I think of moral sacrifice as something closer to a muscle: it can be used up, but it can also be worked out, flexed, strengthened. I think of donating a kidney as something more like a workout that will train the moral muscle than like a marathon that will exhaust it. If you think that donating a kidney would exhaust your moral capacity, I agree that you probably shouldn’t do it.
This is potentially a critical flaw in my framework. I wasn’t think about it this way, but training myself to be ok with giving more would be a very good thing.
(Below I answer your questions about my framework as though I still follow it, because while your point is good enough that I may give it up, I haven’t yet.)
$1600/life saved estimate assumes that the entire benefits of bednets come from protecting children under 5
I had forgotten that. In this case, then, you’re right that our respective valuations of saving the life of an under-5 year old and giving an adult with kidney failure another ten years are going to be different. (My natural draw is actually even stronger towards saving/protecting children than a DALY approach gets you, but I think this is instinctive and excessive.)
I don’t really understand why would you decide to keep more money in response to another, totally non-fiscal decision.
The big problem is that my money can go so much farther in generating happiness and reducing suffering when spent on other people that it has the potential to make every money-related decision really hard. If every dollar I spent on myself came with the question “why aren’t you giving this to people that need it more?” I would be a wreck. I want all decisions I make in my daily life to have only minor consequences. So I set an “I will donate exactly $X this year to the best organization(s) I can find” limit, and don’t have to be constantly struggling with whether I should be giving more. [1]
While this is phrased in terms of money, I convert all other potential utilitarian-virtuous actions into a dollar value so that I am not constantly being pressured to change my giving limit. Imagine I think fair trade chocolate is improves the world, but that it doesn’t improve the world as much as the AMF. If I thought of my “chocolate buying decision” as totally separate from my “how much to donate decision” I might buy fair trade chocolate. But I also would believe that it would be better for me to buy the cheap chocolate, which I think tastes the same, and donate the savings to the AMF. Except my donation limit wouldn’t allow that. So I set things up so that if I were to spend an extra $X to buy fair trade chocolate I would donate $X less to the AMF.
let’s say that your job becomes far more pleasant because you got new coworkers who you liked more. Should you thereby give a higher portion of your salary to charity, to offset the increase in pleasure? If something negative happened in your personal life, would you begin withholding a higher portion of your salary for personal consumption?
Having to constantly evaluate how happy I was and whether that meant I could afford to give more or need give less would make me less happy. I do understand where you’re going with this, and that if my rule is based around giving as much as I can while staying above a happiness line I’m unwilling to cross I need to be tracking my happiness level, but the problem is I’m not sure how to track my happiness level without setting up all sorts of nasty incentives. For example I could mark down on a sheet every evening how happy I was that day, with the idea that if I’m happy enough I can give more. But then Julia might start saying nice things to me she doesn’t actually mean right before I fill out the sheet, or only bring up problems right after I mark things down for the day.
How do you deal with the repugnant conclusion?
I don’t find it repugnant. The larger population has lives that are, on balance, after considering all the joy and suffering of being human, happy. And there are a lot of them. What’s to object to?
(Reading your comments reminds me again how glad I am that GiveWell has such smart and reasonable people behind it.)
[1] I originally started doing this to keep Julia sane, but I find now it’s helpful for me too.
This is potentially a critical flaw in my framework. I wasn’t think about it this way, but training myself to be ok with giving more would be a very good thing.
(Below I answer your questions about my framework as though I still follow it, because while your point is good enough that I may give it up, I haven’t yet.)
I had forgotten that. In this case, then, you’re right that our respective valuations of saving the life of an under-5 year old and giving an adult with kidney failure another ten years are going to be different. (My natural draw is actually even stronger towards saving/protecting children than a DALY approach gets you, but I think this is instinctive and excessive.)
The big problem is that my money can go so much farther in generating happiness and reducing suffering when spent on other people that it has the potential to make every money-related decision really hard. If every dollar I spent on myself came with the question “why aren’t you giving this to people that need it more?” I would be a wreck. I want all decisions I make in my daily life to have only minor consequences. So I set an “I will donate exactly $X this year to the best organization(s) I can find” limit, and don’t have to be constantly struggling with whether I should be giving more. [1]
While this is phrased in terms of money, I convert all other potential utilitarian-virtuous actions into a dollar value so that I am not constantly being pressured to change my giving limit. Imagine I think fair trade chocolate is improves the world, but that it doesn’t improve the world as much as the AMF. If I thought of my “chocolate buying decision” as totally separate from my “how much to donate decision” I might buy fair trade chocolate. But I also would believe that it would be better for me to buy the cheap chocolate, which I think tastes the same, and donate the savings to the AMF. Except my donation limit wouldn’t allow that. So I set things up so that if I were to spend an extra $X to buy fair trade chocolate I would donate $X less to the AMF.
Having to constantly evaluate how happy I was and whether that meant I could afford to give more or need give less would make me less happy. I do understand where you’re going with this, and that if my rule is based around giving as much as I can while staying above a happiness line I’m unwilling to cross I need to be tracking my happiness level, but the problem is I’m not sure how to track my happiness level without setting up all sorts of nasty incentives. For example I could mark down on a sheet every evening how happy I was that day, with the idea that if I’m happy enough I can give more. But then Julia might start saying nice things to me she doesn’t actually mean right before I fill out the sheet, or only bring up problems right after I mark things down for the day.
I don’t find it repugnant. The larger population has lives that are, on balance, after considering all the joy and suffering of being human, happy. And there are a lot of them. What’s to object to?
(Reading your comments reminds me again how glad I am that GiveWell has such smart and reasonable people behind it.)
[1] I originally started doing this to keep Julia sane, but I find now it’s helpful for me too.