I came back to this post a year later because I really wanted to grapple with the idea I should be willing to sacrifice more for the cause. Alas, even in a receptive mood I don’t think this post does a very good job of advocating for this position. I don’t believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she’s clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications. She’s clearly confused about what convenient means (having to slow down to take care of yourself is very inconvenient), and I think this is significant and not just a poor choice of words. So I wrote my own version of the position.
Let’s say Bob is right that the costs exceed the benefits of working harder or suffering. Does that need to be true forever? Could Bob invest in changing himself so that he could better live up to his values? Does he have an ~obligation[1] to do that?
We generally hold that people who can swim have obligations to save drowning children in lakes[2], but there’s no obligation for non-swimmers to make an attempt that will inevitably drown them. Does that mean they’re off the hook, or does it mean their moral failure happened when they chose not to learn how to swim?
One difficulty with this is that there are more potential emergencies than we could possibly plan for. If someone skipped the advance swim lesson where you learn to rescue panicked drowning people because they were learning wilderness first aid, I don’t think that’s a moral failure.
This posits a sort of moral obligation to maximally extend your capacity to help others or take care of yourself in a sustainable way. I still think obligation is not quite the right word for this, but to the extent it applies, it applies to long term strategic decisions and not in-the-moment misery.
I don’t love the word obligation in general. I’m using it here to convey that whatever morality applies to split-second-decisions also applies to long term planning.
Straightforward “strategic ignorance” (avoiding to learn things on purpose to avoid related obligations) seems like an obvious moral failure. The practical problem is that once we start judging people for strategic ignorance, it may motivate them to make their strategy indirect. If you can be blamed for not taking a swimming class that your school provided, it motivates you to choose a school that does not provide swimming classes. Or vote for a government that removes swimming classes from schools, because then it’s no longer your fault.
This posits a sort of moral obligation to maximally extend your capacity to help others or take care of yourself in a sustainable way.
Yes. Unfortunately, I have only heard this idea in some form from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Jordan Peterson. It seems to be outside the social Overton window.
I suppose the reason is that, socially, we need a definition of “ethics” such that most people kinda reach it. Otherwise we don’t get the peer pressure… and might actually get peer pressure against.
Seems like we have two different things here—what is the right thing to do, and what is the optimal social norm to promote—and the relation between them is complicated. It feels it would be nice if these two could be the same thing. Promoting the thing that is the right thing to do, sounds like the right thing to do. But that only works if people already agree, or if there is a cult-like situation that can make them agree (to the degree that they become the enforcers of the norm in private; otherwise you just get two competing moralities). In reality, outside of cults, you don’t get an agreement on anything.
Another option is to choose the optimal social norm (the thing that realistically can be approved of by the majority) and pretend that this is the right thing to do. I think that’s how it works in practice. The problem is what to do about those parts of “doing the right thing” that don’t fit into the “optimal norm that can be socially enforced”? If you openly admit that the social norm is actually not the right thing to do, you undermine the social norm. An alternative is to adopt a (logically inconsistent, if you look too closely) position that something things are “good”, but some things are “beyond-good”—good if you choose to do them, but if you refuse to do them, it doesn’t make you bad.
So, using the traditional language, saving the drowning child is an obligation for swimmers; and learning to swim is supererogatory. Until it happens that most of the people in your society learn to swim, and then you can switch and make learning to swim an obligation.
I used the word obligation because it felt too hard to find a better one, but I don’t like it, even for saving children in shallow ponds. In my mind, obligations are for things you signed up for. In our imperfect world I also feel okay using it for things you got signed up for and benefit from (e.g. I never agreed to be born in the US as a citizen, but I sure do benefit from it, so taxes are an obligation). In my world obligations are always to a specific entity, not general demands.
I think that for some people, rescuing drowning children is an obligation to society, similar to taxes. Something feels wrong about that to me, although I’d think very badly of someone who could have trivially saved a child and chose not to.
A key point for me is that people are allowed to be shitty. This right doesn’t make them not-shitty or free them from the consequences of being shitty, but it is an affordance available to everyone. Not being shitty requires a high average on erogatory actions, plus some number of supererogatory ones.
How many supererogatory actions? The easiest way to define this is relative to capacity, but that seems toxic to me, like people to don’t have a right to their own gains. It also seems likely to drive lots of people crazy with guilt. I don’t know what the right answer is.
TBH I’ve been really surprised at my reaction to “~obligation to maximal growth”. I would have predicted it would feel constraining and toxic, but it feels freeing and empowering, like I’ve been given a more chances to help people at no cost to me. I feel more powerful. I also feel more permission to give up on what is currently too hard, since sacrificing myself for one short term goal hurts my long term obligation.
Maybe the key is that this is a better way to think achieve goals I already had. It’s not a good frame for deciding what one’s goals should be.
[cross-posted from What If You Lived In the Least Convenient Possible World]
I came back to this post a year later because I really wanted to grapple with the idea I should be willing to sacrifice more for the cause. Alas, even in a receptive mood I don’t think this post does a very good job of advocating for this position. I don’t believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she’s clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications. She’s clearly confused about what convenient means (having to slow down to take care of yourself is very inconvenient), and I think this is significant and not just a poor choice of words. So I wrote my own version of the position.
Let’s say Bob is right that the costs exceed the benefits of working harder or suffering. Does that need to be true forever? Could Bob invest in changing himself so that he could better live up to his values? Does he have an ~obligation[1] to do that?
We generally hold that people who can swim have obligations to save drowning children in lakes[2], but there’s no obligation for non-swimmers to make an attempt that will inevitably drown them. Does that mean they’re off the hook, or does it mean their moral failure happened when they chose not to learn how to swim?
One difficulty with this is that there are more potential emergencies than we could possibly plan for. If someone skipped the advance swim lesson where you learn to rescue panicked drowning people because they were learning wilderness first aid, I don’t think that’s a moral failure.
This posits a sort of moral obligation to maximally extend your capacity to help others or take care of yourself in a sustainable way. I still think obligation is not quite the right word for this, but to the extent it applies, it applies to long term strategic decisions and not in-the-moment misery.
I don’t love the word obligation in general. I’m using it here to convey that whatever morality applies to split-second-decisions also applies to long term planning.
The original Singer parable refers to a shallow pond, I assume to get around this problem.
Some related posts:
one example among many of a long runway letting me make more moral choices
ongoing twitter thread on frying pan agency
I get to the airport super early because any fear of being late turns me into an asshole.
Straightforward “strategic ignorance” (avoiding to learn things on purpose to avoid related obligations) seems like an obvious moral failure. The practical problem is that once we start judging people for strategic ignorance, it may motivate them to make their strategy indirect. If you can be blamed for not taking a swimming class that your school provided, it motivates you to choose a school that does not provide swimming classes. Or vote for a government that removes swimming classes from schools, because then it’s no longer your fault.
Yes. Unfortunately, I have only heard this idea in some form from Eliezer Yudkowsky and Jordan Peterson. It seems to be outside the social Overton window.
I suppose the reason is that, socially, we need a definition of “ethics” such that most people kinda reach it. Otherwise we don’t get the peer pressure… and might actually get peer pressure against.
Seems like we have two different things here—what is the right thing to do, and what is the optimal social norm to promote—and the relation between them is complicated. It feels it would be nice if these two could be the same thing. Promoting the thing that is the right thing to do, sounds like the right thing to do. But that only works if people already agree, or if there is a cult-like situation that can make them agree (to the degree that they become the enforcers of the norm in private; otherwise you just get two competing moralities). In reality, outside of cults, you don’t get an agreement on anything.
Another option is to choose the optimal social norm (the thing that realistically can be approved of by the majority) and pretend that this is the right thing to do. I think that’s how it works in practice. The problem is what to do about those parts of “doing the right thing” that don’t fit into the “optimal norm that can be socially enforced”? If you openly admit that the social norm is actually not the right thing to do, you undermine the social norm. An alternative is to adopt a (logically inconsistent, if you look too closely) position that something things are “good”, but some things are “beyond-good”—good if you choose to do them, but if you refuse to do them, it doesn’t make you bad.
So, using the traditional language, saving the drowning child is an obligation for swimmers; and learning to swim is supererogatory. Until it happens that most of the people in your society learn to swim, and then you can switch and make learning to swim an obligation.
I used the word obligation because it felt too hard to find a better one, but I don’t like it, even for saving children in shallow ponds. In my mind, obligations are for things you signed up for. In our imperfect world I also feel okay using it for things you got signed up for and benefit from (e.g. I never agreed to be born in the US as a citizen, but I sure do benefit from it, so taxes are an obligation). In my world obligations are always to a specific entity, not general demands.
I think that for some people, rescuing drowning children is an obligation to society, similar to taxes. Something feels wrong about that to me, although I’d think very badly of someone who could have trivially saved a child and chose not to.
A key point for me is that people are allowed to be shitty. This right doesn’t make them not-shitty or free them from the consequences of being shitty, but it is an affordance available to everyone. Not being shitty requires a high average on erogatory actions, plus some number of supererogatory ones.
How many supererogatory actions? The easiest way to define this is relative to capacity, but that seems toxic to me, like people to don’t have a right to their own gains. It also seems likely to drive lots of people crazy with guilt. I don’t know what the right answer is.
TBH I’ve been really surprised at my reaction to “~obligation to maximal growth”. I would have predicted it would feel constraining and toxic, but it feels freeing and empowering, like I’ve been given a more chances to help people at no cost to me. I feel more powerful. I also feel more permission to give up on what is currently too hard, since sacrificing myself for one short term goal hurts my long term obligation.
Maybe the key is that this is a better way to think achieve goals I already had. It’s not a good frame for deciding what one’s goals should be.