I think what we might also say about why we consider it more important to help our loved ones/community is that we recognize there’s a distinct value in having a personal relationship with people you help, in addition to the value of the helping itself. But my thought is that the value of that relationship should only be a tiebreaker, not an overwhelming consideration in favor of helping those close to home.
As someone who has contributed in an effectively-altruistic way but who also engages in local homeless services volunteering, some part of what is fulfilling about the latter is that these are people I am encountering as-people, rather than as statistics. That I think is what you are arguing against in this essay. But I think that is a small, non-decisive reason why I volunteer in this way.
A bigger motivation is the feeling that homeless people in my community are *my problem* in a way that future malaria sufferers in Malawi are not.
I might plausibly do something better for the world in some sense by mowing the yard most-in-need-of-mowing, but I *ought* to keep my own damn yard mowed. If I let my own yard go so that I can mow "more effectively" elsewhere I think I'm not being virtuous but neglectful.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that (assuming a charitable interpretation of "identify with"). But I think there's reason to believe that we have special duties towards the smaller communities we inhabit and help to constitute. "Civic virtue" if you will.
To be a virtuous person I should take some care for the polis I inhabit because (translating into consequentialism) that sort of thing is necessary for there to be healthy poleis for people to inhabit, and that is good for people in the short and long term. This is true even if I believe that there's nothing special about the people in my neighborhood that makes them better or more worthy than people in Malawi. This is true even if I feel a cosmopolitan sympathy for all mankind that informs some of my charitable behavior.
Fair enough. My thought is that general beneficence applies after you've satisfied whatever special obligations you believe in (parenting, civic duties, etc.).
100% -- and I'd toss in shit like proving your brilliance and principledness and high decoupling ability to kids who teased you in high school, and to hot rationalists in San Francisco and Austin and Oxford. Refusal to lean on these sorts of motivations when it helps improve the world is the height of moral preciousness.
This was a big topic in CS Lewis essays. A line from a demon in the Screwtape letters makes the point: "The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
This criticism underlined the problem people had with Catholic indulgences and 'Abstract Benevolence' suffers all of them. In part that you could be a major asshole and then say, "But money" and absolve yourself of any responsibility towards your family and community. Another is that many people become generous and charitable because people were personally generous with them, thus the virtue spreads by layers, not because someone airdropped some cash over them like a lottery winning. Another is that the indulgence model both outsources actual charity, the dealing with smelly homeless or difficult people, and claims greater virtue than those it outsourced the job to. It also centralizes the direction of charity so that it becomes a political game to be won in the echelons of GiveWell and the like.
The very first sentence, "Many people find effective altruism emotionally unappealing. They find hands-on, locally-oriented volunteering more fulfilling" I think is wrong. Hands on volunteering sucks ass and distant money sending is extremely emotionally appealing. Abstract benevolence lets you keep clean hands and feel virtuous, gives you a badge to show off to others, feel and brag intellectual sophistication and feel the pride of 'saving the world BETTER'.
I don't think that people should be assholes or neglect their family, etc. You can take care of your special obligations and then exercise abstract benevolence on top of that. (The latter may even make the former more likely - recall the "correlated altruism" point.)
It's not obvious to me that homeless Americans are more likely to "pay forward" generosity than, say, GiveDirectly recipients in Africa. Insofar as the latter people are generally more capable, we may if anything expect aid to them to have larger positive ripple effects. But I'd prefer to see empirical evidence/analysis of this issue than mere armchair speculation.
I don't think that funding valuable programs should be derided as not "actual charity", though the direct work is obviously also essential. I don't think donors "claim greater virtue" than global aid workers. But anyone deciding between the two paths would do well to consider the empirical question of which is more needed on present margins. (They could, for example, ask the charity org itself whether it would prefer to have their labor or their donations.)
I'm not sure what you mean by a "political game". Local charities might also compete for volunteers, which would seem 'political' in a sense, but it's going to be difficult for ordinary people to make an informed judgment about the effects of different orgs (bear in mind that some well-meaning interventions can prove outright counterproductive). Having charities assessed by professionals like GiveWell seems like an obvious improvement to me.
Re: Pay Forward. A lot of drug rehab stories start with someone caring very much for them, or at least enough to give them some time and space. I'm sure some data exists one way or the other but 'more aid = more positive internal ripple' is fairly negatively supported measuring by sheer quantity of aid cash dropped in Africa. It could be that warlord effects are just that hugely deleterious, but in any case it's not looking ultra strong.
Re: Political games. Mostly speaking from my experience with non-profits, the direction the cash gets funneled to is a big prize that many people lobby over.
Is this not simply the extension of sidewalks view in methods of ethics that the core virtue which justifies most of the others and the core principle of utilitarianism is a virtue of general benevolence?
I'd certainly expect Sidgwick (or any other utilitarian) to agree with this post, but my point is much more modest and could also be agreed upon by non-utilitarians. One can recognize abstract benevolence as *an* important virtue without viewing it as the *sole* foundational virtue.
I guess I'm more interested in assessing whether my post's claims are *true* than in assessing the extent to which they're similar to or different than someone else's claims.
I think what we might also say about why we consider it more important to help our loved ones/community is that we recognize there’s a distinct value in having a personal relationship with people you help, in addition to the value of the helping itself. But my thought is that the value of that relationship should only be a tiebreaker, not an overwhelming consideration in favor of helping those close to home.
As someone who has contributed in an effectively-altruistic way but who also engages in local homeless services volunteering, some part of what is fulfilling about the latter is that these are people I am encountering as-people, rather than as statistics. That I think is what you are arguing against in this essay. But I think that is a small, non-decisive reason why I volunteer in this way.
A bigger motivation is the feeling that homeless people in my community are *my problem* in a way that future malaria sufferers in Malawi are not.
I might plausibly do something better for the world in some sense by mowing the yard most-in-need-of-mowing, but I *ought* to keep my own damn yard mowed. If I let my own yard go so that I can mow "more effectively" elsewhere I think I'm not being virtuous but neglectful.
Why shouldn't we identify with a larger "community" that includes the people of Malawi?
I don't think there's anything wrong with that (assuming a charitable interpretation of "identify with"). But I think there's reason to believe that we have special duties towards the smaller communities we inhabit and help to constitute. "Civic virtue" if you will.
To be a virtuous person I should take some care for the polis I inhabit because (translating into consequentialism) that sort of thing is necessary for there to be healthy poleis for people to inhabit, and that is good for people in the short and long term. This is true even if I believe that there's nothing special about the people in my neighborhood that makes them better or more worthy than people in Malawi. This is true even if I feel a cosmopolitan sympathy for all mankind that informs some of my charitable behavior.
Fair enough. My thought is that general beneficence applies after you've satisfied whatever special obligations you believe in (parenting, civic duties, etc.).
100% -- and I'd toss in shit like proving your brilliance and principledness and high decoupling ability to kids who teased you in high school, and to hot rationalists in San Francisco and Austin and Oxford. Refusal to lean on these sorts of motivations when it helps improve the world is the height of moral preciousness.
This was a big topic in CS Lewis essays. A line from a demon in the Screwtape letters makes the point: "The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
This criticism underlined the problem people had with Catholic indulgences and 'Abstract Benevolence' suffers all of them. In part that you could be a major asshole and then say, "But money" and absolve yourself of any responsibility towards your family and community. Another is that many people become generous and charitable because people were personally generous with them, thus the virtue spreads by layers, not because someone airdropped some cash over them like a lottery winning. Another is that the indulgence model both outsources actual charity, the dealing with smelly homeless or difficult people, and claims greater virtue than those it outsourced the job to. It also centralizes the direction of charity so that it becomes a political game to be won in the echelons of GiveWell and the like.
The very first sentence, "Many people find effective altruism emotionally unappealing. They find hands-on, locally-oriented volunteering more fulfilling" I think is wrong. Hands on volunteering sucks ass and distant money sending is extremely emotionally appealing. Abstract benevolence lets you keep clean hands and feel virtuous, gives you a badge to show off to others, feel and brag intellectual sophistication and feel the pride of 'saving the world BETTER'.
I don't think that people should be assholes or neglect their family, etc. You can take care of your special obligations and then exercise abstract benevolence on top of that. (The latter may even make the former more likely - recall the "correlated altruism" point.)
It's not obvious to me that homeless Americans are more likely to "pay forward" generosity than, say, GiveDirectly recipients in Africa. Insofar as the latter people are generally more capable, we may if anything expect aid to them to have larger positive ripple effects. But I'd prefer to see empirical evidence/analysis of this issue than mere armchair speculation.
I don't think that funding valuable programs should be derided as not "actual charity", though the direct work is obviously also essential. I don't think donors "claim greater virtue" than global aid workers. But anyone deciding between the two paths would do well to consider the empirical question of which is more needed on present margins. (They could, for example, ask the charity org itself whether it would prefer to have their labor or their donations.)
I'm not sure what you mean by a "political game". Local charities might also compete for volunteers, which would seem 'political' in a sense, but it's going to be difficult for ordinary people to make an informed judgment about the effects of different orgs (bear in mind that some well-meaning interventions can prove outright counterproductive). Having charities assessed by professionals like GiveWell seems like an obvious improvement to me.
Re: Pay Forward. A lot of drug rehab stories start with someone caring very much for them, or at least enough to give them some time and space. I'm sure some data exists one way or the other but 'more aid = more positive internal ripple' is fairly negatively supported measuring by sheer quantity of aid cash dropped in Africa. It could be that warlord effects are just that hugely deleterious, but in any case it's not looking ultra strong.
Re: Political games. Mostly speaking from my experience with non-profits, the direction the cash gets funneled to is a big prize that many people lobby over.
Is this not simply the extension of sidewalks view in methods of ethics that the core virtue which justifies most of the others and the core principle of utilitarianism is a virtue of general benevolence?
I'd certainly expect Sidgwick (or any other utilitarian) to agree with this post, but my point is much more modest and could also be agreed upon by non-utilitarians. One can recognize abstract benevolence as *an* important virtue without viewing it as the *sole* foundational virtue.
But was that not a premise that led to establishing it as the sole virtue Sidgwicks (which I somehow misspelled as sidewalk).
I am just not completely clear what is different about this argument from his other than that it isn’t carried as far.
I guess I'm more interested in assessing whether my post's claims are *true* than in assessing the extent to which they're similar to or different than someone else's claims.
That’s entirely fair, but I find it useful to know where ideas sit in relation to one another.