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Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria? If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it? EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.
If there was already an abundance of bed nets and it'd cost millions to save a single more life even in the most efficient way possible, where as they could open a local art museum that served thousands for just $10k, they'd probably start donating to local art. But right now art is already pretty well funded, and people dying of malaria are relatively underfunded. Although EA has certainly done a lot to change that and I think they have more money than they know how to spend. You could probably post an essay to their website about why donating to local art is the most moral thing to do if you can write out a clear argument for it.
I have empathy for people in west Africa dying of malaria. But I also have empathy for the children that will be spared a life of misery as a result of not being sired due to malaria, or for the more environmentally adapted people that could be inhabiting their lands were they not already occupied.
It's not that I want Africans to suffer, it's just that I think saving the lives of somebody not capable of sustaining themselves actively decreases net utility due to second- and third-order effects.
Or, to put it into more industrial terms - there's no such thing as insurance without paying your insurance fees. What insurance fees has sub-saharan africa been paying to us, exactly? Their gracious donation of workers from the social caste currently responsible for the highest crime rates?
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I do have empathy for them. But empathy enough isn't a good enough reason to do something, not when I'm already groaning under the unmet weight of already-extant duty:
I have a duty to my ancestors who made my life possible, and to carry on that line into the future.
I have a duty to my family who worked and sweated and sacrificed to raise me, and must pay that forward by working and sweating and sacrificing for my future children.
I have a duty to the people who I work with, who have invested in and rely upon me.
I have a duty to the people who live near me, who I share streets and parks and utilities and schools and commerce with, and who have to share those things with me.
I have a duty to my countrymen, who in times of danger are sworn to lay down their lives for me, and for whom I may be called to lay down my life in turn.
Out and out in concentric, relational circles. That's a LOT of duty in the modern world, and I'm not at all certain even all my effort and resources and will is doing a good enough job. Thought and resources I devote to things outside those concentric rings of responsibility is, in a real sense, a defection against those important things. Moreover, because those outside things are far from me and I'm not enmeshed in iterated responsibility with them, I'm not likely to understand what any intervention would do, outside of the most superficially-obvious results.
Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.
This strikes me as a weak moral argument.
There isn't any good ethical basis for privileging one human being over another based on their proximity—genetically or geographically—to you. Of course there is a biological basis for this, and it may be practically impossible for most people to overcome this bias. But that doesn't really have any effect on the ethical math.
You just have strong preferences that run counter to ethical concerns.
This is false.
You could, right now, give money directly to impoverished people across the globe to save/transform their lives.
If you want to participate in morality, you are just as ethically bound to them, you just don't feel it.
There absolutely are several.
(1) Practicality. An ethics which people are not likely to follow will not be implemented widely or for long. However noble its aims, such an ethic fails by its own terms. By contrast, an ethics which people are likely to follow, even if slightly less noble, will be implemented widely and for a longer period of time and thus result in more good. As you said, there is a biological bias in favor of genetic or geographic (and I'd add "sociocultural" as well) proximity. If that bias can be taken advantage of to build solidarity, care, and harmony, then it should!
(2) Accessibility. Proximity Bias is a simple concept, common to most human civilizations. It is simple to explain, and thus easy to spread. Moreover, it is also simpler for people of all different capability strata to implement, even without supervision. It's not perfect, and people being people it will sometimes be implemented poorly. But it's easier.
(3) Iterativity. Proximity Bias stresses that individuals should spend their resources on people and things close to them, which are likely to be things which the individual will interact with frequently. This provides for frequent feedback between all parties and frequent assessment of progress. Thus, it limits the ability of middlemen to grift or divert efforts and resources away from the object, as well as generally unlocking the beneficial dynamics present in iterated games more generally. It also allows for short feedback loops to identify and address unforeseen consequences rapidly.
(4) Resiliency. Though Proximity Bias may be less globally efficient, it does allow for the building of general reserves of both physical and social capital which can be leveraged to counteract/mitigate emergencies. Further, because it is decentralized, there is no single point of failure in the system.
Sorry, nope. Ties go both ways, or not at all. I am bound to those who have some duty to me. Beyond that, I have a duty to cause no unnecessary harm. If, after I have fulfilled my local duties, I still have resources left over, then, and only then, can I look outwards to perform charity on complete strangers. But that's a very high bar to clear.
You seem to be confusing is/ought.
If you choose not to give your life to save 10 people, you are a selfish coward.
I don't mean that as harshly as it sounds, as we are all born selfish cowards, wired that way as a result of billions of years of evolution. And then it's reinforced by our culture. It's super hard not to be a selfish coward.
We don't like to think of ourselves as selfish cowards, so we imagine ourselves to be moral, even when the evidence is clear.
3 million children die of starvation each year. You can literally, truly, concretely, actually save a number of their lives. Say, 10 lives. Just by forgoing insanely lavish luxuries that we all treat "middle class" in the West. You wouldn't even have to forfeit your life, just a bunch of your stuff.
Now, I don't believe people should be forced to sacrifice themselves or sell their shit. It's a personal decision they should arrive at after doing the rational/ethical math.
But the math is clear.
I deny that human morality is math at all. People are not indistinguishable, interchangeable, widgets. The essence of humanity is sociability - our particular relationships and cooperation with each other. Your cold math at best ignores it, and at worst denigrates it as pernicious. That's a recipe for trouble.
Ha. You feel attacked. I get it. :)
You're placing a higher value on the lives of some people due to their proximity to you. This is because you are selfish, by nature. Reputation, reciprocation, kin selection, etc. These are all "is" considerations. (It's cool we all feel it.)
It's only because conscious experience exists that morality exists; it's only by rationally thinking through the implication of this that you can participate in morality. The moral way of assessing value is by measuring the capacity to suffer, or the other end, experience happiness/flourishing. And it's when you do that you realize there is no (unselfish) basis to place a higher value on anyone. You'll see that it's only your selfishness that blinds you to this simple truth.
A man you've never met in Kenya is of equal moral value to your father. This sentence flies in the face of everything we feel, but it's obviously morally true.
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Coming from a place of curiosity: How are these duties managed? By which I mean: who defines them, where are they defined, and who is the judge/enforcer? How do decide to make tradeoffs, like for example in a situation where you would have to renege against your duty to your ancestors in order to fulfill your duty to your family?
In other words, what makes these duties concrete to you?
Christians and others of the Abrahamic faiths have their books that codify their duties, and they have their priests, that act as judge/enforcer and guide. I'm sure other religion provide similar frameworks. Humanism, especially of the EA kind, has their own version of this. So where does yours come from?
I find the substance in the great thinkers and teachers of many cultures, and take my definitions from them (though, of course, with the right to interpret or add as may be honestly needed in the spirit of the original).
The idea that my concern and efforts must start with myself, then move slowly outwards from the center to kin, friends, neighbors, city, state, country, and only then beyond that, is also extremely common in historical moral teachings, from Hierocles:
to Confucius:
It even shows up in poetry, like Pope's "Essay on Man":
So yes, the goal ultimately is to embrace the whole world, but you can't skip steps! You have to adequately care for yourself before you can care for close kin. You have to be able to adequately care for self and kin before you can extend responsibility and purview to friends and local community. You have to provide for yourself, your kin, your friends, and your community before you can move on to the city or nation...and so on and so forth.
The idea that this isn't just true for those alive today, but also extends to a duty to carry on faithfully the work of those who came before, and leave it in a better place than I found it for those yet to come, I draw most pithily from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France:
And as to how it's enforced...I'll turn to Confucius again:
Thanks for sharing that. I understand a little bit more about where you're coming from.
It seems we're more or less aligned on the ends. I'm not sure about the means--for one, divvying people up into cities/states/nations doesn't appeal to me, since I'd rather do the categorization based on culture or at least "big ideas" such as "should the citizen be the property of the state?" But I guess it'll shake out in future discussions, which I'm looking forward to.
Cheers to that!
I would say that "culture" in the specific sense is highly relevant to categorization! You and the people you spend most of your time with are a tiny culture to yourselves, with your own idiosyncratic habits, inside jokes and references, and tendencies. And because you spend most of your time there, you have the most invested in keeping it healthy and productive and pleasant, etc.
Then there's looser subculture's you're part of - all the people who live on the same block, and so care about, e.g., potholes, loaning lawnmowers, watching out for each other's kids, 4th of July block parties, etc., so you collaborate on those things. Or maybe it's based on activity or affinity - a church congregation, softball league, wargaming group, knitting circle, book club, local political party, etc., each of which you spend your time, effort, and resources on.
And then it goes out further and further, through groups you share less and less time and contact with, but still have interests (whether pecuniary, cultural, or social) in common with. That's basically what Hierocles means by tribes, citizens, "those who dwell in the vicinity of the city," etc.
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I don't think the question reflects how the world actually works. If it costs a penny, I would posit that the United States government has spent no shortage of pennies, many of them extracted from my pocket, and that this should be a solved problem. If it costs a penny and the United States government has failed to allocate that sliver of copper, I would think that the many pennies Bill Gates allocates should be sufficient to solve the problem. If it is a mere penny that is needed (or any other trivial sum), then my penny doesn't need to be the marginal penny spent. That I'm being asked for a penny to end this suffering strongly suggests to me that some factor other than the necessary pennies are what's actually causing the suffering, which makes me very suspicious of why someone is asking for my penny.
Well in this case the real price is ~10k, and the US government reasonably decides that the marginal utility of spending more on foreign aid to save more lives isn't worth it at that point. But folks at EA disagree; they will donate at that level of price to lives saved. My point was more that the OP seemed to call EA "evil" but I expect that it's not really such a deep fundamental difference of values as it is his value of foreign lives is significantly lower but not 0. If it was literally 0 he would not spend even a penny to save a foreigner, but I expect that's not true.
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Doesn’t that run afoul of the categorical imperative? If everyone follows your reasoning, and decides that it won’t be their penny that saves a life, we’d expect to see the life continue to go unsaved. This applies to the government, too. How can we tell whether the unsaved life is bait for a trap or a genuine failure to coordinate?
Some charitable rhetoric like the Giving What We Can pledge is specifically trying to force a more stable equilibrium.
Yes, it would, but my point is less "someone else can do it" and more "I believe other someones have already been explicitly funded to do this and the marginal penny flatly isn't the problem". If Bill Gates' coalition of billionaires can't coordinate sufficiently to solve the problem, I think the problem will not be solved by me electing to give a few more of my dollars. That these intractable problems are halfway around the world globe where I can't even begin to meaningfully evaluate them furthers my belief that I'd be better served by lighting the money on fire and enjoying a few moments of warmth. Basically, when someone tells me that I can save a life with a penny, I think they are either incorrect or grifting.
To put some specific numbers on it since the above is a claim that just handwaves away the idea that there are cheaply saved lives, an insecticide bed net apparently costs $2-3 for a family-sized nets. These apparently last 3-4 years, I would assume that it's not literally every African that needs one, and they apparently are large enough for multiple people. So, let's go ahead and call the nets $1 per year and let's say we need a billion of them - how in the world could it be that the Bill Gates team, or Sam Bankman, or USAID can't figure out the $1 billion per year without me chipping in (more than I already do via federal tax dollars)?
If Peter Singer's drowning child ever appears in real life, I will gladly wade into the pond and destroy my nicest suit to save them, but I think applying the same thinking to less legible child-saving is just a rhetorical trick, disconnected from reality.
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If you donate a bed net, it doesn't mean that your poor African is using the bed net to prevent malaria. Instead, they are being used to overfish, poisoning the water supply and possibly starving several communities in the long term.
Meanwhile, if I take care of an elderly neighbor I might not be saving lives or grand gestures like that, but I have a better idea of what they need and can avoid unintentionally hurting them and others.
That's a reasonable point, but then you just disagree with EA on their calculations, not their premises. That's something different than what OP was calling evil I think.
I think I disagree with EA on their premises because I think we can't really help someone unless we have a relationship with them and understand them. There is a balance between impact and knowledge. One side of the scale is something small that has low stakes but involves something you know well - like helping a neighbor pay for a much needed car repair. The other side of the scale has high stakes but involves situations where people don't have any idea what the ripple effects would be because they are too removed from the people they are trying to help - like the Mosquito Nets.
My principle would be that a problem should be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority that includes people directly impacted by the problem. Or in practice, this:
-Brandon Vogt (Saints and Social Justice: A Guide to Changing the World, page 91)
You might think this kind of altruism is reckless, I think giving malaria nets to people whose problems we don't know is reckless. All charity is risky and reckless because it requires involving yourself and your material goods in the well-being of another who may terribly misuse it - making you their accomplice.
Why do you think we don't know these people's problems? Tons of research has been conducted on how terrible malaria is, how it prevents economic development, has all sorts of higher-order effects, etc., and on how to treat and prevent malaria. Much more research than Dorothy Day conducted in your anecdote. Maybe the woman was just a drug addict who would sell the ring for a fraction of its value and spend the money on heroin, and giving her the ring rather than assistance in kind (food and shelter) is just feeding her addiction and funneling money into the pockets of criminals. A few days later, the ring is gone, the woman is still a homeless addict, and you get to pat yourself on the back because you weren't paternalistic and you respected her autonomy.
Apparently the Nigerians believe that imminent starvation is more important to them than malaria, and so use the free tools provided to wreck their environment and feed themselves for a moment instead of prevent malaria. People will use the tools provided to them as they see fit to benefit themselves.
Westerners are telling Nigerians, "look, I know you're hungry but the real problem, mathematically speaking, is malaria. Use these nets to prevent malaria and before long everything will be fine." And the Nigerian sees this as patronizing bullshit and does what they see best. If you need someone's cooperation to do something, they should have a seat at the planning table. If we had given them cash or something with resell value, maybe they'd have bought better fishing nets. If we'd talked to individuals first, we'd have known to give them a means to feed themselves before moving to malaria prevention. Instead we gave them a very specific tool that they are using on a problem it was not made to solve and making things worse in the process.
I mean, aren't there also stories (a la Live Aid) of people organizing to donate money/food to starving African communities, only for warlords to get their hands on said money/food and withold it for reasons of control? Who's to say that trying to give your recipients a seat at the table won't end up giving said seat to someone not interested in representing said recipients?
That's the point - you'd want the person actually needing help to have the most control of the funds/charity.
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I don't think people misusing malaria nets is a major issue, but if you do, GiveWell also recommends funding malaria drugs and vitamin A supplements. Could something go wrong with those? I guess people might overdose. But GiveWell doesn't guess: they've actually run the numbers, and they've found that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. If that still doesn't convince you, you can just donate to GiveDirectly.
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"homeless woman lucky to hock diamond ring for 5% of its value before someone just cuts her finger off for it. 95% of major charitable donation goes to shady pawn shop owner: social justice activists awed and inspired"
The whole anecdote reads like bragging about doing altruism in the most ineffective way possible.
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In all honesty, no. I can't say I do without severely watering down the meaning of the word empathy. If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.
EA stopped being about malaria nets a long time ago when they started putting funding into political campaign donations into "their" candidates into the Democratic Party primaries in Oregon (he lost anyways lmao). Scott Alexander and Big Yud shilling for this loser is a big jumping the shark moment for EA. Shoveling money into the black hole that is politics is the exact opposite of effective or altruism.
Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.
Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)
So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.
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I don't think it's that hard to feel different amounts of non-zero empathy for different people proportional to how close they are to you. To save the life of your child? Spend up to 50% of your wealth. A parent? 10%. A close friend? 0.1%. A foreigner? 0.01%. Made up numbers that would be different for everyone of course, but I think that's the general premise most people actively live life by. I can't imagine if there was a charity that could legitimately save an African life for a penny, maybe because there's some immediate crisis that needs every cent it can get immediately and the big actors can't respond fast enough, and you knew all this for certain, you wouldn't donate. And drawing the line somewhere between a penny and $10k to save a life is reasonable. But people are just drawing their lines at different points, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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That's definitely true, and a real issue for having empathy for all of humanity. It's a problem I have as well, I don't think having empathy exactly like that is effective or helpful for anyone.
However, I get around it by not thinking about the quantity of children/people dying around the world. Just think of them as if they're one, or a few people who are dying and need malaria nets or whatever. Think about, try to feel, how much pain they're experiencing, how scared they are, how scared and sad their family is, etc. That way, you can feel the empathy, which can get you to take positive action, but not have to be destroyed by the scale of how many people out there need help.
...why tho
Getting emotional over people I don't know is irrational and makes you easy to manipulate. Not opening my wallet for a charity just because they will ostensibly reduce suffering somewhere I have never seen that I will never go to. People should look out for the ones they have direct responsibility for first. How about helping a friend out first? Everyone has a friend that's struggling these days.
One can improve the lives of those around them with great precision and far greater cost efficiency than unknown strangers.
Real Effective Altruism is giving a beer to the bum in front of Walmart. I don't expect him to get any better and he will almost certainly die in a ditch in ten years, but at least I know my money is being converted directly into utility (beer == smiles) and not wasted on high overhead charity making political or economic changes with uncertain second order consequences.
Yeah, they're good points. I don't think there are clear answers to this.
I can't speak to EA funding politics stuff, but a few years ago when I was giving more to Against Malaria, it was certainly nice to be able to think about how this small amount of money would help to save real people's lives. Every bit helps to create a better world.
As far as people near us vs people far from us, yes, I agree that it should be more morally incumbent on us to better the lives of the people around us, vs far away and unrelated. But why not both? Some reasons you may want to donate to an EA style charity:
your money does go further in Africa than it does here. There's not anything you can do to save your friend's life for $5. If there is anything, then you definitely should do it
there are complex social politics that will go on in situations of you and the people you personally know. they may be offended that you think they're a charity case, they may not want to accept money cause it'd get weird, etc
tax writeoff
Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"
Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?
I don't mean this as a reflection on you personally - I don't know you, of course - but these two quotes seems related. A person far away actually might be more "real" than a person nearby, at least insofar as their "realness" is as a pure, innocent victim who can be redeemed through charity. The person nearby, after all, is probably smelly and dirty and unsightly and low status. He might be crazy, or addicted to something, or violent and destructive. He might be resistant to help, or prone to relapses, or have other human foibles which so frequently are both the cause and result of being down-and-out. Even if he's none of those things, he might disagree about politics, or listen to the wrong music, or otherwise bear cultural marks that one might cringe from being associated with. And so it's hard and often unpleasant to help those nearby! Meanwhile, you don't see any of those things about the person far away, or if you do it's likely covered up by cultural unfamiliarity. Feels a lot better to help that person, I'd bet.
EA wasn't always like this - insofar as it's an attempt to cut through grift and bloat in charity efforts, it's still quite useful! But your comment seems to encapsulate a version of EA that flattens the world into fungible QALYs and tries to Moneyball-optimize QALYs-per-dollar, with an affective bias against giving and working where one is. And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.
No, those are good activities, too, and I did some of them as well. But that doesn't say anything about my main point in that paragraph, which is bang for the buck. The price of my time is generally considerably high, so really, I was contributing potentially a lot more than just a few dollars when I was volunteering my time. And still, even when I would give time or money to those places, I doubt I was really saving lives, the way paying for malaria nets would be.
Because they don't know the person who's giving it, and also they probably understand how life and death things are. If my life were at stake, I'd take aid from anyone.
I mean, maybe. I personally mostly thought about it as the QALYs-per-dollar thing. I wanted to try to help in the most efficient way possible. Save the most people with as little money as possible. I just think that some far away places probably need that kind of help more than the northeastern US.
Why? Were there not hungry people at the soup kitchen who would otherwise starve? Depressed and troubled kids who, absent mentoring or sports-socialization, would have spiralled downward?
We just disagree on whether or not the flattening of locality in the efficiency calculation represents a loss or not, I guess.
Truly, I don't think the people who were coming were THAT bad off. Orders of magnitude below me in income, yes, but I don't think I saw a single person who was dressed in rags, strung out, covered in filth, or completely crazy, over the course of years that I volunteered there. I'd guess that they were all very low income, but not destitute. They were well off enough that almost all of them were able to afford to get there in a car, or get there with a friend who was in a car.
Then there's the factor that if I wasn't helping at that location, it was a fact that there would be other people who would be instead. There are more people in my area who want to volunteer than there are spots to volunteer in such facilities.
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You seem to fundamentally not understand EA. In principle, it is not about hating your local community, it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you. Even if your mentoring was able to save that kid’s life, that kind of one-on-one volunteering is a highly inefficient use of your time compared with just earning a few extra bucks to buy malaria nets with.
You can spend several hours per week for years as a Big Brother to save one kid, or you could take that time to earn money, donate it towards malaria nets and save many times more (depending on your earning ability).
Now you can say you just don’t care at all about the lives of African kids, which is fair, that’s why I’m not a part of EA. But if you claim to value their lives at all it renders these time-intensive charity efforts like coaching sports highly inefficient
There are a lot of things which would call themselves EA, or otherwise claim to be affiliated with or influenced by the movement, but which act very differently.
I recognize this...and yet...
...then this kind of thing rears its head. The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods. Either that's a basic oversight made at the ideology's creation, or it is, as I put it, an "affective bias" against locality.
If EA becomes widespread enough for this to become a serious concern, the low-hanging fruit of malaria nets will have already been dealt with, and new cost/benefit analyses will need to be conducted to find new causes to contribute to. At that point, local volunteering may well become the most cost-effective option, at least for someone without very high earning potential.
EA focuses on what an individual can do, and right now, the marginal benefit of a single individual devoting their time to earning money for malaria nets is much greater than the marginal cost of a single individual not volunteering in the local community.
Of course, EA assumes that your primary goal is to help others. Maybe someone finds coaching local kids fun and does it as a hobby, but in that case helping others as much as possible is not their goal.
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Stop right there. Bankman-Fried may only have been associated with EA mainly as a moneybags donor, but he was their poster boy there for a while and there are plenty of articles out there licking his arse (as we say round these parts) for what a do-gooder he was.
And he wasn't spending it all on malaria bed nets, or what do you call the sponsorship of sports teams and paying the UC-Berkeley for naming rights of their sports field? Is that "have you no empathy?" Don't respond to criticism with "our hearts bleed unlike yours" about this kind of question.
OP said "Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises?" I took that to mean he took issue with bed nets and not just sports teams.
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I would call it an advertisement paid for by FTX, a for-profit company which Bankman-Fried only partially owned.
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The OP was not criticizing the personal choices of SBF but the principles of EA. You can read his comment below, he very much does seem to think it is utterly evil to buy malaria nets for Africans
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