I disagree. There are degrees of caring, and appropriate responses to them. Admittedly, “nice” is a term with no specific meaning, but most of us can probably put it on a relative ranking with other positive terms, such “non-zero benefit” or “decent” (which I, and probably most people, would rank below “nice”) and “excellent”, “wonderful”, “the best thing in the world” (in the hyperbolic “best thing I have in mind right now” sense), or “literally, after months of introspection, study, and multiplying, I find that this is the best thing which could possibly occur at this time”; I suspect most native English speakers would agree that those are stronger sentiments than “nice”. I can certainly think of things that are more important than merely “nice” yet less important than a reduction in death and suffering.
For example, I would really like a Tesla car, with all the features. In the category of remotely-feasible things somebody could actually give me, I actually value that higher than there’s any rational reason for. On the other hand, if somebody gave me the money for such a car, I wouldn’t spend it on one… I don’t actually need a car, in fact don’t have a place for it, and there are much more valuable things I could do with that money. Donating it to some highly-effective charity, for example.
Leaving aside the fact that “every human being in existence” appears to require excluding a number of people who really are devoting their lives to bringing about reductions in suffering and death, there are lots of people who would respond to a cessation of some cause of suffering or death more positively than to simply think it “nice”. Maybe not proportionately more positively—as the post says, our care-o-meters don’t scale that far—but there would still be a major difference. I don’t know how common, in actual numbers, that reaction is vs. the “It would be nice” reaction (not to mention other possible reactions), but it is absolutely a significant number of people even among those who aren’t devoting their whole life towards that goal.
Pretty much every human being in existence who thinks that stopping death and suffering is a good thing, still spends resources on themselves and their loved ones beyond the bare minimum needed for survival. They could spend some money to buy poor Africans malaria nets, but have something which is not death or suffering which they consider more important than spending the money. to alleviate death and suffering.
In that sense, it’s nice that death and suffering are alleviated, but that’s all.
it is absolutely a significant number of people even among those who aren’t devoting their whole life towards that goal
“Not devoting their whole life towards stopping death and suffering” equates to “thinks something else is more important than stopping death and suffering”.
False dichotomy. You can have (many!) things which are more than merely “nice” yet less than the thing you spend all available resources on. To take a well-known public philanthropist as an example, are you seriously claiming that because he does not spend every cent he has eliminating malaria as fast as possible, Bill Gates’ view on malaria eradication is that “it’s nice that death and suffering are alleviated, but that’s all”?
We should probably taboo the word “nice” here; since we seem likely to be operating on different definitions of it. To rephrase my second sentence of this post, then: You can have (many!) things which you hold to be important and work to bring about, but which you do not spend every plausibly-available resource on.
Also, your final sentence is not logically consistent. To show that a particular goal is the most important thing to you, you only need to devote more resources (including time) to it than to any other particular goal. If you allocate 49% of your resources to ending world poverty, 48% to being a billionaire playboy, and 3% to personal/private uses that are not strictly required for either of those goals, that is probably not the most efficient possible manner to allocate your resources, but there is nothing you value more than ending poverty (a major cause of suffering and death) even though it doesn’t even consume a majority of your resources. Of course, this assumes that the value of your resources is fixed wherever you spend them; in the real world, the marginal value of your investments (especially in things like medicine) go down the more resources you pump into them in a given time frame; a better use might be to invest a large chunk of your resources into things that generate more resources, while providing as much towards your anti-suffering goals as they can efficiently use at once.
Let’s be a bit more concrete here. If you devote approximately half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, that means something like this: you value saving 10000 Africans’ lives less than you value having a second yacht. I’m sure that second yacht is fun to have, but I think it’s reasonable to categorize something that you value less than 1/10000 of the increment from “one yacht” to “two yachts” as no more important than “nice”.
This is of course not a problem unique to billionaire playboys, but it’s maybe a more acute problem for them; a psychologically equivalent luxury for an ordinarily rich person might be a second house costing $1M, which corresponds to 1⁄100 as many African lives and likely brings a bigger gain in personal utility; one for an ordinarily not-so-rich person might be a second car costing $10k, another 100x fewer dead Africans and (at least for some—e.g., two-income families living in the US where getting around without a car can be a biiiig pain) a considerable gain in personal utility. There’s still something kinda indecent about valuing your second car more than a person’s life, but at least to my mind it’s substantially less indecent than valuing your second megayacht more than 10000 people’s lives.
Suppose I have a net worth of $1M and you have a net worth of $10B. Each of us chooses to devote half our resources to ending poverty and half to having fun. That means that I think $500k of fun-having is worth the same as $500k of poverty-ending, and you think $5B of fun-having is worth the same as $5B of poverty-ending. But $5B of poverty-ending is about 10,000 times more poverty-ending than $500k of poverty-ending—but $5B of fun-having is nowhere near 10,000 times more fun than $500k of fun-having. (I doubt it’s even 10x more.) So in this situation it is reasonable to say that you value poverty-ending much less, relative to fun-having, than I do.
Pedantic notes: I’m supposing that your second yacht costs you $100M and that you can save one African’s life for $10k; billionaires’ yachts are often more expensive and the best estimates I’ve heard for saving poor people’s lives are cheaper. Presumably if you focus on ending poverty rather than on e.g. preventing malaria then you think that’s a more efficient way of helping the global poor, which makes your luxury trade off against more lives. I am using “saving lives” as a shorthand; presumably what you actually care about is something more like time-discounted aggregate QALYs. Your billionaire playboy’s luxury purchase might be something other than a yacht. Offer void where prohibited by law. Slippery when wet.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, I strongly endorse devoting half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, if the alternative is putting it all into being a billionaire playboy. The good you can do that way is tremendous, and I’d take my hat off to you if I were wearing one. I just don’t think it’s right to describe that situation by saying that poverty is the most important thing to you.
You can have (many!) things which you hold to be important and work to bring about, but which you do not spend every plausibly-available resource on.
What about the argument from marginal effectiveness? I.e. unless the best thing for you to work on is so small that your contribution reduces its marginal effectiveness below that of the second-best thing, you should devote all of your resources to the best thing.
I don’t myself act on the conclusion, but I also don’t see a flaw in the argument.
I disagree. There are degrees of caring, and appropriate responses to them. Admittedly, “nice” is a term with no specific meaning, but most of us can probably put it on a relative ranking with other positive terms, such “non-zero benefit” or “decent” (which I, and probably most people, would rank below “nice”) and “excellent”, “wonderful”, “the best thing in the world” (in the hyperbolic “best thing I have in mind right now” sense), or “literally, after months of introspection, study, and multiplying, I find that this is the best thing which could possibly occur at this time”; I suspect most native English speakers would agree that those are stronger sentiments than “nice”. I can certainly think of things that are more important than merely “nice” yet less important than a reduction in death and suffering.
For example, I would really like a Tesla car, with all the features. In the category of remotely-feasible things somebody could actually give me, I actually value that higher than there’s any rational reason for. On the other hand, if somebody gave me the money for such a car, I wouldn’t spend it on one… I don’t actually need a car, in fact don’t have a place for it, and there are much more valuable things I could do with that money. Donating it to some highly-effective charity, for example.
Leaving aside the fact that “every human being in existence” appears to require excluding a number of people who really are devoting their lives to bringing about reductions in suffering and death, there are lots of people who would respond to a cessation of some cause of suffering or death more positively than to simply think it “nice”. Maybe not proportionately more positively—as the post says, our care-o-meters don’t scale that far—but there would still be a major difference. I don’t know how common, in actual numbers, that reaction is vs. the “It would be nice” reaction (not to mention other possible reactions), but it is absolutely a significant number of people even among those who aren’t devoting their whole life towards that goal.
Pretty much every human being in existence who thinks that stopping death and suffering is a good thing, still spends resources on themselves and their loved ones beyond the bare minimum needed for survival. They could spend some money to buy poor Africans malaria nets, but have something which is not death or suffering which they consider more important than spending the money. to alleviate death and suffering.
In that sense, it’s nice that death and suffering are alleviated, but that’s all.
“Not devoting their whole life towards stopping death and suffering” equates to “thinks something else is more important than stopping death and suffering”.
False dichotomy. You can have (many!) things which are more than merely “nice” yet less than the thing you spend all available resources on. To take a well-known public philanthropist as an example, are you seriously claiming that because he does not spend every cent he has eliminating malaria as fast as possible, Bill Gates’ view on malaria eradication is that “it’s nice that death and suffering are alleviated, but that’s all”?
We should probably taboo the word “nice” here; since we seem likely to be operating on different definitions of it. To rephrase my second sentence of this post, then: You can have (many!) things which you hold to be important and work to bring about, but which you do not spend every plausibly-available resource on.
Also, your final sentence is not logically consistent. To show that a particular goal is the most important thing to you, you only need to devote more resources (including time) to it than to any other particular goal. If you allocate 49% of your resources to ending world poverty, 48% to being a billionaire playboy, and 3% to personal/private uses that are not strictly required for either of those goals, that is probably not the most efficient possible manner to allocate your resources, but there is nothing you value more than ending poverty (a major cause of suffering and death) even though it doesn’t even consume a majority of your resources. Of course, this assumes that the value of your resources is fixed wherever you spend them; in the real world, the marginal value of your investments (especially in things like medicine) go down the more resources you pump into them in a given time frame; a better use might be to invest a large chunk of your resources into things that generate more resources, while providing as much towards your anti-suffering goals as they can efficiently use at once.
Let’s be a bit more concrete here. If you devote approximately half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, that means something like this: you value saving 10000 Africans’ lives less than you value having a second yacht. I’m sure that second yacht is fun to have, but I think it’s reasonable to categorize something that you value less than 1/10000 of the increment from “one yacht” to “two yachts” as no more important than “nice”.
This is of course not a problem unique to billionaire playboys, but it’s maybe a more acute problem for them; a psychologically equivalent luxury for an ordinarily rich person might be a second house costing $1M, which corresponds to 1⁄100 as many African lives and likely brings a bigger gain in personal utility; one for an ordinarily not-so-rich person might be a second car costing $10k, another 100x fewer dead Africans and (at least for some—e.g., two-income families living in the US where getting around without a car can be a biiiig pain) a considerable gain in personal utility. There’s still something kinda indecent about valuing your second car more than a person’s life, but at least to my mind it’s substantially less indecent than valuing your second megayacht more than 10000 people’s lives.
Suppose I have a net worth of $1M and you have a net worth of $10B. Each of us chooses to devote half our resources to ending poverty and half to having fun. That means that I think $500k of fun-having is worth the same as $500k of poverty-ending, and you think $5B of fun-having is worth the same as $5B of poverty-ending. But $5B of poverty-ending is about 10,000 times more poverty-ending than $500k of poverty-ending—but $5B of fun-having is nowhere near 10,000 times more fun than $500k of fun-having. (I doubt it’s even 10x more.) So in this situation it is reasonable to say that you value poverty-ending much less, relative to fun-having, than I do.
Pedantic notes: I’m supposing that your second yacht costs you $100M and that you can save one African’s life for $10k; billionaires’ yachts are often more expensive and the best estimates I’ve heard for saving poor people’s lives are cheaper. Presumably if you focus on ending poverty rather than on e.g. preventing malaria then you think that’s a more efficient way of helping the global poor, which makes your luxury trade off against more lives. I am using “saving lives” as a shorthand; presumably what you actually care about is something more like time-discounted aggregate QALYs. Your billionaire playboy’s luxury purchase might be something other than a yacht. Offer void where prohibited by law. Slippery when wet.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, I strongly endorse devoting half your resources to ending poverty and half to being a billionaire playboy, if the alternative is putting it all into being a billionaire playboy. The good you can do that way is tremendous, and I’d take my hat off to you if I were wearing one. I just don’t think it’s right to describe that situation by saying that poverty is the most important thing to you.
Thank you, that’s what I would have said.
What about the argument from marginal effectiveness? I.e. unless the best thing for you to work on is so small that your contribution reduces its marginal effectiveness below that of the second-best thing, you should devote all of your resources to the best thing.
I don’t myself act on the conclusion, but I also don’t see a flaw in the argument.