There are people who would be moved to act if they understood the suffering of others, people who would not be, and there are people who actually take pleasure in seeing and even causing suffering. Finally, and most oddly, there are people who have accepted racial, political, or philosophical dogmas that cause them to actively fight aid for others.
It has been essential to the success of humankind that each of us focus greater attention on those nearest to us, to family, to neighbor, to community, etc.. Where the moral dillema becomes obvious, I think, is when a person has all the wealth they could possibly need to minimize their suffering and the suffering of those close to them and they choose to convert every additional increment of wealth into indulgence.
You theorized about the English professor justifying the evils committed on the people of Russia and the Soviet Union for the supposed greater good, but just last year, we had the wealthiest man in the world, in the employ of another billionaire, end the vast majority of programs operated by USAID. The decline in health and the present and future loss of life that has resulted is rarely discussed, but even the lowest estimates are devastating. I tend to think the first of these two men was motivated by wrongheaded racial and political ideas, while the man who employed him was motivated by cruelty and selfishness. Neither would be moved were they more proximate to the suffering.
At least some of the fault lies with left of center media and leftist activists who demonized the GW Bush GOP which created PEPFAR and radicalized the base into voting for Trump.
In the Bush years, mainstream media used to raise PEPFAR mainly to highlight funding of abstinence or homophobic messaging. There was little coverage of its overall mission or impact: that just didn't fit into libs' picture of racist greedy republicans and an administration which bombed Arab children for oil.
Has the tendency to focus on people close to use been essential to humankind? I mean, obviously there have often been practical logistical reasons for things like that (e.g., high transport costs eating up the potential of aid being sent over long distances, in the days where horse-and-cart was the best land transportation).
But I tend to think of ancient China and the way a dynasty would start out strong, but slowly the government would lose its ability to do anything as government officials would start looking at that money meant for national defense or whatever and saying, "I could use this to help my clan instead." I would not generally consider that kind of thing essential to the progress of humankind. Rather, more of roadblock.
"Most of all, the future isn't pretend. The people who might exist in the future... will all be real people like you or I or your friends."
I'm struck by the elision between "might" and "will" here.
Yes, people in the future *will be* real, if and when they actually come into being. But for now, they exist solely as hypotheticals, and the farther in the future we try to look, the more hypothetical they become. You're basically asking me to place the same moral value on real people I know and care about and *figments of your imagination.*
BB refers to "numbers too enormous to fathom—10^58, according to some estimates." Yes, that number includes the children and grandchildren of people now living, but it mostly consists of hypothetical entities so far removed from us in time that we can say little or nothing about their culture, values, or whether they will still be recognizably human.
I'm guessing I mostly agree with you, but could you clarify where you stand between future people having the same moral value as living people you care about and future people having no moral value at all? Take it from your own perspective, starting with your closest circle and similarly think about the next people born to those people, etc..
I think of a kind of moral sphere, with the nearer proximity in time and relationship being the most morally relevant to a person, and the size of a person's moral sphere increasing as they have the resources to take care of the more proximate needs. I perceive my moral sphere going well beyond my friends, family and neighbors and also a half dozen generations into the future but not back to anyone deceased. Others might feel a responsibility to their ancestors or to protect the "family name", but I don't.
It's probably clearest to think of it as an informational issue. In order to have a meaningful discussion of my moral obligations to someone, I have to be able to have some sense of who they are: what they need, what they want, and what tools exist to get them those things. In the case of future people, I think we can project well enough to have a reasonable debate about the next generation or two, though even in that time frame, there are likely to be cultural and technological curve balls that change the moral calculus.
But beyond a time horizon of 50-100 years, I don't think I can know enough to usefully make it my problem.
BB, meanwhile, is confidently projecting much farther ahead -- his 10^58 figure is based on a fantastical scenario involving sentient AI, intergalactic colonization, and the harnessing of all available energy and matter in the visible universe over what I presume would be billions of years.
Arable land, drinkable water, surviveable temperatures and breathable air will come in handy for at least five-hundred to 1000 years and that is enough for me to invest at least some of my "indulgence" money in those future people and those particular needs. Yes, there will continue to be incremental progress and even breakthroughs that make the most of what we have and increase our ability to clean and reuse, but we are already seeing a lot of death and disease due to our anthropogenic damage to the big four.
I also think the ability to pass on wealth over generations, which has only become easier in the United States, means that future generations will be less motivated by potential economic mobility (mobility both up and down will be less). I also invest in reducing wealth concentration.
Claude helped me with some math on the incomprehensibility of BB's future lives number, 10^58. You articulated this well already, but it is fun to consider the numbers. Since the planet can only sustain about 16B people at once and 10^58 new human births means 10^56 people simultaneously alive (assuming current rates of increase of population and lifespan that whole time), that "currently living" population alone will drive massive human relocation. Just the volume of the bodies of those 10^56 people would be about 10^33 x the physical volume of the planet itself. BB's 10^58 requires almost the entire population of humanity to be living in space or other planets, a real trick considering finite resources of earth and the incredible distances to other planets. But I'm thinking the population will level off (as most people expect) and life expectancy will not continue to extend at the same rate. That means fewer people living, but the planet will sustain them much longer. Even if we match the population to the earth's sustainable resources, we will have to get out of dodge before 10^9 years, due to the sun being bigger, brighter, and hotter. Just the brightness alone will boil the oceans.
I agree it's a safe bet that, e.g., drinkable water will remain a necessity for quite some time. Let's suppose I decide to make that my cause, and set up an NGO specifically dedicated to helping provide clean water to as many people as possible. Founding such an organization is relatively straightforward. But making it robust enough to insure that it will continue to make a positive difference in the far future would be extremely difficult. Such an organization would have many points of failure -- funding, management, internal and external politics -- and even if it somehow survived for a thousand years, it would likely morph into something very different than what I imagined. It might even be perverted into a source of problems.
It doesn't follow from this that you shouldn't try, I just think our ability to intelligently affect the future is inherently limited. Probably the most reliable way to create lasting change would be through technology -- invent something that will either continue to be useful for a long time or will create a stepping stone to further technological developments. But a technology that fits that bill will benefit the present and near future as well, and thus would be worth doing even if you didn't care at all about the far future.
Maybe we spend our lives defending animals, but we are still mostly numb to the sheer horror of what’s happening. Personally, I’ve been in this game for a considerable time (building communities, running fellowships, debating with lots of people) but it’s only recently that the 'seriousness' of the situation has started to hit me in a way that’s hard to shake.
When I first went vegan, I genuinely thought people just needed to see what I saw; an information deficit problem. Then, when I realized the psychological barriers and cognitive dissonance were much deeper, I pivoted to food engineering and the tech side. The logic was persuasive: why grow a whole sentient being when you can just grow the tissue? It seemed like a purely economic solve.
But I’ve had another major 'wake-up call' lately. Even if we achieve cost and taste competitive products, there are powerful arguments suggesting that this won't be enough to kill the industry. We’re up against a multi-billion dollar lobby and massive political power, backed by deep-seated cultural habits. This allows the industry to resist even the slightest improvement with everything they've got suggesting that they'll do whatever it takes to prevent their elimination.
As a result of all of this, the current trajectory seems terrifying: data suggest that as global income levels rise, people consume more animal products as a status symbol, not less and combined with a growing population, the total suffering is set to grow exponentially over the coming decades.
Even if we take a super optimistic view and assume this system ends in, let's say, fifty years, the sheer number of sentient beings enduring extreme torture in the interim is unfathomable, multiples of the most tragic events in human history. I honestly don’t know how such a staggering moral debt can ever be repaid and I simply can't accept it.
I feel that if we are to alter this historical trajectory and escape this deep-rooted moral catastrophe, we must push past our mental comfort zones and think more radically about our next steps. I’m curious about your perspective, is there anything that gives you hope?
Sincere question for you, are you aware of any better ethical strategy than earning to give?
When I think about topics like this, I find myself drawn into the negative utilitarianism basin.
When I think about the present, I'm convinced that suffering outweighs pleasure, and I'm also convinced that there's never been a time where that wasn't the case. I struggle to imagine a plausible future where this situation is resolved and the existense of sentience justifies itself in moral terms.
Suppose that factory farming was ended. Nature would still need to be handled which feels intractable. You'd practically have to assume aligned AGI to have any hope at all.
> If it was your child against a stranger’s money, rather than your money against a stranger’s child, favoring donation would be the most obvious thing in the world.
If morality requires you to consider familial relations between you and your children as having no extra importance compared to the suffering of soil nematodes, it seems like we have strong reasons not to care about morality.
All the assertions in this post about what one would believe if more directly confronted with suffering are false. We know this because large parts of this suffering are caused by human beings a few feet away from the sufferers, and they don't seem to be having a change of heart.
You're right that people can be a few feet away from someone and not grasp the intensity of their experience, even if they are visibly in pain. I don't think that's what this post was getting at though. It really is another thing to take the time to imagine what experiencing that suffering is like.
George Orwell reference in the 5th paragraph!
There are people who would be moved to act if they understood the suffering of others, people who would not be, and there are people who actually take pleasure in seeing and even causing suffering. Finally, and most oddly, there are people who have accepted racial, political, or philosophical dogmas that cause them to actively fight aid for others.
It has been essential to the success of humankind that each of us focus greater attention on those nearest to us, to family, to neighbor, to community, etc.. Where the moral dillema becomes obvious, I think, is when a person has all the wealth they could possibly need to minimize their suffering and the suffering of those close to them and they choose to convert every additional increment of wealth into indulgence.
You theorized about the English professor justifying the evils committed on the people of Russia and the Soviet Union for the supposed greater good, but just last year, we had the wealthiest man in the world, in the employ of another billionaire, end the vast majority of programs operated by USAID. The decline in health and the present and future loss of life that has resulted is rarely discussed, but even the lowest estimates are devastating. I tend to think the first of these two men was motivated by wrongheaded racial and political ideas, while the man who employed him was motivated by cruelty and selfishness. Neither would be moved were they more proximate to the suffering.
The (now frozen) USAID cut impact counter: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc
UCLA study of impact of USAID cuts: https://ph.ucla.edu/news-events/news/research-finds-more-14-million-preventable-deaths-2030-if-usaid-defunding
Lancet study: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext
At least some of the fault lies with left of center media and leftist activists who demonized the GW Bush GOP which created PEPFAR and radicalized the base into voting for Trump.
In the Bush years, mainstream media used to raise PEPFAR mainly to highlight funding of abstinence or homophobic messaging. There was little coverage of its overall mission or impact: that just didn't fit into libs' picture of racist greedy republicans and an administration which bombed Arab children for oil.
Has the tendency to focus on people close to use been essential to humankind? I mean, obviously there have often been practical logistical reasons for things like that (e.g., high transport costs eating up the potential of aid being sent over long distances, in the days where horse-and-cart was the best land transportation).
But I tend to think of ancient China and the way a dynasty would start out strong, but slowly the government would lose its ability to do anything as government officials would start looking at that money meant for national defense or whatever and saying, "I could use this to help my clan instead." I would not generally consider that kind of thing essential to the progress of humankind. Rather, more of roadblock.
"Most of all, the future isn't pretend. The people who might exist in the future... will all be real people like you or I or your friends."
I'm struck by the elision between "might" and "will" here.
Yes, people in the future *will be* real, if and when they actually come into being. But for now, they exist solely as hypotheticals, and the farther in the future we try to look, the more hypothetical they become. You're basically asking me to place the same moral value on real people I know and care about and *figments of your imagination.*
There is a lot of ground for compromise between "figments of the imagination" and "people who have not come into being yet".
Keep in mind that these future people are very likely to include the offspring of the people you know and care about.
BB refers to "numbers too enormous to fathom—10^58, according to some estimates." Yes, that number includes the children and grandchildren of people now living, but it mostly consists of hypothetical entities so far removed from us in time that we can say little or nothing about their culture, values, or whether they will still be recognizably human.
I'm guessing I mostly agree with you, but could you clarify where you stand between future people having the same moral value as living people you care about and future people having no moral value at all? Take it from your own perspective, starting with your closest circle and similarly think about the next people born to those people, etc..
I think of a kind of moral sphere, with the nearer proximity in time and relationship being the most morally relevant to a person, and the size of a person's moral sphere increasing as they have the resources to take care of the more proximate needs. I perceive my moral sphere going well beyond my friends, family and neighbors and also a half dozen generations into the future but not back to anyone deceased. Others might feel a responsibility to their ancestors or to protect the "family name", but I don't.
It's probably clearest to think of it as an informational issue. In order to have a meaningful discussion of my moral obligations to someone, I have to be able to have some sense of who they are: what they need, what they want, and what tools exist to get them those things. In the case of future people, I think we can project well enough to have a reasonable debate about the next generation or two, though even in that time frame, there are likely to be cultural and technological curve balls that change the moral calculus.
But beyond a time horizon of 50-100 years, I don't think I can know enough to usefully make it my problem.
BB, meanwhile, is confidently projecting much farther ahead -- his 10^58 figure is based on a fantastical scenario involving sentient AI, intergalactic colonization, and the harnessing of all available energy and matter in the visible universe over what I presume would be billions of years.
Arable land, drinkable water, surviveable temperatures and breathable air will come in handy for at least five-hundred to 1000 years and that is enough for me to invest at least some of my "indulgence" money in those future people and those particular needs. Yes, there will continue to be incremental progress and even breakthroughs that make the most of what we have and increase our ability to clean and reuse, but we are already seeing a lot of death and disease due to our anthropogenic damage to the big four.
I also think the ability to pass on wealth over generations, which has only become easier in the United States, means that future generations will be less motivated by potential economic mobility (mobility both up and down will be less). I also invest in reducing wealth concentration.
Claude helped me with some math on the incomprehensibility of BB's future lives number, 10^58. You articulated this well already, but it is fun to consider the numbers. Since the planet can only sustain about 16B people at once and 10^58 new human births means 10^56 people simultaneously alive (assuming current rates of increase of population and lifespan that whole time), that "currently living" population alone will drive massive human relocation. Just the volume of the bodies of those 10^56 people would be about 10^33 x the physical volume of the planet itself. BB's 10^58 requires almost the entire population of humanity to be living in space or other planets, a real trick considering finite resources of earth and the incredible distances to other planets. But I'm thinking the population will level off (as most people expect) and life expectancy will not continue to extend at the same rate. That means fewer people living, but the planet will sustain them much longer. Even if we match the population to the earth's sustainable resources, we will have to get out of dodge before 10^9 years, due to the sun being bigger, brighter, and hotter. Just the brightness alone will boil the oceans.
I agree it's a safe bet that, e.g., drinkable water will remain a necessity for quite some time. Let's suppose I decide to make that my cause, and set up an NGO specifically dedicated to helping provide clean water to as many people as possible. Founding such an organization is relatively straightforward. But making it robust enough to insure that it will continue to make a positive difference in the far future would be extremely difficult. Such an organization would have many points of failure -- funding, management, internal and external politics -- and even if it somehow survived for a thousand years, it would likely morph into something very different than what I imagined. It might even be perverted into a source of problems.
It doesn't follow from this that you shouldn't try, I just think our ability to intelligently affect the future is inherently limited. Probably the most reliable way to create lasting change would be through technology -- invent something that will either continue to be useful for a long time or will create a stepping stone to further technological developments. But a technology that fits that bill will benefit the present and near future as well, and thus would be worth doing even if you didn't care at all about the far future.
Maybe we spend our lives defending animals, but we are still mostly numb to the sheer horror of what’s happening. Personally, I’ve been in this game for a considerable time (building communities, running fellowships, debating with lots of people) but it’s only recently that the 'seriousness' of the situation has started to hit me in a way that’s hard to shake.
When I first went vegan, I genuinely thought people just needed to see what I saw; an information deficit problem. Then, when I realized the psychological barriers and cognitive dissonance were much deeper, I pivoted to food engineering and the tech side. The logic was persuasive: why grow a whole sentient being when you can just grow the tissue? It seemed like a purely economic solve.
But I’ve had another major 'wake-up call' lately. Even if we achieve cost and taste competitive products, there are powerful arguments suggesting that this won't be enough to kill the industry. We’re up against a multi-billion dollar lobby and massive political power, backed by deep-seated cultural habits. This allows the industry to resist even the slightest improvement with everything they've got suggesting that they'll do whatever it takes to prevent their elimination.
As a result of all of this, the current trajectory seems terrifying: data suggest that as global income levels rise, people consume more animal products as a status symbol, not less and combined with a growing population, the total suffering is set to grow exponentially over the coming decades.
Even if we take a super optimistic view and assume this system ends in, let's say, fifty years, the sheer number of sentient beings enduring extreme torture in the interim is unfathomable, multiples of the most tragic events in human history. I honestly don’t know how such a staggering moral debt can ever be repaid and I simply can't accept it.
I feel that if we are to alter this historical trajectory and escape this deep-rooted moral catastrophe, we must push past our mental comfort zones and think more radically about our next steps. I’m curious about your perspective, is there anything that gives you hope?
Sincere question for you, are you aware of any better ethical strategy than earning to give?
When I think about topics like this, I find myself drawn into the negative utilitarianism basin.
When I think about the present, I'm convinced that suffering outweighs pleasure, and I'm also convinced that there's never been a time where that wasn't the case. I struggle to imagine a plausible future where this situation is resolved and the existense of sentience justifies itself in moral terms.
Suppose that factory farming was ended. Nature would still need to be handled which feels intractable. You'd practically have to assume aligned AGI to have any hope at all.
Yes I think there are lots of very high impact career paths. I basically agree with 80,000 hours https://80000hours.org/career-guide/
why do you try to trigger my scupulosity with almost every single post? its already hard to live with ocd and you try to make it worse
Sorry :(
> If it was your child against a stranger’s money, rather than your money against a stranger’s child, favoring donation would be the most obvious thing in the world.
If morality requires you to consider familial relations between you and your children as having no extra importance compared to the suffering of soil nematodes, it seems like we have strong reasons not to care about morality.
All the assertions in this post about what one would believe if more directly confronted with suffering are false. We know this because large parts of this suffering are caused by human beings a few feet away from the sufferers, and they don't seem to be having a change of heart.
You're right that people can be a few feet away from someone and not grasp the intensity of their experience, even if they are visibly in pain. I don't think that's what this post was getting at though. It really is another thing to take the time to imagine what experiencing that suffering is like.