EAs and ethical vegans seem to work off of an egalitarian framework without ever feeling the need to justify it. Once you do away with the notion that all life is equal, EA collapses. Everyone subjectively values some lives over others, and you can use more objective measurements like how much certain lives contribute to society or standards of living. Anytime this is brought up, the EA will either insist that they can account for all of these factors (at which point they sound like a socialist desperately trying to solve the calculation problem), or they call you a bigot and drop any pretense of rationality.
There’s evidence of a hierarchy of giving in the Bible. Paul says you’re worse than an unbeliever if you can’t provide for your family, and then it also exhorts giving to the Church and the poor. This is true that your family should take precedent then. When I donate to charity, I do so to explicitly Christian charities who help poor people while also providing the Gospel, so it benefits both their physical and spiritual life. In those cases, giving to Christian charities is an extension of giving to the Church if you believe in the Church Invisible. Also, yeah, I’m single and childless.
African nations have had plenty of opportunities to form stable governments that would be beneficial for their people. Being one of the oldest settled continents in existence naturally leads one to wonder about throwing good money after bad. As is the case in the US, governments are universally corrupt and oppressive. Give me back half of the 50% withheld and sales taxes I’m paying and I might have more disposable charity donations. In the meantime, I have the responsibility to build a family financial legacy for my children and a tithe to Christian ministries. And, let’s face it, most of those guys are smug, judgmental virtue signalers
I agree wit pretty much everything you said, but I’d still donate to charities that help in Africa nonetheless. It’s not the starving child’s fault governments are intrinsically evil and inefficient, nor his fault his continent is a complete mess.
Excellent point. By all means, if your financial situation warrants additional charity, give as much as you want. The point of the post was to make sure your personal finances were established properly to ensure you and your own children were protected financially first. Otherwise, you could end up being dependent on others for help later in life. YMMV. But in western culture, we victimize the child every time we have an abortion. No judgment, just facts.
As a fellow father, I’ve realized that EA is best practiced as directly as possible. Especially with my kid. Like if we’re picking up food in the drive thru, we’ll grab an extra meal for the guy at the corner of the intersection.
I agree with a majority of your post but I think that’s just due to the INEFFECTIVE altruism, which I would argue your post is more pointed to.
"I’m a father and a husband. This means that every dollar I make is earmarked first and foremost for my wife and child."
I'm a father and husband, too. We fully own two properties, and have enough money in the bank to buy a third if we want to.
We've got spare. We've got enough that, as Buffett said of his children, so that we can give our children enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing.
Plus I don't like the way the government spends our taxes. So if I donate down to the tax-free threshold then they get nothing from me except consumption taxes.
I think like this in regard to giving to charity. The only reasons I can think to give to causes I'll never benefit from are:
(1) a dollar towards those causes can do more "total good" than a dollar to local causes. It might cost 10x less to feed people elsewhere than in my community.
(2) Throwing money into something you'll never see again might be a way to demonstrate that I trust in God's Providence in my life. It's almost an ascetic practice. It has the value of letting go of worldly attachment while still helping others.
Neither of those demonstrate the "obligation" to give to distant causes, but both reasons (mostly the second one) may provide a unique opportunity to commune with Christ?
Your #1 is (supposedly) the main idea behind "effective altruism." Generally speaking, the poorer and more destitute people are, the less money it takes to reduce their mortality rates. Hence the meme of giving all your money to poor people in Africa--in terms of simply keeping more people alive for longer, regardless of location or relationship to you or anything else, dollars spent on that continent generally go further than anywhere else on the planet.
Your #2 I can see applying if I put myself in the shoes of someone who is permanently single, childless, and with no dependents. So for example, if you're a monk, this mindset makes sense. The average male layperson should be a father and a husband, though, which leads to everything I wrote in this article. I should point out again that it seems to me like most "effective altruists" are childless and consider family formation optional at best, so again, they have an easier time buying into this viewpoint. Giving money to help poor people in Africa is one way they compensate for their otherwise selfish, hedonistic lifestyles.
There's too many Africans in the world as it is already, feeding them will just make more. I'd look more favorably on a charity that promised to reduce their number.
Here are my secular, consequentialist reasons for thinking you're completely right as usual:
For one thing, you're more likely to succeed in actually doing good for those with whom you have an ongoing relationship with, and more likely to have positive knock-on effects like deepening relationships/community, more likely to encourage others to do likewise, leading to a virtuous feedback loop. Whereas sending money to Africa for food will probably end up funding drug-fueled child slave soldiers committing atrocities.
Of course that's the sort of thing EA arose to address. My impression is that the EA people really put serious thought and effort into trying to make sure their charities accomplish what they intended to; that's the whole point. They may not always succeed, but I don't think you can say they aren't trying.
But there's a deeper problem.
I believe morality is a product of evolution. I don't think something must necessarily be good just because it is adaptive; all sorts of horrific stuff is the product of evolution, like the wasps that lay their eggs in the paralyzed bodies of still-living insects to serve as a food source. Like infanticide and rape, etc etc.
But if it's maladaptive in the Darwinian sense, that necessarily by definition means that it undermines its own existence. Therefore if being good was against your genetic interests, goodness would ultimately, necessarily cause the amount of goodness in the universe to decrease. And if something necessarily must cause there to be less goodness...how can it be good?
Ie. Committing suicide so that you can be food for wild animals is as about as "selfless" an act as I could imagine. If all creatures acted like that, there would be no life, and I don't see how that could possibly be considered good.
Hence the Kantian imperative endorses the kind of traditional morality that Thomas Fleming called the morality of everyday life (great book that I recommend). Do your duty to your family and community. If everyone did that, everyone would be taken care of and everyone would be better off, and humanity would thrive. If everyone gave selflessly at the expense of their children (and/or just didn't have children), humanity would go extinct. I take it as axiomatic that human flourishing is better than human extinction.
So why do so many people (ie lefty/liberals) have this inverted morality? You've seen the heat maps I'm sure that show how liberals care about rocks more than grandma? If I were to take an off-the-cuff stab at an answer, I'd say it probably has to do with virtue signaling, status games etc. Which presumably is a consequence of traits that were adaptive at one time, but may or may not be in the present context... I'm guessing not, given secularism and liberalism's negative correlations with fertility.
But the EA people aren't just normie libs... I think they are more utilitarian spergs who are following their premises to their logical conclusions... But their premises are faulty, and there are key factors they have failed to consider. They have too many unexamined assumptions they've absorbed from their post-Christian Progressive social context.
That said, it seems like people like to attack EA more than I think it deserves. If you have extra money you were just going to blow on luxuries anyway, by all means, give it charity if you want. And if you want to give to charity, you might as well put some effort into making sure it's actually helping instead of funding child-slave owning drug lords.
But it's worth having the discussion about the difference in underlying values. Because like you said about traditional values, when you look at those heat maps, it seems to me that one is self-evidently correct/good/consistent with the continued existence of humanity whereas the other is not.
I agree with you, and I’d also add that we’re already being raped with taxes to the extent not seen since the USSR days. The state already sends our taxes to Africans despite our objections!
PS: Here's the fascinating true story about the guy who really followed Mrs. Jellyby thinking aka liberal/progressive/universalist/utilitarianism to its logical conclusion of madness and ruin, incidentally while making groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the evolution of cooperation.
My takeaway is that not only is "true altruism" impossible; it's good that it is, because it would actually not be good at all. It would be kind of psychotic. If it's "selfish" in a sense to care for your kin and allies, to participate in mutually beneficial win-win relationships... So be it! That just means some kinds of selfishness are good...are the source of pretty much everything we consider good, in fact.
Sure, some kinds of selfishness are bad; the kinds that benefit you by hurting others, especially when those others are members of your community. But what makes it bad isn't that it's a win for you; what makes it bad is that it's a loss for the other person.
Even from the utilitarian view in which we should value all humans and/or sentient beings equally (which I also suspect isn't possible or desirable)... Everyone includes you, so if it's good for you AND others, that should be better, not worse, than if it's better just for someone else, but bad for you.
Part of the reason it's hard to think like this though is that our motives are sometimes opaque to us, by design. We would rather be friends with someone who genuinely values us more than themselves than someone who would only do when it's advantageous to them and/or their family. Because the former could more reliably be expected to help us. That's why we don't like it when people are transactional instead of "genuinely caring". So we evolved to portray ourself as the former kind of person, and to believe our own BS, because then it's more convincing.
And a problem us spergs tend to have is: we take our own BS too seriously, literally even. Whereas normal people don't seem to really think about it, but implicitly seem to act as if they understand, "We're just trying to do what is expected to get ahead here." Of course they don't consciously think that, and would be insulted if you suggested it, and seem to be incapable of noticing the logical inconsistencies that result.
Obligations to others depends on distance. You can still donate to charities and take care of your family, as long as you properly prioritize family first (assuming a functioning family structure here). Something simple is to discuss charitable giving with your family members and find an acceptable level for all affected.
You have an obligation to look after family, then friends, your local area, your region, your nation & then off to everybody else. If you’re donating to complete strangers in another land to which you have no connection when someone is in need closer to you, I view you with deep suspicion.
The level of harm someone I’ve never met across the ocean is in has to seriously eclipse the harm of someone here for me to send them something. If a blanket they get from me keeps them alive but someone freezes to death here, I have done wrong.
>Well, can’t you just provide for your family first, and then give what’s left over to charity? That might seem simple enough to someone who has never actually had a family to provide for. The modern world is fraught with uncertainty for people of average wealth and means. I might lose my job, or change jobs, or fail to get as many pay raises as I thought I would. The world might randomly get hit with a pandemic that causes the government to go insane and inflate the currency with tens of trillions in debt spending!
As someone who can see massive problems with the EA movement, I’d like to give you the following piece of tactical advise:
If you can’t write an anti-EA piece that doesn’t make you look like a selfish jerk, don't write anti-EA pieces. If you don't see why the above paragraph makes you look like a selfish jerk, consider how you'd react to a rich oligarch who used the above as justification for his behavior.
As another commenter pointed out, I deliberately specified "average wealth and means." If I *were* a rich oligarch somehow, I'd probably spend my fortune promoting my faith, as I mentioned near the bottom of the post.
Also, I don't give a shit if I "look like a selfish jerk." The point of this blog is to say what I think without caring about anyone else's feelings.
An oligarch is not a man "of average wealth and means" so he would be outside the scope of the argument.
By merely running his businesses he would be providing for thousands of households, so he should probably be concerned with good management for his employees and customers, before charity to strangers.
If a rich oligarch dedicates all his wealth to the security of his family and businesses because he is genuinely fearful of the world’s instability, and thus does not spend on frivolities but only on building a robust legacy ; I would find it reasonable, I might even find him the most ethical oligarch, considering what billionaire philanthropists tend to donate to.
The world would be better off if Sam Bankman-Fried had tried having a family and running his company properly, rather than defrauding investors and customers to buy mosquito nets for Africans.
> If a rich oligarch dedicates all his wealth to the security of his family and businesses because he is genuinely fearful of the world’s instability, and thus does not spend on frivolities but only on building a robust legacy ; I would find it reasonable, I might even find him the most ethical oligarch, considering what billionaire philanthropists tend to donate to.
I agree. However, writing an article about it the way the OP did is a great way to alienate 90% of the public.
EAs and ethical vegans seem to work off of an egalitarian framework without ever feeling the need to justify it. Once you do away with the notion that all life is equal, EA collapses. Everyone subjectively values some lives over others, and you can use more objective measurements like how much certain lives contribute to society or standards of living. Anytime this is brought up, the EA will either insist that they can account for all of these factors (at which point they sound like a socialist desperately trying to solve the calculation problem), or they call you a bigot and drop any pretense of rationality.
There’s evidence of a hierarchy of giving in the Bible. Paul says you’re worse than an unbeliever if you can’t provide for your family, and then it also exhorts giving to the Church and the poor. This is true that your family should take precedent then. When I donate to charity, I do so to explicitly Christian charities who help poor people while also providing the Gospel, so it benefits both their physical and spiritual life. In those cases, giving to Christian charities is an extension of giving to the Church if you believe in the Church Invisible. Also, yeah, I’m single and childless.
African nations have had plenty of opportunities to form stable governments that would be beneficial for their people. Being one of the oldest settled continents in existence naturally leads one to wonder about throwing good money after bad. As is the case in the US, governments are universally corrupt and oppressive. Give me back half of the 50% withheld and sales taxes I’m paying and I might have more disposable charity donations. In the meantime, I have the responsibility to build a family financial legacy for my children and a tithe to Christian ministries. And, let’s face it, most of those guys are smug, judgmental virtue signalers
This is one of the reasons I disdain the label "effective altruism": a large portion of that "movement" appears to be an exercise in virtue signaling.
I agree wit pretty much everything you said, but I’d still donate to charities that help in Africa nonetheless. It’s not the starving child’s fault governments are intrinsically evil and inefficient, nor his fault his continent is a complete mess.
Excellent point. By all means, if your financial situation warrants additional charity, give as much as you want. The point of the post was to make sure your personal finances were established properly to ensure you and your own children were protected financially first. Otherwise, you could end up being dependent on others for help later in life. YMMV. But in western culture, we victimize the child every time we have an abortion. No judgment, just facts.
For me, it’s all about reciprocity. I’m not interested in being charitable to groups and individuals which probably never will be charitable to me.
As a fellow father, I’ve realized that EA is best practiced as directly as possible. Especially with my kid. Like if we’re picking up food in the drive thru, we’ll grab an extra meal for the guy at the corner of the intersection.
I agree with a majority of your post but I think that’s just due to the INEFFECTIVE altruism, which I would argue your post is more pointed to.
"I’m a father and a husband. This means that every dollar I make is earmarked first and foremost for my wife and child."
I'm a father and husband, too. We fully own two properties, and have enough money in the bank to buy a third if we want to.
We've got spare. We've got enough that, as Buffett said of his children, so that we can give our children enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing.
Plus I don't like the way the government spends our taxes. So if I donate down to the tax-free threshold then they get nothing from me except consumption taxes.
I think like this in regard to giving to charity. The only reasons I can think to give to causes I'll never benefit from are:
(1) a dollar towards those causes can do more "total good" than a dollar to local causes. It might cost 10x less to feed people elsewhere than in my community.
(2) Throwing money into something you'll never see again might be a way to demonstrate that I trust in God's Providence in my life. It's almost an ascetic practice. It has the value of letting go of worldly attachment while still helping others.
Neither of those demonstrate the "obligation" to give to distant causes, but both reasons (mostly the second one) may provide a unique opportunity to commune with Christ?
Curious if anything like this crossed your mind
Your #1 is (supposedly) the main idea behind "effective altruism." Generally speaking, the poorer and more destitute people are, the less money it takes to reduce their mortality rates. Hence the meme of giving all your money to poor people in Africa--in terms of simply keeping more people alive for longer, regardless of location or relationship to you or anything else, dollars spent on that continent generally go further than anywhere else on the planet.
Your #2 I can see applying if I put myself in the shoes of someone who is permanently single, childless, and with no dependents. So for example, if you're a monk, this mindset makes sense. The average male layperson should be a father and a husband, though, which leads to everything I wrote in this article. I should point out again that it seems to me like most "effective altruists" are childless and consider family formation optional at best, so again, they have an easier time buying into this viewpoint. Giving money to help poor people in Africa is one way they compensate for their otherwise selfish, hedonistic lifestyles.
There's too many Africans in the world as it is already, feeding them will just make more. I'd look more favorably on a charity that promised to reduce their number.
you get more of what you incentivize
Mrs. Jellyby syndrome.
Here are my secular, consequentialist reasons for thinking you're completely right as usual:
For one thing, you're more likely to succeed in actually doing good for those with whom you have an ongoing relationship with, and more likely to have positive knock-on effects like deepening relationships/community, more likely to encourage others to do likewise, leading to a virtuous feedback loop. Whereas sending money to Africa for food will probably end up funding drug-fueled child slave soldiers committing atrocities.
Of course that's the sort of thing EA arose to address. My impression is that the EA people really put serious thought and effort into trying to make sure their charities accomplish what they intended to; that's the whole point. They may not always succeed, but I don't think you can say they aren't trying.
But there's a deeper problem.
I believe morality is a product of evolution. I don't think something must necessarily be good just because it is adaptive; all sorts of horrific stuff is the product of evolution, like the wasps that lay their eggs in the paralyzed bodies of still-living insects to serve as a food source. Like infanticide and rape, etc etc.
But if it's maladaptive in the Darwinian sense, that necessarily by definition means that it undermines its own existence. Therefore if being good was against your genetic interests, goodness would ultimately, necessarily cause the amount of goodness in the universe to decrease. And if something necessarily must cause there to be less goodness...how can it be good?
Ie. Committing suicide so that you can be food for wild animals is as about as "selfless" an act as I could imagine. If all creatures acted like that, there would be no life, and I don't see how that could possibly be considered good.
Hence the Kantian imperative endorses the kind of traditional morality that Thomas Fleming called the morality of everyday life (great book that I recommend). Do your duty to your family and community. If everyone did that, everyone would be taken care of and everyone would be better off, and humanity would thrive. If everyone gave selflessly at the expense of their children (and/or just didn't have children), humanity would go extinct. I take it as axiomatic that human flourishing is better than human extinction.
So why do so many people (ie lefty/liberals) have this inverted morality? You've seen the heat maps I'm sure that show how liberals care about rocks more than grandma? If I were to take an off-the-cuff stab at an answer, I'd say it probably has to do with virtue signaling, status games etc. Which presumably is a consequence of traits that were adaptive at one time, but may or may not be in the present context... I'm guessing not, given secularism and liberalism's negative correlations with fertility.
But the EA people aren't just normie libs... I think they are more utilitarian spergs who are following their premises to their logical conclusions... But their premises are faulty, and there are key factors they have failed to consider. They have too many unexamined assumptions they've absorbed from their post-Christian Progressive social context.
That said, it seems like people like to attack EA more than I think it deserves. If you have extra money you were just going to blow on luxuries anyway, by all means, give it charity if you want. And if you want to give to charity, you might as well put some effort into making sure it's actually helping instead of funding child-slave owning drug lords.
But it's worth having the discussion about the difference in underlying values. Because like you said about traditional values, when you look at those heat maps, it seems to me that one is self-evidently correct/good/consistent with the continued existence of humanity whereas the other is not.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Heatmaps-indicating-highest-moral-allocation-by-ideology-Study-3a-Source-data-are_fig6_336076674
This is one of the most ennobling essays ever posted on here.
Donate to food banks in areas which are predominantly inhabited by natives.
I agree with you, and I’d also add that we’re already being raped with taxes to the extent not seen since the USSR days. The state already sends our taxes to Africans despite our objections!
PS: Here's the fascinating true story about the guy who really followed Mrs. Jellyby thinking aka liberal/progressive/universalist/utilitarianism to its logical conclusion of madness and ruin, incidentally while making groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the evolution of cooperation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price
My takeaway is that not only is "true altruism" impossible; it's good that it is, because it would actually not be good at all. It would be kind of psychotic. If it's "selfish" in a sense to care for your kin and allies, to participate in mutually beneficial win-win relationships... So be it! That just means some kinds of selfishness are good...are the source of pretty much everything we consider good, in fact.
Sure, some kinds of selfishness are bad; the kinds that benefit you by hurting others, especially when those others are members of your community. But what makes it bad isn't that it's a win for you; what makes it bad is that it's a loss for the other person.
Even from the utilitarian view in which we should value all humans and/or sentient beings equally (which I also suspect isn't possible or desirable)... Everyone includes you, so if it's good for you AND others, that should be better, not worse, than if it's better just for someone else, but bad for you.
Part of the reason it's hard to think like this though is that our motives are sometimes opaque to us, by design. We would rather be friends with someone who genuinely values us more than themselves than someone who would only do when it's advantageous to them and/or their family. Because the former could more reliably be expected to help us. That's why we don't like it when people are transactional instead of "genuinely caring". So we evolved to portray ourself as the former kind of person, and to believe our own BS, because then it's more convincing.
And a problem us spergs tend to have is: we take our own BS too seriously, literally even. Whereas normal people don't seem to really think about it, but implicitly seem to act as if they understand, "We're just trying to do what is expected to get ahead here." Of course they don't consciously think that, and would be insulted if you suggested it, and seem to be incapable of noticing the logical inconsistencies that result.
Obligations to others depends on distance. You can still donate to charities and take care of your family, as long as you properly prioritize family first (assuming a functioning family structure here). Something simple is to discuss charitable giving with your family members and find an acceptable level for all affected.
You have an obligation to look after family, then friends, your local area, your region, your nation & then off to everybody else. If you’re donating to complete strangers in another land to which you have no connection when someone is in need closer to you, I view you with deep suspicion.
The level of harm someone I’ve never met across the ocean is in has to seriously eclipse the harm of someone here for me to send them something. If a blanket they get from me keeps them alive but someone freezes to death here, I have done wrong.
>Well, can’t you just provide for your family first, and then give what’s left over to charity? That might seem simple enough to someone who has never actually had a family to provide for. The modern world is fraught with uncertainty for people of average wealth and means. I might lose my job, or change jobs, or fail to get as many pay raises as I thought I would. The world might randomly get hit with a pandemic that causes the government to go insane and inflate the currency with tens of trillions in debt spending!
As someone who can see massive problems with the EA movement, I’d like to give you the following piece of tactical advise:
If you can’t write an anti-EA piece that doesn’t make you look like a selfish jerk, don't write anti-EA pieces. If you don't see why the above paragraph makes you look like a selfish jerk, consider how you'd react to a rich oligarch who used the above as justification for his behavior.
As another commenter pointed out, I deliberately specified "average wealth and means." If I *were* a rich oligarch somehow, I'd probably spend my fortune promoting my faith, as I mentioned near the bottom of the post.
Also, I don't give a shit if I "look like a selfish jerk." The point of this blog is to say what I think without caring about anyone else's feelings.
What is your faith? Genuinely curious.
Orthodox Christian.
An oligarch is not a man "of average wealth and means" so he would be outside the scope of the argument.
By merely running his businesses he would be providing for thousands of households, so he should probably be concerned with good management for his employees and customers, before charity to strangers.
If a rich oligarch dedicates all his wealth to the security of his family and businesses because he is genuinely fearful of the world’s instability, and thus does not spend on frivolities but only on building a robust legacy ; I would find it reasonable, I might even find him the most ethical oligarch, considering what billionaire philanthropists tend to donate to.
The world would be better off if Sam Bankman-Fried had tried having a family and running his company properly, rather than defrauding investors and customers to buy mosquito nets for Africans.
> If a rich oligarch dedicates all his wealth to the security of his family and businesses because he is genuinely fearful of the world’s instability, and thus does not spend on frivolities but only on building a robust legacy ; I would find it reasonable, I might even find him the most ethical oligarch, considering what billionaire philanthropists tend to donate to.
I agree. However, writing an article about it the way the OP did is a great way to alienate 90% of the public.
When he starts saying "well if hypothetically my family got hit with a one-in-a-million disaster it might need all the money I'm hording".
Car crashes, illnesses, job instability, etc.--these things are hardly "one in a million."