrow registration?
I feel like this is kind of drifting away from the point that started this thread: Some people claim that they don't donate to charity because it's ineffective, but a lot of them are partially motivated by the fact that they just don't want to (because extremely reliable, direct interventions like blood donation do exist). FWIW, I do think that speculating about peoples' unstated motivations is pretty sketchy and I don't 100% endorse Scott here, but I also understand where Scott's annoyance comes from (some people spend a lot of time criticizing EA despite not actually caring much about charity + a lot of the disagreements that people bring up aren't actually fundamental, they just apply to one specific cause area or intervention instead of the actual EA philosophy itself, like people who equate EA with longetermism (or even E-risk with longtermism)).
But to address your comment, I think that blood/bone marrow donation are sometimes brought up in EA but not all that common. If your point is that a maximally ethically consistent EA would be doing all of those things on top of donating, most of the responses that you'll get from EAs will probably boil down to this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/
I think it's also worth asking how often donated blood is a bottleneck in availability. I used to donate blood fairly regularly. Although I mainly stopped for other, more idiosyncratic reasons, it did feel less pressing after I did a bit of searching and found that there's rarely a blood supply shortage to begin with. Money has unlimited fungibility, but if you donate blood in a non-shortage scenario, the limited shelf-life means your donation may not have any marginal value.
Personally, I have seriously considered donating a kidney, since even back before I became aware of the EA community. But it turns out that, at least as of the time I looked into it, things aren't really set up for convenient untargeted organ donations, where you just give a donation to be retained for the most appropriate recipient. Besides that, my most determining objection was that I decided it would just cost me personally too much paranoia, because I'm the sort of person who, if I only had one kidney, would spend too much of my life worrying about the prospect of something happening to it.
I may not be explaining myself well,, but it was Scott that brought up kidney donation as a mike drop.
The notes about the marginal effectiveness of blood donation is fair enough...but it doesn't hold for bone marrow registration. Nor does it apply to things like egg or embryo donation.
My point is still that EA as an organized philosophy is more about the E than the A.
Ironically, it's harder to donate blood as an EA since following an EA-endorsed diet (low in animal products) will make it more likely that you'll be medically disqualified. I've tried to donate blood three times and failed every time.
Also, extremely anecdotally, the people I know who identify at least loosely as EA are quite a bit more likely to give blood, be nice to strangers, and generally be kind. This idea that people will use giving to charity as an excuse to be terrible in other parts of their lives is profoundly untrue in my experience.
For people who might be interested in considering kidney donation, terrif post by my friend Virginia Postrel, who gave a kidney to Sally Satel.
https://vpostrel.com/articles/here-s-looking-at-you-kidney
She's very glamorous.
I've followed both their work for a long time, and both Satel and Postrel are very remarkable women. I remembered that Postrel had donated a kidney somewhat randomly, but I didn't know for some reason that it was to Satel. Good choice.
Virginia and Sally are both just wonderful human beings and also thinkers worth reading.
See https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/11/12716978/kidney-donation-dylan-matthews, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yTu9pa9Po4hAuhETJ/kidney-donation-is-a-reasonable-choice-for-effective
I believe there’s also some EA institutional funding going to orgs like Wait List Zero, which promotes organ donation. Personally I’m an EA who was convinced by the arguments for kidney donation so I’ve donated mine.
Good on you for doing that!
I’m actively exploring the idea of giving away one of mine too. I’ve always sort of embraced the idea on a philosophical level, but I had my gall bladder removed a while ago and the experience demystified organ removal surgery a bit for me and made it feel more like “oh yeah, this is a thing I can actually do.”
See here about kidney donation
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yTu9pa9Po4hAuhETJ/kidney-donation-is-a-reasonable-choice-for-effective
Dylan Matthews -- one of the writers of Future Perfect, Vox's EA vertical -- donated a kidney and has advocated for people doing so.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/15/17962134/future-perfect-podcast-kidney-donation
I recall hearing a Canadian EA complaining about how much of a hassle it was to donate a kidney because he had to take a vacation day from work and pay for everything himself (due to a law against any and all forms of compensation for donating organs). I might donate a kidney someday though it's not top-of-mind atm.
In the US, at least, they finally changed this. Everything is paid for, lost wages are covered. It’s much better now, I had to travel to a hospital and they paid for my flight and hotel
>Q: All possible forms of assistance, financial and otherwise, just make recipients worse off, for extremely complicated reasons.
That's not how I'd put it, however. Charity is a tax/sink of resources on the <caring/my ingroup/whatever>, at the benefit of, at best, anyone, and, realistically, disproportionately of the <uncaring/my outgroup/whatever> (if only because those that donate rarely benefit from charity themselves, thus culling themselves from the pool that can potentially benefit from it). Which seems <evil/perverse/self-destructive> to me. It hardly matter how much it benefits the recipient, because it's the giver that end up worse off.
P.S: there's of course a bit of motte-and-bailey going on at my side, since one can hardly argue against "you should help people if it makes you happy", but EA, and charity at large, relies on a general injunction and social pressure toward giving help, which is what i object to. Helping others is like smoking a cigare: I can enjoy doing it when I feel like it, but if someone tells me "well you're smoking very inefficiently, here's a device that will help you go through 10 of them in 15 minutes, so you can pump up your game", it turns an activity that exchange a small negative for a small positive into one that exchange a larger negative for a larger negative.
That argument gets weaker when there's strong and pervasive social pressure to give, such as would happen if there's broad acceptance of this proposed social norm of donating at least 10% of your income to charity.
Exactly. I've pretty bad about the EA tithing pressure before, but seeing posts like Henry's make me feel better about not donating.
I love this analogy.
Money almost certainly has diminishing marginal utility for individuals though. Do you think a million dollars to Jeff Bezos or one of the Waltons has as much personal value as it does for an individual struggling with unpaid debt?
Even if we assume that donors get no personal sense of fulfillment from it (which may sometimes be, but certainly isn't always the case,) the core argument is that the money has more utility to the recipients than the donors. That might not be the case for some specific charities, but it seems fairly extraordinary for it to not be the case for all charity in general.
1. What makes you think utilitarianism is remotely correct? When you see repugnant conclusions at the end of every line you look it might be time to rethink the basic premise.
2. Jeff Bezos having more money isn't just about Jeff Bezos getting fulfillment from his marginal dollars. Money in Jeff Bezos's hands tends to grow and create further value. When Bezos was merely a rich executive you could have made the same argument and then his marginal dollars would have went to bed nets and there would be no Amazon.
The only people that should be involved with anything like EA are people who have no vision and no use for their money (which is plenty, but titans of industry aren't going to be in that list).
>1. What makes you think utilitarianism is remotely correct? When you see repugnant conclusions at the end of every line you look it might be time to rethink the basic premise.
I think that if the repugnant conclusion is a legitimate extrapolation of our intuitions of goodness, then maybe we should rethink how repugnant it actually is, but if it's not, then the problem lies in our assumptions about what we actually value than in the idea that it's best to maximize the total level of goodness.
There are different flavors of utilitarians, which differ in where they get off at the end of the lines, but agree most of the way to their destinations-
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/
I think that I would be much, much happier in a society where the basic assumptions of people's moral framework were utilitarian than our current one. Like, really overwhelmingly. It's almost impossible for me to overstate the degree of my current level of satisfaction which could be addressed by more utilitarian organization, it's like being a devout Christian living in a society organized around worship of Huitzilopochtli, complete with mass human sacrifice. The Christian might have disagreement with other Christians about the correct interpretation of Christianity, but the difference between their positions, and how they would actually organize a society given the option, is only a tiny fraction of what it is between them and the Huitzilopochtli worshippers. Most utilitarians wouldn't implement Repugnant Conclusion style outcomes if they could, and if they end up destroying the world or something in some extreme eventuality, it's only at a point where they have such a vast degree of power and resources that I think non-utilitarians probably would have failed to avoid destroying the world as well anyway.
>2. Jeff Bezos having more money isn't just about Jeff Bezos getting fulfillment from his marginal dollars. Money in Jeff Bezos's hands tends to grow and create further value. When Bezos was merely a rich executive you could have made the same argument and then his marginal dollars would have went to bed nets and there would be no Amazon.
I actually didn't think Jeff Bezos was an ideal example for pretty much this reason. Most of his wealth isn't cash which he can do anything in particular with, it's valuation of Amazon, which he has a large stake in. But if I searched for the name of a billionaire with a high net-wealth valuation and low plausible utility of their business (maybe a cigarette company magnate or something?) you wouldn't have recognized their name. The Waltons are probably a better example than most who people have a reasonable chance of at least recognizing in aggregate. You can do this sort of thing with some wealthy people, where you assume that the purposes from which they derive their wealth are even more valuable than effective charity, but the idea that you can do it with all of them is frankly pretty absurd. If you want to make a case for that, why not start with the *least* societally valuable wealthy person you can come up with? If you can argue in the extreme case that even the most unworthy personal uses of extreme wealth are more valuable to society than charity, it would be a lot more meaningful than arguing that for the most unusually valuable ones.
Why care about utility?
In short, not-having-the-entire-discussion form, I explored a whole bunch of ideas for things I might care about, and felt it was the only one that made sense.
Because "utility" is defined around maximizing outcomes people care about. The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.
Yeah but utilitarians spend an awful lot of time on outcomes people demonstrably do not care about.
>an individual struggling with unpaid debt?
Which one? There's an uncomfortable fact that many of the "neediest" people in our society are functionally black holes of self-destruction and pathological bad choices. Money to Jeff Bezos at least probably doesn't have a negative marginal utility, or generate terrible moral hazard.
Sure, but that's still a dodge of the broader moral issue when many are not. I have a close friend who's been struggling with a hand-to-mouth existence for years now, and I've given her money on a lot of occasions so she'd be able to make ends meet. If there were a straightforward solution to her financial woes within the powers of my best judgment and her abilities, she'd actually take my advice on it.
The existence of people to whom charitable donations would be badly targeted isn't an argument against the value of carefully targeted charitable donations.
Sure. My point and hobby horse is more "beware of second order consequences and utility holes". The "carefully targeting" part is a very non-trivial issue.
I have a position that the better you know the recipient of charity, the more effective the charity can be. I think EA activists are going to learn (as many NGOs and government entities have) that a large portion of their giving ends up wasted. I have seen Scott reference several such examples, so I know EAs are somewhat aware at least.
I very much like the form of local giving that is exhibited by you giving money to help a friend. You can gauge the level and timing of need to best target improvement, and you can also determine if she's able and willing to positively use it. I think trying to aggregate that approach into a large organization giving out lots of money loses too much in that process and has far less value.
There's also the unintended consequence, such as destroying local economies. The one I first heard about was farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa abandoning farms due to being undercut by Western food charity. They could not sell their food due to the abundance of temporary free food available, and did not have the capital to wait out the process. This made Africa less resilient locally, and therefore dependent on future charitable giving in order to survive. In other words, worse off in a long term sense. I can't help but wonder if bed nets are no longer something that Africans can economically create for themselves, and therefore foreign donations are the only source for them.
>Do you think a million dollars to Jeff Bezos or one of the Waltons has as much personal value as it does for an individual struggling with unpaid debt?
As Ichonochasm remarked, that individual sounds like someone who consume more than he creates, leaving the bill to the rest of mankind. So yeah, even if the margical utility of Bezos's dollar drops to 0, I'd rather he keeps it.
Consider the possibility that the general social good that will come from a million dollars in the hands of Jeff Bezos might exceed that which will come from a bunch of individuals struggling with unpaid debt.
After all, there is such a thing as the wise and foolish use of capital, and without knowing anything further, it would be not unreasonable to assume that Bezos spends his money more wisely than J. Random Struggling With Debt. There's a good chance that's why Bezos is rich and Mr. Debt poor, after all (allowing that weird exceptions like extreme good or bad luck do sometimes happen).
To take an extreme example, if Bezos would invest that million in a start-up working on a drug for Alzheimer's, which succeeds, that would have immense social value. And if all 100 (say) of the recipients of Bezos's money, were he to donate that million, were to spend it all on Thunderbird and playing Lotto until they were quickly broke again -- then we can easily see it's better, even on social grounds, even on the grounds of maximizing group utility, for the money to stay in Bezos's hands.
That's an extreme example, but there's no a priori reason to think the general principle is obviously unsound, so it's by no means obvious that social utility is maximized by transferring money from he who has a diminished *personal* (consumption) utility to he who has an enhanced personal utility. I mean, unless the pleasure of consumption is the *only* measure one is going to make of social utility, which seems....cramped.
If you make the scenario maximally convenient for the supposition that the money might have more utility in the hands of a rich person, and maximally inconvenient for the supposition that it might have more utility in the hands of a poor person, then it's not surprising if you find that the money has more utility in the hands of a rich person in that situation. I could also perfectly well come up with situations where a country would be better off if the head of state were a stupid person who didn't know anything about political administration than a smart person who's knowledgeable about political administration. Would you then agree that, although I deliberately picked extreme examples, there's no a priori reason to think that the general principle that it's not better for heads of state to be intelligent and politically knowledgeable than unintelligent and politically ignorant is unsound?
The point of my picking an extreme example was to point out that it's not at all implausible -- which tells you where the general trend lies. If you can pick out an example *that is equally plausible* by which the money is better off in the hands of J. Random Debtor than someone who has succeeded in life and in business, go ahead. Then your equivalence will not be specious.
So, if I understand this correctly, you're conceptualizing charity as some kind of video game , playing the game alone whenever you feel like it with no strings attached is fun, but playing it on multiplayer sucks all the fun out of it and makes it too competitive and demanding.
That's... Not How Ethics Work. There is a reason they're called Moral *Obligations*.
I don't really get your analogy. Giving shit away for my self-satisfaction is a, let's say, "sin" I indulges from time to time, and like most sin, it's fun in moderation, absolutely destructive when addicted to it.
I also don't see the point of labelling as "moral obligation" something I'm not, in fact, obligated to do in any way.
Your "sin" way of thinking about charity does closely resemble my video game analogy : the sin is the game, indulging in it in moderation is playing the game on single-player in a chill way, being addicted to the sin is playing the game on multiplayer in an addictive and resource-consuming way. It's a mapping, but not a stretching one.
>I also don't see the point of labelling as "moral obligation" something I'm not, in fact, obligated to do in any way.
But, you see, there is no point to talking about being "obligated" without specifying the framework for obligation, or - if you will -, a theory of What We Owe Each Other. I technically don't owe you anything, not even leaving you and\or your property safe and inviolable. I'm not *obligated*, by any obvious mechanism that can make me, to not take your shit or enslave you. You can make me by using the Laws of Physics, which is the ultimate authority all of the universe answers to and all other obligations eventually has to be translated to, but those Laws seem to be neutral, I can equally well use them against you as you against me.
One way of solving the above conundrum is playing it out till one of us lose, potentially a life. Another way is getting as far from each other as possible in an environment full of more low-risk/high-return targets for our desires than each other, such as deep space. Both of those solutions have pros and cons, I personally prefer the second, but they are often impractical for several reasons. A third way is for us to agree on a joint framework that specifies what each one of us owes the other, in a way that (hopefully) require little or no violence to enforce and keep.
This framework is ever-changing and sometimes unfair to some parties (which is why I prefer the second impractical solution of us leaving others alone and them leaving us in deep space, but alas, it can't be done yet), imagine buying a bunch of blacks to serve you and your farm lands in the 1850s only to be forced to give them away barely a decade after. I don't say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, taking slaves away from slave-owners who bought them out of legitimate money is really unfair, especially when no one told them to not buy slaves before they did and everybody was buying slaves around them. But, the joint framework has to accommodate the blacks, and so we must commit to this unfairness.
All of those words summarized : Ethical Obligations exist, and they compel you to do far more than you currently think. If you think they're unfair, well fair point, but they are also sometimes unfair in your favor as well. If you don't follow them when they work in others' favors, why should others (who very much can harm you and take your shit) follow them when they work in yours ?
What if I told you I don't believe in moral obligations?
OK, I believe you're morally obliged to do things that you have explicitly agreed to do -- if you make a deal with someone then you're obliged to hold up your end of it. But I don't believe you have any moral obligations to random strangers simply by virtue of having been born on the same planet and of the same species.
If you pass a drowning child, you are not morally obliged to save it. It's a very good thing to save it, and I reserve the right to criticise you if you don't, but you're not obliged to.
If you say you _are_ morally obliged to save the drowning child, then it follows by arguments presented earlier, that you're obliged to save millions of others who need help. And you can't possibly save them all. And it's unreasonable to tell people that they're obliged to do things that they can't possibly do. Therefore you're not obliged to save anyone.
One... interesting (to use a polite word) consequence of your views is that all crimes are morally A-OK. I have never explicitely agreed, in spoken or written words, to not steal, to not kill, to not rape. I live in a city of 20 million inhabitant, what do I owe all those random strangers ? according to you, nothing. Why shouldn't I rape a woman just because I happened to be born in the same "country", an even more fictional and arbitary entity than "Planet" or "Species" ?
Maybe you will say something like that rape or murder or theft is forbidden by my country's law, and that I explicitly agreed to that law whenever I sign any government paper work ? I would disagree because that's not how "explicitly" work, but you know what ? I can simply kill and rape people from other countries. There, I don't have any obligations towards *those* randos right ? including the obligation not to kill or rape them.
You think this is a self-consistent way to live through life ? Do you want to live according to it ? Do you want *me* to live according to it in close proximity as you ?
>you're obliged to save millions of others who need help
Chad-Yes.jpeg
>it's unreasonable to tell people that they're obliged to do things that they can't possibly do.
Which is why all humans are morally guilty of any terrible thing they could have changed but didn't. Seriously, that's the far simpler method of confronting the horribleness of life, just accept that you're a flawed being who's commiting thousands or millions of crimes each day by inaction and move on, trying to fix what you can. This is, while not trivial, is far more defensible and self-consistent thing to do than your "Akshually moral obligations are not a thing unless I agree to them".
Oh, it's not fair to be guilty without doing anything ? But nothing is fair. A person who worked as an atlantic ship's cook in 1750 is a profoundly guilty human, merely because they cooked food for slavers. Is that fair ? no, is the solution to declare slavery ok because nobody actually agreed to not enslave africans (including modern people) ? no.
I think this is semantics; I was talking about positive obligations (the obligation to do something) rather than negative obligations (the obligation not to do something). Obviously I believe that there are things you should _not_ do, I wouldn't use the word "obligation" here but you can if you like.
Here's a fun question: by your standards, is a slave who chooses to have children, knowing that they too will be born into slavery, profoundly guilty?
If your moral system finds caring about your "outgroup" to be repugnant, are you generous towards your in-group?
I think it's fair to say that if you're morally opposed to caring about strangers you're not going to like EA.
Haha I think the favorite excuse I've used to not give to charity has been:
Q: "If I give now, while I'm relatively poor myself, then I'll basically be giving hardly any money away at all/ helping hardly anyone! But if I just focus on myself *for now* and try to get rich, then really help people AFTER I've accumulated a large amount of capital, then I could help those in need so much MORE!!!
A: But you're obviously never going to get rich so this is just an excuse to do nothing. Also, if everyone assumed that fame and fortune were prerequisites for doing anything "truly good", then our world would be a pretty selfish/ lonely place. Oh wait...
So yeah, what I mean to say is that your arguments are basically just rock solid, and I feel pretty called out. It's so much easier to "wish that we did more to help the poor" when this means "someone else doing something that I tell them to do down the road when I'm dictator" rather than "me parting with a chunk of my paycheck right now."
Well, the general assumption is that well-directed charity has a "social compounding" aspect. e.g. if you donate $30 to buy a malaria net some sickly Sudanese 2-year-old doesn't get malaria and die, and then grows up to invent a cure for cancer or at least become a sainted leader that transforms Sudan into a peaceful prosperous democracy.
I mean, people are generally pretty negative about charitable giving that has *no* compounding, only some immediate effect, like you give $100 to the street person and he buys himself a nice dinner for $25 and spends the rest on a fresh supply of meth, so that your donation has only a short-lived temporary effect. People hate that. So they usually assume there's a fair amount of social "compounding" going on (the bum buys himself a nice dinner for $25, a shower for $5, and a used but clean suit for $60, and with that he gets a job, sticks with it, moves into an apartment...invents a cure for cancer...).
Yeah, I'm very familiar with these compounding arguments, because I've used them :). And I mean, I don't think they're all wrong. In general, I really don't think we should all feel obligated to save the world anyways. Unless we're super rich and powerful, then we should. But I do think we should feel obligated to do *something* "good" now, rather than just focusing on accumulating wealth and power so we can eventually do good. But I don't think that good needs to be something grandiose or even in the realm of charities/ "altruism." I think we should just all treat each other better/ be more kind and thoughtful. I think we should try to have honest careers that at the very least don't make the world worse. And if, within our tiny spheres of influence, we're giving back rather than being parasitic, I think that's probably enough to make us decent human beings. Giving ten percent might be a bonus, but first off I think we should just try to not be parasites. If we achieve that, we're already pretty awesome.
If you're very early in your career and you expect to make a lot more money later (even if you don't "get rich") then it probably does make more sense to focus on how you can optimize your career than on donating right now. I agree you should do *something* good now, not least because it will help you get in the habit.
That's completely reasonable. It's a lot easier to be broke and to say "hey, people with money should be giving more, I just happen to not have any" than to actually build a successful career. And building a successful career that's honest/ positive could be seen in some ways as a "good deed" in and of itself as well, there are more ways to do good in this world than dishing up soup for the homeless. I think "different stages of life" fits into all this somehow as well.
If it helps, I did that. Waited a long time before donating more than trivial amounts, realized I'm actually in a life moment where I have extra cash, made a sizeable donation to a charity I considered effective.
Now I'm back in no-donate mode, but I'm somewhat more chill because I know that next time I have considerable extra funds, I'll most likely do it again. Which btw is one of the best reasons to donate regularly regardless of income - it's building a habit.
Why don't I do it? Because I just don't like donating - the act itself. I'm selfish and stingy and it doesn't feel good to give my money to anything other than possibly causes I feel something about. This is a personality trait and has nothing to do with my goals and values, so making money and donating more occasionally suits me just fine.
Whoever your friends are who are telling you not to post this spicy essay, you should know that they are being very unaltruistic. They have had the chance to behold it in all its glory, and are refusing to share that same transcendence with the world.
Put those friends aside. Listen to your soul. You want to post it.
It’s what the world needs.
It’s what the people demand.
+1.
I come here exactly for this kind of writing.
And if that's too-spicy-for-real-life... I dunno... I think we should then pray for an x-risk to kill us all and let nature rebuild with something better than us.
Ask someone who can take the reputational hit (a Joe Rogan-like figure) - to post it under their name and see what happens. Link to it...with a comment like, "Man, I wish I could have written something so spicy like this!"
What was that, about utilitarism or, basically, any logical system/philosophy leading to absurd conclusions if it was taken to extremes/if you were looking for edge cases?
There are many ways kidney donation become problematic if all people would be required to donate their kidney to random strangers. If donated kidneys are cheap, we *would* get stuck in an inadequate equilibrium where there is less effort to come up with a better, permanent solution (such as, replacement kidney grown from patient's own cells that don't require immunological medication nor deprive anyone of their spare kidney). Like we have become stuck with everything that we have cheap availability of.
Some limited amount of philanthropists donating money or their kidney's to random strangers -- and a bit more donating to their close relatives -- probably isn't too problematic. An universal rule would be.
One could defend oneself saying that one isn't suggesting it to everyone, but it doesn't apply here: your Q/A is targeted at generic you, that is, the public at large, that is, everyone.
Q: "Well, if hypothetically, every human being got together to cure all the world's ills, the marginal value of charity would decline to zero!"
A: "Cool, I would love to teleport to this imaginary universe you are talking about! Over in this one I just donated ~10% of my net worth after failing to altruistically donate a kidney (ruled out by the hospital due to previous kidney stones), while approximately 99.99% of the population failed to do the latter (situation unclear on the former). The situation seems highly resistant to change, too."
Once we are in the universe where we're all ants chasing each other's asses in endless charity, I promise we can have this discussion. Hell, even once we get, I dunno, halfway there, we can start talking about slowing down. But here in the actual, real world, this is such a ridiculous criticism it belongs in the same category as Pascal's mugging.
I really don't understand this type of argument; it would be very obvious if we were getting anywhere near the point of absurdity
Signed, another failed kidney donator (they're (for good reasons) quite picky!)
I don't understand how your reply is related to my comment at all.
I literally can't understand how you can not understand this? Your comment appears very straightforwardly to be the Q. If you intended something completely different then you did not communicate this.
My argument was that donated kidney is suboptimal way to fix a broken kidney, but if donated kidneys become "cheap" by demanding everyone with healthy one to give it away for free citing ethical rules (or frankly, probably even demanding everyone to sell by going market rate, because some people are desperate), we are stuck in an inadequate equilibrium:
- sick people get subpar replacement technology and become immunologically compromised
- donators are worse off
- if donated kidneys are cheap, there is less investment in better technologies
I don't believe kidney donation is a step towards curing world's ills, except maybe in some very local context that wouldn't generalize. More over, the generalized solution would not be described as "everyone coming together" but more like "after a sizeable vocal minority comes together they can bully the rest of us" . (Both are all part of your Q but all assumptions on your part.)
As an another example, volunteer work can achieve some good locally. However, demanding that everyone should do volunteer work is effectively demanding an universal conscription. Such system can be grossly inefficient way of using affected individuals' time.
In general, universally enforced ethical demands to give valuable stuff for free are a form of subvention. This was to argue that all claims of form "people should do stuff" should come with an off-ramp if serious (I admit that conclusion I didn't write upfront).
Kidney donation isn’t an effective refutation of charity’s ineffectiveness. Physically weakening the most altruistic among us to strengthen the median needed kidney recipient has a very obvious utilitarian downside: kidney donation comes with many risks and the decrease in the donor’s overall life utility output that comes with it could very well outweigh the median kidney recipient’s gain in utility. In a model where overall societal progress is disproportionately driven by a small subset of individuals(a view that I think you endorse), it's just a matter of tweaking your model parameters until promotion of kidney donation is no longer a net gain in utilitarian terms.
On a less devil's-advocate note, this is my obligatory criticism of EA - they don't commit to the bit. Where's the utilitarian evaluation of the average gain in the Sub-Saraharan country that is receiving donations of bed nets in comparison to countries that aren't? Where's the EA research paper on the net effects of cash transfer to the poor on support ending up in the pockets of local warlords? Why isn't EA grappling with the fact that Sub-Saharan Africa is actively regressing in GDP development despite their attempts at helping alleviate poverty in those countries?
If you're gonna commit to utilitarian principles, then commit damn it! Don't stop at assuming that every human life is equally valuable just because it's morally unpalatable to consider otherwise, that defeats the entire purpose of utilitarianism! Clearly EA is comfortable being Utilitarian absolutists about their weird woo-woo stuff like AGI and longtermism, but they shy away from using the same logic on their more conventional pursuits.
What COVID? According to worldometers data, almost every sub-Saharan country other than South Africa (which is a weird case in many ways) has had less than 5000 COVID deaths total, in the past two years. That's noise on their typical mortality counts.
I had literally this objection the other day FROM AN ECONOMIST.
That's actually a good point. I would consider donating a kidney to a relative or a dear friend; but I would not donate a kidney to a random child in Africa or to some unspecified number of future humans. In other words, my kidney would be a personal gift, not systematic charity.
I don't agree with the viewpoint that organized charity always makes people worse off, but answering that with "what about kidneys" is IMO not going to be persuasive for people who do subscribe to this view.
We should be funding research into genetically modifying humans to grow multiple redundant kidneys which are easily detachable for donation.
We're already growing human-compatible kidneys in pigs, this seems like a neater solution https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01418-3
(unless of course you believe that pig lives should be treated as equivalent to human lives in which case... bad luck I guess?)
I'm signing up for an altruistic kidney donation, does that free me of my 10% cost obligation?
Technically, kidney donation is one of the standard examples where donations make recipients worse - having a heavily regulated but paid market for organs would be a hell of a lot better. Probably even paid organ harvesting from dead people would up the numbers by some factor.
With free donation only we keep wallowing in a local maxima of charity and serendipity.
Adding some TDT and coordination to fill the gap from the individual decision to the final outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.
Hi Scott, could we translate this essay into Portuguese for our EA Website? Here's something about our work (still a draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11lZZyewfCDiaSL8yGjYbu394bJQeq-_hDGYBsKPbNiw/edit?usp=sharing) Feel free to use my email.
My problem might be similar to this, or deeper: I don’t even know how to tell what’s right, what goals to work toward. Different people say different things about questions like whether to give aid to (potentially) dangerous people. That doesn’t mean there are no good forms of charity, it’s just that _I_ can’t be sure enough that any particular form won’t be bad. When (over a decade ago) I asked questions about François-René Rideau’s post “Why indiscriminate charity is immoral” (https://fare.livejournal.com/104397.html), he said “Giving without discrimination is worse than not giving”.
He also said “Regarding stem-cell donations to anonymous recipient, I think it's a great idea […]”, and I hope his logic also applies to kidneys. But others might oppose giving kidneys to strangers, so much so that it’s not even possible where I live. Anyway, I hope the “human-compatible kidneys in pigs” that Melvin mentioned will make such questions irrelevant in a few years.
Just re-reading this as I ruminate on the FTX situation; this comment makes it seem like you probably missed KidneyGate, aka "this white woman donated a kidney and wanted her friends, who are women of color, to care about it, what a bitch". So for at least some types, kidney donation is problematic white-saviorism now
A: Are you donating 10% of your income to anti-charity?
I'm donating 100% of my income on my needs & goals, so...yes?
That’s not anti-charity. You should be devoting 10% of your income to efforts to subvert charity (e.g., politicians who want to revoke the 501(c)(3) status of churches) and remove/defund welfare programs. If you actually believe that charity and handouts are bad for people, then you have a corresponding moral obligation to work to stop the handouts.
Totally missing the framework here.
It isn’t his argument that handouts alone are bad. It’s that giving other people money, unless it’s for things you want, is on net just distorting the world and adding noise.
Not saying I agree but I can see where this comes from.
It appears though that his argument *is* that most handouts are bad because they are mostly targeting and advancing the causes of his outgroup and therefore things he does not want.
I don’t think there’s a way to reconcile this without discarding the idea of moral obligations, which really discards the idea of ethics at all.
Revoking the special tax-status of churches - and much more the defunding of all government "welfare"-programs plus a major part of other "welfarers" (red cross!, oxfam, greenpeace!, amnesty ...) - should be your aim in any case. As EA, cuz they are ineffective. As any kinda altruist., as their results are over all: usu. negative. As Uncle Scrooge - as your money is taken and no value produced. Even if you have a plush job at this misleading burners of charity-money. ( A good school-system might be an "investment", not welfare. The one you and we have is: sadism. The one Indian parents pay a few bucks for privately: affordable. Education ministry: "idi na chui!" - 24.8.2022 Slava Ukraina!)
I know it's not a democracy, but this gets my nomination for highlighted comment!
I found this hilarious and laughed really hard, for what it’s worth.
Basically everyone investing in a company exploiting humans or harming the environment is doing so. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a relevant overlap with people donating to charities.
Yea I'm not sure why rationalists struggle to see the abject failure of non profit incentive structure. The kidney example below is obviously not effective altruism - lots of people in kidney donation are responding to financial incentives! And you'd get even more kidney donors if financial compensation was allowed.
The real question is whether it's easier to fix the non profit complex or to fix capitalism where it's failing.
> The real question is whether it's easier to fix the non profit complex or to fix capitalism where it's failing.
I see it as the Profit/Non-Profit incentive structure, since there is an interplay between the two and they do not necessarily exist in a vacuum without the other.
Particularly true in healthcare, where a transition from non-profit to profit has resulted in a myriad of issues (from higher costs to decreased access to care). Others can note that the transition to profit has spurred even more advanced drug technology (e.g. in cancer care). Weighing these pros and cons is subjective, though the conversation tends to end at "is healthcare a human right?" If it is, a non-profit incentive structure is more aligned and a profit one is less aligned. However, since profit incentives have a stronger short term reward function and humans are humans, there would still be a degree of bias in favor of profit structures by a subset.
To wrap it up, there are some areas where non-profit structures could be more favorable (e.g. healthcare delivery) and others for profit structures (e.g. drug development), and they tend to coexist in a larger ecosystem together (e.g. healthcare). Despite whatever balance there is, I think there is an inherent bias towards responding to profit incentives even when non-profit may be preferable.
I have a tough time disentangling the immense role of the government in your healthcare & health science examples. Of course the government exists in every industry but healthcare is just overwhelmingly dictated by regulation to the point where the prices for identical goods and services can vary about 100's of %.
And this is going to sound like a nit pick but it honestly isn't: Non-Profit isn't the same thing as "Not for profit". I'm guessing your examples of high quality healthcare delivery are "not for profits", as in, they run a business that's generally cash flow neutral. Maybe you're thinking of Providence or Intermountain, both of whom have done really well. That business model is super duper distinctly different than a foundation which relies on donations to fund their activities rather than customers who willingly cough up money for the services they receive. The donation:customer earned revenue ratio matters a lot in how an organization behaves.
Markets are just really good at allocating resources, aligning incentives, and validating what consumers actually want. Non profits really struggle to do that and I've never seen a counterexample - though I'd be interested in hearing about one!
I would argue that "Effective Altruism" as a distinct entity only starts at maybe the "Cause Prioritizations" level of your tower of assumptions. The two layers below are shared by so many others -- ranging from for-profit insurance companies to government bureaucracies to religions -- that they can't be fairly claimed to be part of EA. "Cause Prioritizations" is also the level of the tower at which people start to raise serious objections to EA. That is not a coincidence.
If all you want is for people to do more from the lowest two levels of the tower, that's fine. But that is not EA, and claiming it is so is very close to a motte and bailey fallacy. People can donate 10% or do charity work in less developed countries because they are observant Christians or the government gives tax incentives or whatever without touching anything resembling EA at all.
If you want my spicy take on this, I think you added those lowest two levels purely as a defensive measure to protect EA. Why not add layers underneath? There are even more foundational assumptions like "Suffering exists", "Cause and effect exist and we have free will to affect it" or "We exist". These are also necessary. But you stopped there because the motte would be too obvious then.
Charities and charitable giving often don't go beyond the "we should help other people" bullet on the bottom. Seriously considering how much effort to put in, and actually thinking about the opportunity cost, is not common. Imagine asking almost anyone in your life detailed, probing questions about how much effort/resource they expend for other people, or tell them that St Jude, while good in isolation, is not a good recipient of their donations compared to other opportunities. Do they get mad?
You guys/gals crack me up. Why does everyone nowadays need a cause? Why do You all need a movement to feel self-important?
I live on $29 or $30K social security because I inherited enough money to buy a house. Since that time I've given the money I was spending on a condo to charity. That's about 20%. Actually, it's 20% this year because I'm cutting *back*.
This is nothing new. I've been giving 10% since I started making good money. When I wasn't making good money, I cut back. Then I inherited the money and went forward.
You guys and gals that live by "shoulds" are, unfortunately, rule by "shoulds." Do what You can and feel good about Yourself. No movement required.
"Do what you can and feel good about yourself" is a "should," jt, and you're advocating it on a public forum, pointing to yourself as an example. I'm not knocking what you do, which certainly seems good to me; I just think it's a little ironic that you chose to be snarky in describing it.
It's the prioritisation (or at least equal prioritisation) of people far away versus people close to you. And this intuitively doesn't feel right to a lot of people.
Which major religion does not have a version of what Christians call the Golden Rule? "Love thy neighbour as thyself" "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" What allows EA to claim this idea as theirs when it is so ancient and widespread?
Their idea (still not new) is that everyone is your neighbour to the same extent.
I'd say that it's not the idea itself that's particularly new, but it just recently became plausible that your donation of $5k (or whatever) can save a life in some African hellhole, but still dubious. The more radical idea is that saving 20 of those lives is obviously better than a donation of $100k to a museum/university/library/animal shelter near you, which people would likely agree with if asked directly but don't tend to think of on their own. Ironically, now that AI alignment non-profits are supposedly even higher priority than that, EA's potential appeal to normies is even less straightforward.