Right, I agree with your distinction. I was thinking of this as something Scott was ignoring, when he wrote about selling all your possessions. I don’t want to read into it too much, since it was an offhand example of what it would look like to go all the way in the taking-altruism-seriously direction. But it does seem like Scott (at the time) implicitly believed that going too far would include things of this sort. (That’s the point of his example!) So when you say:
The effect Scott probably worries about is the following:
I’m like, no, I don’t think Scott was explicitly reasoning this way. Infinite Debt was not about how altruists need to think long-term about what does the most good. It was a post about how it’s OK not to do that all the time, and principles like altruism should be allowed to ask arbitrarily much from us. Yes, you can make an argument “thinking about the long-term good all the time isn’t the best way to produce the most long-term good” and “asking people to be as good as possible isn’t the best way to get them to be as good as possible” and things along those lines. But for better or worse, that’s not the argument in the post.
Right, I agree with your distinction. I was thinking of this as something Scott was ignoring, when he wrote about selling all your possessions. I don’t want to read into it too much, since it was an offhand example of what it would look like to go all the way in the taking-altruism-seriously direction. But it does seem like Scott (at the time) implicitly believed that going too far would include things of this sort. (That’s the point of his example!) So when you say:
I’m like, no, I don’t think Scott was explicitly reasoning this way. Infinite Debt was not about how altruists need to think long-term about what does the most good. It was a post about how it’s OK not to do that all the time, and principles like altruism should be allowed to ask arbitrarily much from us. Yes, you can make an argument “thinking about the long-term good all the time isn’t the best way to produce the most long-term good” and “asking people to be as good as possible isn’t the best way to get them to be as good as possible” and things along those lines. But for better or worse, that’s not the argument in the post.