[Following Singer’s kid-in-a-pond parable: ] Most people value the well-being of human strangers. This is at least in part a terminal value, not an instrumental value. So why don’t people give more money away with a view toward maximizing positive social impact?
That’s not a precise way of putting it. There is a huge difference in how people view strangers that happen to be physically close at the moment, especially if they are perceived to belong to the same community in some sense, versus distant strangers that are out of sight.
You are expected to exert a reasonable effort to help strangers in dire trouble that you encounter physically. This includes, say, giving directions to someone who is lost, calling 911 if you find someone lying wounded, or pulling a drowning kid out of a pond. This social norm is, to my knowledge, a human universal. Its overall effects are positive by all reasonable standards, and it is entirely rational to suspect people who break it of serious personality defects. Life is immensely safer and more pleasant for everyone if you can expect random people around you to watch your back and care about you to some reasonable degree.
In contrast, people as a rule don’t care at all about distant, out of sight strangers. Yes, they will often donate to charity in the name of helping them, but the reasons for such donations have little or nothing to do with the actual psychological mechanisms of care for fellow humans. Moreover, while attempts to help immediately present strangers almost always actually help them, the case for remote charity is much more moot. The law of unintended consequences is harsh and merciless whenever large-scale interventions in human affairs are undertaken, and it’s illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell. Whether or not people like James Shikwati are exaggerating their case, it is even more foolish and dishonest to dismiss them out of hand.
So, on the whole, when it comes to helping strangers, I readily admit that I feel a strong obligation to help strangers in cases of the first kind, and expect the same from others, while I’m largely indifferent and skeptical towards aid to distant foreigners. This is simply what human beings are like, and denying it is empty posturing—there is practically no one who actually considers his obligations towards all strangers the same, or vice versa, no matter what the distance. When Singer conflates these cases, it is merely a reflection of his spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing at all to do with the real human moral instincts—or any other actual aspect of humanity, for that matter. He is just proselytizing his own eccentric quasi-religious belief system.
it is merely a reflection of his spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing at all to do with the actual human moral instincts—or any other actual aspect of humanity, for that matter
Perhaps that is a little harsh.
The advantage of efficiently caring about other people in your community is that it is efficient. Our countries would be better if people were at least efficient in the way they cared for each other. For example, I’d trade people not calling 911 if I were hurt for those same people spending an hour a week reading about cognitive biases or each donating $30 to SENS.
The same holds for the world at large, though the inefficiencies introduced by different races and cultures trying to cooperate makes me distrustful of international aid.
To be precise, I said that specifically about Singer’s philosophy, of which I really don’t think anything good (I’m generally allergic to utilitarianism, and I find Singer’s variant especially noxious). I’m not saying all his conclusions are as outlandish as the philosophy he uses to derive them; some things he says can still be reasonable in a stopped-clock sort of way.
The same holds for the world at large, though the inefficiencies introduced by different races and cultures trying to cooperate makes me distrustful of international aid.
I’d say that the problems of unintended consequences go far beyond inefficiency losses, and even beyond the complaints voiced by Shikwati in that article I linked. But that’s a complex topic in its own right.
Nah, that wouldn’t deter me. In the interest of my own intellectual improvement, I have developed the ability to read through arbitrarily obnoxious stuff, much like medical students develop the ability to overcome the normal disgust of dissection and handling corpses.
(a) I agree that Singer sometimes exhibits spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing to do with real human moral instincts. I also agree that his views are in some ways naive.
(b) The issue of negative unintended consequences connected with developing aid world is a serious one.
(c) If you have a good argument that “it’s illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell” then I’m interested in hearing it. But at the moment your implicit criticism of the efficacy of donating to GiveWell’s top recommended international aid charities appears to be totally ungrounded.
(d) Whether or not international aid is a good cause has little bearing on whether or not people should be giving more of their money away. The “saving a life” imagery is best understood metaphorically. There may be causes that are much more cost-effective from the point of view of maximizing positive social impact than giving to improve international health. People who believe that developing world aid is not cost-effective should consider donating a sizable fraction of their income to an organization that supports a cause that they prefer, or placing a sizable fraction of their income in a donor advised fund for future charitable use.
If you have a good argument that “it’s illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell” then I’m interested in hearing it. But at the moment your implicit criticism of the efficacy of donating to GiveWell’s top recommended international aid charities appears to be totally ungrounded.
Maybe I should state my claim more clearly. What I mean is that while criteria such as those used by GiveWell can eliminate certain modes of failure in aid projects, they are by no means sufficient to eliminate the possibility of numerous other non-obvious failure modes—and given the actual historical record of various humanitarian aid programs, it seems pretty obvious to me that such failures are a rule rather than exceptions. I would say that this constitutes enough evidence to shift the burden of proof on those who argue in favor of supporting such projects.
Note that even if it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt that a certain program has saved so many lives, it is by no means a guarantee that its overall long-term consequences are positive by any standard. For example, reducing mortality among people who are stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium in a way that doesn’t force them out of this equilibrium will only increase the amount of suffering in the medium-to-long run, which can be alleviated only by ever increasing amounts of aid, creating a diabolical positive feedback process that results in an ever greater dependence—possibly making it even more difficult for them to escape the Malthusian condition. Or, to take another example, aiding the subjects of a disastrously bad government will increase its stability and grip on power in a way that may easily allow it to make an even worse subsequent mess. Such scenarious, and various other equally depressing ones, have happened on innumerably many occasions in modern history, and keep on happening.
On the whole, when someone claims that some project will improve the lot of distant strangers that are outside of your regular sphere of attention and comprehension, you need an awful lot of evidence to be reasonably sure that these claims are true—certainly way more evidence than even GiveWell is capable of providing, even if they really are the best source of information on these matters.
There may be causes that are much more cost-effective from the point of view of maximizing positive social impact than giving to improve international health. People who believe that developing world aid is not cost-effective should consider donating a sizable fraction of their income to an organization that supports a cause that they prefer, or placing a sizable fraction of their income in a donor advised fund for future charitable use.
I have no particular argument with this, as long as such attitudes are not based on the absurd Singerian idea that distant anonymous strangers have an equal claim on my altruism as people stuck in some accidental trouble right in front of me. An essential part of human nature is that people care more about family and friends than about strangers, and more about strangers that are closer by various criteria than about more distant ones—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this by any reasonable standard, regardless of how much Singer and his ilk smugly chastise normal people for not falling in line with their ideology.
The odd thing is that the way out of the Malthusian trap turned out to be education for women and availability of birth control.
The Victorians believed that education for women made them less likely to have children. Were the Victorians must making things up, or did they observe a real pattern? In any case, they thought something was bad which, so far, has turned out to look like a good thing.
So far as I know, the thing that controls bad governments is a middle class—they’re people with something to lose and at least a few resources for protecting it.
The thing is, these are weirdly idealistic and indirect solutions. They aren’t reaching down and rearranging things to aim directly at a goal.
If I’m on to a real pattern, this doesn’t mean that charities to save lives are a bad idea, but it would imply that increasing large numbers of people’s access to choice is where the big but hard to anticipate victories are.
•I don’t think that it’s clear that you need more evidence than GiveWell is capable of providing to believe that GiveWell’s top rated charities have an expected impact comparable to what they ostensibly do. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that health interventions of the type that VillageReach and StopTB have any systemic negative side effects. I don’t see anything in the interview with Shikwati that points to the idea that such interventions can be expected to have negative side effects. Do you?
•See this GiveWell research message board post for GiveWell founder Holden’s current position on Malthusian problems. In regard to the possibility of aid giving rise to disastrously bad government, I see no reason to expect that the sort of work that VillageReach and StopTB do is more likely to give rise to disastrously bad government than it is to prevent disastrously bad government. If you have reasons for believing that VillageReach and StopTB systematically promote Malthusian problems or disastrously bad governments I would be interested hearing them.
•I agree that Peter Singer and his colleagues are often absurd. His analysis often fails to take into account features of human psychology. I find him unpleasantly arrogant. That being said, I give him major credit for making some effort to improve society by writing “The Life You Can Save,” even though his effort is suboptimal on account of being off-putting to people like you.
•Again, the main point of my post is to encourage people to experiment with donating a sizable fraction of their income with a view toward maximizing their positive social impact, not to encourage people to donate to charities working on improving health in the developing world.
As far as I know, there’s no evidence that health interventions of the type that VillageReach and StopTB have any systemic negative side effects. I don’t see anything in the interview with Shikwati that points to the idea that such interventions can be expected to have negative side effects. Do you?
It seems like the main point of our disagreement is that you believe that the effects of interventions in remote parts of the world can be assessed in a straightforward way using some basic common-sense criteria, while I am much more skeptical and wary of the real-world complexity and the law of unintended consequences. As a general principle, absent some extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe that even the most resourceful and well-intentioned people really know what they’re doing when they try to influence things in extremely distant and alien parts of the world, even if their intervention seems so purely benevolent that you can’t even think of what might possibly go wrong.
So, to answer your question, yes, I do see a multitude of possibilities for how even the most benevolent-seeming interventions can go wrong, including these ones, and I distrust any simple analysis that purports to account for their effects fully. To answer whether these possibilities correspond exactly to the specific things mentioned by Shikwati, I would need to know much more about the specific details of how these organizations work than it’s possible to find out from the public information about them. In particular, when it comes to the issues of Malthusian problems and abetting bad government, I don’t find your replies satisfactory. The mechanisms of these problems are clear and straightforward, and they’ve been observed many times historically up to the present day. To be convinced that some intervention is worth supporting, I need to see strong evidence to the contrary, for these issues as well as numerous others. They are the ones asking for my money, after all.
If someone claims to have an airtight case that a certain intervention in a distant part of the world really is worth supporting, the burden of proof is on them. And yes, they have an awfully high bar to clear, but given the sordid history of well-intentioned interventions among distant strangers throughout the last century or so, it’s impossible not to be either naive or strongly skeptical.
multifoliaterose, thanks for the link to GiveWell—I find it much more useful than Charity Navigator.
Unintended consequences need not be bad consequences. Given the relationship between health and birth rates, I’m aware of much more evidence pointing to the decrease than the increase of Malthusian problems by improving health. But then, given this data presented by Hans Rosling, Malthusian problems may not be relevant in much of the world.
I like the ideas about donor-advised funds. Actually bringing incentives to bear on charities seems like a good idea in the abstract. Though from my point of view, it’s a moot point: the only charity that matters at all is FAI research and other critical existential risk reduction, and the problem in this area is not inefficiency, it’s lack of total capitol and/or more organizations. Unless you can increase the efficiency of SIAI/FHI more cheaply than you can attract more capitol, that is. We’re talking about ~$300k annual budgets here.
multifoliaterose:
That’s not a precise way of putting it. There is a huge difference in how people view strangers that happen to be physically close at the moment, especially if they are perceived to belong to the same community in some sense, versus distant strangers that are out of sight.
You are expected to exert a reasonable effort to help strangers in dire trouble that you encounter physically. This includes, say, giving directions to someone who is lost, calling 911 if you find someone lying wounded, or pulling a drowning kid out of a pond. This social norm is, to my knowledge, a human universal. Its overall effects are positive by all reasonable standards, and it is entirely rational to suspect people who break it of serious personality defects. Life is immensely safer and more pleasant for everyone if you can expect random people around you to watch your back and care about you to some reasonable degree.
In contrast, people as a rule don’t care at all about distant, out of sight strangers. Yes, they will often donate to charity in the name of helping them, but the reasons for such donations have little or nothing to do with the actual psychological mechanisms of care for fellow humans. Moreover, while attempts to help immediately present strangers almost always actually help them, the case for remote charity is much more moot. The law of unintended consequences is harsh and merciless whenever large-scale interventions in human affairs are undertaken, and it’s illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell. Whether or not people like James Shikwati are exaggerating their case, it is even more foolish and dishonest to dismiss them out of hand.
So, on the whole, when it comes to helping strangers, I readily admit that I feel a strong obligation to help strangers in cases of the first kind, and expect the same from others, while I’m largely indifferent and skeptical towards aid to distant foreigners. This is simply what human beings are like, and denying it is empty posturing—there is practically no one who actually considers his obligations towards all strangers the same, or vice versa, no matter what the distance. When Singer conflates these cases, it is merely a reflection of his spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing at all to do with the real human moral instincts—or any other actual aspect of humanity, for that matter. He is just proselytizing his own eccentric quasi-religious belief system.
Perhaps that is a little harsh.
The advantage of efficiently caring about other people in your community is that it is efficient. Our countries would be better if people were at least efficient in the way they cared for each other. For example, I’d trade people not calling 911 if I were hurt for those same people spending an hour a week reading about cognitive biases or each donating $30 to SENS.
The same holds for the world at large, though the inefficiencies introduced by different races and cultures trying to cooperate makes me distrustful of international aid.
Roko:
To be precise, I said that specifically about Singer’s philosophy, of which I really don’t think anything good (I’m generally allergic to utilitarianism, and I find Singer’s variant especially noxious). I’m not saying all his conclusions are as outlandish as the philosophy he uses to derive them; some things he says can still be reasonable in a stopped-clock sort of way.
I’d say that the problems of unintended consequences go far beyond inefficiency losses, and even beyond the complaints voiced by Shikwati in that article I linked. But that’s a complex topic in its own right.
So if I ever need to defeat you, forget the Kryptonite, just brandish a copy of “the life you can save”?
Nah, that wouldn’t deter me. In the interest of my own intellectual improvement, I have developed the ability to read through arbitrarily obnoxious stuff, much like medical students develop the ability to overcome the normal disgust of dissection and handling corpses.
(a) I agree that Singer sometimes exhibits spherical-cow utilitarianism that has nothing to do with real human moral instincts. I also agree that his views are in some ways naive.
(b) The issue of negative unintended consequences connected with developing aid world is a serious one.
(c) If you have a good argument that “it’s illusory to believe that it can be avoided by some simple precautions such as those advocated by GiveWell” then I’m interested in hearing it. But at the moment your implicit criticism of the efficacy of donating to GiveWell’s top recommended international aid charities appears to be totally ungrounded.
(d) Whether or not international aid is a good cause has little bearing on whether or not people should be giving more of their money away. The “saving a life” imagery is best understood metaphorically. There may be causes that are much more cost-effective from the point of view of maximizing positive social impact than giving to improve international health. People who believe that developing world aid is not cost-effective should consider donating a sizable fraction of their income to an organization that supports a cause that they prefer, or placing a sizable fraction of their income in a donor advised fund for future charitable use.
multifoliaterose:
Maybe I should state my claim more clearly. What I mean is that while criteria such as those used by GiveWell can eliminate certain modes of failure in aid projects, they are by no means sufficient to eliminate the possibility of numerous other non-obvious failure modes—and given the actual historical record of various humanitarian aid programs, it seems pretty obvious to me that such failures are a rule rather than exceptions. I would say that this constitutes enough evidence to shift the burden of proof on those who argue in favor of supporting such projects.
Note that even if it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt that a certain program has saved so many lives, it is by no means a guarantee that its overall long-term consequences are positive by any standard. For example, reducing mortality among people who are stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium in a way that doesn’t force them out of this equilibrium will only increase the amount of suffering in the medium-to-long run, which can be alleviated only by ever increasing amounts of aid, creating a diabolical positive feedback process that results in an ever greater dependence—possibly making it even more difficult for them to escape the Malthusian condition. Or, to take another example, aiding the subjects of a disastrously bad government will increase its stability and grip on power in a way that may easily allow it to make an even worse subsequent mess. Such scenarious, and various other equally depressing ones, have happened on innumerably many occasions in modern history, and keep on happening.
On the whole, when someone claims that some project will improve the lot of distant strangers that are outside of your regular sphere of attention and comprehension, you need an awful lot of evidence to be reasonably sure that these claims are true—certainly way more evidence than even GiveWell is capable of providing, even if they really are the best source of information on these matters.
I have no particular argument with this, as long as such attitudes are not based on the absurd Singerian idea that distant anonymous strangers have an equal claim on my altruism as people stuck in some accidental trouble right in front of me. An essential part of human nature is that people care more about family and friends than about strangers, and more about strangers that are closer by various criteria than about more distant ones—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this by any reasonable standard, regardless of how much Singer and his ilk smugly chastise normal people for not falling in line with their ideology.
The odd thing is that the way out of the Malthusian trap turned out to be education for women and availability of birth control.
The Victorians believed that education for women made them less likely to have children. Were the Victorians must making things up, or did they observe a real pattern? In any case, they thought something was bad which, so far, has turned out to look like a good thing.
So far as I know, the thing that controls bad governments is a middle class—they’re people with something to lose and at least a few resources for protecting it.
The thing is, these are weirdly idealistic and indirect solutions. They aren’t reaching down and rearranging things to aim directly at a goal.
If I’m on to a real pattern, this doesn’t mean that charities to save lives are a bad idea, but it would imply that increasing large numbers of people’s access to choice is where the big but hard to anticipate victories are.
•I don’t think that it’s clear that you need more evidence than GiveWell is capable of providing to believe that GiveWell’s top rated charities have an expected impact comparable to what they ostensibly do. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that health interventions of the type that VillageReach and StopTB have any systemic negative side effects. I don’t see anything in the interview with Shikwati that points to the idea that such interventions can be expected to have negative side effects. Do you?
•See this GiveWell research message board post for GiveWell founder Holden’s current position on Malthusian problems. In regard to the possibility of aid giving rise to disastrously bad government, I see no reason to expect that the sort of work that VillageReach and StopTB do is more likely to give rise to disastrously bad government than it is to prevent disastrously bad government. If you have reasons for believing that VillageReach and StopTB systematically promote Malthusian problems or disastrously bad governments I would be interested hearing them.
•I agree that Peter Singer and his colleagues are often absurd. His analysis often fails to take into account features of human psychology. I find him unpleasantly arrogant. That being said, I give him major credit for making some effort to improve society by writing “The Life You Can Save,” even though his effort is suboptimal on account of being off-putting to people like you.
•Again, the main point of my post is to encourage people to experiment with donating a sizable fraction of their income with a view toward maximizing their positive social impact, not to encourage people to donate to charities working on improving health in the developing world.
multifoliaterose:
It seems like the main point of our disagreement is that you believe that the effects of interventions in remote parts of the world can be assessed in a straightforward way using some basic common-sense criteria, while I am much more skeptical and wary of the real-world complexity and the law of unintended consequences. As a general principle, absent some extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I don’t believe that even the most resourceful and well-intentioned people really know what they’re doing when they try to influence things in extremely distant and alien parts of the world, even if their intervention seems so purely benevolent that you can’t even think of what might possibly go wrong.
So, to answer your question, yes, I do see a multitude of possibilities for how even the most benevolent-seeming interventions can go wrong, including these ones, and I distrust any simple analysis that purports to account for their effects fully. To answer whether these possibilities correspond exactly to the specific things mentioned by Shikwati, I would need to know much more about the specific details of how these organizations work than it’s possible to find out from the public information about them. In particular, when it comes to the issues of Malthusian problems and abetting bad government, I don’t find your replies satisfactory. The mechanisms of these problems are clear and straightforward, and they’ve been observed many times historically up to the present day. To be convinced that some intervention is worth supporting, I need to see strong evidence to the contrary, for these issues as well as numerous others. They are the ones asking for my money, after all.
If someone claims to have an airtight case that a certain intervention in a distant part of the world really is worth supporting, the burden of proof is on them. And yes, they have an awfully high bar to clear, but given the sordid history of well-intentioned interventions among distant strangers throughout the last century or so, it’s impossible not to be either naive or strongly skeptical.
multifoliaterose, thanks for the link to GiveWell—I find it much more useful than Charity Navigator.
Unintended consequences need not be bad consequences. Given the relationship between health and birth rates, I’m aware of much more evidence pointing to the decrease than the increase of Malthusian problems by improving health. But then, given this data presented by Hans Rosling, Malthusian problems may not be relevant in much of the world.
I like the ideas about donor-advised funds. Actually bringing incentives to bear on charities seems like a good idea in the abstract. Though from my point of view, it’s a moot point: the only charity that matters at all is FAI research and other critical existential risk reduction, and the problem in this area is not inefficiency, it’s lack of total capitol and/or more organizations. Unless you can increase the efficiency of SIAI/FHI more cheaply than you can attract more capitol, that is. We’re talking about ~$300k annual budgets here.