Quotes from the Screwtape Letters have not been terribly well-received in this thread. So, perversely, I decided I had to take a turn:
Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. 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. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy...you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us.
-- The demon Screwtape, on how best to tempt a human being to destruction.
The existence of souls notwithstanding, Screwtape is clearly right: if you are charitable to almost everybody—except for those your see every day!--then you are not practicing the virtue of charity and are ill-served to imagine otherwise. You cannot fantasize good mental habits into being; they must be acted upon.
Who does more good with their life—the person who contributes a large amount of money to efficient charities while avoiding the people nearby, or the person who ignores anyone more than 100 miles away while being nice to his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train?
If he actually donates the money then the charity is not constrained to fantasy. By the miracle of the world banking network, people thousands of literal miles away can be brought as close as the sphere of action. Those concentric rings are measured in frequency and impactfulness of interaction, not physical distance.
What Screwtape is advocating is that he simply intend to donate the money once Givewell publishes a truely definitive report (which they never will). Or better, that he feel great compassion for people so many steps removed that he could not possibly do anything for them (perhaps the people of North Korea, who are beyond the reach of most charities due to government interdiction).
The obvious, and trivially true, answer is that he who does both does more good than either. But that’s not what you asked.
So. It can be hard to compare the two options when considering the actions of a single person, since the beneficiaries of the actions do not overlap. Therefore I shall employ a simple heuristic; I shall assume that the option which does the most good when one person does it is also the option that does the most good when everyone does it.
So, the first option; everyone (who can afford it) makes large donations to efficient charities, while everyone avoids those nearby and is unpleasant when forced to deal with someone else directly.
If I make a few assumptions about the effectiveness (and priorities) of the charities and the sum of the donations, I find myself considering a world where everyone is sufficiently fed, clothed, sheltered, medically cared for and educated. However, the fact that everyone is unpleasant to everyone else leads to everyone being grumpy, irritated, and mildly unhappy.
Considering the second option; charitable donations drastically decrease, but everyone is pleasant and helpful to everyone they meet face-to-face. In this possible world, there are people who go hungry, naked, homeless. But probably fewer than in our current world; because everyone they meet will be helpful, aiding if they can in their plight. And because everyone’s pleasant and tries to uplift the mood of those they meet, a large majority of people consider themselves happy.
Therefore I shall employ a simple heuristic; I shall assume that the option which does the most good when one person does it is also the option that does the most good when everyone does it.
This assumption seems trivially false to me, and despite being labeled as a mere ‘heuristic’, it is the crucial step in your argument. Can you explain why I should take it seriously?
Well, for most choices between “is this good?” and “is this bad?” the assumption is true. For example, is it good for me to drop my chocolate wrapper on the street instead of finding a rubbish bin? If I assume everyone were to do that, I get the idea of a street awash in chocolate wrappers, and I consider that reason enough to find a rubbish bin.
Furthermore, and more importantly, the aim here is not to produce an argument that one action is better than the other in a single, specific case; rather, it is to produce a general principle (whether it is generally better to be charitable to those nearby, or to those further away).
And if option A is generally better than option B, then I think it is very probable that universal application of A will remain better than universal application of B; and vice versa.
When you ask what it’s like if everyone were to “do that”, the answer you get is going to be determined by how you define “that”. For instance, if everyone were to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of your annoying neighbor, you might be happy. So is it okay to drop the wrapper on your neighbor’s lawn?
It’s tempting to reply to this by saying “‘doing the same thing’ means removing all self-serving qualifiers, so the correct question is whether you would like it if people dropped wrappers wherever they wanted, not specifically on your neighbor’s lawn”. This reply doesn’t work, because there are are plenty of situations where you want the qualifier—for instance, putting criminals in jail when the qualifier “criminal” excludes yourself.
(And what’s your stance on homosexuality? If everyone were to do that, humanity would be extinct.)
When you ask what it’s like if everyone were to “do that”, the answer you get is going to be determined by how you define “that”. For instance, if everyone were to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of your annoying neighbor, you might be happy. So is it okay to drop the wrapper on your neighbor’s lawn?
I do need to be careful to define “that” as a generally applicable rule. In this case, the generally applicable rule would be, is it okay to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people one finds annoying?
So I need to consider the world in which everyone drops chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people they find annoying. Considering this, the chances of someone dropping a wrapper on my lawn becomes dependent on the probability that someone will find me annoying.
So, in short, I can put as many qualifiers on the rule as I like. However, I have to be careful to attach my qualifiers to the true reason for my formulation of the rule; I cannot select the rule “it is acceptable to drop chocolate wrappers on that exact specific lawn over there” without referencing the process by which I chose that exact specific lawn.
I can’t attach a qualifier to a specific person; but I can attach a qualifier to a specific quality, like being annoying, when considering a proposal.
And what’s your stance on homosexuality? If everyone were to do that, humanity would be extinct.
Well, what’s your stance on forcing homosexuals to breed heterosexually to save humanity from extinction? Or forcing all homosexual women and a few men chosen by lottery, since we have an overabundance of sperm?
I don’t think people should be forced to breed, but I wasn’t arguing that people should be forced to breed, I was pointing out that the above argument (would you like if everyone did that) means that it is wrong to refuse to breed. Pointing out that an argument I oppose leads to an uncomfortable conclusion is a reductio ad absurdum and does not mean that I endorse that conlusion myself.
And if everyone were to breed, that would exacerbate the problems that are due to overpopulation. This implies that there should be some process that one follows when deciding whether or not to breed; it should be a process that has a nonzero chance of making the decision either to breed or not.
Exactly what the optimal process is, I do not know.
Why the Hell would I want to practice the virtue of charity? If anything, I want to help people. And hating people from a foreign country could be an excellent way to do damage!
I’m sorry, my original post was not quite precise. I meant charity in the sense of the Principle of Charity, not charitable contributions. If you prefer, substitute “kind” for “charitable”; it’s not quite the same but illustrates the point just as well.
And hating people from a foreign country could be an excellent way to do damage!
Keep in mind, we’re talking about the damage you do to yourself. Hating people you’ve never met is not a very efficient way to damage yourself. Much better is to hate people you know intimately and see every day. That way you can practice your vices efficiently, and will have as many opportunities as possible to act them out.
Applying the principle of charity to people you know but not to foreigners is a well-known failure mode that produced Soviet atrocities against Germans, to use Lewis’ own example. And again, here is Lewis applying the principle of charity to a transformation-happy Sith Lord with a mind-altering book after writing these allegedly helpful quotes. He seems to genuinely not see the parallels between borderline-self-insert Coriakin and his most famous villain.
Lewis is explicitly writing religious propaganda. It’s not coincidence that his advice would have his mostly-Christian readers focus on charity to Christian authority figures before Soviets, or even Church critics they don’t personally know.
To the women in the Magdalen laundries, that would be their employer. But if you genuinely insist that because Lewis said “every day” rather than every week, he couldn’t have meant a priest or vicar (or one of those supervising nuns) except in the case of those readers who actually do see one every day, then I’m going to insist he didn’t want to help women because he said “he”. Or do you want to argue this quote has nothing to say about people who fall in between the most “immediate” and the “remote circumference”?
Also, we just had another quote from the same source in which Lewis used the narrow form of this principle to attack atheists—or anyone who doubts that “his” neighbors belong to the body of an otherworldly entity, for what Lewis implies are poor reasons. (I agree they aren’t the best reasons—those would start with the absurdly low prior.)
Are you going to respond to my argument that this habit of trusting the familiar hurt Lewis’ rationality?
Are you going to respond to my argument that this habit of trusting the familiar hurt Lewis’ rationality?
No, of course not. It has nothing to do with the quote I posted.
You’re clearly suffering and I don’t want to just blow you off, but in this thread you’ve almost exclusively responded to things I didn’t write. I am not the proper object for your anger with Lewis and Christianity, and I’m done engaging with you.
Why the Hell would I want to practice the virtue of charity? If anything, I want to help people.
Except, with that attitude you won’t. You’ll sit around telling yourself how virtuous you are for liking people you’ve never met, while being a misanthrope to everyone you personally know. Furthermore, if (or when) you mean one of the foreign people you supposedly love, you’ll wind up being a misanthrope to them as well.
And hating people from a foreign country could be an excellent way to do damage!
Really? How does you, personally, hating people from a foreign country do damage?
I think it’s implicit from when he said “if anything, I want to help people”, and when he described donations that are efficient at helping anonymous strangers as “produc[ing] a giant net benefit”.
The people of the soviet union were a resource that Stalin had a great amount of control over, and so even if he was perfectly selfish and uncaring towards his people, he would prefer to preserve that resource. The selfish benefit to be gained from saving a life in Africa is negligible, and is vastly outweighed by the cost.
I suppose I should clarify that I’m taking “love” in this context to basically mean the same thing as “like”—in many contexts it’s not just a mere difference of degree, but in the context of “loving humanity” and such phrases I think it probably is.
There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.
Of course, it’s a lot harder to be charitable to the man on the train—or worse, to one’s own exploiter employer—than to one’s mother. For one thing, the wider the circle of charity, the deeper a pit to fill with one’s efforts!
Which was precisely why, during my internship last summer, I eventually just picked one homeless guy and gave him my loose $1 bills every day during my commute.
Quotes from the Screwtape Letters have not been terribly well-received in this thread. So, perversely, I decided I had to take a turn:
-- The demon Screwtape, on how best to tempt a human being to destruction.
The existence of souls notwithstanding, Screwtape is clearly right: if you are charitable to almost everybody—except for those your see every day!--then you are not practicing the virtue of charity and are ill-served to imagine otherwise. You cannot fantasize good mental habits into being; they must be acted upon.
Who does more good with their life—the person who contributes a large amount of money to efficient charities while avoiding the people nearby, or the person who ignores anyone more than 100 miles away while being nice to his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train?
If he actually donates the money then the charity is not constrained to fantasy. By the miracle of the world banking network, people thousands of literal miles away can be brought as close as the sphere of action. Those concentric rings are measured in frequency and impactfulness of interaction, not physical distance.
What Screwtape is advocating is that he simply intend to donate the money once Givewell publishes a truely definitive report (which they never will). Or better, that he feel great compassion for people so many steps removed that he could not possibly do anything for them (perhaps the people of North Korea, who are beyond the reach of most charities due to government interdiction).
Yeah, that’s been confusing: I meant this principle of charity.
A tricky question.
The obvious, and trivially true, answer is that he who does both does more good than either. But that’s not what you asked.
So. It can be hard to compare the two options when considering the actions of a single person, since the beneficiaries of the actions do not overlap. Therefore I shall employ a simple heuristic; I shall assume that the option which does the most good when one person does it is also the option that does the most good when everyone does it.
So, the first option; everyone (who can afford it) makes large donations to efficient charities, while everyone avoids those nearby and is unpleasant when forced to deal with someone else directly.
If I make a few assumptions about the effectiveness (and priorities) of the charities and the sum of the donations, I find myself considering a world where everyone is sufficiently fed, clothed, sheltered, medically cared for and educated. However, the fact that everyone is unpleasant to everyone else leads to everyone being grumpy, irritated, and mildly unhappy.
Considering the second option; charitable donations drastically decrease, but everyone is pleasant and helpful to everyone they meet face-to-face. In this possible world, there are people who go hungry, naked, homeless. But probably fewer than in our current world; because everyone they meet will be helpful, aiding if they can in their plight. And because everyone’s pleasant and tries to uplift the mood of those they meet, a large majority of people consider themselves happy.
This assumption seems trivially false to me, and despite being labeled as a mere ‘heuristic’, it is the crucial step in your argument. Can you explain why I should take it seriously?
Well, for most choices between “is this good?” and “is this bad?” the assumption is true. For example, is it good for me to drop my chocolate wrapper on the street instead of finding a rubbish bin? If I assume everyone were to do that, I get the idea of a street awash in chocolate wrappers, and I consider that reason enough to find a rubbish bin.
Furthermore, and more importantly, the aim here is not to produce an argument that one action is better than the other in a single, specific case; rather, it is to produce a general principle (whether it is generally better to be charitable to those nearby, or to those further away).
And if option A is generally better than option B, then I think it is very probable that universal application of A will remain better than universal application of B; and vice versa.
When you ask what it’s like if everyone were to “do that”, the answer you get is going to be determined by how you define “that”. For instance, if everyone were to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of your annoying neighbor, you might be happy. So is it okay to drop the wrapper on your neighbor’s lawn?
It’s tempting to reply to this by saying “‘doing the same thing’ means removing all self-serving qualifiers, so the correct question is whether you would like it if people dropped wrappers wherever they wanted, not specifically on your neighbor’s lawn”. This reply doesn’t work, because there are are plenty of situations where you want the qualifier—for instance, putting criminals in jail when the qualifier “criminal” excludes yourself.
(And what’s your stance on homosexuality? If everyone were to do that, humanity would be extinct.)
I do need to be careful to define “that” as a generally applicable rule. In this case, the generally applicable rule would be, is it okay to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people one finds annoying?
So I need to consider the world in which everyone drops chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people they find annoying. Considering this, the chances of someone dropping a wrapper on my lawn becomes dependent on the probability that someone will find me annoying.
So, in short, I can put as many qualifiers on the rule as I like. However, I have to be careful to attach my qualifiers to the true reason for my formulation of the rule; I cannot select the rule “it is acceptable to drop chocolate wrappers on that exact specific lawn over there” without referencing the process by which I chose that exact specific lawn.
I can’t attach a qualifier to a specific person; but I can attach a qualifier to a specific quality, like being annoying, when considering a proposal.
Well, what’s your stance on forcing homosexuals to breed heterosexually to save humanity from extinction? Or forcing all homosexual women and a few men chosen by lottery, since we have an overabundance of sperm?
I don’t think people should be forced to breed, but I wasn’t arguing that people should be forced to breed, I was pointing out that the above argument (would you like if everyone did that) means that it is wrong to refuse to breed. Pointing out that an argument I oppose leads to an uncomfortable conclusion is a reductio ad absurdum and does not mean that I endorse that conlusion myself.
And if everyone were to breed, that would exacerbate the problems that are due to overpopulation. This implies that there should be some process that one follows when deciding whether or not to breed; it should be a process that has a nonzero chance of making the decision either to breed or not.
Exactly what the optimal process is, I do not know.
Yvain in these two old blog posts of his makes the case that it’s not clear that a world with grumpy people is worse than a world with hungry people.
You are correct. It is by no means clear which is better.
Why the Hell would I want to practice the virtue of charity? If anything, I want to help people. And hating people from a foreign country could be an excellent way to do damage!
I’m sorry, my original post was not quite precise. I meant charity in the sense of the Principle of Charity, not charitable contributions. If you prefer, substitute “kind” for “charitable”; it’s not quite the same but illustrates the point just as well.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about the damage you do to yourself. Hating people you’ve never met is not a very efficient way to damage yourself. Much better is to hate people you know intimately and see every day. That way you can practice your vices efficiently, and will have as many opportunities as possible to act them out.
Applying the principle of charity to people you know but not to foreigners is a well-known failure mode that produced Soviet atrocities against Germans, to use Lewis’ own example. And again, here is Lewis applying the principle of charity to a transformation-happy Sith Lord with a mind-altering book after writing these allegedly helpful quotes. He seems to genuinely not see the parallels between borderline-self-insert Coriakin and his most famous villain.
Lewis is explicitly writing religious propaganda. It’s not coincidence that his advice would have his mostly-Christian readers focus on charity to Christian authority figures before Soviets, or even Church critics they don’t personally know.
The three examples given in the quote are:
Which of those are Christian authority figures?
To the women in the Magdalen laundries, that would be their employer. But if you genuinely insist that because Lewis said “every day” rather than every week, he couldn’t have meant a priest or vicar (or one of those supervising nuns) except in the case of those readers who actually do see one every day, then I’m going to insist he didn’t want to help women because he said “he”. Or do you want to argue this quote has nothing to say about people who fall in between the most “immediate” and the “remote circumference”?
Also, we just had another quote from the same source in which Lewis used the narrow form of this principle to attack atheists—or anyone who doubts that “his” neighbors belong to the body of an otherworldly entity, for what Lewis implies are poor reasons. (I agree they aren’t the best reasons—those would start with the absurdly low prior.)
Are you going to respond to my argument that this habit of trusting the familiar hurt Lewis’ rationality?
No, of course not. It has nothing to do with the quote I posted.
You’re clearly suffering and I don’t want to just blow you off, but in this thread you’ve almost exclusively responded to things I didn’t write. I am not the proper object for your anger with Lewis and Christianity, and I’m done engaging with you.
To self-modify, perhaps?
Except, with that attitude you won’t. You’ll sit around telling yourself how virtuous you are for liking people you’ve never met, while being a misanthrope to everyone you personally know. Furthermore, if (or when) you mean one of the foreign people you supposedly love, you’ll wind up being a misanthrope to them as well.
Really? How does you, personally, hating people from a foreign country do damage?
And why would I care about that if my donations produce a giant net benefit? When did I even claim to love anyone?
If you don’t love people, why would your utility function include a term for their wellbeing?
Where did he claim that his utility function included a term for the stranger’s well-being?
I think it’s implicit from when he said “if anything, I want to help people”, and when he described donations that are efficient at helping anonymous strangers as “produc[ing] a giant net benefit”.
If Stalin didn’t love his own people, why would he mildly prefer not to throw them at Hitler?
The people of the soviet union were a resource that Stalin had a great amount of control over, and so even if he was perfectly selfish and uncaring towards his people, he would prefer to preserve that resource. The selfish benefit to be gained from saving a life in Africa is negligible, and is vastly outweighed by the cost.
I suppose I should clarify that I’m taking “love” in this context to basically mean the same thing as “like”—in many contexts it’s not just a mere difference of degree, but in the context of “loving humanity” and such phrases I think it probably is.
Of course, it’s a lot harder to be charitable to the man on the train—or worse, to one’s own exploiter employer—than to one’s mother. For one thing, the wider the circle of charity, the deeper a pit to fill with one’s efforts!
Which was precisely why, during my internship last summer, I eventually just picked one homeless guy and gave him my loose $1 bills every day during my commute.