I like the EAs, and utilitarianism isn’t a bad heuristic for day to day mundane moral calculus. But Singer’s thought experiment is a shell game, a card trick. Here’s an alternative to his little fable:
Imagine that you live next to a pond. Every day, cruel men dump dozens children into this pond. Often these are their own children! This has been going on since before you were born. Nobody stops the men; sometimes the men jump into the pond themselves, and none of them can swim either. Whenever someone tries to save one of these children, the men find another child and throw that one in as well.
Now what do your moral intuitions tell you? That you have a moral obligation to spend every waking minute, for your entire life, trying to save some small number of these children, despite the men seemingly able to make more children to throw into the pond — and to make them in proportion to the number you save?
Perhaps that’s an admirable conclusion. Perhaps it’s admirable to be a saint, dying amongst the lepers, spending your one solitary life on this earth pushing a stone up a hill only to have it tumble back again, and again, and again, until your strength deserts you and you tumble down the hill as well, lifeless as a stone yourself. But I think that perhaps not everyone has to choose to spend their life doing this. And that you’re not a bad person for wanting to actually live.
Well, yeah, exactly. In 1990, 36% of the global population lived in extreme poverty; in 2015, that number was 10%. Globalization managed to build that fence by integrating poor countries into global markets for labour, manufacturing, and commodities. It didn’t happen as a result of individuals donating to Save The Children (even though many such charities do valuable work). The change we needed to save all those children was systemic, and required us to think in structural, systemic terms about collective action problems and governance.
Singer’s framework took the systemic problem as unsolvable and instead asked individuals to become saints: stop eating meat and eggs and dairy products, stop spending money on middle class comforts, stop having children, just give all your money to the poor. It’s a perfect example of the atomization of elite professional-class society: each solitary individual, taking personal responsibility for trying to save the world. That has never worked and never will.
Great points though I think the irony is that we *didn’t* think in systemic terms about collective action problems. Globalisation and thus access to reward for these people was a byproduct of the choices of corporations driven by capitalism. You could call that an atomised response too but it’s a lot easier to get people to act in their own self-interest (“it’s cheaper!”) than someone else’s (“think of the starving children in Africa!”).
There’s certainly some truth to that, but it’s not like the WTO and the dozens of international free trade agreements it enforces happened by accident. A lot of economists believed that trade is good for everyone, and especially for the third world, and while they were denounced for decades as greedy corporate shills, it turns out they were right and the hippy retards talking about “corporate greed” and blocking the streets in Seattle in ‘99 were wrong. The results are in, and it is not a close call. So I don’t think it’s fair to pretend that this happened by accident, or that the economists were lying to further the interests of their corporate overlords. If I put forward a model that predicts X, and 90% of my colleagues agree that the model is accurate, and the other 10% (with the backing of politicians who favour protectionism because it assists some small faction of their constituencies) calls me a liar, and 30 years later the model turns out to be 100% accurate… well, it isn’t the global corporations who were at fault, or the economists. It was the entrenched local corporate interests who favoured the protectionist status quo, and their useful idiots.
as one of the afore-mentioned "hippy retards" (in spirit, not that i was old enough to be in Seattle in '99) i always wonder: isn't it convenient how all the graphs used by the economists to demonstrate that "trade is good for everyone" all start *after* imperialism wrecked most of the world?
the stock explanation is "yeah, but there was no data available before then." well—no shit. the people who started collecting the data and deciding which metrics mattered were colonial functionaries with a vested interest in *not* portraying their economic systems as colossal moral failures. we get these pithy soundbites about "X% more people have access to clean drinking water, or Y% more literacy compared to three hundred years ago." then you dig into the actual history, and find out that five hundred or a thousand years ago—practically yesterday, in the history of some of these ancient cultures—those people were doing just fine without Western standards of "literacy," and there was plenty of fresh drinking water before it was fucked up by foreign incursion and industrial development. the thing that changed, which the data mysteriously doesn't reflect, was that a bunch of supposedly "rationalist" dickheads showed up with guns to "civilize" the local culture, because democracy is only legitimate when it generates a profit.
the whole idea that capitalism produces scientifically superior outcomes is a charade. the final argument ends up being that it's too late to solve the problems of the past, or there are no better alternatives, so we just have to live with it—which conveniently absolves the underlying ethos of any culpability, and paves the way for the same ongoing criminality. quite the opposite of scientific rationalism: it's the same theological reasoning that says the world would be a playground for Satan without the Church, and the occasional Inquisition or child-buggering is a small price to pay for Global Salvation. because look how many souls have been saved since the Magisterium started collecting data! you can't argue with those numbers.
Don’t worry, I was a hippy retard too. I was young! Most (not all) young people are retards.
If you want to take the conspiracy theory to the next level and posit that the societies “wrecked” by imperialism, with their 70% infant mortality rates, were some kind of Rousseauvian noble savage utopia, I’m not sure I can say much to change your mind.
“Imperialism” has been a constant in every corner of the world for the past 10,000 years. I’m not sure if the Aztecs or the Haida or the Bantu or the Thule or the Persians are the world-wreckers you have in mind, but those empires span the entire globe and several thousand years. You imagine there was an Edenic paradise prior to empire, but that’s not what history tells us.
I agree that that would probably be “admirable”. But Singer’s consequentialist framework makes no distinction between acts of commission and omission, so the decision to play with your own kid for an hour instead of working an extra hour at your job and donating the proceeds to save ten kids in Sierra Leone is the moral equivalent of gunning down ten kids at a playground. It’s perverse. It’s also overly simplistic. The law of tort, despite a century or more of domination by the utilitarian “law and economics” movement, nonetheless retains several very useful limitations on naive utilitarianism. Among these are the ideas of the “least-cost avoider” — the person who is in the best position to effectively avoid a harm — and the “officious intermeddler” — the person who lacks the full context around a problem but who decides to rely on his own (stupid, ignorant, presumptuous) good intentions to solve it.
Basically, utilitarians like Singer are real-life incarnations of the Officious Intermeddler. The law has had none-too-flattering things to say about this character for quite a long time now.
Excuse me, but I'm pretty sure that the Vitamin A supplements I pay for are not being stuffed down unwilling childrens' throats, nor are they asked to pay for them after the fact. Because, you know, I paid for them.
So I don't see how I did an Officious Intermeddling.
No, I agree — apologies if I was unclear. Private charitable interventions are of course capable of doing great good. All I’m saying is that exhorting everyone to participate in private charitable interventions, as a moral
Imperative, is a recipe for lots of counterproductive, exploitative scams and quixotic crusades.
I actually admire Singer quite a bit. I just think he’s wrong about a lot of things. But he really follows through on his (wrong) moral conclusions, it’s very Aspie of him. I like that.
Can we build some kind of power plant out of this? This sounds like a free energy gradient!
Sell the rights for the corpses to Soylent and send the saved kids to work on the Fields (or one of the Nobels or whatever).
If the situation is inevitable make the best of it! Fight fire with a comprehensive culture of safety engineering!
... even if Singer's framework is wrong the goal is definitely worthy enough to take some time and try to salvage it. The whole point of having the institution of EA is to rise above the middling intermeddler level. Find out what the actual problems are what works and what definitely doesn't (what makes it worse).
EA can be good even if we never find a perfect philosophical argument for it.
That said there's a subjectivity factor to these util computations. The main call to action is basically exactly about that "hey, wanna change your preferences a bit and do something very good on the cheap?" ... and then it's up to everyone to evaluate how much their leisure time is worth. (As you say how time they can/want to allocate for "pond duty" out of their life.)
The hypothetical utilclip maximizers have to also factor in that if they get burnt out after 2 weeks of overtime at their 3 jobs, even if they managed to send a lot more money in those weeks, it's still much much much fewer utilclips on the long term than spending quality time with their kids raising them right so that later they also donate 10% effectively.
And that's also why there are many different charities, based on who values what. (Some people want the super shallow but still a tiny bit real connection when they know that their money is going to this particular individual. Some people want to give for very specific causes, etc.) And I think for these things Singer's argument works a bit better. (But even then pushing people to have more consistent preferences won't magically make those preferences more altruistic.)
Hi Glenn. I hope you read this. I have a PhD and I have studied nine languages and dreamt in three. I read about 200 books a year. I wouldn't call myself intellectually lazy, and yet I very much enjoy Jeff Tiedrich's substack. He obviously reads the news compulsively (oh boy!)and he collects any developments that reflect badly on the MAGA movement. He documents and links to everything he presents in his sub stack, and if he makes a mistake, he issues a correction. Like thousands, I find his writing style highly entertaining.
I'm not going to Jeff for novel insights on our rapidly developing culture. I'm going to Jeff as an effective and highly entertaining news aggregator, who has helped me understand more about the pathology of MAGA and the inadequacy of the MSM.
Even though I subscribe to and read the NYT, the WaPo, AP, and the Economist on a daily basis, Jeff keeps me up to speed on the sewers in which Mega dwells. He goes places that I really rather not have to go myself.
BTW, I agree that with you that GW Bush hasn't received enough appreciation for saving millions of lives in Africa from the AIDS epidemic.
I agree that Bush has not been given his due on the assistance re: AIDS. Might’ve been overlooked by those of us watching in horror at what he and Cheney wrought in Iraq
what if there were about 20 million different children drowning in a ridiculously big pond, but you only have the agency to help one child? would it be your own child, kinda dangerously struggling swimming right now, calling for your help? would it be the foreign kid you don't like anyways, 300 meters out, currently actively drowning?
would it be any of the other kids, by some weird mechanism all lined up in inverse according to distance to yourself and gravity of their issues?
Guess what? 🥇🥇🥇Jeff Tiedrich was recognized by Frank Bruni 🥇🥇🥇
in "For the Love of Senences" feature.
Regarding the gubernatorial race in North Carolina, Jeff wrote: “Sorry, Republicans, it looks like you’re going to be forced to carry Mark Robinson to term — even if doing so endangers the life of your party.” (nominated by Linda Edmundson, Cranston, R.I.)
What's your actual response to the initial argument? It seems pretty similar to a common anti-utilitarian argument that it's difficult, if not-impossible, to objectively gauge the utility of various actions. This is exacerbated by dishonest actors.
Or what's the response to the other arguments? Isn't it possible that domination by outsiders is worse than those outsiders allowing a community to die? And what if you can only help some people and by doing so you do create a hierarchy that leads to more suffering later on?
My view is that these questions are usually asked in bad-faith and the questioner just doesn't want to feel obligated to do anything. Or they feel self-conscious about their altruistic choices. Intellectually I know that my donation to the senior cat shelter would be more effective going to mosquito nets in Africa, but emotionally I think of those cute whiskers and sad eyes. But the questions could still be answered.
This is a ridiculous argument. If you decide to send money to a cat charity, then send your money. If you want to give kids in South America food and education, send your money. If you decide that God wants you to move to Asia to give aid and preach the Gospel, then go. Your priorities are yours, alone.
But in everything, balance your ideas and wishes with the inherent value of who you are supporting, understanding that you do not have to totally understand the cultural differences, but you do need to be aware that they exist and account for them.
Do NOT let this head fake (colonialism, cultural differences, whatever) freeze you into inaction. There is a kid in Bolivia that wants to go to law school, and I will do what I can to help (which is not much). There is a professor in South Sudan that is helping his country through hard times, because a whole lot of people gave of their time and money to give him opportunities for an education (and survival).
The counter-argument is sophistry (which is just a fancy way of calling BS).
Hey Kevin, thanks for responding (and responding to yourself).
I'm not sure if I expressed myself clearly.
I understand that my priorities are my own, but the drowning child argument is meant for me to reevaluate my priorities. So I wanted to understand it and the counterarguments better.
The colonialism argument is more that meddling in exotic places can lead to long term issues. For example, what if the professor in South Sudan is Dinka and believes that the best way to help his country through hard times is to fund Dinka institutions until they can dominate Nuer institutions? Long term, directing external support to only one ethnic group could cause suffering than is prevented.
And I understand that a lot of anti-EA arguments are sophistry, either by people that don't want to do charity or don't want to question their charitable giving (like funding cat surgery). But since there's sophistry, there should be good responses.
First. Major props for knowing Dinka vs Nuer tribes! Yes, we did have to learn that, and one of the projects the prof wanted to do back in Sudan wasn’t able to work because of inter-tribe conflict.
I don’t want to say that those arguments are invalid (so ‘sophistry’ was not a good term), but such arguments should not be considered as anything but instructive for future decisions. Those who are wise listen to multiple counselors, so the best response would be, “Thank you for your insights. You’ve given me something to think about.” And then, act.
I look at the SBF crap a lot like I do rampant messes within the Catholic church. The bad behavior of a whole lot of the leadership does not invalidate Christian morality. But it does point out how it’s application can go terribly wrong
Not so fun fact. My great grandfather, a father to a young son and another on the way was with his little brother swimming and another person and the little brother started to drown and my great grandfather attempted to rescue him and they both ended up drowning. This ended up causing a lot of generational pain and poverty to that part of my family. Yet at the time I’m sure it was unthinkable in his mind not to try. There are just no simple answers to these kind of moral dilemmas. In the long run it would have been better for his widow and children if he hadn’t but I doubt he could have lived with himself for the rest of his life.
There's a lot of good stuff here and it reads like an academic textbook.
If that's not the goal, please read some Stephen Pinker and then his style book. It's possible to be intellectually thorough and entertaining at the same.
I think if you see a drowning child you should stop what you're doing to save them, I've donated to Against Malaria Foundation and think eradication of Malaria is a worthwhile charitable goal even if working toward this would risk making you feel like a white savior or leaving behind a more prosperous society where some were even more prosperous than others. Yet I don't think the drowning child argument is a very good argument. Because Singer wants you to ignore many features of the drowning child situation that give it such moral force -- the immediacy, the fact that you are right there where the situation is occurring, can plainly see it and are better positioned to understand the likely consequences of your potential interventions than anyone -- and instead analyze the situation with a reasoning by which you'd be no more walking past that drowning child than someone in a village in Africa is. And he ignores that the kind of utilitarian reasoning he prefers is the only kind of moral reasoning where it would make sense to account for the suit in the first place. I mean -- what if the reason you're wearing that expensive suit is because you're on your way to your well remunerated job, and stopping means missing lots of high frequency trades which means you can now buy far fewer mosquito nets for children in Africa -- should you stop then? Should you weight this drowning child in front of you more than the remote ones in Africa you are trying to save with nets? I'd argue yes, you should still stop, but perhaps more important than whether my argument would be correct is that most people have a strong intuition that this is the right thing to do, and this is why the situation has the moral force Singer wants to start from, yet he argues as if the reason for saving the child is something else that fewer people would agree with and doesn't as strongly argue for saving the child, and proceeds from there in a style that doesn't match how most people think about morality.
Perhaps I should break down the steps of the argument:
1. You'd stop to save a drowning child even if it would ruin your expensive suit. (Yes)
2. Let's interpret your hypothetical action through a utilitarian calculation by which you would be less strongly motivated than you are to save the child, and from that derive from that the monetary equivalent of the moral worth of saving one random child's life. (This step is highly dubious.)
3. You should give the price of any suit of a price that wouldn't change step one to a charity that has calculated that for a cost of no more than that they can save a statistically expected one or more random children somewhere in the world in whatever situation. (No. I mean, I could be convinced to do so, but not by this logic.)
4. And, by the same reasoning, you should give them that money again. If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. (No. I mean, I see the internal logic here, but I don't think it works to take it this far, and I could swear I've heard this somewhere before, but it didn't really seem like an argument...)
You should stop writing this blog. Instead listen and learn
I like the EAs, and utilitarianism isn’t a bad heuristic for day to day mundane moral calculus. But Singer’s thought experiment is a shell game, a card trick. Here’s an alternative to his little fable:
Imagine that you live next to a pond. Every day, cruel men dump dozens children into this pond. Often these are their own children! This has been going on since before you were born. Nobody stops the men; sometimes the men jump into the pond themselves, and none of them can swim either. Whenever someone tries to save one of these children, the men find another child and throw that one in as well.
Now what do your moral intuitions tell you? That you have a moral obligation to spend every waking minute, for your entire life, trying to save some small number of these children, despite the men seemingly able to make more children to throw into the pond — and to make them in proportion to the number you save?
Perhaps that’s an admirable conclusion. Perhaps it’s admirable to be a saint, dying amongst the lepers, spending your one solitary life on this earth pushing a stone up a hill only to have it tumble back again, and again, and again, until your strength deserts you and you tumble down the hill as well, lifeless as a stone yourself. But I think that perhaps not everyone has to choose to spend their life doing this. And that you’re not a bad person for wanting to actually live.
I dunno, man, I’d see about building a fence around the pond, that place sounds dangerous.
Well, yeah, exactly. In 1990, 36% of the global population lived in extreme poverty; in 2015, that number was 10%. Globalization managed to build that fence by integrating poor countries into global markets for labour, manufacturing, and commodities. It didn’t happen as a result of individuals donating to Save The Children (even though many such charities do valuable work). The change we needed to save all those children was systemic, and required us to think in structural, systemic terms about collective action problems and governance.
Singer’s framework took the systemic problem as unsolvable and instead asked individuals to become saints: stop eating meat and eggs and dairy products, stop spending money on middle class comforts, stop having children, just give all your money to the poor. It’s a perfect example of the atomization of elite professional-class society: each solitary individual, taking personal responsibility for trying to save the world. That has never worked and never will.
Great points though I think the irony is that we *didn’t* think in systemic terms about collective action problems. Globalisation and thus access to reward for these people was a byproduct of the choices of corporations driven by capitalism. You could call that an atomised response too but it’s a lot easier to get people to act in their own self-interest (“it’s cheaper!”) than someone else’s (“think of the starving children in Africa!”).
There’s certainly some truth to that, but it’s not like the WTO and the dozens of international free trade agreements it enforces happened by accident. A lot of economists believed that trade is good for everyone, and especially for the third world, and while they were denounced for decades as greedy corporate shills, it turns out they were right and the hippy retards talking about “corporate greed” and blocking the streets in Seattle in ‘99 were wrong. The results are in, and it is not a close call. So I don’t think it’s fair to pretend that this happened by accident, or that the economists were lying to further the interests of their corporate overlords. If I put forward a model that predicts X, and 90% of my colleagues agree that the model is accurate, and the other 10% (with the backing of politicians who favour protectionism because it assists some small faction of their constituencies) calls me a liar, and 30 years later the model turns out to be 100% accurate… well, it isn’t the global corporations who were at fault, or the economists. It was the entrenched local corporate interests who favoured the protectionist status quo, and their useful idiots.
as one of the afore-mentioned "hippy retards" (in spirit, not that i was old enough to be in Seattle in '99) i always wonder: isn't it convenient how all the graphs used by the economists to demonstrate that "trade is good for everyone" all start *after* imperialism wrecked most of the world?
the stock explanation is "yeah, but there was no data available before then." well—no shit. the people who started collecting the data and deciding which metrics mattered were colonial functionaries with a vested interest in *not* portraying their economic systems as colossal moral failures. we get these pithy soundbites about "X% more people have access to clean drinking water, or Y% more literacy compared to three hundred years ago." then you dig into the actual history, and find out that five hundred or a thousand years ago—practically yesterday, in the history of some of these ancient cultures—those people were doing just fine without Western standards of "literacy," and there was plenty of fresh drinking water before it was fucked up by foreign incursion and industrial development. the thing that changed, which the data mysteriously doesn't reflect, was that a bunch of supposedly "rationalist" dickheads showed up with guns to "civilize" the local culture, because democracy is only legitimate when it generates a profit.
the whole idea that capitalism produces scientifically superior outcomes is a charade. the final argument ends up being that it's too late to solve the problems of the past, or there are no better alternatives, so we just have to live with it—which conveniently absolves the underlying ethos of any culpability, and paves the way for the same ongoing criminality. quite the opposite of scientific rationalism: it's the same theological reasoning that says the world would be a playground for Satan without the Church, and the occasional Inquisition or child-buggering is a small price to pay for Global Salvation. because look how many souls have been saved since the Magisterium started collecting data! you can't argue with those numbers.
that's what the hippie retards think, anyway.
Don’t worry, I was a hippy retard too. I was young! Most (not all) young people are retards.
If you want to take the conspiracy theory to the next level and posit that the societies “wrecked” by imperialism, with their 70% infant mortality rates, were some kind of Rousseauvian noble savage utopia, I’m not sure I can say much to change your mind.
“Imperialism” has been a constant in every corner of the world for the past 10,000 years. I’m not sure if the Aztecs or the Haida or the Bantu or the Thule or the Persians are the world-wreckers you have in mind, but those empires span the entire globe and several thousand years. You imagine there was an Edenic paradise prior to empire, but that’s not what history tells us.
I wouldn't say you should spend every waking minute saving the children. But I would say you should save more than zero of the children.
I'd say it would be admirable if you spent 10% of your time[1] saving children from the pond, and spend the rest of your time on other things.
[1] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
I agree that that would probably be “admirable”. But Singer’s consequentialist framework makes no distinction between acts of commission and omission, so the decision to play with your own kid for an hour instead of working an extra hour at your job and donating the proceeds to save ten kids in Sierra Leone is the moral equivalent of gunning down ten kids at a playground. It’s perverse. It’s also overly simplistic. The law of tort, despite a century or more of domination by the utilitarian “law and economics” movement, nonetheless retains several very useful limitations on naive utilitarianism. Among these are the ideas of the “least-cost avoider” — the person who is in the best position to effectively avoid a harm — and the “officious intermeddler” — the person who lacks the full context around a problem but who decides to rely on his own (stupid, ignorant, presumptuous) good intentions to solve it.
Basically, utilitarians like Singer are real-life incarnations of the Officious Intermeddler. The law has had none-too-flattering things to say about this character for quite a long time now.
Excuse me, but I'm pretty sure that the Vitamin A supplements I pay for are not being stuffed down unwilling childrens' throats, nor are they asked to pay for them after the fact. Because, you know, I paid for them.
So I don't see how I did an Officious Intermeddling.
No, I agree — apologies if I was unclear. Private charitable interventions are of course capable of doing great good. All I’m saying is that exhorting everyone to participate in private charitable interventions, as a moral
Imperative, is a recipe for lots of counterproductive, exploitative scams and quixotic crusades.
Instead of dropping children can we drop shitty analogies along with their authors ? It’s a win win
I actually admire Singer quite a bit. I just think he’s wrong about a lot of things. But he really follows through on his (wrong) moral conclusions, it’s very Aspie of him. I like that.
Can we build some kind of power plant out of this? This sounds like a free energy gradient!
Sell the rights for the corpses to Soylent and send the saved kids to work on the Fields (or one of the Nobels or whatever).
If the situation is inevitable make the best of it! Fight fire with a comprehensive culture of safety engineering!
... even if Singer's framework is wrong the goal is definitely worthy enough to take some time and try to salvage it. The whole point of having the institution of EA is to rise above the middling intermeddler level. Find out what the actual problems are what works and what definitely doesn't (what makes it worse).
EA can be good even if we never find a perfect philosophical argument for it.
That said there's a subjectivity factor to these util computations. The main call to action is basically exactly about that "hey, wanna change your preferences a bit and do something very good on the cheap?" ... and then it's up to everyone to evaluate how much their leisure time is worth. (As you say how time they can/want to allocate for "pond duty" out of their life.)
The hypothetical utilclip maximizers have to also factor in that if they get burnt out after 2 weeks of overtime at their 3 jobs, even if they managed to send a lot more money in those weeks, it's still much much much fewer utilclips on the long term than spending quality time with their kids raising them right so that later they also donate 10% effectively.
And that's also why there are many different charities, based on who values what. (Some people want the super shallow but still a tiny bit real connection when they know that their money is going to this particular individual. Some people want to give for very specific causes, etc.) And I think for these things Singer's argument works a bit better. (But even then pushing people to have more consistent preferences won't magically make those preferences more altruistic.)
Hi Glenn. I hope you read this. I have a PhD and I have studied nine languages and dreamt in three. I read about 200 books a year. I wouldn't call myself intellectually lazy, and yet I very much enjoy Jeff Tiedrich's substack. He obviously reads the news compulsively (oh boy!)and he collects any developments that reflect badly on the MAGA movement. He documents and links to everything he presents in his sub stack, and if he makes a mistake, he issues a correction. Like thousands, I find his writing style highly entertaining.
I'm not going to Jeff for novel insights on our rapidly developing culture. I'm going to Jeff as an effective and highly entertaining news aggregator, who has helped me understand more about the pathology of MAGA and the inadequacy of the MSM.
Even though I subscribe to and read the NYT, the WaPo, AP, and the Economist on a daily basis, Jeff keeps me up to speed on the sewers in which Mega dwells. He goes places that I really rather not have to go myself.
BTW, I agree that with you that GW Bush hasn't received enough appreciation for saving millions of lives in Africa from the AIDS epidemic.
I agree that Bush has not been given his due on the assistance re: AIDS. Might’ve been overlooked by those of us watching in horror at what he and Cheney wrought in Iraq
what if there were about 20 million different children drowning in a ridiculously big pond, but you only have the agency to help one child? would it be your own child, kinda dangerously struggling swimming right now, calling for your help? would it be the foreign kid you don't like anyways, 300 meters out, currently actively drowning?
would it be any of the other kids, by some weird mechanism all lined up in inverse according to distance to yourself and gravity of their issues?
Guess what? 🥇🥇🥇Jeff Tiedrich was recognized by Frank Bruni 🥇🥇🥇
in "For the Love of Senences" feature.
Regarding the gubernatorial race in North Carolina, Jeff wrote: “Sorry, Republicans, it looks like you’re going to be forced to carry Mark Robinson to term — even if doing so endangers the life of your party.” (nominated by Linda Edmundson, Cranston, R.I.)
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render?campaign_id=93&emc=edit_fb_20240926&instance_id=135336&isViewInBrowser=true&nl=frank-bruni&paid_regi=1®i_id=191440926&segment_id=178904&te=1&uri=nyt://newsletter/48a77125-32c9-56cd-8582-b3cb27de45c3&user_id=ce1478ce2e51de14ed53104496dd6d2c
Wasn’t that delicious?
A fascinating fact about EA is that while being often quite crazy, it is mostly about trying to put rationality into woke identitarianism.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/r3f45au7ewEkypygf/wokism-rethinking-priorities-and-the-bostrom-case
The author refuses to stay in xir's lane, and I'm here for it
I was going to comment and then, decided against it.
What's your actual response to the initial argument? It seems pretty similar to a common anti-utilitarian argument that it's difficult, if not-impossible, to objectively gauge the utility of various actions. This is exacerbated by dishonest actors.
Or what's the response to the other arguments? Isn't it possible that domination by outsiders is worse than those outsiders allowing a community to die? And what if you can only help some people and by doing so you do create a hierarchy that leads to more suffering later on?
My view is that these questions are usually asked in bad-faith and the questioner just doesn't want to feel obligated to do anything. Or they feel self-conscious about their altruistic choices. Intellectually I know that my donation to the senior cat shelter would be more effective going to mosquito nets in Africa, but emotionally I think of those cute whiskers and sad eyes. But the questions could still be answered.
This is a ridiculous argument. If you decide to send money to a cat charity, then send your money. If you want to give kids in South America food and education, send your money. If you decide that God wants you to move to Asia to give aid and preach the Gospel, then go. Your priorities are yours, alone.
But in everything, balance your ideas and wishes with the inherent value of who you are supporting, understanding that you do not have to totally understand the cultural differences, but you do need to be aware that they exist and account for them.
Do NOT let this head fake (colonialism, cultural differences, whatever) freeze you into inaction. There is a kid in Bolivia that wants to go to law school, and I will do what I can to help (which is not much). There is a professor in South Sudan that is helping his country through hard times, because a whole lot of people gave of their time and money to give him opportunities for an education (and survival).
The counter-argument is sophistry (which is just a fancy way of calling BS).
Wow. Triggered much, Kevin?
Hey Kevin, thanks for responding (and responding to yourself).
I'm not sure if I expressed myself clearly.
I understand that my priorities are my own, but the drowning child argument is meant for me to reevaluate my priorities. So I wanted to understand it and the counterarguments better.
The colonialism argument is more that meddling in exotic places can lead to long term issues. For example, what if the professor in South Sudan is Dinka and believes that the best way to help his country through hard times is to fund Dinka institutions until they can dominate Nuer institutions? Long term, directing external support to only one ethnic group could cause suffering than is prevented.
And I understand that a lot of anti-EA arguments are sophistry, either by people that don't want to do charity or don't want to question their charitable giving (like funding cat surgery). But since there's sophistry, there should be good responses.
First. Major props for knowing Dinka vs Nuer tribes! Yes, we did have to learn that, and one of the projects the prof wanted to do back in Sudan wasn’t able to work because of inter-tribe conflict.
I don’t want to say that those arguments are invalid (so ‘sophistry’ was not a good term), but such arguments should not be considered as anything but instructive for future decisions. Those who are wise listen to multiple counselors, so the best response would be, “Thank you for your insights. You’ve given me something to think about.” And then, act.
😂😂😂 My sarcasm meter nearly broke, well played
I look at the SBF crap a lot like I do rampant messes within the Catholic church. The bad behavior of a whole lot of the leadership does not invalidate Christian morality. But it does point out how it’s application can go terribly wrong
Not so fun fact. My great grandfather, a father to a young son and another on the way was with his little brother swimming and another person and the little brother started to drown and my great grandfather attempted to rescue him and they both ended up drowning. This ended up causing a lot of generational pain and poverty to that part of my family. Yet at the time I’m sure it was unthinkable in his mind not to try. There are just no simple answers to these kind of moral dilemmas. In the long run it would have been better for his widow and children if he hadn’t but I doubt he could have lived with himself for the rest of his life.
I laughed at this or something
I love the sarcasm. https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/the-day-the-pig-fell-into-the-well
I get it now. Good and bad are unknowable.
There's a lot of good stuff here and it reads like an academic textbook.
If that's not the goal, please read some Stephen Pinker and then his style book. It's possible to be intellectually thorough and entertaining at the same.
I think if you see a drowning child you should stop what you're doing to save them, I've donated to Against Malaria Foundation and think eradication of Malaria is a worthwhile charitable goal even if working toward this would risk making you feel like a white savior or leaving behind a more prosperous society where some were even more prosperous than others. Yet I don't think the drowning child argument is a very good argument. Because Singer wants you to ignore many features of the drowning child situation that give it such moral force -- the immediacy, the fact that you are right there where the situation is occurring, can plainly see it and are better positioned to understand the likely consequences of your potential interventions than anyone -- and instead analyze the situation with a reasoning by which you'd be no more walking past that drowning child than someone in a village in Africa is. And he ignores that the kind of utilitarian reasoning he prefers is the only kind of moral reasoning where it would make sense to account for the suit in the first place. I mean -- what if the reason you're wearing that expensive suit is because you're on your way to your well remunerated job, and stopping means missing lots of high frequency trades which means you can now buy far fewer mosquito nets for children in Africa -- should you stop then? Should you weight this drowning child in front of you more than the remote ones in Africa you are trying to save with nets? I'd argue yes, you should still stop, but perhaps more important than whether my argument would be correct is that most people have a strong intuition that this is the right thing to do, and this is why the situation has the moral force Singer wants to start from, yet he argues as if the reason for saving the child is something else that fewer people would agree with and doesn't as strongly argue for saving the child, and proceeds from there in a style that doesn't match how most people think about morality.
Perhaps I should break down the steps of the argument:
1. You'd stop to save a drowning child even if it would ruin your expensive suit. (Yes)
2. Let's interpret your hypothetical action through a utilitarian calculation by which you would be less strongly motivated than you are to save the child, and from that derive from that the monetary equivalent of the moral worth of saving one random child's life. (This step is highly dubious.)
3. You should give the price of any suit of a price that wouldn't change step one to a charity that has calculated that for a cost of no more than that they can save a statistically expected one or more random children somewhere in the world in whatever situation. (No. I mean, I could be convinced to do so, but not by this logic.)
4. And, by the same reasoning, you should give them that money again. If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. (No. I mean, I see the internal logic here, but I don't think it works to take it this far, and I could swear I've heard this somewhere before, but it didn't really seem like an argument...)