I had a professor explain it like this one time: if you get convinced by the "drowning child" argument and give away virtually all your money, that's great and you've helped some people, but you haven't made much of a dent in the problem. It would have made a much bigger impact if lots of people had donated. But people aren't going to give away everything they have. But if you give away 10% of your income and inspire others to do so, you'll have a much greater absolute impact on the problem. For a long time I thought that's what "effective altruism" was but I think that professor was referring to something else, maybe the "giving what we can" pledge.
This sounds like the basis of an interesting mathematical model. If you give away R proportion of your wealth, what is the probability distribution that you will inspire N other people to also give away a similar proportion of their wealth, and have this process repeat? You could then determine the optimal proportion of wealth to give away based on this.
I kind of like the scalar approach. More is better and that's all there is to say at a fundamental level.
It's useful to construct norms around "requirements" or "obligations" (which is perhaps what this article is doing), but they're nothing more than that.
I think morality requires you to never truly stop asking yourself that question and then give what your conscience, that you are always trying to better form, answers. If you don’t have a great answer, then 10% is indeed a great place to start. If that is burdensome, then give less and supplement it with your time/manpower. If that seems trivial, then give more. If you’re not sure if that amount is trivial, then it probably is :).
This is completely philosophically unsound. “Yeah, the drowning child argument means you have a moral obligation to give to charity but only to the extent that you feel comfortable” is not a rigorous argument. So there are all these drowning children around me. What’s my obligation? Do I have to save one every day? Every week? Every year? If you’re going to tell me I need to make this major sacrifice because it’s what morality requires, you need something better than vibes.
The problem here just shows the problem with the drowning argument in general. We only feel like we should save drowning children because it’s assumed to be a rare occurrence. If there were drowning children all around all the time, people wouldn’t have this intuition because the obligation would be too demanding. The drowning children argument is pretty much the only way you can even get this argument to have rhetorical effect. Trying to generalize it to distant strangers is absurd.
At the end of the day, you either accept the argument and understand the implication of an obligation to constantly being working for charity money and live a monk lifestyle or just realize the whole thing is absurd. Your position is incoherent.
This just seems like a Straussian response, IIRC Caplan in the Singer debate didn’t have a problem with describing people who give away almost everything as Saints, he was just reluctant to call those who who didn’t as acting immorally. But like from what I understand your view is giving to the point at which MB=MC, which might not be some nice percent or dollar amount, but nevertheless basically leaving you at subsistence as a first approximation.
In the case of obligations to your children, wouldn’t utilitarianism imply individuals making the choice to not have kids since it’s cheaper to induce extra humans via the AMF or something, like raising a child in a developed country seems pretty costly compared to making more somewhere else.
If "mere life", especially in the near term, is the metric of our utilitarian calculus eventually the entire planets population would be replaced by low IQ K-selected types.
Is the most effective way of helping people really giving away almost all of your money? (What does "money" mean, by the way? Wealth? Income? Savings? But regardless.)
How would venture capital exist in such a world (is a world with neither Google nor malaria really better than a world with both)? How would anyone have enough money to start a charitable foundation in such a world? How would we deal with the massive inflationary effect of all this new purchasing power that doesn't have enough supply to support it?
Does "giving away" imply redirecting the funds from infrastructure, trade, industry, etc.? In that case, where is the calculation showing which course of action maximizes utility in the long run?
Also, are two medium-length, immiserated lives really better than one really long, happy, healthy life and one really short, unhappy, unhealthy life? Is there a point of immiseration at which the balance tips?
A drowning child -- or an army of drowning children for that matter -- is a terribly impoverished analogy for discussing these complex issues.
Good article, but I majorly disagree with the "drowning child" argument:
"Whether a person is near to you just isn’t morally important."
Actually, it is the single most essential criteria, in my opinion. There is an overwhelming amount of evil and harm and bad in the world, and needs that are insatiable. Every minute/hour/etc, somewhere in the world, someone is raped, or beaten, or suffering disease, or pain, or hungry, or-or-or.
When confronted with that, the only logical response would be learned helplessness: I cannot even so much as move a cup of water from this damn ocean of suffering, so why bother?
The answer is in the nearness heuristic. Put plainly: All the rapes in the world are awful, but they are not my responsibility. What IS my responsibility is if I walk down the street and hear a woman screaming "rape". NOW it is my responsibility, my duty; it is actively "on my plate".
All the drowning children in the world are not my responsibility. It becomes my responsibility if one of those children is in fact drowning in front of me.
This is possibly not perfectly clean logically (you could make the case now that, with internet and mass media, we know of all the drowning children so they are all effectively "near"), but I think it is the only workable solution.
Tend to your own backyard, put your mask on before helping others, and rescue those whose appeals have come to you naturally.
All this comes down to "poor Africans are cheap to help." That's why it seems so overwhelming of a moral decision.
But why are Africans so poor? My answer to that is basically "genetics", and so no matter how much you help they are always going to be poor.
By contrast it would be really expensive for say a smart couple in the first world to have more children, but those children would probably go on to also be smart adults and have a large positive impact on the world long term.
You can insert a million other things you invest money on in the first world, all of which will be much more expensive, but also is way more likely to have a long term positive impact that overpopulating Africa.
1) The problem is you're a utilitarian universalist, so you really are saying that you have an absolute moral obligation to give away everything to save lives, even your kids Christmas present. You can't cafeteria utilitarian your way out of that logic.
2) Tithe 10% is a pretty old rule and doesn't require utilitarian philosophy.
3) You could go a step further in your utilitarianism and prioritize economic growth and eugenics, which would preclude wasting money saving Africans because it wasn't utilitarian.
The drowning child analogy is an intuition pump that infantilizes other humans. They’re not adults who could make their own way in the world. No, they’re drowning children.
I’ve asked this before and not gotten an answer. Why can’t they make their own bed nets?
I think there’s at least one conception of “right” and “wrong” that’s a social engineering question for a consequentialist, even if you’re a moral realist (like I am), and it’s tied to what an action says about someone’s character.
For example, it seems like when many people say a murderer is doing something more wrong than someone who fails to save someone, they aren’t actually advocating a *true* doing/allowing distinction. I think the source of this intuition for a lot of people is: there is some sense in which “not murdering someone” is easier than “not failing to save someone,” and hence it is deserving of more scorn as it is easier behavior to avoid, so we might as well have a stronger norm discouraging it. (Obviously, most deontologists accept a true doing/allowing distinction, but I’m not talking about them.)
Similarly, there’s some sense in which stealing someone’s things could be “more wrong” than meat eating, even if meat eating is objectively morally worse, because it requires less moral motivation to refrain from theft. There’s a similar sense in which a rich person donating $100 is less praiseworthy than a poor person doing the same thing.
I think in all these cases, if you’re a consequentialist with these intuitions, you aren’t actually pointing to the moral truth of the matter. Implicitly, you might be thinking of something like Scott Alexander’s “Economic Perspective on Moral Standards” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/16/the-economic-perspective-on-moral-standards/). I think we can judge acts as objectively right and wrong, but we can separately judge *people’s character* according to the acts that they do, and the question of what a person’s character should be judged as feels like a social engineering question. (Plus, even if there’s an objective sense in which a person’s character is good or bad, it seems like stealing might be a more reliable signal of “bad character” than eating meat, as the former requires less moral motivation to avoid.) And when it’s a social engineering question, we can decide our assessments based on what standards make people more likely to do good things.
I had a professor explain it like this one time: if you get convinced by the "drowning child" argument and give away virtually all your money, that's great and you've helped some people, but you haven't made much of a dent in the problem. It would have made a much bigger impact if lots of people had donated. But people aren't going to give away everything they have. But if you give away 10% of your income and inspire others to do so, you'll have a much greater absolute impact on the problem. For a long time I thought that's what "effective altruism" was but I think that professor was referring to something else, maybe the "giving what we can" pledge.
This sounds like the basis of an interesting mathematical model. If you give away R proportion of your wealth, what is the probability distribution that you will inspire N other people to also give away a similar proportion of their wealth, and have this process repeat? You could then determine the optimal proportion of wealth to give away based on this.
I kind of like the scalar approach. More is better and that's all there is to say at a fundamental level.
It's useful to construct norms around "requirements" or "obligations" (which is perhaps what this article is doing), but they're nothing more than that.
Help until it is almost detrimental to you and your responsibilities, then dial it back.
I think morality requires you to never truly stop asking yourself that question and then give what your conscience, that you are always trying to better form, answers. If you don’t have a great answer, then 10% is indeed a great place to start. If that is burdensome, then give less and supplement it with your time/manpower. If that seems trivial, then give more. If you’re not sure if that amount is trivial, then it probably is :).
This is completely philosophically unsound. “Yeah, the drowning child argument means you have a moral obligation to give to charity but only to the extent that you feel comfortable” is not a rigorous argument. So there are all these drowning children around me. What’s my obligation? Do I have to save one every day? Every week? Every year? If you’re going to tell me I need to make this major sacrifice because it’s what morality requires, you need something better than vibes.
The problem here just shows the problem with the drowning argument in general. We only feel like we should save drowning children because it’s assumed to be a rare occurrence. If there were drowning children all around all the time, people wouldn’t have this intuition because the obligation would be too demanding. The drowning children argument is pretty much the only way you can even get this argument to have rhetorical effect. Trying to generalize it to distant strangers is absurd.
At the end of the day, you either accept the argument and understand the implication of an obligation to constantly being working for charity money and live a monk lifestyle or just realize the whole thing is absurd. Your position is incoherent.
This just seems like a Straussian response, IIRC Caplan in the Singer debate didn’t have a problem with describing people who give away almost everything as Saints, he was just reluctant to call those who who didn’t as acting immorally. But like from what I understand your view is giving to the point at which MB=MC, which might not be some nice percent or dollar amount, but nevertheless basically leaving you at subsistence as a first approximation.
In the case of obligations to your children, wouldn’t utilitarianism imply individuals making the choice to not have kids since it’s cheaper to induce extra humans via the AMF or something, like raising a child in a developed country seems pretty costly compared to making more somewhere else.
I think certain moral norms--e.g. ones about obligations--are moral naturalist, and Straussian in that sense.
If "mere life", especially in the near term, is the metric of our utilitarian calculus eventually the entire planets population would be replaced by low IQ K-selected types.
Is the most effective way of helping people really giving away almost all of your money? (What does "money" mean, by the way? Wealth? Income? Savings? But regardless.)
How would venture capital exist in such a world (is a world with neither Google nor malaria really better than a world with both)? How would anyone have enough money to start a charitable foundation in such a world? How would we deal with the massive inflationary effect of all this new purchasing power that doesn't have enough supply to support it?
Does "giving away" imply redirecting the funds from infrastructure, trade, industry, etc.? In that case, where is the calculation showing which course of action maximizes utility in the long run?
Also, are two medium-length, immiserated lives really better than one really long, happy, healthy life and one really short, unhappy, unhealthy life? Is there a point of immiseration at which the balance tips?
A drowning child -- or an army of drowning children for that matter -- is a terribly impoverished analogy for discussing these complex issues.
Good article, but I majorly disagree with the "drowning child" argument:
"Whether a person is near to you just isn’t morally important."
Actually, it is the single most essential criteria, in my opinion. There is an overwhelming amount of evil and harm and bad in the world, and needs that are insatiable. Every minute/hour/etc, somewhere in the world, someone is raped, or beaten, or suffering disease, or pain, or hungry, or-or-or.
When confronted with that, the only logical response would be learned helplessness: I cannot even so much as move a cup of water from this damn ocean of suffering, so why bother?
The answer is in the nearness heuristic. Put plainly: All the rapes in the world are awful, but they are not my responsibility. What IS my responsibility is if I walk down the street and hear a woman screaming "rape". NOW it is my responsibility, my duty; it is actively "on my plate".
All the drowning children in the world are not my responsibility. It becomes my responsibility if one of those children is in fact drowning in front of me.
This is possibly not perfectly clean logically (you could make the case now that, with internet and mass media, we know of all the drowning children so they are all effectively "near"), but I think it is the only workable solution.
Tend to your own backyard, put your mask on before helping others, and rescue those whose appeals have come to you naturally.
"the only logical response would be learned helplessness"
No, the rational response is to do as much good as you can!
This seems to be more a point of ought implies can. But in cases of charitable giving, the idea is that it can help others.
All this comes down to "poor Africans are cheap to help." That's why it seems so overwhelming of a moral decision.
But why are Africans so poor? My answer to that is basically "genetics", and so no matter how much you help they are always going to be poor.
By contrast it would be really expensive for say a smart couple in the first world to have more children, but those children would probably go on to also be smart adults and have a large positive impact on the world long term.
You can insert a million other things you invest money on in the first world, all of which will be much more expensive, but also is way more likely to have a long term positive impact that overpopulating Africa.
1) The problem is you're a utilitarian universalist, so you really are saying that you have an absolute moral obligation to give away everything to save lives, even your kids Christmas present. You can't cafeteria utilitarian your way out of that logic.
2) Tithe 10% is a pretty old rule and doesn't require utilitarian philosophy.
3) You could go a step further in your utilitarianism and prioritize economic growth and eugenics, which would preclude wasting money saving Africans because it wasn't utilitarian.
The drowning child analogy is an intuition pump that infantilizes other humans. They’re not adults who could make their own way in the world. No, they’re drowning children.
I’ve asked this before and not gotten an answer. Why can’t they make their own bed nets?
I think there’s at least one conception of “right” and “wrong” that’s a social engineering question for a consequentialist, even if you’re a moral realist (like I am), and it’s tied to what an action says about someone’s character.
For example, it seems like when many people say a murderer is doing something more wrong than someone who fails to save someone, they aren’t actually advocating a *true* doing/allowing distinction. I think the source of this intuition for a lot of people is: there is some sense in which “not murdering someone” is easier than “not failing to save someone,” and hence it is deserving of more scorn as it is easier behavior to avoid, so we might as well have a stronger norm discouraging it. (Obviously, most deontologists accept a true doing/allowing distinction, but I’m not talking about them.)
Similarly, there’s some sense in which stealing someone’s things could be “more wrong” than meat eating, even if meat eating is objectively morally worse, because it requires less moral motivation to refrain from theft. There’s a similar sense in which a rich person donating $100 is less praiseworthy than a poor person doing the same thing.
I think in all these cases, if you’re a consequentialist with these intuitions, you aren’t actually pointing to the moral truth of the matter. Implicitly, you might be thinking of something like Scott Alexander’s “Economic Perspective on Moral Standards” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/16/the-economic-perspective-on-moral-standards/). I think we can judge acts as objectively right and wrong, but we can separately judge *people’s character* according to the acts that they do, and the question of what a person’s character should be judged as feels like a social engineering question. (Plus, even if there’s an objective sense in which a person’s character is good or bad, it seems like stealing might be a more reliable signal of “bad character” than eating meat, as the former requires less moral motivation to avoid.) And when it’s a social engineering question, we can decide our assessments based on what standards make people more likely to do good things.