Contra Huemer on Utilitarianism Part 8
The extreme ethical importance of donating
“We live in a very morally weird world.”
William Macaskill.
Michael Huemer thinks that utilitarianism, much like the stereotypical Jewish or Asian parent, cares far too much about you being a doctor or a lawyer. Huemer argues the following “Consider two people, A and B. A is a professor who gives away 50% of his modest income to charity each year, thereby saving several lives each year. However, A is highly intelligent and could have chosen to be a rich lawyer (assume he would not have to do anything very bad to do this), in which case he could have donated an additional $100,000 to highly effective charities each year. According to GiveWell, this would save about another 50 lives a year.
B, on the other hand, is an incompetent, poor janitor who could not have earned any more money than he is earning. Due to his incompetence, he could not have given any more money to charity than he is giving. Also, B is a serial murderer who kills around 20 people every year for fun.
Which person is morally worse? According to utilitarianism, A is behaving vastly worse than B, because failing to save lives is just as wrong as actively killing, and B is only killing 20 people each year, while A is failing to save 50 people.”
In terms of which person is morally worse, I’d comfortably say that person B is morally worse. Judging people is different from judging actions. Utilitarianism holds that what fundamentally matters are consequences, and that actions are only valuable if they promote what fundamentally matters. Utilitarians and society broadly encouraging people to not be serial killers is morally more important than encouraging people to donate. Society would be worse if people could go on killing sprees but get off scot free based on donating money. Utilitarianism holds that we shouldn’t judge people merely based on the consequences of their actions. Hitler’s grandmother shouldn’t be deemed to be a terrible person, because it’s impossible to deter actions with bad consequences if those consequences are unpredictable. However, in terms of the question of which action is morally worse, the professor is worse.
One caveat is that being the professor may be conducive to overall utility if professors publish important information. If the professor encourages students and other philosophers to donate to give well, or has important research, that could be more important than merely being a lawyer who donates to givewell.
This judgement seems very counterintuitive (that was the point of Huemer’s thought experiments. Let’s consider a parallel case. Suppose that a person is making a choice of whether or not to both assault 50 people who would otherwise have died of malaria, and donate to givewell to save those 50 people. Maybe you think that the person should not take the conjunction of actions. This may seem intuitive at first, until you realize that all the people who will be assaulted by the person are made better off on net by having their lives saved. An action that’s better for literally everyone, such that all the “victims,” want it to happen surely isn’t bad. Well, this shows that assaulting 50 people is less bad than donating to Givewell to save 50 lives. Consider another case, for all of the people who would otherwise die of malaria, you can give them a drug that will kill 90% of them, but save the other 10%. In this case you should obviously give them the drug. All of them are made better off in expectation and in actuality, none of them are made worse off.
From this we learn that failing to donate to givewell to save 50 people is morally equivalent worse than causing a 90% chance of death for 50 people. Giving them a the drug has a 90% chance of killing them but a 10% chance of saving them—it would be functionally identical to donating to give-well to save 50 people and then giving a drug to all of them that kills 90% of them. So if giving them the medicine is good in the first case, failing to donate to givewell is seriously morally wrong. If it’s as morally wrong as killing 90% of 50 people, it’s certainly morally worse than killing 20 people, as the janitor does.
Maybe you think the relevant symmetry breaker is consent. Well, in the above case with saving people’s lives and then assaulting them, we can add an additional stipulation according to which the person is unconscious, so they don’t have the opportunity to consent. It still seems like it’s good to take the combined actions of giving the person medicine and then assaulting them.
Note, it would obviously be better to give them the medicine without assaulting them. We’re stipulating that, in this case, on can only do both or neither.
Another objection argument for the utilitarian conclusion can be made. Suppose that a Tim had two options of jobs. He could either work as a lawyer or a professor. However, he knows in advance that if he becomes a professor Hannibal will fill in for him as a lawyer. Tim knows that Hannibal will become a serial killer and kill 50 people per year if he becomes a lawyer. Surely it would be very morally bad for Tim to become a professor and let 50 people be horrendously killed by Hannibal. Taking an action that you know will cause a serial killer to murder 50 people makes the world worse. You shouldn’t do things that make the world worse.
Maybe you think that there’s a disanalogy between taking a job to prevent a serial killer from killing people and taking a job to prevent people from dying of malaria. There doesn’t seem to be any consistent way of parsing out the difference. In both cases you’re taking a job to save 50 lives. Surely deaths caused by serial killers don’t just automatically become more important than deaths from disease. If I died of cancer, I would be no worse off if that had happened because I was given lethal radiation doses by a serial killer.
Maybe you think this still sounds counterintuitive. A few things are worth noting.
1 As we’ve already seen, rights run into lots of paradoxes and impossibilities.
2 Presumably most people would accept that a world where 50 people are saved per year but 20 extra are killed is a better total world. Fewer people die. Well, if we accept that, then agreeing with Huemer’s intuition requires thinking that ethics sometimes demands that we make the world worse. That’s deeply counterintuitive.
3 The world is very counterintuitive. Our moral faculties evolved for facilitating cooperation while we were foraging the plains. Having the ability to save hundreds of people on the other side of the world doesn’t factor neatly into our moral calculus. It’s no surprise that our intuitions about it are systematically off track.
People care much more about things nearer to them. Even if they know on an intellectual level that donating lots of money to givewell saves lots of lives, it’s hard to really get, on an emotional level, that your donations save so many lives that each year you save enough lives to more than offset Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders.
I once read through stories of children who died of disease at a young age, to try to understand on an emotional level just how much good can be done by effective charities. When you realize that the people being saved by givewell are not just statistics—they are real people with names, parents that love them, and grieving family members, it becomes more clear that donating to givewell is very morally important. Morally important enough to overturn Huemer’s judgement.
While we’re here, it’s worth plugging effective charities.
Click here to donate generally to the top charities
Here’s a link to donate specifically to the most effective health charity, the malaria consortium.
https://www.malariaconsortium.org/sup... )
Here’s a link to donate to the most effective animal charities
https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/announcing-our-2021-charity-recommendations/
If you donate a few thousand dollars you will save a person’s life. Doing so would be great!