The basic framework you envision seems to have a certain fixed level of charitable resources (potential “sacrifice”), to be stewarded and spent in a utility-optimizing way over time. Once spent, these resources are gone. In this framework, asking “is the amount I would have to donate to the best charity to accomplish the same benefits as donating a kidney less than the price for which I would sell my kidney?” is a coherent and useful question, because you plan to offset your charitable contributions by that amount if you decide to donate a kidney, in order to maintain a stable level of personal welfare.
This sense of a broad scarcity of “charitable resources” (meant to include money, time, organs, etc.) is well-expressed by Julia’s comment:
People think about doing their good deed for the day. I bet if you asked someone who’d just undergone major surgery to save someone’s life if they now wanted to donate money as well, they’d say, “Look, I’ve sacrificed enough.”
My framework is different. 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.
Julia pointed to (a LessWrong writeup of) a study that purports to show that people behave less ethically after purchasing “green” products because they have “licensed” some immoral behavior with their positive actions. I think this dynamic makes a lot of sense with my experience in small actions but, big, life-changing decisions like donating a kidney or giving away a large portion of your income seem more likely to have the opposite effect: reinforcing an identity as a “charitable person” who is committed to the welfare of others. A couple weeks after I donated my kidney, I made my annual charitable donation; I’m nowhere near you and Julia, but I tithe. I don’t think this is especially idiosyncratic: there’s a psychology literature on “moral identity” that shows more or less the exact opposite of the literature on “moral licensing.”
Of course, in these psych studies, the sample sizes are small and the conclusions are based on sample averages. The psych studies showing that any mention of statistics or more than one victim reduces donations clearly aren’t characterizing GiveWell donors, and in the same vein I don’t see much reason to think that these studies, even the one I cited, are characterizing people like me. So even if the “moral licensing” phenomenon is the dominant one in a broad swath of social activity or individuals, I think that gives me little reason to believe it dominates in my case or yours.
Details
Does the $100K account for the costs of the transplant operation and followup costs such as anti-rejection drugs?
Yep.
There are also economic benefits of fewer people getting malaria. I don’t know the relative magnitudes of these.
Agreed, though the far greater productivity of workers in the developed world (and the social support that they draw on when not working) means that the dollar magnitude of those economic gains will be much higher. Conversely, the higher baseline also means that the welfare returns to the developed-world economic gains are lower than the developing world returns for similar dollar values.
Because I estimated DALYs just from an overall $/life-saved and an estimate at life expectancy then we the question here is whether I’m right to treat one life saved via a malarial net as four times more valuable than ten additional years via a kidney donation. We don’t have to bring DALYs into it.
Agree that we don’t literally have to use DALYs, but I don’t think this is responsive. You’re saying that you value saving the child’s life at 4x the amount of extending the adult’s life by 10 years; my point is that I value additional life for mid-life people much more than I do for infants, so I don’t share your value here. I’m not sure what my multiple is, but it tilts the other direction (i.e. for your value of 4x, I have a value of less than one).
As far as I can tell, I care about happiness and avoiding suffering, where two years of at joy-minus-suffering level X matter twice as much as one year at level X.
But neither the AMF’s nor kidney donation’s benefit comes much from an effect on newborns, so that doesn’t apply here.
AMF’s benefits don’t come from newborns, but the $1600/life saved estimate assumes that the entire benefits of bednets come from protecting children under 5.
That’s unfortunate. I would really like it if GiveWell could give me $/life-saved that corrected for these issues and was as accurate enough to take literally. How far off do you think this number is? 2x? 100x?
I don’t know the right answer to this question. I agree with what Holden wrote about why what you’re asking for is too hard to do in a reasonable way.
Isn’t medical leave generally unpaid, especially for elective surgeries? If you miss two weeks of work and take home $50K/year then that’s about $2K in missed pay.
I don’t know of the general case here. I know a guy who got paid medical leave from his law firm, and I don’t explicitly know of any cases where people had to take unpaid leave. The federal government offers 30 days of paid leave for organ donation for federal employees, as do many state governments (PDF). I would be mildly surprised if Google wasn’t willing to give paid leave for altruistic kidney donation. My general guess is that this is going to track the overall generosity of the benefits of your employer. I do agree that this consideration could easily be decisive.
“Because of the very general framing of “sacrifice,” donating a kidney—if it were “worth doing”—would imply that you thereby reduce your charitable obligations.” Yes. I would do this.
I tried to address this in the framework section, above. You’ve shown that you can live happily and healthily on the amount of income that you and Julia save for your own consumption. I don’t really understand why would you decide to keep more money in response to another, totally non-fiscal decision.
To put it in a different context, 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? I have a feeling that I’m probably not being fair with these examples, but I’m genuinely not sure why.
Anyway, as much as a I don’t understand this approach, I do agree that the bar for donating a kidney should be high if it leads you to reduce your fiscal charitable contributions. If you would reduce your charitable contributions by $10K, I’m not sure if it’s worth donating a kidney; if you would reduce your contributions by $50K, I’m pretty sure it’s not (with the exception of the hard-to-quantify outreach benefits).
“Envisioning people as having a fixed amount of suffering they’re willing to undergo does not strike me as a very accurate psychological model.” It doesn’t? As long as you account for things like “giving up meat is hard at first but gets easier” it seems about right to me.
I addressed this in the framework section, but I wanted to add that I think “giving up meat is hard at first, but gets easier” dynamics are pervasive. I think giving a big portion of your income is hard at first but probably gets easier over time. If you weren’t giving at all, giving 50% of one’s income might seem inconceivable; after giving 25% for a long time, it might seem far more doable (even though the next 25% is harder). Most of the studies I’ve read on hedonic adaptation suggest that humans are quite good at adapting (over time) to new circumstances and new forms of suffering.
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.
At the framework level
The basic framework you envision seems to have a certain fixed level of charitable resources (potential “sacrifice”), to be stewarded and spent in a utility-optimizing way over time. Once spent, these resources are gone. In this framework, asking “is the amount I would have to donate to the best charity to accomplish the same benefits as donating a kidney less than the price for which I would sell my kidney?” is a coherent and useful question, because you plan to offset your charitable contributions by that amount if you decide to donate a kidney, in order to maintain a stable level of personal welfare.
This sense of a broad scarcity of “charitable resources” (meant to include money, time, organs, etc.) is well-expressed by Julia’s comment:
My framework is different. 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.
Julia pointed to (a LessWrong writeup of) a study that purports to show that people behave less ethically after purchasing “green” products because they have “licensed” some immoral behavior with their positive actions. I think this dynamic makes a lot of sense with my experience in small actions but, big, life-changing decisions like donating a kidney or giving away a large portion of your income seem more likely to have the opposite effect: reinforcing an identity as a “charitable person” who is committed to the welfare of others. A couple weeks after I donated my kidney, I made my annual charitable donation; I’m nowhere near you and Julia, but I tithe. I don’t think this is especially idiosyncratic: there’s a psychology literature on “moral identity” that shows more or less the exact opposite of the literature on “moral licensing.”
Of course, in these psych studies, the sample sizes are small and the conclusions are based on sample averages. The psych studies showing that any mention of statistics or more than one victim reduces donations clearly aren’t characterizing GiveWell donors, and in the same vein I don’t see much reason to think that these studies, even the one I cited, are characterizing people like me. So even if the “moral licensing” phenomenon is the dominant one in a broad swath of social activity or individuals, I think that gives me little reason to believe it dominates in my case or yours.
Details
Yep.
Agreed, though the far greater productivity of workers in the developed world (and the social support that they draw on when not working) means that the dollar magnitude of those economic gains will be much higher. Conversely, the higher baseline also means that the welfare returns to the developed-world economic gains are lower than the developing world returns for similar dollar values.
Agree that we don’t literally have to use DALYs, but I don’t think this is responsive. You’re saying that you value saving the child’s life at 4x the amount of extending the adult’s life by 10 years; my point is that I value additional life for mid-life people much more than I do for infants, so I don’t share your value here. I’m not sure what my multiple is, but it tilts the other direction (i.e. for your value of 4x, I have a value of less than one).
How do you deal with the repugnant conclusion?
AMF’s benefits don’t come from newborns, but the $1600/life saved estimate assumes that the entire benefits of bednets come from protecting children under 5.
I don’t know the right answer to this question. I agree with what Holden wrote about why what you’re asking for is too hard to do in a reasonable way.
I don’t know of the general case here. I know a guy who got paid medical leave from his law firm, and I don’t explicitly know of any cases where people had to take unpaid leave. The federal government offers 30 days of paid leave for organ donation for federal employees, as do many state governments (PDF). I would be mildly surprised if Google wasn’t willing to give paid leave for altruistic kidney donation. My general guess is that this is going to track the overall generosity of the benefits of your employer. I do agree that this consideration could easily be decisive.
I tried to address this in the framework section, above. You’ve shown that you can live happily and healthily on the amount of income that you and Julia save for your own consumption. I don’t really understand why would you decide to keep more money in response to another, totally non-fiscal decision.
To put it in a different context, 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? I have a feeling that I’m probably not being fair with these examples, but I’m genuinely not sure why.
Anyway, as much as a I don’t understand this approach, I do agree that the bar for donating a kidney should be high if it leads you to reduce your fiscal charitable contributions. If you would reduce your charitable contributions by $10K, I’m not sure if it’s worth donating a kidney; if you would reduce your contributions by $50K, I’m pretty sure it’s not (with the exception of the hard-to-quantify outreach benefits).
I addressed this in the framework section, but I wanted to add that I think “giving up meat is hard at first, but gets easier” dynamics are pervasive. I think giving a big portion of your income is hard at first but probably gets easier over time. If you weren’t giving at all, giving 50% of one’s income might seem inconceivable; after giving 25% for a long time, it might seem far more doable (even though the next 25% is harder). Most of the studies I’ve read on hedonic adaptation suggest that humans are quite good at adapting (over time) to new circumstances and new forms of suffering.
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.