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Extreme altruism: caring for strangers at the expense of family

62 points by aschearer 11y ago

mizzao 11y ago
In economic terms, might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare? I always thought some of my reasoning about the world was rather strange and hard to comprehend. Now I see that there are people who are even more extreme than me. It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other religions.
- andrepd 11y ago
  You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want happiness and thus working towards others' happiness is a worthy goal.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    The way you phrase it is as if one of those things follows from the other, but it doesn't. Would you say "You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want ice cream, thus working towards giving them ice cream is a worthy goal"? Just because other people want something doesn't mean that you value giving it to them, without some other unstated belief.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      But it would make them happy? And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it. That’s like the whole point why social nations in Europe can exist. Because everyone is willing to help, sometimes even at their own cost.
      - MichaelGG 11y ago
        >And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it. This can't be true (or did you just mean for ice cream, where the cost is negligible?). Some people are going to have a terrible life, and for something like 20% of your salary, you could dramatically improve it. I doubt there is a way to measure the impact where giving, say, half of disposable income directly to some poor folks isn't a net positive.
        kuschku 11y ago
        Well, that's one of the parts of social democracies, where you end up spending around half of your salary on income taxes.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other religions. What are you on about now?
- cjbprime 11y ago
  > might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare? Yes, and in fact this (entirely secular) philosophy has a name: utilitarianism.
obrero 11y ago
The old party line of the Communist Party USA was to not only not support charity, but on some level to work against charity. As Europe and North America shifted from farming and feudalism, a new group came into existence, the "reserve army of labor" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), also known as the unemployed. As the people who control production want this, trying to fight this charity and whatnot is considered a waste of time - the people who control production want unemployment and poverty to be at a certain level, and if the working class makes a massive effort to relieve it one place, the controllers of production will just increase it elsewhere. You can see this in its modern form by reading the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek etc. in the year 2000. There were worries the unemployment rate had gotten "too low" (<4%), i.e. it was a problem too many people looking for a job could find one. Talks of inflation and so forth, basically the WSJ-speak way which can easily be translated into Marxist terminology. If the powers that be were openly seeking to increase unemployment in 2000, what is the point of devoting a lot of effort to charity? The communists thought charities contributed to this problem, by prolonging the agony. It seems the problem is more structural.
Mz 11y ago
In wartime, it is thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family for the sake of a cause. In ordinary times, to ask a person to sacrifice his life for a stranger seems outrageous, but in war it is commonplace. In wartime, you go off to war in hopes of preventing it from coming to your village, in hopes of protecting your family and your land and your people and your little world. I think we are seeing articles like this because with 7 billion people on the planet and dead zones in the ocean and global media, we cannot escape the awareness that the fabric of society is tattered and could fray further and the only hope for protecting our little corner or the world is to somehow find a way to make the entire world more stable. Yet, no one knows how to make that happen. People are scared, even wealthy people. And some of them react by trying to make the entire world a better place. Global media makes it hard to have those boundaries that distinguish clearly between whom we should help or must help and whom we have no obligation to help. Global media makes it hard to figure out where to draw those lines. It has erased boundaries we did not know we had, and now we don't know how this new reality works.
- deleted 11y ago
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- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  I have been thinking about the world as if we are in wartime* for some time now. It kind of makes a lot of things that I see around me make a lot more sense. But I don't think it's true that no one knows how to make the entire world more stable. I think the article explains it very well: You just start treating people outside your family as if they were in your family. (Family, meaning your circle of care, not your biological family.) Many are already doing this, but since poverty is still here it apparently isn't enough people yet. Pile on! * The war, in this sense, is between those who want to add more individuals to their family and those who want to farm individuals as resources. And of course many of us play both roles, sometimes simultaneously.
- krauthammer 11y ago
  Nobody knows how to make it happen? Sure we do. Ban liberal (dark) arts. Ban gay marriage. Bring back systemic racism, segregation, and bring gulags to America. This will free up white america and enable whites to tackle environmental problems, save the oceans, and save and prop up the lives of non-whites all around the world.
andyl 11y ago
Just another campaign in the cultural marxist war on the family. Who could be against altruism?
- andrepd 11y ago
  Why is it "another campaign"? I only see the testimony of a person with an extreme (and commendable) sense of morality.
throwitup 11y ago
These "saints" will destroy the world. http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_taylor_sj.htm http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_ta...
- andrepd 11y ago
  You have a right to your opinion. Care to elaborate on why you think this way? What makes you think you are above everyone else?
zth 11y ago
I've always thought you should take care of yourself first, then help others, because that was the only way you can help people in the first place. Perhaps there's a way of maximizing human flourishing in which we go as far as we can go and somehow train ourselves to truly be dispassionate to friends and family and just be globally concerned and not weight our children's welfare more than someone else's children. There's a thousand ways to tune the variable of selfishness versus altruism. Some people think it's morally/emotionally normative to privilege your family members over strangers. I wouldn't want to care just as much as the stranger on the street as my family, and I wouldn't want to take as much joy in his presence as in theirs, because that would seem to somehow deflate the significance of my relationships to my family. But if you take drugs like MDMA or do meditation practices like love and kindness, you realize that love really isn't transactional or personal in any important sense, it is a state of consciousness, a state of being you can inhabit to one or another degree and in our normal mode, we only tend to get glimpses of it. When one's experiencing these states of consciousness it's not like one loves ones children less. It's possible to just throw open the gates to that state of mind, and doing that, you wouldn't see any good reason to relinquish it if you could effortlessly stay at that place.
jondubois 11y ago
Poverty is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. If poor Africans keep having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty - If you give them the wrong kind of help, you will just allow them to survive and have more children but it wont create any long term improvements. I think the root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured as well as they could be because there are too many of them. I think the one child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years - It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and allowed them to get the best education possible.
- Mz 11y ago
  The One Child policy was a draconian method. A humane solution is to improve education and rights for women globally. Educated, empowered women choose to have fewer children, take better care of them, etc.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Sadly, you have to also start tackling religious issues: Catholicism can not further forbid abortion or use of condoms. This is seriously hurting humanity.
    - hguant 11y ago
      Catholicism also promotes the idea of the sanctity of individual life, places moral burdens on business and political leaders in countries where brutality and exploitation are the norm, and creates a culture that emphasizes and encourages education. (Not to mention the whole "creating the moral foundation Western Democracy takes for granted" thing.) You don't need to start fighting religion to help the poor; religion has provided, for many, the most effective means of getting out poverty. Also, going in to a place and starting a fight against the local religion (be it Catholicism, Islam, neo-Jobsian technocracy) is a good way to be ignored by the people your trying to help.
      - 11y ago
a3voices 11y ago
What about animal and plant life? Articles like these are very human-centric. For example it might be best if everyone from South America was forced to relocate to Central America, and make all of South America a nature reserve.
emmab 11y ago
The switch to male pronouns partway through the article when it became a theoretical person was a little jarring.
- cjbprime 11y ago
  Yeah! That was weird.
DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
this is nothing new and modern psychology explains it well. http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-yale-psychologists-discover-why-heroes-risk-their-lives-save-307049 http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-yale-... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-fear/201001/altruism-heroics-and-extreme-altrusim https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-fear/201001/a...
- aschearer 11y ago
  The linked article isn't about "hero altruism" as described in your links. It's about people who put the welfare of strangers above their own. For example by contributing 50+% of their income to charities, forgoing children in order to pursue career and donate more, and so forth.
chipsy 11y ago
Altruism defined in wealth terms is very narrow. It allows you to steal billions and give away millions and come out with a net balance of "wealthy philanthropist". The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice. I think many do-gooders struggle with the problem on different terms: whether they can find a place where they both fit in the system and yet also do good for the system. For example, a basic researcher in the sciences does nothing at all now but might open the door to great achievements later. A politician will be distrusted no matter what they do, but if they are adept they gradually reorganize the landscape to enable policies progressive towards their vision of a better society. There is enormous room for people to do work that benefits them and nobody else, but that doesn't lead to a concrete conclusion about all workers, because this problem is faced in every sector.
- orborde 11y ago
  > The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice. Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are real people who are, so far as I know, pretty much as the article describes: http://www.givinggladly.com/ http://www.givinggladly.com/ http://www.jefftk.com/ http://www.jefftk.com/
epx 11y ago
Eating an apple and feeling guilty... think about crazy people. I actually knew a handful of persons like that (mostly women). They cared about anyone except their own offspring, and the children are adults now, and struggling. So sorry, I can't agree with that, so sorry.
deleted 11y ago
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pdonis 11y ago
The problem I see with the title concept--caring for strangers at the expense of family, or more generally caring for people you don't know, at the expense of people you do know--is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them. But no one person can know everyone in the world. Human beings don't scale. The only effective way to get a lot of people helped is to have a lot of people willing to help, each of whom gets to know a few people well enough to understand what will help them, and then helps those few people. But for some odd reason, we don't think of "charity" this way. We think that helping people you know, so that your help is as effective as possible, is somehow less "moral" than "helping" people you don't know at all, so that you don't know what will help them.
- cjbprime 11y ago
  > in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them Or maybe not -- what do you think of https://givedirectly.org/ https://givedirectly.org/?
  - pdonis 11y ago
    I agree that, if you have already decided you're going to give to people you don't know, it's more effective to give them money than anything else, since that is the most flexible form of help. Whether it is as effective as helping people you do know is a different question.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them It is not strictly true. Yes, helping someone effectively involves a person who knows the recipient of aid enough to understand their needs. But that doesn't have to be you. You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives. You can work on making those nets, and that is helping. Or you can have a well-paying job and use surplus income to support people distributing those nets, people who know those they're helping. Also, a lot of low-hanging-fruits of world-fixing exist on social or global level, not on the level of individuals. I don't need to know of or care about any sick person in particular to help fight malaria effectively - in fact, getting emotional is often counterproductive. What matters are aggregate effects. Number of people who would die but are not going to because of the aid is what matters. Average quality of life improving is what matters. But I think that's orthogonal to the issue of family vs. strangers, and conflating the two doesn't help with anything. I agree that we shouldn't treat helping people we know as less moral just because we know them (and thus get to experience their gratitude). But I also don't think that those close to me are inherently more worth than those further. I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense. This comes naturally when you start extending your concept of 'family and friends' to the entire world.
javert 11y ago
But there is no reason to be altruistic. It's a total fantasy, just like any religion is. To believe otherwise is to live an unexamined life, and the unexamined life is not worth living. Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).
- verbin217 11y ago
  Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs. They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish. I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such that you can then optimize it.
  - javert 11y ago
    I can't really follow this. For one thing, I don't know what "person of enough collective benefit" means (seems like you are missing a proposition or something). For another thing, it's not true that people are doomed to ignorance, and it seems like your argument probably rests on that assumption. I don't see for a second why you'd say people are doomed to ignorance. We use sense perception to perceive stuff, and we develop a coherent picture of the world (so we learn to reconcile optical illusions, for instance). And for all intents and purposes, that is reality, and it's objective. Maybe there's some other reality underneath that, but then, maybe there are pink unicorns dancing on Alpha Centauri; it's totally arbitrary, and thus irrelevant.
    - verbin217 11y ago
Tycho 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> What would the world be like if everyone thought like a do-gooder? What if everyone believed that his family was no more important or valuable than anyone else’s? They would pool up, and solve all the problems in order, and live happy and wealthy ever after. We would have a paradise on Earth, because when everyone cares about everyone else, everyone gets cared about too. Because seriously, a lot of bad things stem from the fact that majority of people care primarily about their closest circle and treats everyone else as exploitable. -- I understand the problems of people in this article perfectly. I had a similar depression period and, like probably pretty much everybody, learned to avoid thinking about it too much in order to preserve my own sanity. Still, I think I can relate to those "do-gooders" much better than to normal people. In fact, I think normal people have their morality backwards - and Hollywood has it sideways. In movies, it's becoming common for a protagonist to explicitly kill (or allow to be killed) even thousands of people to save one relative, or for some silly reasons like revenge, and the audience doesn't even blink. Family is important, we're pretty much wired to care about them more. But I also think that as humans, we're capable of doing more than just stopping on purely low-level, biological impulses. Exercising empathy and rational thought helps one realize that all the other people are just like you, with dreams and worries and hopes for the future. It makes you care about the whole humanity, not just some arbitrary groups related to your place of birth. After all, we all live together on the same piece of rock in the middle of emptiness. We are family. And laugh all you want at various "do-gooders", effective altruists and people with dreams of brighter future. But somebody has to do the job of fixing things, building a better world for everyone. It won't spontaneously appear.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  This deserves to be less of an HN comment, and more of a manifesto (I mean that as a compliment).
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
What I find interesting, is that Bill Gates (and others) are doing literally this, giving large amounts of their wealth away to people other than their kids, and yet it doesn't seem odd in the slightest to most people. The obvious retort is that he has more than enough, even after his charity, which then begs the question: how much is enough? In particular, does Bill Gates only have "enough" relatively, or is there some absolute level of enough.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think Bill Gates (and others) understands that leaving his children too much wealth will hurt them, preclude from growing up into a functioning member of society that trusts their own strength. There isn't an absolute level of "enough", but as a practical limit I'd consider that enough is the amount that lets you live without worrying about money for food and shelter being the major part of your day-to-day decisionmaking process.

62 points by aschearer 11y ago

In economic terms, might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare? I always thought some of my reasoning about the world was rather strange and hard to comprehend. Now I see that there are people who are even more extreme than me. It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other religions.

andrepd 11y ago
You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want happiness and thus working towards others' happiness is a worthy goal.
- deleted 11y ago
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- kybernetikos 11y ago
  The way you phrase it is as if one of those things follows from the other, but it doesn't. Would you say "You don't have to be religious to recognize that people want ice cream, thus working towards giving them ice cream is a worthy goal"? Just because other people want something doesn't mean that you value giving it to them, without some other unstated belief.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    But it would make them happy? And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it. That’s like the whole point why social nations in Europe can exist. Because everyone is willing to help, sometimes even at their own cost.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      >And if it costs me less than it brings them, sure, I’d do it. This can't be true (or did you just mean for ice cream, where the cost is negligible?). Some people are going to have a terrible life, and for something like 20% of your salary, you could dramatically improve it. I doubt there is a way to measure the impact where giving, say, half of disposable income directly to some poor folks isn't a net positive.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        Well, that's one of the parts of social democracies, where you end up spending around half of your salary on income taxes.
- deleted 11y ago
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eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>It's also particularly interesting that someone can be this way in the absence of religion, since atheism probably begets nihilism more so than other religions. What are you on about now?
cjbprime 11y ago
> might we think about this as someone who is maximizing a utility function for social welfare rather than individual welfare? Yes, and in fact this (entirely secular) philosophy has a name: utilitarianism.

obrero 11y ago

The old party line of the Communist Party USA was to not only not support charity, but on some level to work against charity. As Europe and North America shifted from farming and feudalism, a new group came into existence, the "reserve army of labor" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ), also known as the unemployed. As the people who control production want this, trying to fight this charity and whatnot is considered a waste of time - the people who control production want unemployment and poverty to be at a certain level, and if the working class makes a massive effort to relieve it one place, the controllers of production will just increase it elsewhere. You can see this in its modern form by reading the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek etc. in the year 2000. There were worries the unemployment rate had gotten "too low" (<4%), i.e. it was a problem too many people looking for a job could find one. Talks of inflation and so forth, basically the WSJ-speak way which can easily be translated into Marxist terminology. If the powers that be were openly seeking to increase unemployment in 2000, what is the point of devoting a lot of effort to charity? The communists thought charities contributed to this problem, by prolonging the agony. It seems the problem is more structural.

Mz 11y ago

In wartime, it is thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family for the sake of a cause. In ordinary times, to ask a person to sacrifice his life for a stranger seems outrageous, but in war it is commonplace. In wartime, you go off to war in hopes of preventing it from coming to your village, in hopes of protecting your family and your land and your people and your little world. I think we are seeing articles like this because with 7 billion people on the planet and dead zones in the ocean and global media, we cannot escape the awareness that the fabric of society is tattered and could fray further and the only hope for protecting our little corner or the world is to somehow find a way to make the entire world more stable. Yet, no one knows how to make that happen. People are scared, even wealthy people. And some of them react by trying to make the entire world a better place. Global media makes it hard to have those boundaries that distinguish clearly between whom we should help or must help and whom we have no obligation to help. Global media makes it hard to figure out where to draw those lines. It has erased boundaries we did not know we had, and now we don't know how this new reality works.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
erikpukinskis 11y ago
I have been thinking about the world as if we are in wartime* for some time now. It kind of makes a lot of things that I see around me make a lot more sense. But I don't think it's true that no one knows how to make the entire world more stable. I think the article explains it very well: You just start treating people outside your family as if they were in your family. (Family, meaning your circle of care, not your biological family.) Many are already doing this, but since poverty is still here it apparently isn't enough people yet. Pile on! * The war, in this sense, is between those who want to add more individuals to their family and those who want to farm individuals as resources. And of course many of us play both roles, sometimes simultaneously.
krauthammer 11y ago
Nobody knows how to make it happen? Sure we do. Ban liberal (dark) arts. Ban gay marriage. Bring back systemic racism, segregation, and bring gulags to America. This will free up white america and enable whites to tackle environmental problems, save the oceans, and save and prop up the lives of non-whites all around the world.

andyl 11y ago

Just another campaign in the cultural marxist war on the family. Who could be against altruism?

andrepd 11y ago
Why is it "another campaign"? I only see the testimony of a person with an extreme (and commendable) sense of morality.

throwitup 11y ago

These "saints" will destroy the world. http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_taylor_sj.htm http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_ta...

andrepd 11y ago
You have a right to your opinion. Care to elaborate on why you think this way? What makes you think you are above everyone else?

zth 11y ago

I've always thought you should take care of yourself first, then help others, because that was the only way you can help people in the first place. Perhaps there's a way of maximizing human flourishing in which we go as far as we can go and somehow train ourselves to truly be dispassionate to friends and family and just be globally concerned and not weight our children's welfare more than someone else's children. There's a thousand ways to tune the variable of selfishness versus altruism. Some people think it's morally/emotionally normative to privilege your family members over strangers. I wouldn't want to care just as much as the stranger on the street as my family, and I wouldn't want to take as much joy in his presence as in theirs, because that would seem to somehow deflate the significance of my relationships to my family. But if you take drugs like MDMA or do meditation practices like love and kindness, you realize that love really isn't transactional or personal in any important sense, it is a state of consciousness, a state of being you can inhabit to one or another degree and in our normal mode, we only tend to get glimpses of it. When one's experiencing these states of consciousness it's not like one loves ones children less. It's possible to just throw open the gates to that state of mind, and doing that, you wouldn't see any good reason to relinquish it if you could effortlessly stay at that place.

jondubois 11y ago

Poverty is an almost impossible problem to solve. If you give individuals the wrong kind of help, you will make the problem worse. If poor Africans keep having 10 children each, there is no way they will ever get out of poverty - If you give them the wrong kind of help, you will just allow them to survive and have more children but it wont create any long term improvements. I think the root problem is education. African children are not being nurtured as well as they could be because there are too many of them. I think the one child policy in China has has been a key to its success over the past 20 years - It allowed parents to focus all their resources on that one child and allowed them to get the best education possible.

Mz 11y ago
The One Child policy was a draconian method. A humane solution is to improve education and rights for women globally. Educated, empowered women choose to have fewer children, take better care of them, etc.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Sadly, you have to also start tackling religious issues: Catholicism can not further forbid abortion or use of condoms. This is seriously hurting humanity.
  - hguant 11y ago
    Catholicism also promotes the idea of the sanctity of individual life, places moral burdens on business and political leaders in countries where brutality and exploitation are the norm, and creates a culture that emphasizes and encourages education. (Not to mention the whole "creating the moral foundation Western Democracy takes for granted" thing.) You don't need to start fighting religion to help the poor; religion has provided, for many, the most effective means of getting out poverty. Also, going in to a place and starting a fight against the local religion (be it Catholicism, Islam, neo-Jobsian technocracy) is a good way to be ignored by the people your trying to help.
    - 11y ago

a3voices 11y ago

What about animal and plant life? Articles like these are very human-centric. For example it might be best if everyone from South America was forced to relocate to Central America, and make all of South America a nature reserve.

emmab 11y ago

The switch to male pronouns partway through the article when it became a theoretical person was a little jarring.

cjbprime 11y ago
Yeah! That was weird.

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago

this is nothing new and modern psychology explains it well. http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-yale-psychologists-discover-why-heroes-risk-their-lives-save-307049 http://www.medicaldaily.com/extreme-altruism-explained-yale-... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-fear/201001/altruism-heroics-and-extreme-altrusim https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-your-fear/201001/a...

aschearer 11y ago
The linked article isn't about "hero altruism" as described in your links. It's about people who put the welfare of strangers above their own. For example by contributing 50+% of their income to charities, forgoing children in order to pursue career and donate more, and so forth.

chipsy 11y ago

Altruism defined in wealth terms is very narrow. It allows you to steal billions and give away millions and come out with a net balance of "wealthy philanthropist". The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice. I think many do-gooders struggle with the problem on different terms: whether they can find a place where they both fit in the system and yet also do good for the system. For example, a basic researcher in the sciences does nothing at all now but might open the door to great achievements later. A politician will be distrusted no matter what they do, but if they are adept they gradually reorganize the landscape to enable policies progressive towards their vision of a better society. There is enormous room for people to do work that benefits them and nobody else, but that doesn't lead to a concrete conclusion about all workers, because this problem is faced in every sector.

orborde 11y ago
> The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice. Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are real people who are, so far as I know, pretty much as the article describes: http://www.givinggladly.com/ http://www.givinggladly.com/ http://www.jefftk.com/ http://www.jefftk.com/

epx 11y ago

Eating an apple and feeling guilty... think about crazy people. I actually knew a handful of persons like that (mostly women). They cared about anyone except their own offspring, and the children are adults now, and struggling. So sorry, I can't agree with that, so sorry.

deleted 11y ago

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pdonis 11y ago

The problem I see with the title concept--caring for strangers at the expense of family, or more generally caring for people you don't know, at the expense of people you do know--is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them. But no one person can know everyone in the world. Human beings don't scale. The only effective way to get a lot of people helped is to have a lot of people willing to help, each of whom gets to know a few people well enough to understand what will help them, and then helps those few people. But for some odd reason, we don't think of "charity" this way. We think that helping people you know, so that your help is as effective as possible, is somehow less "moral" than "helping" people you don't know at all, so that you don't know what will help them.

cjbprime 11y ago
> in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them Or maybe not -- what do you think of https://givedirectly.org/ https://givedirectly.org/?
- pdonis 11y ago
  I agree that, if you have already decided you're going to give to people you don't know, it's more effective to give them money than anything else, since that is the most flexible form of help. Whether it is as effective as helping people you do know is a different question.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> is that in order to effectively help someone, you have to know them It is not strictly true. Yes, helping someone effectively involves a person who knows the recipient of aid enough to understand their needs. But that doesn't have to be you. You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives. You can work on making those nets, and that is helping. Or you can have a well-paying job and use surplus income to support people distributing those nets, people who know those they're helping. Also, a lot of low-hanging-fruits of world-fixing exist on social or global level, not on the level of individuals. I don't need to know of or care about any sick person in particular to help fight malaria effectively - in fact, getting emotional is often counterproductive. What matters are aggregate effects. Number of people who would die but are not going to because of the aid is what matters. Average quality of life improving is what matters. But I think that's orthogonal to the issue of family vs. strangers, and conflating the two doesn't help with anything. I agree that we shouldn't treat helping people we know as less moral just because we know them (and thus get to experience their gratitude). But I also don't think that those close to me are inherently more worth than those further. I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense. This comes naturally when you start extending your concept of 'family and friends' to the entire world.

javert 11y ago

But there is no reason to be altruistic. It's a total fantasy, just like any religion is. To believe otherwise is to live an unexamined life, and the unexamined life is not worth living. Some people feel like being altruistic, but feelings are the products of ideas. Ideas can be examined and thrown out when irrational (as in this case).

verbin217 11y ago
Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs. They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish. I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such that you can then optimize it.
- javert 11y ago
  I can't really follow this. For one thing, I don't know what "person of enough collective benefit" means (seems like you are missing a proposition or something). For another thing, it's not true that people are doomed to ignorance, and it seems like your argument probably rests on that assumption. I don't see for a second why you'd say people are doomed to ignorance. We use sense perception to perceive stuff, and we develop a coherent picture of the world (so we learn to reconcile optical illusions, for instance). And for all intents and purposes, that is reality, and it's objective. Maybe there's some other reality underneath that, but then, maybe there are pink unicorns dancing on Alpha Centauri; it's totally arbitrary, and thus irrelevant.
  - verbin217 11y ago

Tycho 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Selfishness

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> What would the world be like if everyone thought like a do-gooder? What if everyone believed that his family was no more important or valuable than anyone else’s? They would pool up, and solve all the problems in order, and live happy and wealthy ever after. We would have a paradise on Earth, because when everyone cares about everyone else, everyone gets cared about too. Because seriously, a lot of bad things stem from the fact that majority of people care primarily about their closest circle and treats everyone else as exploitable. -- I understand the problems of people in this article perfectly. I had a similar depression period and, like probably pretty much everybody, learned to avoid thinking about it too much in order to preserve my own sanity. Still, I think I can relate to those "do-gooders" much better than to normal people. In fact, I think normal people have their morality backwards - and Hollywood has it sideways. In movies, it's becoming common for a protagonist to explicitly kill (or allow to be killed) even thousands of people to save one relative, or for some silly reasons like revenge, and the audience doesn't even blink. Family is important, we're pretty much wired to care about them more. But I also think that as humans, we're capable of doing more than just stopping on purely low-level, biological impulses. Exercising empathy and rational thought helps one realize that all the other people are just like you, with dreams and worries and hopes for the future. It makes you care about the whole humanity, not just some arbitrary groups related to your place of birth. After all, we all live together on the same piece of rock in the middle of emptiness. We are family. And laugh all you want at various "do-gooders", effective altruists and people with dreams of brighter future. But somebody has to do the job of fixing things, building a better world for everyone. It won't spontaneously appear.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
This deserves to be less of an HN comment, and more of a manifesto (I mean that as a compliment).

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

What I find interesting, is that Bill Gates (and others) are doing literally this, giving large amounts of their wealth away to people other than their kids, and yet it doesn't seem odd in the slightest to most people. The obvious retort is that he has more than enough, even after his charity, which then begs the question: how much is enough? In particular, does Bill Gates only have "enough" relatively, or is there some absolute level of enough.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I think Bill Gates (and others) understands that leaving his children too much wealth will hurt them, preclude from growing up into a functioning member of society that trusts their own strength. There isn't an absolute level of "enough", but as a practical limit I'd consider that enough is the amount that lets you live without worrying about money for food and shelter being the major part of your day-to-day decisionmaking process.