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Can’t we just cut through the Gordian Knot and understand that our moral obligation is somewhere between an annual donation to a local opera house, and donating
by sweetheart 4y ago
Can’t we just cut through the Gordian Knot and understand that our moral obligation is somewhere between an annual donation to a local opera house, and donating all your excess money to organizations to end malaria?
It’s so tiring to see this quibbling over what the absolute best giving philosophy is when there is such ample opportunity for individuals to make a difference in the world.
It’s like watching someone in a pie eating contest lose because they spent the first 10 minutes deciding what the optimal first bite would be, then convincing themselves that optimal first bites are actually a form the Repugnant Conclusion which will ruin all their future meals.
You can do more than you are. You SHOULD do more than you are. You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. We don’t need perfect knowledge of a situation to start improving it, and boy oh boy do we need to start improving the world.
If you don’t want to call yourself an effective altruist, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. But don’t let this petty quibbling over the most extreme examples of giving let you stop yourself from making a $300 monthly donation to a charity with good reviews on Charity Navigator.
- throw_pm23 4y ago> You KNOW the malaria nets are better than the donation to the local soccer team. I most certainly don't know that. The more local, the more immediate, the less distance between action and effect, the less unintended consequences, the better.
- sweetheart 4y agoHow do you come to that conclusion?
- throw_pm23 4y ago1) I prefer what I can verify, understand, and immediately experience to what I cannot. 2) I use the heuristic that where there are more participants and intermediaries, it is more likely that something ugly will happen even if the original intentions were noble, which is already a big if. 3) I prefer improving my own neighborhood which also affects me, to some abstract global goal which I find less tangible. EDIT: 4) I am put off by the grandiosity of "saving lives" far away, and I prefer more modest goals, e.g. provide a warm soup for the local soccer team.
- lupire 4y agoIf you are saying that a near guaranteed miniscule benefit to rich people outweighs a risky gift to desperately sthenuffering people, you know you are doing so little good that it may as well be zero.
- throw_pm23 4y agoA "near zero" contribution would in many cases be a major improvement to what ends up being a massive negative contribution.
- sweetheart 4y agoWhy the parenthesis around “saving lives”? You seem skeptical that actually contributing to saving lives is possible.
- easygenes 4y agoYeah, I'm genuinely curious as well. Malaria nets are cheap, well studied as highly effective, and directly prevent debilitating and life-threatening illness. We're talking about something that can fairly immediately save real existing lives, no hypotheticals or easy to conceive of major deleterious second order effects.
- samus 4y agoConsidering that malaria infestation has historically complicated making use of the land available to humans all over the world, we know that efforts towards managing and eradicating malaria improves the human condition. Resistance to malaria and other diseases was one of the reasons why humans were trafficked all over the world.
- throw_pm23 4y agoI'll let historians sort that out, I care mostly for my immediate neighborhood and local effects.
- samus 4y agoMostly caring about your immediate neighbourhood and local effects does not mean ignoring that other places and their history exists. For Malaria, there is not even a debate that it historically was a very widespread disease with high impact in economy and also in warfare. It is estimated that 60000 US soldiers died to Malaria alone in WW II.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- circular_lights 4y ago10/10 would pick local soccer team anytime. I am not utilitarian and I do not believe in human interchangeability. I value the health of local youth in my backyard far more, especially when the cause is boys in sports.
- sweetheart 4y agoSure, but _why_ is the question. I cannot understand how you think more good comes from making sure the local boys soccer club has a clean field to play vs. ensuring 4 families will sleep without the risk of contracting malaria. What makes you value the former more than the latter? If you were the family facing malaria, and someone tried to donate the nets to you, would you sell them and donate the proceeds to their local soccer club?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- circular_lights 4y ago"More good" reeks of nerdy utilitarianism which I completely reject. What makes me value the soccer team is love and kinship and vitalism. Mine extends to the local boys playing soccer. I want to see them thrive. I do not care about the malaria net folks. No ill will - I just do not care, I want them occupying no part of my brain. And certainly no dorky nerds unable to comprehend human reality and attempting to force everyone in their abstract streamlined toy-reality with Philosophy 101 word games will change my mind.
- sweetheart 4y agoyikes
- easygenes 4y agoIf we're looking for a giving threshold that has also stood the test of time in terms of practicality for a reasonable portion of the population to be able to follow it long term, then we need to look no further than the precedent of the 10% church tithe. Giving 10% is practical for many and would make an enormous difference in the world. Seems like a good baseline.
- lupire 4y agoWeird example since the most famous 10% in the modern world funds the gilded real estate empire of abusive bigots, the latest in a long line of religious authorities who use the threat of supernatural damnation to exploit people.
- easygenes 4y agoYeah, not arguing in favor of any churches here. Just pointing out that 10% is a practical level of giving for many, so a good place to start in considering how much you might want to be charitable.
- andylynch 4y agoZakat’s also a great model and the principles behind it are sound too, I think regardless of one’s faith or tradition. Given that it’s wealth rather than earnings based it a more progressive model than tithes’ usual 10% of income.
- lvass 4y agoWhat if you're already paying around 50% in taxes, and benefiting of a nearly negligible part of what the government spends in?
- easygenes 4y agoWell, giving is by its nature optional, so you must fit it into your personal circumstances. I'm just pointing at a reasonable baseline that many people around the world have followed for generations.
- ploum 4y agoNope. That’s too simplistic. There’s no "effective altruism", just people trying to buy a good conscience. You can’t become a billionaire without f* lot of people and exploiting the system’s loopholes. There’s no way to be a moral billionaire. In fact, by definition, every billionaire is a dangerous psychopat (normal people would stop focusing on earning money pass a given amount. You can’t be intellectually sane and a billionnaire). Every billioniare is a policy failure. So now, we have those dangerous psychopats who f* the system for money who try to justify their action by using the money in a way that they find morally good according to their own f** up moral values. Which means that they get even more power than just money: they start to define what is good and what is bad. The only sane way to give money is to let the community decide how to spend money. That’s called taxes. Strangely enough, every single billionaire is against paying taxes. Because they consider themselves morally superior. I agree that government are corrupts. I agree that democracy has lot of failures. But between a system which is not perfect and a dangerous psychopat who consider himself superior to any democratically elected government, I know which one is the worst for our future.
- mrep 4y agoHow did J. K. Rowling, Michael Jordan, or Jerry Seinfeld f* a lot of people and exploit the system's loopholes?
- lvass 4y agoThey gave people what they wanted badly enough to pay for, but not for free, like all evil capitalists.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago"evil capitalists". This is ridiculous. It's envy rationalization at this point. There are plenty of truly evil capitalists if you want to look for them, but many just aren't. Economy isn't zero sum game, like the truly evil communists would have you believe. Capitalism let's people vote continuously with their wallets. J.K. rowing might have gotten a big paycheck from everything, but much of the economic value dispersed to everyone else. And people wanted those resources in the hands of people making the movies. Nothing is free. There's always a price, and many times the margins of profits are just the margins required for stability anyway. And stability always comes with a price for risk, and it's always the investors paying the risk. What turned out as positive outcome could come from a negative expectation value distribution. There's nothing morally wrong from making a profit especially if you took a risk with negative expectation outcome. You expect these people to give you for free, but if they gave you for free on success they have negative expected outcome and they will never do it. That's like expecting people to give you money, and that's rude.