What do you think of this rephrasing of your original argument: I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the the value of foreign aid ⌠I think this argument is very bad and I suspect you do too.
First, I think GiveWellâs research, say, is mostly consumed by people who agree people matter equally regardless of which country they live in. Which makes this scenario more similar to my âWhen using the moral weights of animals to decide between various animal-focused interventions this is not a major concern: the donors, charity evaluators, and moral weights researchers are coming from a similar perspective.â
But say I argued that the US Department of Transportation funding ($12.5M/âlife) should be redirected to foreign aid until they had equal marginal costs per life saved. I donât think the objection Iâd get would be âAmericans have greater moral valueâ but instead things like âsaving lives in other countries is the role of private charity, not the governmentâ. In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donât think Iâve ever gotten the objection âbut people in other countries donât matterâ or âthey matter far less than Americansâ, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donât think Iâve ever gotten the objection âbut people in other countries donât matterâ or âthey matter far less than Americansâ, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iâm afraid you should get out more often :).
More generally, that foreigners and/âor immigrants donât matter, or matter little compared to native born locals, is fundamental to political parties around the world. Itâs a banal take in international politics. Sure, some opposition to global health charities is an implied or explicit empirical claim about the role of government. But fundamentally, not all of it as a lot of people donât value the lives of the out-group and people not in your country are in the out-group (or at least not in the in-group) for much of the worldâs population.
First, I think GiveWellâs research, say, is mostly consumed by people who agree people matter equally regardless of which country they live in.
GiveWell donors are not representative of all humans. I think a large fraction of humanity would select the âweâre all equalâ option on a survey but clearly donât actually believe it or act on it (which brings us back to revealed preferences in trades like those humans make about animal lives).
But even if none of that is true, were someone to make this argument about the value of the global poor, the best moral (I make no claims about whatâs empirically persuasive) response is âmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorâ, and not something like âmost humans actually agree that the global poor have equal value so donât stray too far from equality in your assessment.â If you do the latter, you are making a contingent claim based on a given population at a given time. To put it mildly, for most of human history I do not believe we even would have gotten people to half-heartedly select the âmoral equality for all humansâ option on a survey. For me at least, we arenât bound in our philosophical assessment of value by popular belief here or for animal welfare.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iâm afraid you should get out more often :).
Yikes; ugh. Probably a lot of this is me talking to so many college students in the Northeast.
âmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorâ
I think maybe Iâm not being clear enough about what Iâm trying to do with my post? As I wrote to Wayne below, what Iâm hoping happens is:
Some people who donât think animals matter very much respond to RPâs weights with âthat seems really far from where Iâd put them, but if those are really right then a lot of us are making very poor prioritization decisionsâ.
Those people put in a bunch of effort to generate their own weights.
Probably those weights end up in a very different place, and then thereâs a lot of discussion, figuring out why, and identifying the core disagreements.
Awesome, thanks! Good post!
First, I think GiveWellâs research, say, is mostly consumed by people who agree people matter equally regardless of which country they live in. Which makes this scenario more similar to my âWhen using the moral weights of animals to decide between various animal-focused interventions this is not a major concern: the donors, charity evaluators, and moral weights researchers are coming from a similar perspective.â
But say I argued that the US Department of Transportation funding ($12.5M/âlife) should be redirected to foreign aid until they had equal marginal costs per life saved. I donât think the objection Iâd get would be âAmericans have greater moral valueâ but instead things like âsaving lives in other countries is the role of private charity, not the governmentâ. In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donât think Iâve ever gotten the objection âbut people in other countries donât matterâ or âthey matter far less than Americansâ, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iâm afraid you should get out more often :).
More generally, that foreigners and/âor immigrants donât matter, or matter little compared to native born locals, is fundamental to political parties around the world. Itâs a banal take in international politics. Sure, some opposition to global health charities is an implied or explicit empirical claim about the role of government. But fundamentally, not all of it as a lot of people donât value the lives of the out-group and people not in your country are in the out-group (or at least not in the in-group) for much of the worldâs population.
GiveWell donors are not representative of all humans. I think a large fraction of humanity would select the âweâre all equalâ option on a survey but clearly donât actually believe it or act on it (which brings us back to revealed preferences in trades like those humans make about animal lives).
But even if none of that is true, were someone to make this argument about the value of the global poor, the best moral (I make no claims about whatâs empirically persuasive) response is âmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorâ, and not something like âmost humans actually agree that the global poor have equal value so donât stray too far from equality in your assessment.â If you do the latter, you are making a contingent claim based on a given population at a given time. To put it mildly, for most of human history I do not believe we even would have gotten people to half-heartedly select the âmoral equality for all humansâ option on a survey. For me at least, we arenât bound in our philosophical assessment of value by popular belief here or for animal welfare.
Yikes; ugh. Probably a lot of this is me talking to so many college students in the Northeast.
I think maybe Iâm not being clear enough about what Iâm trying to do with my post? As I wrote to Wayne below, what Iâm hoping happens is:
Some people who donât think animals matter very much respond to RPâs weights with âthat seems really far from where Iâd put them, but if those are really right then a lot of us are making very poor prioritization decisionsâ.
Those people put in a bunch of effort to generate their own weights.
Probably those weights end up in a very different place, and then thereâs a lot of discussion, figuring out why, and identifying the core disagreements.