I don’t think that risk aversion does what you think it does. Let’s say that he only wants to perform interventions which are certain to be helpful.
Whether he is selfish depends on his reasons for acting that way. If he thinks it’s morally better to support x risk but gains more personal satisfaction from his donations, then he is selfish. But if he believes that there are moral or other reasons to support more robust interventions then it sounds like he isn’t selfish.
If someone did make their allocations based on risk aversion rather than utility maximization, they would be operating according to a fairly reasonable decision model, so probably not selfish there either. (Unless they really believed that utility maximization was correct but derived personal satisfaction from being risk averse, which I don’t think describes many people.)
I still have this feeling, though, that some people support some causes over others simply for the reason that ‘my personal impact probably won’t make a difference’, which seems hard to justify to me.
I don’t think that risk aversion does what you think it does. Let’s say that he only wants to perform interventions which are certain to be helpful.
Whether he is selfish depends on his reasons for acting that way. If he thinks it’s morally better to support x risk but gains more personal satisfaction from his donations, then he is selfish. But if he believes that there are moral or other reasons to support more robust interventions then it sounds like he isn’t selfish.
If someone did make their allocations based on risk aversion rather than utility maximization, they would be operating according to a fairly reasonable decision model, so probably not selfish there either. (Unless they really believed that utility maximization was correct but derived personal satisfaction from being risk averse, which I don’t think describes many people.)
Thanks, there are some good points here.
I still have this feeling, though, that some people support some causes over others simply for the reason that ‘my personal impact probably won’t make a difference’, which seems hard to justify to me.