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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   37034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris

Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

To be fair that's not what he said; at least not in that particular message. His parodying one position dosn't necessarily imply embracing the opposite.

Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism

We spend around 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid. Scott is not saying we should give infinite money to foreigners. He is saying we should give a modest amount of money to foreigners. You inferred the infinite part.*

I do not think right-wingers are at all reasoning clearly about this. Like, Scott made a tweet. It was, in fact, a funny tweet. That tweet was not primarily designed to be a political argument. It was designed to be a joke. A joke around a political argument, one related to his position, sure. But it's still a joke.

His twitter bio says:

I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.

He, in the comments, endorses claims that you should care about your family members more than others, and that more of our budget should go to American citizens than foreigners. He clarifies that the tweet was meant to be an analogy to PEPFAR.

I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments. If they were saying "We should not send foreign aid to Africa, because this leads to more of them living, which is bad, because they are below average human beings and it's good for natural selection to operate on the species, and this is worth their suffering", I think that's a coherent opinion, one that Scott would have a complicated philosophical disagreement with. But they're not saying that. They're responding like Scott's asking them to let their child die for one in Africa. He's not

I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments.

It seems obvious to me that they're angry because Scott just described them [opponents of PEPFAR] as being too callous to save a kid drowning in front of them.

"Do this thing you disagree with or you're a terrible person" is basically tailor-made to generate angry responses.

This is the same reason people got angry about Black Lives Matter (before the riots). Waving a placard saying "Black lives matter!" is implicitly an accusation. It's saying, "I have to scream 'black lives matter' at you because you secretly don't think they do.'"

All Lives Matter was the same accusation in reverse, which is why it was banned so quickly.

"So PEPFAR was good but using USAID to do surveillance work for the NSA and routing $300 million accidentally into the coffers of an African warlord was not so great. On balance, now that PEPFAR funding is restored and funding to African warlords isn't, I think this is a W for Elon" is the sort of post I could easily see Scott writing in a year. I wonder if Team Trump will be able to turn up anything really juicy.

It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.

Not all religions care about strangers. Islamic charity (zakat) is only supposed to go to muslims, because islam is Moral Defection At Every Level: The Religion. Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically. Obviously they should be kicked out of the circle of care.

I looked it up, zakat is not charity, it is more like a tax that every muslim has to pay to help their communities, but there are some imams that actually believe in giving some of the zakat money to non-muslims in extreme poverty, and also as a means to "encourage" non-muslims to convert.

Actual charity is called "sadaqah" and there are no restrictions on it.

That's obscuring reality. Zakat is a pillar of islam, an obligatory duty. Sadakat as you present it, in its non-discriminatory form, is a modern apologist concept no one cares about (nor should they, since it’s optional). In the coran when sadakat comes up, it means zakat. All muslim charities are 99% concentrated on helping muslims, when they’re not building mosques and supporting terrorism.

@OliveTapenade

It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).

I’ll just quote this fatwa:

Is it permissible to give zakah to a children’s cancer hospital?

Building hospitals and equipping them them does not fall into one of the categories of zakah. It is very difficult for the one who gives zakah to a hospital to be certain that it will be spent in the manner prescribed. It might be spent on equipping or expanding the hospital, or purchasing equipment for it, or on salaries and bonuses for those who work there, or on buying medicine to be given to all the patients, both poor and rich, Muslim and non-Muslim.

When it ‘overflows’ and benefits everyone as you say, it is not an acceptable beneficiary of islamic charity.

We do not think that it is permissible to give zakah to such funds, because hospitals are not among the categories of people to whom zakah may be given, as stated in Islamic teachings, and one cannot be sure that it will be spent in the prescribed manner.

You made a general claim, though, that Muslims will never be - and are in fact forbidden to be - charitable towards non-Muslims. That's not the case. On the doctrinal or dogmatic level, sadaqah is permitted and indeed considered praiseworthy, and sadaqah can be directed towards anybody.

There are some rules about zakat, yes, though depending on the specific Islamic community those rules may be interpreted in different ways, or more or less stringently. One fatwa rarely proves very much, because a fatwa is just an opinion by a scholar, and scholars regularly disagree. Even in this case, the objection to giving zakat to a hospital in a generic sense is that the Qur'an lists the proper recipients of zakat, and hospitals aren't among them. (The needy are, but obviously you can't assume that any given hospital is needy - there are wealthy hospitals and wealthy patients.) The website you've linked says:

Now that we know the eight categories to whom zakah may be given, zakah should not be spent on other interests, whether public or private. Based on this, we should not use zakah to build mosques, repair roads, build libraries and so on, because when Allah mentioned the categories of those to whom zakah may be given, He said (interpretation of the meaning): “a duty imposed by Allah. And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise” i.e., these categories have come as an obligation from Allah. “And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise.”

Obviously Muslims are not forbidden to build mosques, repair roads, or build libraries. (Who else would build a mosque, anyway?) They're just not to use the zakat funds for that, because zakat is earmarked for something else.

Now I take it your objection is to zakat being earmarked for Muslims specifically.

The first thing to say is that the linked page explicitly allows non-Muslims to benefit from zakat funds in some circumstances (for instance, it mentions using zakat to buy and free even a non-Muslim slave, especially if there is hope he may become Muslim; or paying zakat to "an evil man... so as to ward off his evil from the Muslims"). However, it is in general true that the point of zakat is the aid and succour of the Islamic community.

It is... unclear to me why that it is immediately forbidden. The money in the church collection plate will be used to benefit the church. If you donate money to a Buddhist temple or to a synagogue, you may reasonably assume it will be used for Buddhist or Jewish causes.

Zakat is not the sum total of Islamic charity, so I guess I don't find it obvious evidence of the evil or perfidy of Islam that Muslims donate a certain amount of money to help other Muslims.

Now, it might be true that, structurally as it were, Islam is less inclined to donate money or labour for the humanitarian benefit of non-Muslims. That's the sort of thing that I plausibly expect would differ between religions - for instance, Christianity and Buddhism both have strong, explicit ethics of universal beneficence and are involved in global aid societies, whereas not all religions might be like that. I'm not immediately aware of any good comparative figures on charitable giving by religion; I suspect it might be confounded a lot by firstly religious people who give to secular causes and don't record their religious motivation, and secondly the fact that different religions are not evenly distributed socio-economically, so religions that tend to have wealthier adherents might show up as more generous. But I'll have a look around later today and see if I can find anything.

The first result Google gave me suggests that in the US, Jews are the most charitable, followed by Protestants, and then Muslims and Catholics are neck-and-neck for the third, and it suggests that Jews and Muslims tend to favour secular organisations, while Christians favour religious organisations. But I imagine that is heavily confounded as well (if nothing else Christian charities are much more common and comprehensive in the US). This page is unsourced but suggests that Christians are the most generous, followed by Sikhs and Muslims, but offers no source. More searching to come.

This is correct - zakat is more like a tithe in that it's a mandatory payment that's supposed to go to the wider Islamic community. It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).

Non-obligatory charity, or sadaqah, is considered highly meritorious and may be used for any righteous purpose, including aid to non-Muslims.

I think it helps to put this into a historical context, where zakat is basically Islamic taxes. It would be paid to the caliphate, which is to say, to the state, which then uses it for causes of benefit to the entire state. Historically, this was a confessional, Islamic organisation, because the historical, pre-modern mode of Islamic governance is either theocratic, or at least a confessional monarchy of some kind. At present this model is a bit muddled because there is no caliphate, so in practice Muslims pay taxes twice, once to the state and once to the ummah, and the latter are used by various Islamic NGOs. This is definitely an awkward situation and there's no doubt need for some critical conversations within Islam about the role of zakat in a secular state. However, this:

Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically.

is simply false. Zakat is not the extent of Islamic charity.

There is a lot of Islamic giving that is preferentially directed towards Muslims, naturally, but then, I doubt you'll have much trouble finding church aid services that are directed particularly towards Christians, or similar. It is, at any rate, not Islamic dogma that no charity may be offered towards non-Muslims.

Paying the tithe to the church or the zakat to the mosque or any of the many ways of religious giving is nowhere near the same as the modern nation-state piss pot of foreign aid. It isn't the same, and to equivocate it is such an astonishing rhetorical flourish that its sheer chutzpah must be admired. No, the American NGO industrial complex is not a moral agent of generosity like thousands of years of religious charity.

Yes, the State department funds "democratization" programs that are a front for destabilization of foreign governments and the subversion of their civil society with progressive ideology. I won't lose any sleep if all of that gets tossed in the trash heap of history. But Scott and I are not talking about the entire NGO complex; we are talking about PEPFAR. And I see little daylight between giving lifesaving medicine to the deathly ill and the unborn and any sort of traditional religous charity.

You can object to it because it involves providing contraception, performing circumcisions, or because the recipients are African, but to consider it a net negative requires placing either zero or negative value on tens of millions of human lives. Even I, someone who doesn't particularly like Africans (I lived there for 3 years; I have no illusions about what they are like), wouldn't want them in my country, and thinks it would be better if most of them had never been born, believe they're worth something, and that if it is possible to save them from certain death for the cost of a rounding error of our budget, then to not do so would be a crime against humanity.

But, and let me emphasise here: that you could come up with righteous explanations for every single bit of aid that the United States currently pays for, summed all together to be unlimited money to be given to foreigners. You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life. You could justify anything.

Can you name a limit? Can you name a terminus where the taxpayer money not going to a cause isn't a crime to humanity? Is there a cost to benefit ratio where an African life simply isn't worth saving? If you can't give a number, then we are merely engaged in moral epicycles.

No, I don't go around assigning exact numerical values to how much taxpayer money should be spent on foreign aid, or healthcare, or the military, or exactly how many American lives we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war to defend our allies. If you believe that everyone who doesn't autistically prepare spreadsheets of such figures is incapable of moral reasoning, then I have some bad news for you (or good news, if you want to ignore everyone's opinions, I suppose). Not that I couldn't put such a list together, but it would be a lie, as these things are decided intuitively on a case by case basis, as below.

You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life.

If this were being proposed at a time when every American did not also have such a suit of power armor and this would be an immense strain on the economy, then it would be a violation of the ordo amoris as properly understood. If, however, there comes a day when every US citizen is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and mass produced power armor costs next to nothing to export, then why not send them some? You give decreasing amounts to each concentric circle of care, moving outwards, but if you are fantastically wealthy the people on the outside still get quite a lot in absolute terms.

Well, it seems like people like me - or people who think like me - can name a number: zero. Consider the epistemic sin of easily preventable deaths on the heads of people who refuse to name a number.

How is it not the same?

How is it not the same?

It's usually voluntary, and often goes towards local things.

Yeah, one thing that Nietzschean neoreactionaries on Twitter sometimes don't understand is that almost nobody likes them. I agree with some of their takes, but most of them seem so weird and morally repugnant to me that I wouldn't want to be friends with them. Surely it should be possible to, say, have a neoreactionary attitude to immigration or whatever, without gleefully calling for people to suffer like many of these people do. A lot of the time they don't even like each other - their communities, just like most extremist ideological groups, are constantly full of them bickering in petty drama and accusing each other of not being ideologically correct. Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.

Christians at least often make a point of seeming like nice people and being welcoming to outsiders.

Sharing your opinion on a group is fine. Generalizing to what “almost nobody” thinks, or drawing conclusions about “many of these people,” is not.

You’ve been banned for this exact behavior before. On the other hand, you’ve been relatively good for the better part of a year. I’m going to go with a 1 day ban as a reminder to be more precise and charitable, even about people who are trying to be edgy.

Nah, you hate them because your politics. I am also not on their side but a) most people who are critical on Scott are not Nietzschean neoreactionaries and much more on the right and I am on their side more so because the dispute is more so about whether it is good at all to have an ethnic group you identify and put first rather than full seflishness b) Those few who actually are that, their take goes too far but it is a reaction towards those who want to impose pathological altruism on them. Going full vitalist in general is incorrect but having that reaction towards people demanding that they put their people last is correct. In addition with respecting prioritising one's family including extended, there needs to be a reciprocity in altruism that exists even among people of different abilities. Which is to say I help you but you would help me.

So, if we talk about specific characters and not as a way to dismiss the right in general, I do have some disagreement and antipathy, but you don't have any sympathy for the imposition of pathological altruism against their people, as a motivating factor.

The neocon and left wing ideologues contrarily oppose treating their ethnic outgroup as victims who needs justify any prioritization. This is dominant perspective on the left that claims to be antiwoke which I would put neocons who try to be influential in the right to also fit into.

  • Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.

Hilariously uncharitable and far leftist redditor 101 rhetoric. Also doesn't this statement by implication try to present your faction as the ubermench over the extreme leftists and the Nietzscheans? Why not start saying they have a small dick and are all incels. One can dismiss every faction by making this claim since it is easy to assume for your outgroup, and many social media addicts will have their losers. Although it does seem that the left has greater % of mentally ill.

I do think it is a bit much for people online to pretend that any movement is made by ubermench while everyone else are the losers.

The tactic of leftist liberals trying to win the debate by pretending they represent a centrist middle is also at play here.

It's a pathology I used to notice on the online left as well. If you're in a heavily-online space and engaged in curating your identity, you want to stand out from the pack and grab attention. The best way to do that is to say radical things. Occupying an extreme position also allows you to more easily denounce your rivals for not being as hardcore or based as you are, since the biggest threat to a wannabe-thought-leader like this is competition from others in the same space. The result is pressure towards radicalising yourself, taking stronger and stronger positions that more clearly mark you out from the normies. This is particularly the case because, unlike in the real world, online all you have are words - you're often pseudonymous, and even if you're not, it's much harder to point to actual things you did in the real world for other people. So it's all self-presentation, and the way to get attention there is to be extreme and weird.

It might work for a while, but it falls apart the moment you try to build a mass movement or appeal to people in the real world. Once you've talked yourself into taking extreme or insane positions, you've handicapped your appeal to anyone else, because it turns out that most normal people have pretty basic moral instincts, and recoil from things that seem absurd or repugnant. We've seen that happen with woke overreach; the right-wing equivalent is unlikely to be any different.

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

Great, I will keep this in mind next time I see a child drowning. I anticipate it is a rare occurrence, because skill of swimming is widespread, taught early to children, and most parents in my society don't let children who yet can't swim wander near bodies of water, and most popular swimming places have a lifeguard presence.

I wish someone would come up with an article that would encourage modern academic philosophy and its offshoots to throw "intuition pumps" to rubbish bin. "Saving child drowning in the river" is nearly nothing like what the author actually exhorts the reader to do; all the important pieces of context are abstracted away, so that reader is lead to a particular conclusion, then the author brings up he context again, presuming the conclusion should still apply.

Eh, here in Arizona, the news networks have a common saying: "watch your kids around water." Too many kids have drowned in backyard swimming pools here.

Swimming is an inherently dangerous activity like driving. It also is a basic activity where the issues can and often are mitigated by responsible practices.

The split from something like USAID and PEPFAR is that AIDS is the result of an inherently dangerous activity, that being anal sex and "dry" sex (better know as sex with abrasives placed in the vagina) which are also easily mitigated, but those who are on the side of these charities insist that mitigation is far too burdensome, even though it is much less burdensome than getting your child a proper car seat, not driving drunk, and not letting toddlers swim on their own.

Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.

Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.

I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.

I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."

are you sure foreign aid helps the US perception in the world? i wonder if it suffers from this copenhagen ethics problem where because you help out you are now blamed for anything that is not perfect. not the best example but the US helped the afghans militarily then when 9/11 happened apparently the US 'deserved' it partly because they helped the Afghans militarily.

I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.

Actually, there is probably a pretty good correlation between womens' education and low birthrate. Low birthrate minimizes future humanitarian needs, so stuff that seems quite "progressive" might be a very good investment long term. The devil is of course in the details.

I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.

If we are just bribing dictators and/or corrupt bureaucrats to be on our side, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply bribe them, without the pretense of curing AIDS/malaria/whatever?

Dictators have limited tenures. If you covertly support them via foreign aid (as opposed to direct bribery), then you have plausible deniability which enables you to continue working with whoever deposes them.

Eh, just call it the "Congo Development Fund" or something, and wire transfer directly to whoever's top dog at the moment -- several layers of bureaucracy and graft (including on the American side) could be removed by not pretending to care what happens to the money once it leaves the public purse.

Quite - I think ordo amoris by itself fails as an argument against foreign aid, partly because it's not at all clear that the small amount of foreign aid the US provides is not in fact net beneficial to the US, and partly because ordo amoris in no way says that you should have zero care for people far away from you. It says that your moral duties to care for others scale with distance, such that American moral obligation to non-Americans is less, but less is not zero.

It is worth noting that Aquinas actually talks for a while about almsgiving as an act of charity, and appears to be wholly in favour of doing corporal works of mercy for others simply because they are in need. He follows the ordo amoris (article 9) in asserting that it is better, all other things being equal, to give to those "more closely united to us", but immediately qualifies that with the note that all other things are usually not equal. Aquinas:

I answer that, As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28), "it falls to us by lot, as it were, to have to look to the welfare of those who are more closely united to us." Nevertheless in this matter we must employ discretion, according to the various degrees of connection, holiness and utility. For we ought to give alms to one who is much holier and in greater want, and to one who is more useful to the common weal, rather than to one who is more closely united to us, especially if the latter be not very closely united, and has no special claim on our care then and there, and who is not in very urgent need.

Per Aquinas, it is better to give to a more righteous cause, or to one who is in more desperate need, over one who may be closer to us in other terms. He endorses the kind of charitable triage that I mentioned here. The ordo amoris requires a kind of discernment around need, righteousness, justice, and so on.

One must also remember that Aquinas lived in a totally different world. His concerns were local by default because nothing else was possible.

Giving alms to your neighbour’s friend whose house burnt down instead of your neighbour who stubbed his toe is one thing. Being on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world is a very different thing.

Aquinas was familiar with international charity. Thomas Aquinas lived in the mid 13th century. By his day, international projects like the Crusades were a century and a half old, and among the justifications for the Crusades had been charity - that it is an act of gracious generosity to one's fellow-believers who are in need, even though they may be on the other side of a continent.

The idea of giving charitable aid to people a long way away from you geographically goes back as far as the New Testament itself - for instance, in 1 Corinthians 16:25-28, Paul talks about his plan to bring donations from churches in Achaia and Macedonia all the way to Jerusalem. Aquinas was surely familiar with such cases.

So I don't think we can assume that Aquinas' model of charity assumes only local charity. He understood and approved of the idea of a Christian making great sacrifices in order to aid Christians in another country entirely.

Now, sure, this doesn't necessarily equate to "on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world" - that's an exaggeration or caricature. What I'm saying is that Aquinas' interpretation of the ordo amoris plainly allows for charity to people with whom the giver is not personally familiar. For Aquinas, proximity is one among several factors influencing who it is appropriate to give charity to, alongside need, holiness, and the common good more generally. These are criteria that allow for international projects in some circumstances.

Aquinas does think that having something in common with the needy is important. This comes up further in the next section of the Summa:

On the contrary, Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28): "Since one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance are more closely united to us."

I answer that, Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by Divine wisdom. Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it. In like manner God pours forth the gifts of His goodness first and most plentifully on the substances which are nearest to Him, as Dionysius declares (Coel. Hier. vii). But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.

Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.

You will notice that, having established the principle that one owes more to people with whom one has a commonality, Aquinas then goes on to explain two things. Firstly, that 'closeness' has several measures, including natural, civic, and spiritual matters. Thus he might argue that, for instance, a fellow Christian in another country is spiritually close and has a stronger claim on a Christian's aid than a non-believer. Secondly, this does vary contextually, such that, as he says, a stranger in desperate need may have a higher claim on charity than one's own family.

This does not add up to "you have a direct moral responsibility for the entire planet", but it does legitimate kinds of international charity. If those with whom I have a natural bond (e.g. a family relation), or a civic bond (e.g. if we are members of the same nation), or a spiritual bond (e.g. we are both Christians) reside far away geographically, I may still possess duties of charity towards them.

The case for extending this even to non-believers in certain circumstances seems fairly straightforward to me (cf. Matthew 5:47), in a way that does not create an infinite obligation, but does suggest that doing good even for those to whom one shares no connection is supererogatorily good. Aquinas appears to agree that need is sufficient to create a kind of moral claim, which must be judged carefully alongside the claims created by connection or proximity:

For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.

That's fair, and I appreciate the detailed rebuttal. I still don't think it's quite the same. At the time of the crusades, the Arab nations were roughly on a par with the Europeans. By contrast, today we are called upon to feel responsibility (in the sense of duty not blame) for huge masses of people who are civilisationally/economically far below our level and may always be. There are not some people in the third world who need charity, as there were Christians in Islamic nations who needed assistance, but instead the entire third world needs assistance, billions on billions of them, maybe forever.

That would seem to be an anticipated problem for a religious tradition whose most sacred text says plainly, "The poor you will always have with you." (Mark 14:7, Matthew 26:11) The number of people in need of charity is functionally unlimited - that was the case in Jesus' day, in Aquinas' day, and also in our day.

I take the ordo amoris to be suggesting some structure to our moral duties such that we are not crushed entirely flat by the weight. This much seems right and just. But within that structure, it can hardly be bad to seek to do more than the barest minimum.

FWIW, if the problem is cultural rather than HBD, it may be fixable - provided that those millions of people don't migrate all over the world and extinguish all the more functional cultures in favor of their dysfunctional ones.

I hope so, with the proviso you mention.

All right, I guess I'll bite on this one at last.

Ordo amoris, in essence, is a relatively common-sense doctrine intended to make sense of most people's moral intuitions, while avoiding two absurd extremes. The first extreme to be avoided is the hardcore utilitarian, Peter Singer perspective - all lives are equally valuable, there is no rational basis for preferring those in close proximity to us, and therefore we should seek to improve as many lives as possible, affording no preference whatsoever to family or country. The second extreme to be avoided is the exclusive tribalist - we have definite moral obligations only to those with whom we are connected in some way, and all other people can burn for all we care.

Both those positions seem absurd to most people. Most people's intuitions seem to say that if we can treat even distant strangers benevolently, we ought to; but also that we have greater moral obligations towards those closer to us. That's roughly what ordo amoris is - we have moral obligations to behave benevolently and compassionately towards all people, but those obligations scale with proximity.

There is also a side issue here to do with how we conceptualise 'closeness' or moral proximity. Scott's tweet is particularly silly because most versions of the ordo amoris I'm familiar with would give quite a high moral priority to people who are literally, physically in front of you, whether they're related to you or not. (As James Orr puts it, "we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern".) However, most also do consider the bonds of family, tribe, political or religious community, and so on, to serve as intensifiers. If there are two drowning people in front of you, there is only time to save one, and one is a family member, ceteris paribus you should save your family member. Likewise your nation, your faith, or whatever. However, most of what we might say about the ordo amoris works regardless of the exact way you define moral proximity.

The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.

There is also the Hayekian local knowledge problem / skin in the game that Ordo amoris solves.

The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.

Point of order- isn't Vance using it to suggest that deporting foreigners to their home countries is fine, even if it's bad for those foreigners personally?

I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.

At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:

Aquinas applies the notion of ordo amoris to our love of other people. There is no question that all persons are equally worthy of our love. We are created in the image and likeness of God. But each of us is cast into a world of already existing relationships. These relationships bring with them duties and responsibilities.

This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.

Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.

Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.

Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman.

The National Catholic Reporter is a liberal/progressive "Catholic" publication. They have and do promote political positions completely at odds with Catholic teaching, including defence of abortion and IVF, among many other things. To the point where bishops have called on them to remove Catholic from their name. I wouldn't take them as representative of the faithul Catholic position. It's in their interest to misrepresent Vance. This is the polite way of describing the NCR.

The US has a $36 trillion debt. A quick Google shows all foreign aid is about $70 billion per year. About 0.2% of the total debt.

Later in that thread Scott shares that he donated about $350,000 to charity last year.

To analogize this to the US foreign aid situation, this would be like donating $350,000 to charity while you have debt of $175 million. And it's not a debt that you've addressed in any real way, and it grows substantially year after year.

I hate the argument “it’s a small number.” Because many things are a small number. Add up ten “small numbers” and maybe it’s meaningful. Four years of eliminating foreign aid taking into account interest is probably at least 300b of debt we don’t incur.

It's not even a small number! An analyst at a company with a budget in the billions (nevermind an order of magnitude more -- not too many companies like that!) who found a (legible) way to .2% would be in line for a promotion and a big bonus -- it is a lot of money; companies understand that.

I don't think that either Scott or the average utilitarian would claim that, for the sake of utilitarianism, the flow of money to foreigners should have no limits whatsoever. I'm not a utilitarian myself, but I think that this is a mischaracterization of utilitarian thought.

You're right that they do put limits, but they have no theoretical basis to do so. It's just an unprincipled hack that they tack on at the end to prevent their moral philosophy from ruining their life. Eventually someone is going to write "Famine, Affluecne, and Morality II" in which a good effective altruist is walking to work after just finishing their annual 10% donation for the year and sees a drowning child. Obviously you wouldn't let the child die just because you already donated 10% for the year right?

True. Funny thing is, there is a theoretical basis that utililtarians could use if they wanted to. One could argue that, since Americans are more innovative than people in most other countries, it is overall better for humanity in a utilitarian sense to help Americans instead of non-Americans. But probably most utilitarians would not wish to pursue this line of thought.

I strongly prefer helping my own country, town, and family before helping foreigners. But I still support foreign aid to Africa because it's ridiculously effective at saving people. So even though I value the life of random strangers less, it's still a better use of money than letting the military blow it on F-35s or whatever.

I will note that if F-35s can deter Xi Jinping from starting WWIII (or even help cut down the amount of ICBMs that get off the ground when it goes nuclear), they're actually pretty good value for money. Assuming that something won't be needed always sets its value to 0, but most things have nonzero value because that assumption is usually wrong.

No, Scott is dumb, and I've only realized it in the past few years: you can always find reasons to wring out more blood and treasure saving African lives, but left unsaid: are the lives of the modal African worth saving? In particular, the kind of African that grits his penis to tear bloody cuts into a woman's vagina?

It's odd that those who would condemn a man to the eternal pits of progressive damnation for the slightest of errors would support such a practice. You could say that they don't intend that, but that's the practical outcome of their efforts. The F-35 may be a boondoggle but it doesn't have the moral catastrophe of spreading AIDS.

The life a neighbor 15 miles away probably isn't even worth saving. That's not the point.

However, the money I have represents enough power to affect an African. It is not enough power to affect a fellow American. When I donate to VLCOL-based charities I am buying an effigy of influence.

Feeling powerful feels good. That is enough.

That is not relevant to the post you are responding to. They are saying you should feel powerful...but also should feel evil.

From Scott further down in the thread:

I think the non-zero-sumness is that if everyone tries to save everyone else's child, then everyone is better off. That is, if your child is drowning in China, and the Chinese person by the riverbank thinks "it's not my child, forget it", and a Chinese child is drowning in America, and you think "it's not my child, forget it", then both of you are worse off than if you both saved each other's children.

I think this hypothetical, as stated, is obviously correct. There is a pretty big assumption though, the assumption that this is a reciprocal arrangement. You can get into galaxy-brained decision theory stuff to argue that because of acausal trade, there is an unnegotiated policy that intelligent agents would automatically know they should follow where agents help each other. Its a bit hard to see how impovershed African children have any way to help Americans even if they wanted to, to say nothing of their intuitive understanding of functional decision theory. Still, I have to concede that it is at least conceivably possible.

Where this logic does not hold at all is in animal welfare. No one can seriously argue that animals would collectively decide to treat humanity better if only we would reduce the suffering associated with factory farms.

I was just going to post this, lol. Why the hell is Scott posting fallacies on Twitter now? I know he's a clear thinker in general, so why is he being obviously stupid here? (I'll explain the fallacy below).

Here's his tweet:

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

This might take a bit of context for the unordained to understand. Let me explain. This tweet references three things.

  1. The philosophy of Peter Singer. In "The Life You Can Save", he writes about a thought experiment. If you saw a child drowning, you would jump in and save him, even if you ruined your $1000 suit. So why don't you give $1000 to charity and save a life in Africa? (Pretend, for the sake of argument this is actually possible).

  2. The meme that white progressives care more about people in other countries than their own people. They have pro-outgroup bias. This is opposed to the 99% of people who show concentric lines of caring. They care about family, then friends, then neighbors, then countrymen, then foreigners. Presumably, this makes white progressives bad allies since they will betray their own to help others. It is sometimes depicted with this jpeg.

  3. Trump canceling all grants to NGOs. Amongst the sea of graft and Marxism, there were some actual effective programs too. The one everyone is getting excited about is PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving millions of African lives by providing cheap AIDS medications. (Note: It is generally impossible for AIDS to become widespread in a heterosexual population. It spreads in Africa because of the cultural practice of "dry sex".)

The fallacy here is that Scott is comparing canceling PEPFAR to letting the child drown.

But why is it a fallacy?

Because, in the child drowning scenario, only YOU can save the child. If you take no action, the child will drown. But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap. This is not something that only the US can do. In fact, governments are often uniquely bad at delivering aid.

Scott knows this of course. Does he just not care, or is it TDS? I think maybe he is willing to lie and manipulate to achieve an otherwise worthy goal. But, if so, why should I listen to him at all if he's just trying to manipulate me?

For the record, I think the US should continue to fund PEPFAR because it's apparently extremely effective so it's worth the cost even if it otherwise goes against my desire for a much smaller and less corrupt US government. I don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap

Where did you get this idea from? I don't see any strong reason to assume this will fully happen within the next decade, or that the funding for the PEPFAR replacement will be as large as PEPFAR currently is. It might happen, but it also might not happen. And in the meantime, a lot of medical treatment won't be provided.

don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

Because he was making a political joke on twitter. Please read his twitter bio: "I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns." He's made plenty of complicated arguments about EA on his blog. People are holding this tweet to a much higher standard than they would any other tweet because they really want to own the libs, but it's a fine tweet.

For the record, I think the US should continue to fund PEPFAR because it's apparently extremely effective so it's worth the cost even if it otherwise goes against my desire for a much smaller and less corrupt US government. I don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

If you are making this argument for PEPFAR, I think it is self defeating.

All these sorts of arguments are inherently utilitarian at least in part. The problem with this is that there is no evidence that PEPFAR or related programs will solve the problem and end. Any utilitarian argument for a form of welfare must chart a path to its own termination, and frankly, that is the opposite of basically every African aid program. To be frank, there is no end in sight. Africans aren't on the path to manufacture their own mosquito nets, let alone antivirals. You are keeping people alive for the purpose of the next generation of Americans to pay to keep the next generation of them alive. Repeat until the AI destroys us all or decides to dedicate its purposes to keeping them alive, despite their best efforts.

Its not like the PEPFAR enthusiasts are human slavers of any sort and have a plan to take a bunch of Africans and make them carry raw materials to build a space elevator, but without that sort of plan the program does appear to lack much justification.

It is sometimes depicted with this jpeg.

Am I missing some context? Presumably it's that anyone who scores... some way on some metric that results in that chart isn't worth listening to?

That jpeg is actually misleading, the original question listed a bunch of groups from closest to furthest away, from family to foreigners to animals to plants, and to choose the point where you no longer morally care.

The way it was set up, it is literally impossible to say you care about foreigners more than about the close ones, the assumption that literally everyone cares about their family more than about strangers, about human strangers more than animals and so on was just baked into the study.

So if anyone says that study proves democrats care more about animals than people, they are wrong.

That jpeg is actually misleading, the original question listed a bunch of groups from closest to furthest away, from family to foreigners to animals to plants, and to choose the point where you no longer morally care.

Knowyourmeme was wrong about that, though to be fair they're better than regular journalists.

From the original article (link should bring you directly to Methods, Study 3a, procedure):

All participants completed a moral allocation task, in which participants allocated 100 “moral units” among the following 16 categories...

[...]

We also explained to participants that these categories were non-overlapping such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family).

created the heatmap shown. Afterwards:

In addition, participants also completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4).

and supplementary note 4 is shown in the knowyourmeme post.

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

Yes thanks for the sources, I didn't know that allocating points was part of the study, but apparently that part was irrelevant to the heatmap.

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-12227-0/MediaObjects/41467_2019_12227_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Please click on a number that depicts the extent of your moral circle. Note that in this scale, the number you select includes the numbers below it as well. So, if you select 10 (all mammals), you are also including numbers 1-9 (up to 'all people on all continents') in your moral circle.

That data was not used to generate the heatmap.

>Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

In addition, participants also completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4). This measure allowed us to create heatmaps to visualize the relative sizes of liberals’ and conservatives’ moral circles.

Does this not say that heatmaps were made out of what they used in supplementary note 4?

I had to dig into their data source to be sure, but it seems you're right. The "allocation" in the caption is talking about the "extent" in the main body, not the "allocation" there. The raw data of the heatmaps is x/y coordinates where they clicked.

The way it was set up, it is literally impossible to say you care about foreigners more than about the close ones

Why? Iirc it was simply a matter of assigning 100 points to different categories.

No, as far as I remember it was not about assigning points, it was about choosing the size of the moral circle, if you look at the graph each circle has the previous smaller circle included within, that imagery is intentional, that is how the participants were meant to interpret it, when they choose animals (big circle) the humans (small circle) is included within.

Yes, you're right.

Finally, we assessed the heatmaps generated by participants’ clicks on the rung they felt best represented the extent of their moral circle.

The size of the moral circle was examined in that study, but was not used to generate the heatmap:

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

Well they explicitly say heatmaps were made from the size of the moral circle, and I don't see any other heatmap besides that one.

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

Sounds vague enough that I don't think i have to change my interpretation, even if the wording kinda sound like they're talking about the points allocation.

Every liberal I know would in fact not choose a tree over their family, even if they care about the environment, if your interpretation is right that goes against what you can just see with the naked eye.

Liberals are not these caricatures that "care about rocks more than about their families", please ask any liberal you know if they care less about someone the more closely related they are to them, if they would rather cut a tree or a family member, they are not actually insane.

Sounds vague enough that...

I came down on the other side of that vagueness, but their raw data source is the pixel people clicked on, which is undeniable evidence for your interpretation of that.

Liberals are not these caricatures that "care about rocks more than about their families", please ask any liberal you know if they care less about someone the more closely related they are to them, if they would rather cut a tree or a family member, they are not actually insane.

I have, and that's why I found it plausible. Humans as equal to everything else in the universe is not at all outlandish of a statement. (As to whether they would actually follow that through to its conclusion? Nah, I doubt it. It's all talk.)

Going from memory, it's the amount of empathy the study population (left wingers in that picture) have to a series of groups, starting from "family" in the middle and proceeding through neighbors/countrymen/foreigners/mammals/other animals/bacteria at the edges.

EDIT: found it. The most common highest choice outer limit among liberals looks like "all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms" while it's "all of your friends (including distant ones)" for conservatives.

White progressives have a pro-outgroup bias. That means they like black people more than other white people, foreigners more than countrymen, etc... They are the only group known to have these biases.

I think the image is trying to say something like this: Why should I listen to you when you hate yourself? You think white people are bad. Shouldn't I just go listen to a black person instead?

For example, recently Michael Moore (a fat, stupid, white male) complained that the problem with America is that there are too many fat, stupid, white men in charge. This seems like the perfect time to reply with the jpg.

The other problem with that hypo (which is the original problem with the Singer hypo) is that it is very rare to encounter a drowning child (ie the problem is discrete and solvable) whereas the poor will always be with us (ie the problem is unbounded). Applying the logic of the first to the second is wrong headed.

But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap. This is not something that only the US can do. In fact, governments are often uniquely bad at delivering aid.

This is precisely what the US should do.

Trump should simply declare that PEPFAR etc are worthy initiatives but US national interests are at the moment constrained but that billionaires and ordinary citizens who have prospered handsomely from business in the free world and can bear it should contribute to such initiatives instead of funding left-wing activism or people gluing themselves to roads.

Is Scott implying that if his child were depressed, he wouldn’t spend more time helping his child than a stranger’s child? Or if his own child needed tutoring, he wouldn’t tutor him more than another child? Or is he saying that saving a life is the ultimate criterion of value, thus it dwarfs everything? It’s not actually clear. The example further doesn’t make sense because (1) his scenario implies the child is a community member, falling squarely into the ordo amoris worldview; (2) what we witness first hand compels our moral instinct in ways that data does not, and rather than meaning we have a mismatch between intuition and logic, it means that the pain of not helping the child is more severe and the absence of moral response is more damning when it occurs in front of us — this is part of our design, it’s not a bug. It’s like, if you see a crying puppy in front of you, and you just bought a steak, there’s a big chance you give the crying puppy the steak, because your body is designed to experience distress when not helping someone whose distress you witness. This does not imply that you must now buy steaks and distribute them to hungry puppies worldwide. In fact it doesn’t even imply that you ought to give the puppy the steak if you were somewhere else and someone merely informed you “a 6 month old canine would like your steak”.

He's saying that hypothetically saving a drowning child has no negative impact on his ability to care for his family.

It's an odd choice of example because quite a few people are killed annually trying to rescue children from bodies of water. It's not risk-free.

The original hypothetical from Peter Singer is a child drowning in a shallow pond, where you could just walk over and pull them out. It is designed to be a zero risk situation.

I say the kid (or his parents) owes the rescuer a new suit, which short circuits the whole thing.

And at the end of the day, this is the problem -- I haven't spent enough time reading literature responding to it, so hopefully this critique is already well documented -- this is an un-trolley problem. It's designed so that there's absolutely no opportunity cost. But then used to imply therefore, the opportunity cost of other scenarios are handwavable.

If I'm walking by a pond where there's a drowing child; in all likelihood, rescuing that child is the most valuable thing I can do in that moment, and the ruin of a 1k suit, that I'm already wearing is a sunk cost.

But this doesn't extend to prove that some future fungible time and money, there's a best thing to do and thus it is a moral imperative to have it done.

As soon as we add any actual opportunity cost to saving that child or ruining the suit, the parsimony of the aesop falls apart. Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem, with a little bit of forecasting mixed in, and there's nothing really to gleam from it.

If alternatively we take the most superficial lesson from the problem: We should help others when we are able, at a cost to ourselves, even when we aren't physically near them. Then sure! It's a great reminder. And it has just about nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.

Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.

To me, Singer's hypothetical points out that there are people you or I can easily help/save at a financial cost that we normally don't blink an eye at (the cost of a phone, a suit, a plane ride...), at no real danger to ourselves. This isn't a philosophical imperative, it is an observation. The observation becomes obvious when the person is next to you, but it still exists when the person in trouble is on another continent. Of course, most people are viscerally affected by someone in danger next to them, and generally have no reason to think of anyone on another continent. Singer's hypothetical attempts to address that disconnect.

At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem

I ised to have a lot of beef with the trolley problem because it is almost tautological in its obviousness. But reading some variations on it by the original author, and knowing she was a virtue ethicist, the major point I took away was that real-world moral decision-making is hard! The trolley problem is easy, but recognizing when you are faced with a "trolley problem" in real life, and figuring out which track is which, is difficult. Humans are concerned with ethics, but we have to practice to be discerning and virtuous. Ethics are not (just) a math problem.

nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.

I don't know if that follows from what you said. I can see why foreign aid isn't a consideration in a vacuum. But I would think that if helping people who are far away at a low cost to ourselves is considered a good thing, it is a consideration that a society and its government can make on a grand scale.

Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.

Yes I know, my point was in agreement with yours. That's why I said the original is an 'un'trolley problem. My point in describing some additional opportunity cost was exectly to illustrate that opportunity cost ruins the thought experiment.

And that's why it has very little to say about foreign aid or most other real world charitable activities that are abstracted from time and place. Because outside of immediate and present opportunities (like saving a drowning child right in front of you), opportunity cost does have to be considered.

And as you've agreed, it becomes different than the thought experiment, thus the thought experiment is no longer relevant.

or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.

Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.

(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)

I want less Africans, not more.

https://www.condoms.com.au/donate-to-africa/

Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

Yeah, it's subsidizing the proliferation of one of the most low human capital and negative value-add populations of the world.

If money is to be spent by the West in Sub-Saharan Africa, it should be on cash in exchange for tubal ligation for teenage girls and women under 35 or so. We can free SSA girls and women from the oppression of pregnancy and child-rearing, and we can better empower them to focus on their education and careers. If there's cash left over that, the West can pay for and provide stipends for children of all ages getting much-needed gender affirming hormone therapies and surgeries. And then if there's money left over that, to be Inclusive and all, the West can do cash in exchange for vasectomies for the men.

The US withdrawing foreign aid to Africa is not going to decrease the amount of future Africans, unless you can get the rest of the world to agree to a policy of blockade and imposed famine. As it stands, the Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, etc. would be more than happy to pick up the slack and claim the moral high ground, meaning the only result would be damaging America's international reputation while saving a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.

If you want to lower the African population, all you have to do is accelerate their demographic transition through development work i.e. what organizations like USAID are supposed to be doing anyway. Getting girls in school and providing them with contraceptives will tank the birthrate faster than waiting around for them to starve or die in a pandemic (even if you tried bombing them you'd have about as much luck as Israel has had in Gaza). They don't have to become rich to stop having children; France underwent the transition in the 19th century when they were poorer than anywhere on Earth today.

Moreover, if your problem with Africans is their migration to western countries, then all you have to do is not let them in and it becomes a non-issue. If you assume that this is impossible because white people are too altruistic then I don't see how you can imagine getting them to cut off foreign aid either. If your problem is that Africans are taking up land and resources that would be better utilized by higher IQ populations then I refer you to the previous paragraph (or we could just invest in eugenics).

the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless

“Essentially” is doing quite a lot of work there. The existence of a massive cost doesn’t negate the existence of a far smaller but still very large cost.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

I will consider this if he working as hard as he can, living an ascetic life, giving it all away. One gets zero moral points taking the fruits of another person's labor.

I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality.

Where did Jesus say one should advocate Caesar take money from others and redistribute it according to one's will?

Is that true? On my phone right now but I’m pretty sure the absolute number of Native Americans in the US is higher than any time in the pre-Columbian era. And were they really better off back then when murder and torture were commonplace ? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely debatable.

In 2010, 5.2 million US Americans identified as native. The pre-Mayflower native population of what is today the US has been subject to many estimates but I think most seem to place it around 5-20 million.

In addition, most of those “natives” as of 2010 were 75%+ non-native by genetic origin and almost all would have been more than 50% non-native, certainly outside of Alaska. So I think it’s quite likely that absent any European colonization there would probably be a higher native North American population, sure.

2025 numbers are way up from 2010 but point taken about European admixture. Most of the explosion in Native American population numbers is just essentially white people self identifying as Native (I won’t name names).

Color me skeptical about pre-Columbian population numbers which are highly influenced by bogus culture war politics. 20 million is wild.

Pre-Columbian population isn't the right basis assuming (as is believed) many natives were wiped out by disease before the US was founded. The Mayflower was in 1620, which is considerably later than 1492.

Tangential, but I was expecting a lot more culture war fallout from Reich's pre-columbian population estimates paper. I guess even in 2020 that fell under "easier to just ignore than attack," especially after Saini's "the return of race science" failed to take him down.

Do you have a link for said paper, or a pointer to it?

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time. Would Scott support this? If the notion of subsidiarity supersedes the interest to invade, then we can just as easily argue that the notion of subsidiarity supersedes our interest to help.

some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality

This is really just the Parable of the Good Samaritan being abused by bad exegetes imo

I don't know if Scott would support invading Africa and imposing more humane governments on the continent, but having read much of his writing, I feel that he would at least give the idea an honest evaluation rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Wrong- we can try to invade Africa and redistribute the resources of their warlords into helping ordinary people. Perhaps a long term occupational state- say, a garrison of cleruchs- can make the lot of African peasants very slightly better. The USA is constitutionally incapable of doing this. What would actually happen if we invaded, say, the DRC is that, first off, things would get way worse because of collateral damage. Then Kinshasa would be rebuilt, until it broke into another civil war, the transitional government stole all the development money, and we wound up back at square one.

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time.

Uh, we tried that in Afghanistan and let's just say it wasn't exactly a profit center for the government (not to even touch on the other points).

If you think we tried to colonize or patronize Afghanistan you are greatly mistaken. We gave them free money

That's not even remotely what we were trying to do in Afghanistan.

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