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 ā¦ I think this argument is very bad and I suspect you do too.
First, I think GiveWellās 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 āWhen 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.ā
But say I argued that the US Department of Transportation funding ($12.5M/ālife) should be redirected to foreign aid until they had equal marginal costs per life saved. I donāt think the objection Iād get would be āAmericans have greater moral valueā but instead things like āsaving lives in other countries is the role of private charity, not the governmentā. In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donāt think Iāve ever gotten the objection ābut people in other countries donāt matterā or āthey matter far less than Americansā, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donāt think Iāve ever gotten the objection ābut people in other countries donāt matterā or āthey matter far less than Americansā, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iām afraid you should get out more often :).
More generally, that foreigners and/āor immigrants donāt matter, or matter little compared to native born locals, is fundamental to political parties around the world. Itās 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 donāt 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 worldās population.
First, I think GiveWellās 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 āweāre all equalā option on a survey but clearly donāt 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 whatās empirically persuasive) response is āmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorā, and not something like āmost humans actually agree that the global poor have equal value so donāt stray too far from equality in your assessment.ā 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 āmoral equality for all humansā option on a survey. For me at least, we arenāt 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 Iām 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.
āmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorā
I think maybe Iām not being clear enough about what Iām trying to do with my post? As I wrote to Wayne below, what Iām hoping happens is:
Some people who donāt think animals matter very much respond to RPās weights with āthat seems really far from where Iād put them, but if those are really right then a lot of us are making very poor prioritization decisionsā.
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 thereās a lot of discussion, figuring out why, and identifying the core disagreements.
Awesome, thanks! Good post!
First, I think GiveWellās 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 āWhen 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.ā
But say I argued that the US Department of Transportation funding ($12.5M/ālife) should be redirected to foreign aid until they had equal marginal costs per life saved. I donāt think the objection Iād get would be āAmericans have greater moral valueā but instead things like āsaving lives in other countries is the role of private charity, not the governmentā. In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donāt think Iāve ever gotten the objection ābut people in other countries donāt matterā or āthey matter far less than Americansā, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iām afraid you should get out more often :).
More generally, that foreigners and/āor immigrants donāt matter, or matter little compared to native born locals, is fundamental to political parties around the world. Itās 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 donāt 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 worldās population.
GiveWell donors are not representative of all humans. I think a large fraction of humanity would select the āweāre all equalā option on a survey but clearly donāt 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 whatās empirically persuasive) response is āmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorā, and not something like āmost humans actually agree that the global poor have equal value so donāt stray too far from equality in your assessment.ā 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 āmoral equality for all humansā option on a survey. For me at least, we arenāt 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 Iām not being clear enough about what Iām trying to do with my post? As I wrote to Wayne below, what Iām hoping happens is:
Some people who donāt think animals matter very much respond to RPās weights with āthat seems really far from where Iād put them, but if those are really right then a lot of us are making very poor prioritization decisionsā.
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 thereās a lot of discussion, figuring out why, and identifying the core disagreements.