Most people approach morality like Patrick Bateman at dinner. It's about amassing the perfect littany of causes that they can "support" verbally such that it will give them social credit from the peer group they want to be respected by. For the overwhelming majority of college-educated young people, that's performative champaigne socialism. The best ROI imagineable for them is to give verbal support to a visual symbol which they believe will anger conservatives. It gives them a chance to play around with rhetoric, show off to their peers how noble and supportive they are of the currently accepted victim group of the day, and then go home to every dime of their material comfort. Kids in Africa dying of malaria don't matter to them, but *neither do gay people*. What matters is their aspired peer group and the social status they can gain within it.
I think theres a lot of important points here. From my perspective I think this crescendos in US political discussions surrounding world politics. For instance, in the US there is a massive pro-palestinian movement amongst young people that predominate college campuses and left leaning cities. While broadly I agree with these movements, their rethoric is interesting.
They decry genocide in Gaza with the emotion that genocide is an unacceptable reality that the US must do everything to stop or at the very least alleviate. But nothing is ever said about the genocides, civil wars, and famines in Africa, and it is simply because Sudan is not socially popular.
Similarly, there is conservitive rethoric within the US that when Trump was in office in 2016 that the world was at peace and Biden screwed that up--insofar as Russia had not invaded Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza crisis had not occurred. But even then there were massive wars and gang conflicts going on throughout the parts of the world that simply arent popular to talk about.
I think people think that effective altruism is some neurotic obsession with every dollar. That the guy who spends 30 bucks on a steam game should think himself a murderer for doing exactly thus. But I dont think this is or should be the case. The human life is an organic unity and as St. Paul says we must weep with those who weep and rejoice with those rejoicing. As such, charitable vocation, where and how much we decide to donate our money, is just as much a vital part of the whole, in the unity of our lives, as where our kids will go to school, what career we pursue, etc.
We are born into systems and a world that perpetuates sin and suffering, it is an unhealthy egotism to think of ourselves its savior. We must all always be contrite that there is probably more we can do. We never stop growing in light of the cross. And we never stop being complicit. But this should not produce the apathy that is all too common about charity. For instance, in accordance with the Orthodox calendar for more than half the year I am vegan--the other half I am not. Psychologically those periods are difficult and I can feel the staunch difference and as such I do not commit to this diet, as of right now, the entire year around. I think the common mindset that pollutes our ability to help says that because I have not done it perfectly and preformed this every day or furthermore that I havent changed my career path and decided to become an activist, etc., etc., entails that thus I should not even think it is that important. If we cannot so it all why try in the first place? This is wrong and evil for it misses how much has been helped by even simply doing this, that if everyone preformed only this meager action, animals would be benefitted astronomically. This does not mean we ought not to look at the horizon and walk towards the more that we can preform but it does mean that peoples pessimism allows them to excuse themselves for refusing to take small steps because they, on their own, cannot leap.
We are born in a polluted lake and just because, alone we cannot remove trash from every inch of water, it does not mean that some creatures will not be saved by that which we can do. And just because we take some time away from weeping to rejoice with the rejoicing does not mean that we should abandon the weeping entirely. And who knows they may be helped just as much by our joy as they are by our aid.
This is a great article and its unfortunate to think that cultural mindsets even at such a sophisticated institution can miss the point entirely.
I dont know if even this is the case. We may have heard other sources, but conservitives or pro-zionist liberals rarely care or know enough about Africa to even use it as a deflection. (I dont know if its your implication that Im doing that here. If so, I think that misses the point, which is about the social popularity of causes that are used as means to the end of securing social credit, rather than the intrinsic justice of the pro-palestinian cause.)
And even if it was, we can hold two ideas in our head at the same time and condemn multiple things, and advocate for multiple groups, with the same tounge.
You are wrong about the Sundanese issue. It’s become fairly popular online to say “why aren’t they protesting Sudan” or “Why are they protesting the only Jewish state and not Sudan”, by people who are otherwise - if their post history is examined just as unconcerned about Sudan - except as an argument to tu quoque. There is an element of fashionable leftism to some of the pro Palestinian campaign, but there are obvious reasons to protest American and western enablement of, and support of sales of arms to, Israel rather than, say, the UAE support of Sudan. The west is not the UAE.
The other problem here is assuming opposition to Israel is something that’s only fashionable amongst the progressive left, and not popular or centrist. America is an outlier here: Israel and the present campaign in particular are wildly unpopular worldwide and becoming more unpopular even in the US.
I never said that my problem was protesting the Sudanese state alongisde protesting the Israeli state. I merely said that there have been humanitarien crises in the region that should warrant our attention. It was merely an example at the end of a paragraph to illustrate the relative divergence in the way we treat issues.
For instance, a point I made, which you didnt bring up, was that its a common conservative talking point to say that during Trumps 2016 admin we had peace in the world. But this is a bias that only views silk road adjacent nations as relavent to our global analaysis. This was my overarching point about how the reasons political movements claim to be their motivators often are not actually the thing driving a large portion of their participants.
This has been my main point. And I think you may be identifying me perhaps with other ideaological opponents you have seen, but none of the points you have alleged that I made, I actually made in that post. Im not trying to deflect from Gaza or say that less attention is warranted on it because of other global issues. Nor am I even saying because I think the polity in America suffers, from as you aptly indicated, a culture of fashion rather than a culture of action, that therefore we should contuine the pro-palestinian protests or the broader movement therein. Merely my intention has simply been to imply that if for the right, politics is about power, for the left it is often about purity. And being ideaological pristine is prioritized over actual political efficacy. Compare the policy centric efficacy of the civil rights movement with the protests we have in our current age and I wonder how much of the advocacy is sincere when it seems to be so ineffective.
That is frustrating. However, I will say that even as a donor to the Shrimp Welfare Project myself, I think it was a mistake for your friend to nominate them. You need to have the situational awareness and theory of mind to understand that it’s just too weird sounding to the general public ie “normies” that it was inevitably going to be dead on arrival. They should have chosen a more conventional EA charity like you did.
I have had a weirdly large amount of success winning people over and getting them to give to shrimp welfare. But I agree that it wasn't super likely to succeed!
It is not practically feasible for me to treat every decision to spend money as having the moral weight of whether to kill someone (at a rate of $3000/life). A human being has a limited amount of bandwidth.
Now, I find it plausible that you do this calculation every time you spend a dollar (1/3000th of a life). I would not accuse you of lying if you claimed to do so! But you (analogously to the students deliberating on pride) seem to genuinely enjoy doing this kind of moral calculus.
For those that have other things to do, I don’t think it’s possible to function while doing a full moral calculation to any use of time or money. One would have to care about all lives much much less, as opposed to the current norm where one assigns more serious concern to people proximately affected by their decisions.
I am not willing to do that. If that makes me monstrous and beastly, I don’t particularly care.
Okay but come on! There's a difference between how to treat spending a dollar and how to treat spending thousands of dollars! I agree you shouldn't hyper stress about spending individual dollars, but you should think carefully before spending thousands of dollars!
Well, if every dollar is 1/3000th of a life, and you can spend $12 versus $18 on lunch, it seems like you are making a decision about 1/500th of a life.
Think about what that means! A human lives for about 1000 months. You’re essentially sacrificing two average or even youthful months (not necessarily end-of-life) of a person in the third world for the sake of satiating your desire for lunch. Two months of life are a big deal.
If you were told that someone would be thrown in jail without cause for two months if you bought the $18 lunch versus the $12 lunch, would you not “hyper stress” about it? Being killed is arguably worse than being thrown in jail!
But there is a big difference between saying that you should take seriously a single very momentous decision and saying you should take seriously each of a thousand decisions that add up to be momentous. Obviously!
Let's say that Bentham would recommend spending 1h on discussing and deciding how to spend the $3000-ish in charity (as he notes, it would probably not be worth it to discuss it for a full hour since you'll probably be arguing in circles, but still). That $6 difference in meal cost would be equivalent to 12 seconds of thought. I probably do in fact consider what to eat for longer than twelve seconds, and cost is part of that, so I'm probably already doing this.
Your argument is slightly different from his, but in any case should not result in "hyper stress." If we treat the dollars and lives saved and so forth in this way, then there's nothing to stress about at all - the decision is trivial! If my spending $18 instead of $12 resulted in somebody else getting thrown in jail for two months, it requires me no time at all for me to make the correct decision (don't get an innocent person thrown in jail).
> Let's say that Bentham would recommend spending 1h on discussing and deciding how to spend the $3000-ish in charity
Ok. I'll accept this.
> That $6 difference in meal cost would be equivalent to 12 seconds of thought.
Sure. since Matthew thinks that Shrimp welfare is at least 6,000 times more important than human charity, we're spending about one second to determine whether one should kill a human.
> I probably do in fact consider what to eat for longer than twelve seconds, and cost is part of that, so I'm probably already doing this.
You are not doing a moral calculus. You are doing a personal evaluation of what you want to eat and what's in your budget. You should spend an extra two seconds per dollar thinking about morality under this view.
> Your argument is slightly different from his, but in any case should not result in "hyper stress."
Well, you either accept that not spending $6 on charity condemns at least 12 humans worth of shrimp to a horrible death, or you don't. If you do the former, you should stress. Every decision you make literally determines whether an unimaginable amount of suffering to happen. If you don't stress or you don't care, then you are a "monstrous and beastly" person.
> If we treat the dollars and lives saved and so forth in this way, then there's nothing to stress about at all - the decision is trivial! If my spending $18 instead of $12 resulted in somebody else getting thrown in jail for two months, it requires me no time at all for me to make the correct decision
How much did you spend on lunch today? Seems like the decision isn't very "trivial." You just got huge numbers of Shrimp tortured to death.
Nope. Stressing out about things doesn't help anyone or anything, so there is no reason to stress. If I make bad decisions, stressing will just make me miserable; if I make good decisions, stressing won't make them any better. "Stressing" is for when you don't know what the right decision is, but again, it's trivially solved for questions like this. Obviously it's better to give to (a good, efficacious) charity than to not give to (a good, efficacious) charity.
Well, I have indulged myself over long in this tail. Long story short, human flesh is far superior to that of shrimp. There, I have said it, and may we all be the better for it.
While it is true that reports of cannibalism among the natives are greatly exaggerated, it would be wrong to suggest that tales of the practice amongst the Fore and Kurowai are entirely apocryphal, though the cartoonish images of natives dancing about large pots of missionaries should warrant little consideration. Nevertheless, one can find remnants of the practice amongst the somber mountain coves and noisome bayous, and mortuary practices involving totems of the departed are well documented, leading perhaps to cases of “the laughing sickness“ which has been attributed to consumption of prions contained in human flesh.
And yes, certainly the mosquitoes of those environments were obnoxious and noxious, particularly below certain elevations, where we were much obliged to hang curtains of netting each night, or in fact anytime we sought rest or relaxation. As the pests do not frequent higher elevations, much of the interior did not require such precautions. But I digress.
This most enlightened conversation has recalled my thoughts most forcefully to a previous sojourn, to a most remote location in Papua New Guinea. The native cultures therein comprise many habits, some greatly exaggerated in the public mind through the consumption of hyperbolic accounts manufactured by so-called journalists, anthropologists and other misanthropes, but there is certainly truth to the tales of “domestic consumption“ in which certain exemplars may perish for the good of the commons. As my own Ancestry lead naturally to certain in roads, I had determined in my youth to pursue such advantages that would allow me exposure to what I thought of the time would be a most enlightening and gratifying sequence of travel and experience.
"the woke tend only to be concerned about injustice when it falls neatly along social justice lines. Mere deaths from starvation, poverty, and disease are ignored." Social injustice is often at the heart of starvation, poverty, disease, and death. Also, I'm uncomfortable when white people co-opt the word "woke" to negatively describe liberal elites, etc. it's a word that is used by African Americans to describe systemic racism. Its also a blanket statement. I'm "woke" (not your meaning) and I care.
> Even if you are of the opinion that hanging up the gay flag is quite important, it is hard to imagine that it is more important than hanging up even one malaria net.
As someone who hasn't hung up a gay flag but has donated to countless malaria nets, I'm not sure that's true. Obviously the amount of money you ended up spending is much more important so I agree with the thrust of this post, but I'm not sure about this specific claim.
Right now trans-people are being actively targeted by powerful figures in the US, and their suicide numbers are really high. Things are little better for the rest of the queer community, but still not great.
A malaria bednet is (as you might know, but other commenters might not) a product that only lasts for about four years. Not every bednet will prevent someone from getting malaria, though they will in almost every case prevent someone from getting normal mosquito bites, which also counts for something. The flag will slightly decrease the risk of suicide, and sends a social signal that helps lessen queerphobia, which helps combat these horrible pieces of legislation. Obviously this is all very hard/impossible to measure, and I doubt anyone would claim the flag is more important than letting thousands of people sleep under malaria bednets (which the donation could cause), but for the specific claim of *one* it's a little bit more murky.
How come when *you* spent a hour discussing the hanging of a pride flag and no time at all discussing the allocation of funds, you just “failed to realise what was going on” because of “how quickly it all happened”, but the others in the room- who did *exactly* the same thing- were “unwilling to carefully deliberate” on something they “simply didn’t regard as important” compared to “trendy and in vogue” gestures that “do little more than signal”?
To your credit, you do still attribute yourself “considerable” (if “shielded”) moral blame. But the completely baseless difference between your perception of your own motivations and blame worthiness on one hand, and those of the others in the room on the other, is quite striking coming from someone who makes a living from their moral reasoning.
Though come to think of it, I'm probably *more* blameworthy because I have thought hard about the moral seriousness of charitable ineffectiveness. So really I'm likely the worst villain in this whole sordid affair (though my dispositions are more fortunate, even if they increase the blame I merit).
I think this is unduly harsh. Introducing and voting for shrimp welfare was pretty important. I am sure you will do more to campaign for it in the future when you have advance notice of decisions like this.
I was including myself among those who are blameworthy! Though presumably the people who would bear the most blame are those who were in charge of dictating how the meeting was run.
You're discovering why public action is a bad idea. If I spend my own money for myself, I will do a lot of due diligence and make a very well considered decision. If I spend the tax payers' money for other people, why should I care?
I wouldn’t be so quick to be down on the light touch approach. Do you think that prolonged deliberation would have significantly enhanced the quality of the group’s decision? Often it’s just as likely that the conversation gets derailed, acrimonious, etc.—then there wouldn’t be an allocation next year!
I think all charitable money is best spent on charities in your own community. Kids with malaria more important than a flag but what about donating money to families in your local community who don’t have food security, etc. or to a food shelter, or for a book drive or create a camp fund for local kids with disabilities, etc. That three thousand bucks will go further locally than by the time it is filtered down through charitable bureaucracy to get overseas. Maybe people were less engaged in the charity conversation because it was abstract and about money, not action. Maybe if you had been talking about sending money to local causes where they could also engage in action ( eg, volunteer), you might have had a more lively discussion about where the money should go. The flag conversation probably felt more tangible to them because it was more action oriented.
And shrimp welfare? 🙄
And what is all this “blameworthy “ talk? Such useless, wasted emotion/guilt. Not the right lesson to take from this experience.
I am not a rich philanthropist. By any stretch of the imagination. And there is a place for helping kids in Africa. But this post is talking about 3,000 pounds or dollars, and bemoaning the fact that people were more interested in the discussion about the flags. People feel more invested when help is more local/concrete and when they can take action. I was just answering the self-criticism and despair of the article.
People's typical response to things you think are grave moral concerns is complete lack of interest. Not merely that they don't find it in their interest, but that it just seems *uninteresting*. You seem to get enraged a lot over this. Perhaps that's preventing you from thinking about *why* this pattern occurs so consistently. Max Planck could have just constantly got enraged about the weird pattern of colors exhibited by metal cavities as you heated them up, inconsistent with classical thermodynamics. Instead, he tried to understand it:
Pretty strongly agree with everything here, but I’d like to offer a small defense of their actions anyway:
The value to be gained from the correct allocation of the charitable donation is not the full 2000 pounds, but the difference between the allocation that would be made carelessly and the one that would be made after deliberation.
Since I agree with you that the conservationist charities are likely very low in terms of the moral value produced/$, this still seems to show significant value in deliberation.
But likely the attendees don’t see it that way! They probably think those charities are high in value, after all they voted for them! If they view the difference in value between A and B as minimal it seems reasonable not to spend a lot of time deliberating between A and B.
So the issue may not be so much moral carelessness as moral confusion, in thinking that the conservationist charities provide significantly high moral value.
Of course _that confusion_ may itself be a result of moral carelessness in not examining the issue.
Most people approach morality like Patrick Bateman at dinner. It's about amassing the perfect littany of causes that they can "support" verbally such that it will give them social credit from the peer group they want to be respected by. For the overwhelming majority of college-educated young people, that's performative champaigne socialism. The best ROI imagineable for them is to give verbal support to a visual symbol which they believe will anger conservatives. It gives them a chance to play around with rhetoric, show off to their peers how noble and supportive they are of the currently accepted victim group of the day, and then go home to every dime of their material comfort. Kids in Africa dying of malaria don't matter to them, but *neither do gay people*. What matters is their aspired peer group and the social status they can gain within it.
I think theres a lot of important points here. From my perspective I think this crescendos in US political discussions surrounding world politics. For instance, in the US there is a massive pro-palestinian movement amongst young people that predominate college campuses and left leaning cities. While broadly I agree with these movements, their rethoric is interesting.
They decry genocide in Gaza with the emotion that genocide is an unacceptable reality that the US must do everything to stop or at the very least alleviate. But nothing is ever said about the genocides, civil wars, and famines in Africa, and it is simply because Sudan is not socially popular.
Similarly, there is conservitive rethoric within the US that when Trump was in office in 2016 that the world was at peace and Biden screwed that up--insofar as Russia had not invaded Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza crisis had not occurred. But even then there were massive wars and gang conflicts going on throughout the parts of the world that simply arent popular to talk about.
I think people think that effective altruism is some neurotic obsession with every dollar. That the guy who spends 30 bucks on a steam game should think himself a murderer for doing exactly thus. But I dont think this is or should be the case. The human life is an organic unity and as St. Paul says we must weep with those who weep and rejoice with those rejoicing. As such, charitable vocation, where and how much we decide to donate our money, is just as much a vital part of the whole, in the unity of our lives, as where our kids will go to school, what career we pursue, etc.
We are born into systems and a world that perpetuates sin and suffering, it is an unhealthy egotism to think of ourselves its savior. We must all always be contrite that there is probably more we can do. We never stop growing in light of the cross. And we never stop being complicit. But this should not produce the apathy that is all too common about charity. For instance, in accordance with the Orthodox calendar for more than half the year I am vegan--the other half I am not. Psychologically those periods are difficult and I can feel the staunch difference and as such I do not commit to this diet, as of right now, the entire year around. I think the common mindset that pollutes our ability to help says that because I have not done it perfectly and preformed this every day or furthermore that I havent changed my career path and decided to become an activist, etc., etc., entails that thus I should not even think it is that important. If we cannot so it all why try in the first place? This is wrong and evil for it misses how much has been helped by even simply doing this, that if everyone preformed only this meager action, animals would be benefitted astronomically. This does not mean we ought not to look at the horizon and walk towards the more that we can preform but it does mean that peoples pessimism allows them to excuse themselves for refusing to take small steps because they, on their own, cannot leap.
We are born in a polluted lake and just because, alone we cannot remove trash from every inch of water, it does not mean that some creatures will not be saved by that which we can do. And just because we take some time away from weeping to rejoice with the rejoicing does not mean that we should abandon the weeping entirely. And who knows they may be helped just as much by our joy as they are by our aid.
This is a great article and its unfortunate to think that cultural mindsets even at such a sophisticated institution can miss the point entirely.
> But nothing is ever said about the genocides, civil wars, and famines in Africa, and it is simply because Sudan is not socially popular.
So much so that the civil wars and famines in Africa are only used to deflect from Palestine.
I dont know if even this is the case. We may have heard other sources, but conservitives or pro-zionist liberals rarely care or know enough about Africa to even use it as a deflection. (I dont know if its your implication that Im doing that here. If so, I think that misses the point, which is about the social popularity of causes that are used as means to the end of securing social credit, rather than the intrinsic justice of the pro-palestinian cause.)
And even if it was, we can hold two ideas in our head at the same time and condemn multiple things, and advocate for multiple groups, with the same tounge.
You are wrong about the Sundanese issue. It’s become fairly popular online to say “why aren’t they protesting Sudan” or “Why are they protesting the only Jewish state and not Sudan”, by people who are otherwise - if their post history is examined just as unconcerned about Sudan - except as an argument to tu quoque. There is an element of fashionable leftism to some of the pro Palestinian campaign, but there are obvious reasons to protest American and western enablement of, and support of sales of arms to, Israel rather than, say, the UAE support of Sudan. The west is not the UAE.
The other problem here is assuming opposition to Israel is something that’s only fashionable amongst the progressive left, and not popular or centrist. America is an outlier here: Israel and the present campaign in particular are wildly unpopular worldwide and becoming more unpopular even in the US.
I agree. And I think you do too.
I never said that my problem was protesting the Sudanese state alongisde protesting the Israeli state. I merely said that there have been humanitarien crises in the region that should warrant our attention. It was merely an example at the end of a paragraph to illustrate the relative divergence in the way we treat issues.
For instance, a point I made, which you didnt bring up, was that its a common conservative talking point to say that during Trumps 2016 admin we had peace in the world. But this is a bias that only views silk road adjacent nations as relavent to our global analaysis. This was my overarching point about how the reasons political movements claim to be their motivators often are not actually the thing driving a large portion of their participants.
This has been my main point. And I think you may be identifying me perhaps with other ideaological opponents you have seen, but none of the points you have alleged that I made, I actually made in that post. Im not trying to deflect from Gaza or say that less attention is warranted on it because of other global issues. Nor am I even saying because I think the polity in America suffers, from as you aptly indicated, a culture of fashion rather than a culture of action, that therefore we should contuine the pro-palestinian protests or the broader movement therein. Merely my intention has simply been to imply that if for the right, politics is about power, for the left it is often about purity. And being ideaological pristine is prioritized over actual political efficacy. Compare the policy centric efficacy of the civil rights movement with the protests we have in our current age and I wonder how much of the advocacy is sincere when it seems to be so ineffective.
^^I said contuine when i meant to say condemn^^
Quoting a fiction book! Are you perhaps beginning to see English as a useful and fruitful pursuit?
No. I was but then I thought about your SEVERE case of sds (shrimp derangement syndrome) and concluded that English is a pox on the soul!
That is frustrating. However, I will say that even as a donor to the Shrimp Welfare Project myself, I think it was a mistake for your friend to nominate them. You need to have the situational awareness and theory of mind to understand that it’s just too weird sounding to the general public ie “normies” that it was inevitably going to be dead on arrival. They should have chosen a more conventional EA charity like you did.
I have had a weirdly large amount of success winning people over and getting them to give to shrimp welfare. But I agree that it wasn't super likely to succeed!
But I bet your success has mainly been with people who were already sympathetic to EA to begin with - those aren’t normies!
It is not practically feasible for me to treat every decision to spend money as having the moral weight of whether to kill someone (at a rate of $3000/life). A human being has a limited amount of bandwidth.
Now, I find it plausible that you do this calculation every time you spend a dollar (1/3000th of a life). I would not accuse you of lying if you claimed to do so! But you (analogously to the students deliberating on pride) seem to genuinely enjoy doing this kind of moral calculus.
For those that have other things to do, I don’t think it’s possible to function while doing a full moral calculation to any use of time or money. One would have to care about all lives much much less, as opposed to the current norm where one assigns more serious concern to people proximately affected by their decisions.
I am not willing to do that. If that makes me monstrous and beastly, I don’t particularly care.
Okay but come on! There's a difference between how to treat spending a dollar and how to treat spending thousands of dollars! I agree you shouldn't hyper stress about spending individual dollars, but you should think carefully before spending thousands of dollars!
Well, if every dollar is 1/3000th of a life, and you can spend $12 versus $18 on lunch, it seems like you are making a decision about 1/500th of a life.
Think about what that means! A human lives for about 1000 months. You’re essentially sacrificing two average or even youthful months (not necessarily end-of-life) of a person in the third world for the sake of satiating your desire for lunch. Two months of life are a big deal.
If you were told that someone would be thrown in jail without cause for two months if you bought the $18 lunch versus the $12 lunch, would you not “hyper stress” about it? Being killed is arguably worse than being thrown in jail!
But there is a big difference between saying that you should take seriously a single very momentous decision and saying you should take seriously each of a thousand decisions that add up to be momentous. Obviously!
Is throwing an innocent person in jail for two months a "momentous decision"?
Let's say that Bentham would recommend spending 1h on discussing and deciding how to spend the $3000-ish in charity (as he notes, it would probably not be worth it to discuss it for a full hour since you'll probably be arguing in circles, but still). That $6 difference in meal cost would be equivalent to 12 seconds of thought. I probably do in fact consider what to eat for longer than twelve seconds, and cost is part of that, so I'm probably already doing this.
Your argument is slightly different from his, but in any case should not result in "hyper stress." If we treat the dollars and lives saved and so forth in this way, then there's nothing to stress about at all - the decision is trivial! If my spending $18 instead of $12 resulted in somebody else getting thrown in jail for two months, it requires me no time at all for me to make the correct decision (don't get an innocent person thrown in jail).
> Let's say that Bentham would recommend spending 1h on discussing and deciding how to spend the $3000-ish in charity
Ok. I'll accept this.
> That $6 difference in meal cost would be equivalent to 12 seconds of thought.
Sure. since Matthew thinks that Shrimp welfare is at least 6,000 times more important than human charity, we're spending about one second to determine whether one should kill a human.
> I probably do in fact consider what to eat for longer than twelve seconds, and cost is part of that, so I'm probably already doing this.
You are not doing a moral calculus. You are doing a personal evaluation of what you want to eat and what's in your budget. You should spend an extra two seconds per dollar thinking about morality under this view.
> Your argument is slightly different from his, but in any case should not result in "hyper stress."
Well, you either accept that not spending $6 on charity condemns at least 12 humans worth of shrimp to a horrible death, or you don't. If you do the former, you should stress. Every decision you make literally determines whether an unimaginable amount of suffering to happen. If you don't stress or you don't care, then you are a "monstrous and beastly" person.
> If we treat the dollars and lives saved and so forth in this way, then there's nothing to stress about at all - the decision is trivial! If my spending $18 instead of $12 resulted in somebody else getting thrown in jail for two months, it requires me no time at all for me to make the correct decision
How much did you spend on lunch today? Seems like the decision isn't very "trivial." You just got huge numbers of Shrimp tortured to death.
> If you do the former, you should stress.
Nope. Stressing out about things doesn't help anyone or anything, so there is no reason to stress. If I make bad decisions, stressing will just make me miserable; if I make good decisions, stressing won't make them any better. "Stressing" is for when you don't know what the right decision is, but again, it's trivially solved for questions like this. Obviously it's better to give to (a good, efficacious) charity than to not give to (a good, efficacious) charity.
Alright. If you don’t stress about important but supposedly easy decisions, then that’s fine. How much did you spend on lunch today?
Well, I have indulged myself over long in this tail. Long story short, human flesh is far superior to that of shrimp. There, I have said it, and may we all be the better for it.
Dinner at my house? Say about seven.
Alright. Message me the on substack PMs and I’ll be there by 7.
While it is true that reports of cannibalism among the natives are greatly exaggerated, it would be wrong to suggest that tales of the practice amongst the Fore and Kurowai are entirely apocryphal, though the cartoonish images of natives dancing about large pots of missionaries should warrant little consideration. Nevertheless, one can find remnants of the practice amongst the somber mountain coves and noisome bayous, and mortuary practices involving totems of the departed are well documented, leading perhaps to cases of “the laughing sickness“ which has been attributed to consumption of prions contained in human flesh.
And yes, certainly the mosquitoes of those environments were obnoxious and noxious, particularly below certain elevations, where we were much obliged to hang curtains of netting each night, or in fact anytime we sought rest or relaxation. As the pests do not frequent higher elevations, much of the interior did not require such precautions. But I digress.
This most enlightened conversation has recalled my thoughts most forcefully to a previous sojourn, to a most remote location in Papua New Guinea. The native cultures therein comprise many habits, some greatly exaggerated in the public mind through the consumption of hyperbolic accounts manufactured by so-called journalists, anthropologists and other misanthropes, but there is certainly truth to the tales of “domestic consumption“ in which certain exemplars may perish for the good of the commons. As my own Ancestry lead naturally to certain in roads, I had determined in my youth to pursue such advantages that would allow me exposure to what I thought of the time would be a most enlightening and gratifying sequence of travel and experience.
I hate shrimp.
The Is The Way
"the woke tend only to be concerned about injustice when it falls neatly along social justice lines. Mere deaths from starvation, poverty, and disease are ignored." Social injustice is often at the heart of starvation, poverty, disease, and death. Also, I'm uncomfortable when white people co-opt the word "woke" to negatively describe liberal elites, etc. it's a word that is used by African Americans to describe systemic racism. Its also a blanket statement. I'm "woke" (not your meaning) and I care.
> Even if you are of the opinion that hanging up the gay flag is quite important, it is hard to imagine that it is more important than hanging up even one malaria net.
As someone who hasn't hung up a gay flag but has donated to countless malaria nets, I'm not sure that's true. Obviously the amount of money you ended up spending is much more important so I agree with the thrust of this post, but I'm not sure about this specific claim.
Right now trans-people are being actively targeted by powerful figures in the US, and their suicide numbers are really high. Things are little better for the rest of the queer community, but still not great.
A malaria bednet is (as you might know, but other commenters might not) a product that only lasts for about four years. Not every bednet will prevent someone from getting malaria, though they will in almost every case prevent someone from getting normal mosquito bites, which also counts for something. The flag will slightly decrease the risk of suicide, and sends a social signal that helps lessen queerphobia, which helps combat these horrible pieces of legislation. Obviously this is all very hard/impossible to measure, and I doubt anyone would claim the flag is more important than letting thousands of people sleep under malaria bednets (which the donation could cause), but for the specific claim of *one* it's a little bit more murky.
Fundamental attribution error: the substack post
How come when *you* spent a hour discussing the hanging of a pride flag and no time at all discussing the allocation of funds, you just “failed to realise what was going on” because of “how quickly it all happened”, but the others in the room- who did *exactly* the same thing- were “unwilling to carefully deliberate” on something they “simply didn’t regard as important” compared to “trendy and in vogue” gestures that “do little more than signal”?
To your credit, you do still attribute yourself “considerable” (if “shielded”) moral blame. But the completely baseless difference between your perception of your own motivations and blame worthiness on one hand, and those of the others in the room on the other, is quite striking coming from someone who makes a living from their moral reasoning.
Though come to think of it, I'm probably *more* blameworthy because I have thought hard about the moral seriousness of charitable ineffectiveness. So really I'm likely the worst villain in this whole sordid affair (though my dispositions are more fortunate, even if they increase the blame I merit).
I think this is unduly harsh. Introducing and voting for shrimp welfare was pretty important. I am sure you will do more to campaign for it in the future when you have advance notice of decisions like this.
I was including myself among those who are blameworthy! Though presumably the people who would bear the most blame are those who were in charge of dictating how the meeting was run.
You're discovering why public action is a bad idea. If I spend my own money for myself, I will do a lot of due diligence and make a very well considered decision. If I spend the tax payers' money for other people, why should I care?
That's certainly a pro tanto consideration!
I wouldn’t be so quick to be down on the light touch approach. Do you think that prolonged deliberation would have significantly enhanced the quality of the group’s decision? Often it’s just as likely that the conversation gets derailed, acrimonious, etc.—then there wouldn’t be an allocation next year!
My rule of thumb is: voting > meetings.
Why would you be in favor of hanging up a pride flag?
I think all charitable money is best spent on charities in your own community. Kids with malaria more important than a flag but what about donating money to families in your local community who don’t have food security, etc. or to a food shelter, or for a book drive or create a camp fund for local kids with disabilities, etc. That three thousand bucks will go further locally than by the time it is filtered down through charitable bureaucracy to get overseas. Maybe people were less engaged in the charity conversation because it was abstract and about money, not action. Maybe if you had been talking about sending money to local causes where they could also engage in action ( eg, volunteer), you might have had a more lively discussion about where the money should go. The flag conversation probably felt more tangible to them because it was more action oriented.
And shrimp welfare? 🙄
And what is all this “blameworthy “ talk? Such useless, wasted emotion/guilt. Not the right lesson to take from this experience.
You are deliberately missing my point.
local communities of rich people tend to be very rich in absolute terms, and their problems tend to be less solvable with money.
In contrast, kids with malaria tend not to come from communities with rich philanthropists in their midst.
I am not a rich philanthropist. By any stretch of the imagination. And there is a place for helping kids in Africa. But this post is talking about 3,000 pounds or dollars, and bemoaning the fact that people were more interested in the discussion about the flags. People feel more invested when help is more local/concrete and when they can take action. I was just answering the self-criticism and despair of the article.
You may or may not be rich, but Oxford certainly is!
Which conservation charities? Which college?
You behaved badly by not opting out to begin with. What were you thinking?
People's typical response to things you think are grave moral concerns is complete lack of interest. Not merely that they don't find it in their interest, but that it just seems *uninteresting*. You seem to get enraged a lot over this. Perhaps that's preventing you from thinking about *why* this pattern occurs so consistently. Max Planck could have just constantly got enraged about the weird pattern of colors exhibited by metal cavities as you heated them up, inconsistent with classical thermodynamics. Instead, he tried to understand it:
https://ricksint.substack.com/p/renormalizable-morality
Pretty strongly agree with everything here, but I’d like to offer a small defense of their actions anyway:
The value to be gained from the correct allocation of the charitable donation is not the full 2000 pounds, but the difference between the allocation that would be made carelessly and the one that would be made after deliberation.
Since I agree with you that the conservationist charities are likely very low in terms of the moral value produced/$, this still seems to show significant value in deliberation.
But likely the attendees don’t see it that way! They probably think those charities are high in value, after all they voted for them! If they view the difference in value between A and B as minimal it seems reasonable not to spend a lot of time deliberating between A and B.
So the issue may not be so much moral carelessness as moral confusion, in thinking that the conservationist charities provide significantly high moral value.
Of course _that confusion_ may itself be a result of moral carelessness in not examining the issue.