When people have a wide circle of concern and advocate for its widening as a norm, this makes me nervous because it implies huge additional costs forced on me, through coercive means like taxation or regulations
At the moment I (and many others on LW) are experiencing the opposite. We would prefer to give money to people in Africa, but instead we are forced by taxes to give to poor people in the same country as us. Since charity to Africa is much more effective, this means that (from our point of view) 99% of the taxed money is being wasted.
Yes, it certainly cuts both ways. Of course, your country’s welfare system is also available to you and your family if you ever need it, and you benefit more directly from social peace and democracy in your country, which is helped by these transfers. It is hard to see how you could have a functioning democracy without poor people voting for some transfers, so unless you think democracy has no useful function for you, that’s a cost in your best interest to pay.
Really, the fact that different sizes of moral circle can incentivize coercion is just a trivial corollary of the fact that value differences in general can incentivize coercion.
But an expanding circle of moral concern increases value differences. If I have to pay for a welfare system, or else pay for a welfare system and also biodiversity maintainance and also animal protection and also development aid and also a Mars mission without a business model and also far-future climate change prevention, I’d rather just pay for the welfare system. Other ideological conflicts would also go away, such as the conflict between preventing animal suffering and maintaining pristine nature, ethical natalism vs. ethical anti-natalism, and so on.
At the moment I (and many others on LW) are experiencing the opposite. We would prefer to give money to people in Africa, but instead we are forced by taxes to give to poor people in the same country as us. Since charity to Africa is much more effective, this means that (from our point of view) 99% of the taxed money is being wasted.
Yes, it certainly cuts both ways. Of course, your country’s welfare system is also available to you and your family if you ever need it, and you benefit more directly from social peace and democracy in your country, which is helped by these transfers. It is hard to see how you could have a functioning democracy without poor people voting for some transfers, so unless you think democracy has no useful function for you, that’s a cost in your best interest to pay.
Really, the fact that different sizes of moral circle can incentivize coercion is just a trivial corollary of the fact that value differences in general can incentivize coercion.
But an expanding circle of moral concern increases value differences. If I have to pay for a welfare system, or else pay for a welfare system and also biodiversity maintainance and also animal protection and also development aid and also a Mars mission without a business model and also far-future climate change prevention, I’d rather just pay for the welfare system. Other ideological conflicts would also go away, such as the conflict between preventing animal suffering and maintaining pristine nature, ethical natalism vs. ethical anti-natalism, and so on.