Learning from feminist anarchist funders about how to get the best out of cost effectiveness evaluations: Create an environment of trust and collaboration, where the funder and charity are working together to find the best strategy. Align goals, and create a supportive rather than punitive environment, with space to fail and pivot. I can really recommend watching the whole talk here. There are a lot more useful ideas from the Guerilla Foundation on this youtube series and on their website.
Rubenstein says that “As the low-hanging fruit of basic health programs and cash transfers are exhausted, saving lives and alleviating suffering will require more complicated political action, such as reforming global institutions.” Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and things have recently gotten even worse as of late with the USAID collapse and the UK cutting back on foreign aid.
In general, as the level of EA’s involvement and influence in a given domain increases, the more I start to be concerned about the sort of things that Rubenstein worries about here. When a particular approach is at a smaller size, it’s likely to concentrate on niches where its strengths shine and its limitations are less relevant. I would put the classic GiveWell-type interventions in that category, for instance. Compared to the scope of both the needs in global health & development and the actions of other actors, EA is still a fairly small fish.
Are we (the relatively wealthy) the moral equivalent of Nazis?
The Nazi party murdered c. 12 million people* in the Holocaust, and had 8 million members, making each member ‘individually responsible’ for c. 1.5 deaths.
If it costs 5000 USD to save a life, and someone has more than 7500 USD to spare, but spends that money on a car, are they the moral equivalent of a Nazi**?
Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?
My best way out of this has been to view strategy as more important than morality. Moral positions won’t do anything helpful here. Instead I grieve and use the clarity that grief brings to spread awareness; building a movement to deeply change things***.
** I’m not one to believe in individual responsibility in this way—the system that has lead to this level of inequality has been built up by many people over many centuries, each one with good intentions in some way or another. But the same applies to the creation of the Nazi party and the circumstances that led people to be part of it. Additionally, this is an ‘outcome based’ morality, rather than an ‘intention based’ morality. It’s down to you to decide whether this is a valid way of assessing morality.
*** Just because someone is the moral equivalent of a Nazi doesn’t mean that yelling at them (/yourself) that they’re a Nazi is necessarily the best way to change their (/your) behaviour. I’m open to all the options, as long as they change this stuff, and fast.
This is the kind of idea that has a superficial sheen of plausibility but begins to look plainly absurd when you take time to reflect on the deep reasons our moral views are the way they are.
Here are a few reasons this argument doesn’t make sense.
1. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison
The Nazis also didn’t donate money to help with global poverty, so to make this comparison you have to count the deaths they could have averted by donating but didn’t on top of the people they actively killed.
2. Even if we are focused just on outcomes, intent still matters
Intent is important to outcome.
If you give money to one of GiveWell’s top charities, like the Against Malaria Foundation, you are relying on the intent of the people who work there to produce a good outcome — more money leads to more people helped, such as more anti-malarial bednets deployed. If you somehow found out the people who work at a charity secretly have bad intent (like that they wanted to abscond with the money), you wouldn’t donate because your prediction of the outcome would change. Your view that the charity is good would change.
Part of what made the Nazis bad was not just what they did — although that, of course, was among the worst things anyone’s ever done, among the worst things imaginable — but also what they intended to do if they had won World War II and gained more power. The outcome would have been bad. One of the ways to assess someone’s moral character is to ask what the outcome would be if they had a lot more money, power, or influence.
3. Actively killing is morally worse than passively letting die
Moral agency, moral responsibility, and moral luck are complex and vexing topics. But I will still say that actively killing someone, deliberately and violently, is morally worse than failing to save someone’s life by spending money on personal consumption rather than donating to charity.
Even if you think of things in a pure, rigid consequentialist or utilitarian way, it makes sense to believe that directly, violently killing people is worse because of what I just said about the connection between intent and outcomes.
What kind of world would we live in if we elevated people prone to violently killing others to positions of wealth, power, and influence, rather than treating this as morally evil? The proclivity to actively kill people is strongly correlated with a failure to respond to global poverty humanely, and it’s also strongly correlated with everything else bad.
4. Altruistic self-sacrifice is part of moral assessment
A factor that seems important in assessing the morality of an action or the moral character of a person is altruistic self-sacrifice.
In thought experiments (what the philosopher Daniel Dennett would call “intuition pumps”) like Peter Singer’s parable of the drowning child,[1] the amount of sacrifice the person is required to make to save a life is typically stipulated to be minimal. In reality, the amount of personal sacrifice required to save a life is probably greater — more like 3,000 to 5,000 USD rather than the cost of ruined shoes or clothes in Singer’s hypothetical.
And these thought experiments don’t directly address the question (don’t directly pump our intuitions about) the morality of a person’s actions if they are faced with millions of drowning children and now face real trade-offs between living their own life normally and saving the children. In Singer’s parable, the dilemma is small because the sacrifice is small. Extrapolating from that parable to an argument or an intuition that larger sacrifices should also be required may or may not be justified, but we need to consider how you get from the drowning child parable to that conclusion.
But more importantly to the topic at hand, how much self-sacrifice a person should be willing to endure in order to altruistically help others and whether a person has sacrificed enough is a different topic entirely than what the Nazis did. The Nazis went out of their way to kill people.
This point, #4, builds on points #2 and #3. The willingness to engage in altruistic self-sacrifice matters even if we’re just focused on outcomes. Going out of your way to kill people seems much worse than failing to engage in “enough” altruistic self-sacrifice, and if someone insists on it, we can even justify that on consequentialist grounds.
Someone somewhere once came up with a clever variation of this parable where you are holding your phone and have to drop it on the ground, smashing it, to catch a child falling off a building.
Thanks for the thoughtful response @Yarrow ! Here are a few replies. Interested to hear your further thoughts.
Most members of the Nazi party were not actively killing people. They were politically supporting an organisation that did. Your argument seems to be comparing wealthy people to Nazi executioners instead.
Thanks for pointing out that not donating is dissimilar to murder. I agree, and maybe it’s better to say that it is the creation and enforcement of inequality that is morally equivalent to murder. This level of inequality is what makes donations so effective, and we could instead use this donation metric to estimate the marginal impact of improving/worsening inequality (i.e. making a very poor person £5000 poorer is equivalent to killing a person.[1]
Wealthy countries enforces various international structures that impoverish people in poor countries.[2] This ‘hidden violence’ continues down the chain, affecting people who are beaten and arrested if they steal food they need to survive. People in wealthy countries are supporting a state that creates these policies, and I would suggest that being a cooperating and supportive member of a country such as this is morally equivalent to being a supporter of the Nazi party. Both are in the gray area between ‘actively killing’ and ‘passively letting die’. The only difference being that Nazis use more direct violence, whereas now we use more hidden forms of violence (far away, threat-based).
I tend to agree with you overall, however, that one Nazi murder is morally worse than one wealth inequality starvation/disease/climate disaster murder. If it is, let’s say, 5 times worse, then that now means that anyone with £37,500 spare (via owning a smaller house, for example) would still be morally equivalent to a Nazi. Similar applies for 10 times, or 20 times etc. This would still put a lot of middle class people in this category.
I think I need a little more explanation on your fourth point. If anything, it seems like the self sacrifice of not being a Nazi (dissenting in a fascist country) is greater than living in a smaller house. Could you give a little more detail?
Let me know if there is anything more in your reply that you feel I haven’t properly addressed.
I appreciate that you are probably writing quickly in order to be brief, but I’d really like if you could consider whether an opening line like the following might be a little overweighted towards dismissal, rather than mutual learning:
This is the kind of idea that has a superficial sheen of plausibility but begins to look plainly absurd when you take time to reflect on the deep reasons our moral views are the way they are.
For example, an alternative opening line could be ‘I believe there are some flaws in the logic of this argument, which I’ve described below. Do you agree with these?’
I noticed a flaw in my own logic here. I am assuming that accumulated wealth is coming only from the world’s poorest people, which is not true. The best method for calculating this might be to take a weighted average of this effect for all income groups below average wealth, weighted by the amount below global average wealth they have. My best estimate would be that the effect of average wealth accumulation would be 3 to 10 times lower than wealth accumulated from the world’s poorest people.
I guess my mistake was interpreting your quick take as a sincere question rather than a rhetorical question. I now realize you were asking a rhetorical question in order to make an argument and not actually asking for people to try to answer your question.
My initial interpretation — the reason why I replied — was that you were feeling a lot of guilt about your level of moral responsibility for or complicity in global poverty and the harm it does to people. I wanted to help alleviate your guilt, which I think when taken to such an extreme can be paralyzing and counterproductive. I’ve seen no evidence it actually helps anyone and lots of evidence of it doing harm.
I already tried to make several points in my previous comment. I’ll try to make one more.
You say there is “hidden violence” in the world economic system. Well, knowledge is a component of moral culpability. A famous line from the Watergate scandal was this question a U.S. Senator asked about Richard Nixon: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” The extent to which you know about something affects how morally culpable you are.
There is another layer of complexity beyond this. For example, there is the concept in law of willful ignorance. If you get involved in something that you know or have reasonable grounds to believe is criminal activity and choose not to know certain details in order to try to protect yourself from legal liability, this will probably not hold up as a legal defense and you will probably still be held criminally liable.
But I think it would be a stretch to try to apply the concept of “willful ignorance” to global poverty or the world economic system, since people’s ignorance of the “hidden violence” you describe — if it indeed exists — is genuine and not a ruse to try to avoid culpability.
The moral culpability of normal Germans in the 1930s and 1940s is a complex topic that requires knowing a lot about this time and place in history — which I do not. I think everyone would agree that, for example, a child forced to join the Hitler Youth has a lot less moral culpability than someone with a leadership position in the Nazi Party. So, there is some ambiguity in the term “Nazi” that you have to reckon with to discuss this topic.
But I don’t think it is ethical to drag this complex discussion about this period in history into a debate about effective altruism.
Nazi analogies should be used with a lot of sensitivity and care. By invoking Nazi crimes against humanity in order to try to make some rhetorical point about an unrelated topic, you risk diminishing the importance of these grim events and disrespecting the victims. There are hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors alive today. There are many Jewish families who lost relatives in the Holocaust. Many families are affected by the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust. It seems completely disrespectful to them to try to turn their suffering and loss into effective altruist rhetoric.
So, I have indulged the Nazi analogies enough. I will not entertain this any more.
If you want to make an argument that there are high moral demands on us to respond humanely to global poverty, many people — such as Peter Singer, as I mentioned in my previous comment — have argued this using vivid analogies that have captured people’s imaginations and has helped persuade many of them (including me) to try to do more to help the globally poor.
I guess my mistake was interpreting your quick take as a sincere question rather than a rhetorical question. I now realize you were asking a rhetorical question in order to make an argument and not actually asking for people to try to answer your question
Thanks for the consideration, but you were actually correct the first time. This was a genuine question, and my view has adjusted based on both your comments, which I am grateful for. I haven’t agreed with everything that you have said, but that does not mean that I haven’t found it valuable. Thank you again for the time and thought. What I was most hoping to get out of this post was answers to my two other questions: “Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?”. I pushed back a little on your ‘no’ to the first question, with the hope of answering these too.
I wanted to help alleviate your guilt, which I think when taken to such an extreme can be paralyzing and counterproductive. I’ve seen no evidence it actually helps anyone and lots of evidence of it doing harm.
I totally agree with this. For me it has been at times paralysing, but at times extremely motivating. My aim with the post was to see how I can deal with this grief, since I believe it to be justified. I have changed my lifestyle such that I no longer feel guilt (spending less, donating more, working on impactful things), but the despair remains. Maybe it would have been wiser for me to totally avoid it, but having these ideas is not something I regret. When I try to motivate others to action, I follow the evidence that you mention and am more likely to use ‘drowning child’ style reflections about positive interventions that can be made.
Many families are affected by the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust. It seems completely disrespectful to them to try to turn their suffering and loss into effective altruist rhetoric.
I’m Jewish, and highlighting the comparable moral atrocity has been useful for me. I know that won’t be the case for everyone, and it can definitely be a triggering topic.
But I think it would be a stretch to try to apply the concept of “willful ignorance” to global poverty or the world economic system, since people’s ignorance of the “hidden violence” you describe — if it indeed exists — is genuine and not a ruse to try to avoid culpability.
This is a really good point, and definitely helps to diminish the size of the grief. I have vaguely thought along these lines before, but I like the way that you formulate it. I think there is still some gray area here: a lot of people I know do continue to work in jobs that they know are destructive. But I agree that it is not the case for most.
So, I have indulged the Nazi analogies enough. I will not entertain this any more.
This sounds like this exchange has been unpleasant for you, and I am sorry to hear that. I hope some of the detail in this reply have softened some of this, but regardless I hope that you were able to enjoy some parts of it, and continue to make other valuable contributions on this forum. Take care.
In that case, I apologize. I don’t know you and I don’t know your background or intentions, and apparently I was wrong about both.
I think the experience you’re describing — of feeling a sense of guilt or grief or sadness or obligation that’s so big you don’t know how to handle it — is something that probably the majority of people who have participated in the effective altruist movement have felt at one time or another. I’ve seen many people describe feeling this way, both online and in real life.
When I was an organizer at my university’s effective altruist group, several of the friends I made through that group expressed these kinds of feelings. This stuff weighed on us heavily.
I haven’t read the book Strangers Drowning, but I’ve heard it described, and I know it’s about people who go to extreme lengths to answer the call of moral obligation. Maybe that book would interest you. I don’t know.
This topic goes beyond the domain of ethical theory into a territory that is different parts existential, spiritual, and psychotherapeutic. It can be dangerous not to handle this topic with care because it can get out of control. It can contribute to clinical depression and anxiety, it can motivate people to inflict pain on others, or people can become overzealous, overconfident, and adopt an unfair sense of superiority to other people.
I find it useful to draw on examples from fantasy and sci-fi to think about this sort of thing. In the Marvel universe, the Infinity Stones can only be wielded safely by god-like beings and normal humans or mortals die when they try to use them. The Stones even pose a danger to some superhuman beings, like Thanos and the Hulk. In Star Trek: Picard, there is an ancient message left by an unknown, advanced civilization. When people try to watch/listen to the message, it drives most of them to madness. There are other examples of this sort of thing — something so powerful that coming into contact with it, even coming near it, is incredibly dangerous.
To try to reckon with the suffering of the whole world is like that. Not impossible, not something to be avoided forever, but something dangerous to be approached with caution. People who approach it recklessly can destroy themselves, destroy others, or succumb to madness.
There is a connection between reckoning with the world’s suffering and one’s own personal suffering. In two different ways. First, how we think and feel about one influences how we think and feel about the other. Second, I think a lot of the wisdom about how people should reckon with their own suffering probably applies well to reckoning with the world’s suffering. With someone’s personal trauma or grief, we know (or at least people who go to therapy know) that it’s important for that person to find a safe container to express their thoughts and feelings about it. Talking about it just anywhere or to just anyone, without regard for whether that’s a safe container, is unsafe and unwise.
We know that — after the initial shock of a loss or a traumatic event — it isn’t healthy for a person to focus on their trauma or grief all the time, to the exclusion of other things. But trying to completely avoid forever it isn’t a good strategy either.
We know that the path is never simple, clean, or easy. Connection to other people who have been through or who are going through similar things is often helpful, as is the counsel of a helping professional like a therapist or social worker (or in some cases a spiritual or religious leader), but the help doesn’t come in the form of outlining a straightforward step-by-step process. What helps someone reckon with or make sense of their own emotional suffering is often personal to that individual and not generally applicable.
For example, in the beautiful — and unfairly maligned — memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a point in her life when she feels completely crushed, and when she’s seriously, clinically unwell. She describes how when nothing else feels enjoyable or interesting, she discovers desperately needed pleasure in learning Italian.
I don’t think in the lowest times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. I don’t think in the best or most mediocre times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. The specific thing that helps is usually not generalizable to everyone who’s suffering (which, ultimately, is everyone) and is usually not predictable in advance, including by the person who it ends up helping.
So, the question of how to face the world’s darkness or the world’s suffering, or how to recover from a breakdown when the world’s darkness or suffering seems too much, is an answerable question, but it’s not answerable in a universal, simple, or direct way. It’s about your relationship with the universe, which is something for you and the universe to figure out.
As I indicated above, I like to take things from fantasy and sci-fi to make sense of the world. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell laments that society lacks modern myths. He names Star Wars as the rare exception. (Return of the Jedi came out a few years before The Power of Myth was recorded.) Nowadays, there are lots of modern myths, if you count things like Star Trek, Marvel, X-Men, and Dungeons & Dragons.
I also rely a lot on spiritual and religious teachings. This episode of the RobCast with Rob Bell is relevant to this topic and a great episode. Another great episode, also relevant, is “Light Heavy Light”.
In the more psychotherapeutic realm, I love everything Brené Brown has done — her books, her TV show, her audio programs, her TED Talks. I’ve never heard her directly talk about global poverty, but she talks about so much that is relevant to the questions you asked in one way or another. In her book Rising Strong, she talks about her emotional difficulty facing (literally and figuratively) the people in her city who are homeless. Initially, she decided what she needed to do to resolve this emotional difficulty was to do more to help. She did, but she didn’t feel any differently. This led to a deeper exploration.
In her book Braving the Wilderness, she talks about how she processed collective tragedies like the Challenger disaster and the killings of the kids and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This is what you’re asking about — how to process grief over tragedies that are collective and shared by the world, not personal just to you.
Finally, a warning. In my opinion, a lot of people in effective altruism, including on the Effective Altruism Forum, have not found healthy ways of reckoning with the suffering of the world. There are a few who are so broken by the suffering of the world that they believe life was a mistake and we would be better off returning to non-existence. (In the Dungeons & Dragons lore, these people would be like the worshippers of Shar.) Many are swept up in another kind of madness: eschatological prophecies around artificial general intelligence. Many numb, detach, or intellectualize rather than feel. A lot of energy goes into fighting.
So, the wisdom you are seeking you will probably not find here. You will find good debates on charity effectiveness. Maybe some okay discussions of ethical theory. Not wisdom on how to deal with the human condition.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate your apology and adjustment of tone. I hope that this can inform future dialogues in a way that is helpful for you and for the movement.
I’m not sure whether strangers drowning has the answers I’m hoping for. I listened to a podcast about it, and mostly it sounds like the people who face the world in that way end up extremely unhappy.
Your advice about a container is very wise. It’s a useful technique I discovered through therapy and I’m glad that more people know about it, and to have that faith in the idea validated.
I agree with you that the answer to this question will likely be very individual. Sometimes to the extent where it can be quite lonely.
Thanks for the RobCast recommendation. I’ll listen to it. Likewise for Rising Strong. I like D&D but have struggled with most scifi, apart from more feminist sci fi like Ursula LeGuin.
I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the ability of EAs on average for processing these feelings. I’d love to make it a bigger part of EA—I think many people could hugely benefit from it. And also I believe that it makes your ability to do good so much greater—it has for me at least. Both in terms of having energy to take action, and
If you’re looking for recommendations for your own journey on this, I can really recommend reading ‘a field guide to climate anxiety’. It helped me a lot.
Learning from feminist anarchist funders about how to get the best out of cost effectiveness evaluations:
Create an environment of trust and collaboration, where the funder and charity are working together to find the best strategy. Align goals, and create a supportive rather than punitive environment, with space to fail and pivot.
I can really recommend watching the whole talk here. There are a lot more useful ideas from the Guerilla Foundation on this youtube series and on their website.
Would anyone be up for reading and responding to this article? I find myself agreeing with a lot of it.
”Effective altruism is a movement that excludes poor people”
This is a ten year old article, but it was discussed at the time—see e.g. here.
Rubenstein says that “As the low-hanging fruit of basic health programs and cash transfers are exhausted, saving lives and alleviating suffering will require more complicated political action, such as reforming global institutions.” Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and things have recently gotten even worse as of late with the USAID collapse and the UK cutting back on foreign aid.
In general, as the level of EA’s involvement and influence in a given domain increases, the more I start to be concerned about the sort of things that Rubenstein worries about here. When a particular approach is at a smaller size, it’s likely to concentrate on niches where its strengths shine and its limitations are less relevant. I would put the classic GiveWell-type interventions in that category, for instance. Compared to the scope of both the needs in global health & development and the actions of other actors, EA is still a fairly small fish.
Are we (the relatively wealthy) the moral equivalent of Nazis?
The Nazi party murdered c. 12 million people* in the Holocaust, and had 8 million members, making each member ‘individually responsible’ for c. 1.5 deaths.
If it costs 5000 USD to save a life, and someone has more than 7500 USD to spare, but spends that money on a car, are they the moral equivalent of a Nazi**?
Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?
My best way out of this has been to view strategy as more important than morality. Moral positions won’t do anything helpful here. Instead I grieve and use the clarity that grief brings to spread awareness; building a movement to deeply change things***.
Footnotes
* This is the best figure availble, even though the numbers are unclear: https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/holocaust-misconceptions/
** I’m not one to believe in individual responsibility in this way—the system that has lead to this level of inequality has been built up by many people over many centuries, each one with good intentions in some way or another. But the same applies to the creation of the Nazi party and the circumstances that led people to be part of it. Additionally, this is an ‘outcome based’ morality, rather than an ‘intention based’ morality. It’s down to you to decide whether this is a valid way of assessing morality.
*** Just because someone is the moral equivalent of a Nazi doesn’t mean that yelling at them (/yourself) that they’re a Nazi is necessarily the best way to change their (/your) behaviour. I’m open to all the options, as long as they change this stuff, and fast.
This is the kind of idea that has a superficial sheen of plausibility but begins to look plainly absurd when you take time to reflect on the deep reasons our moral views are the way they are.
Here are a few reasons this argument doesn’t make sense.
1. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison
The Nazis also didn’t donate money to help with global poverty, so to make this comparison you have to count the deaths they could have averted by donating but didn’t on top of the people they actively killed.
2. Even if we are focused just on outcomes, intent still matters
Intent is important to outcome.
If you give money to one of GiveWell’s top charities, like the Against Malaria Foundation, you are relying on the intent of the people who work there to produce a good outcome — more money leads to more people helped, such as more anti-malarial bednets deployed. If you somehow found out the people who work at a charity secretly have bad intent (like that they wanted to abscond with the money), you wouldn’t donate because your prediction of the outcome would change. Your view that the charity is good would change.
Part of what made the Nazis bad was not just what they did — although that, of course, was among the worst things anyone’s ever done, among the worst things imaginable — but also what they intended to do if they had won World War II and gained more power. The outcome would have been bad. One of the ways to assess someone’s moral character is to ask what the outcome would be if they had a lot more money, power, or influence.
3. Actively killing is morally worse than passively letting die
Moral agency, moral responsibility, and moral luck are complex and vexing topics. But I will still say that actively killing someone, deliberately and violently, is morally worse than failing to save someone’s life by spending money on personal consumption rather than donating to charity.
Even if you think of things in a pure, rigid consequentialist or utilitarian way, it makes sense to believe that directly, violently killing people is worse because of what I just said about the connection between intent and outcomes.
What kind of world would we live in if we elevated people prone to violently killing others to positions of wealth, power, and influence, rather than treating this as morally evil? The proclivity to actively kill people is strongly correlated with a failure to respond to global poverty humanely, and it’s also strongly correlated with everything else bad.
4. Altruistic self-sacrifice is part of moral assessment
A factor that seems important in assessing the morality of an action or the moral character of a person is altruistic self-sacrifice.
In thought experiments (what the philosopher Daniel Dennett would call “intuition pumps”) like Peter Singer’s parable of the drowning child,[1] the amount of sacrifice the person is required to make to save a life is typically stipulated to be minimal. In reality, the amount of personal sacrifice required to save a life is probably greater — more like 3,000 to 5,000 USD rather than the cost of ruined shoes or clothes in Singer’s hypothetical.
And these thought experiments don’t directly address the question (don’t directly pump our intuitions about) the morality of a person’s actions if they are faced with millions of drowning children and now face real trade-offs between living their own life normally and saving the children. In Singer’s parable, the dilemma is small because the sacrifice is small. Extrapolating from that parable to an argument or an intuition that larger sacrifices should also be required may or may not be justified, but we need to consider how you get from the drowning child parable to that conclusion.
But more importantly to the topic at hand, how much self-sacrifice a person should be willing to endure in order to altruistically help others and whether a person has sacrificed enough is a different topic entirely than what the Nazis did. The Nazis went out of their way to kill people.
This point, #4, builds on points #2 and #3. The willingness to engage in altruistic self-sacrifice matters even if we’re just focused on outcomes. Going out of your way to kill people seems much worse than failing to engage in “enough” altruistic self-sacrifice, and if someone insists on it, we can even justify that on consequentialist grounds.
Someone somewhere once came up with a clever variation of this parable where you are holding your phone and have to drop it on the ground, smashing it, to catch a child falling off a building.
Thanks for the thoughtful response @Yarrow ! Here are a few replies. Interested to hear your further thoughts.
Most members of the Nazi party were not actively killing people. They were politically supporting an organisation that did. Your argument seems to be comparing wealthy people to Nazi executioners instead.
Thanks for pointing out that not donating is dissimilar to murder. I agree, and maybe it’s better to say that it is the creation and enforcement of inequality that is morally equivalent to murder. This level of inequality is what makes donations so effective, and we could instead use this donation metric to estimate the marginal impact of improving/worsening inequality (i.e. making a very poor person £5000 poorer is equivalent to killing a person.[1]
Wealthy countries enforces various international structures that impoverish people in poor countries.[2] This ‘hidden violence’ continues down the chain, affecting people who are beaten and arrested if they steal food they need to survive. People in wealthy countries are supporting a state that creates these policies, and I would suggest that being a cooperating and supportive member of a country such as this is morally equivalent to being a supporter of the Nazi party. Both are in the gray area between ‘actively killing’ and ‘passively letting die’. The only difference being that Nazis use more direct violence, whereas now we use more hidden forms of violence (far away, threat-based).
I tend to agree with you overall, however, that one Nazi murder is morally worse than one wealth inequality starvation/disease/climate disaster murder. If it is, let’s say, 5 times worse, then that now means that anyone with £37,500 spare (via owning a smaller house, for example) would still be morally equivalent to a Nazi. Similar applies for 10 times, or 20 times etc. This would still put a lot of middle class people in this category.
I think I need a little more explanation on your fourth point. If anything, it seems like the self sacrifice of not being a Nazi (dissenting in a fascist country) is greater than living in a smaller house. Could you give a little more detail?
Let me know if there is anything more in your reply that you feel I haven’t properly addressed.
I appreciate that you are probably writing quickly in order to be brief, but I’d really like if you could consider whether an opening line like the following might be a little overweighted towards dismissal, rather than mutual learning:
For example, an alternative opening line could be ‘I believe there are some flaws in the logic of this argument, which I’ve described below. Do you agree with these?’
I noticed a flaw in my own logic here. I am assuming that accumulated wealth is coming only from the world’s poorest people, which is not true. The best method for calculating this might be to take a weighted average of this effect for all income groups below average wealth, weighted by the amount below global average wealth they have. My best estimate would be that the effect of average wealth accumulation would be 3 to 10 times lower than wealth accumulated from the world’s poorest people.
This is a long topic. I recommend reading The Divide by Jason Hickel for anyone interested
I guess my mistake was interpreting your quick take as a sincere question rather than a rhetorical question. I now realize you were asking a rhetorical question in order to make an argument and not actually asking for people to try to answer your question.
My initial interpretation — the reason why I replied — was that you were feeling a lot of guilt about your level of moral responsibility for or complicity in global poverty and the harm it does to people. I wanted to help alleviate your guilt, which I think when taken to such an extreme can be paralyzing and counterproductive. I’ve seen no evidence it actually helps anyone and lots of evidence of it doing harm.
I already tried to make several points in my previous comment. I’ll try to make one more.
You say there is “hidden violence” in the world economic system. Well, knowledge is a component of moral culpability. A famous line from the Watergate scandal was this question a U.S. Senator asked about Richard Nixon: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” The extent to which you know about something affects how morally culpable you are.
There is another layer of complexity beyond this. For example, there is the concept in law of willful ignorance. If you get involved in something that you know or have reasonable grounds to believe is criminal activity and choose not to know certain details in order to try to protect yourself from legal liability, this will probably not hold up as a legal defense and you will probably still be held criminally liable.
But I think it would be a stretch to try to apply the concept of “willful ignorance” to global poverty or the world economic system, since people’s ignorance of the “hidden violence” you describe — if it indeed exists — is genuine and not a ruse to try to avoid culpability.
The moral culpability of normal Germans in the 1930s and 1940s is a complex topic that requires knowing a lot about this time and place in history — which I do not. I think everyone would agree that, for example, a child forced to join the Hitler Youth has a lot less moral culpability than someone with a leadership position in the Nazi Party. So, there is some ambiguity in the term “Nazi” that you have to reckon with to discuss this topic.
But I don’t think it is ethical to drag this complex discussion about this period in history into a debate about effective altruism.
Nazi analogies should be used with a lot of sensitivity and care. By invoking Nazi crimes against humanity in order to try to make some rhetorical point about an unrelated topic, you risk diminishing the importance of these grim events and disrespecting the victims. There are hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors alive today. There are many Jewish families who lost relatives in the Holocaust. Many families are affected by the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust. It seems completely disrespectful to them to try to turn their suffering and loss into effective altruist rhetoric.
So, I have indulged the Nazi analogies enough. I will not entertain this any more.
If you want to make an argument that there are high moral demands on us to respond humanely to global poverty, many people — such as Peter Singer, as I mentioned in my previous comment — have argued this using vivid analogies that have captured people’s imaginations and has helped persuade many of them (including me) to try to do more to help the globally poor.
Thanks for the consideration, but you were actually correct the first time. This was a genuine question, and my view has adjusted based on both your comments, which I am grateful for. I haven’t agreed with everything that you have said, but that does not mean that I haven’t found it valuable. Thank you again for the time and thought.
What I was most hoping to get out of this post was answers to my two other questions: “Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?”. I pushed back a little on your ‘no’ to the first question, with the hope of answering these too.
I totally agree with this. For me it has been at times paralysing, but at times extremely motivating. My aim with the post was to see how I can deal with this grief, since I believe it to be justified. I have changed my lifestyle such that I no longer feel guilt (spending less, donating more, working on impactful things), but the despair remains. Maybe it would have been wiser for me to totally avoid it, but having these ideas is not something I regret. When I try to motivate others to action, I follow the evidence that you mention and am more likely to use ‘drowning child’ style reflections about positive interventions that can be made.
I’m Jewish, and highlighting the comparable moral atrocity has been useful for me. I know that won’t be the case for everyone, and it can definitely be a triggering topic.
This is a really good point, and definitely helps to diminish the size of the grief. I have vaguely thought along these lines before, but I like the way that you formulate it. I think there is still some gray area here: a lot of people I know do continue to work in jobs that they know are destructive. But I agree that it is not the case for most.
This sounds like this exchange has been unpleasant for you, and I am sorry to hear that. I hope some of the detail in this reply have softened some of this, but regardless I hope that you were able to enjoy some parts of it, and continue to make other valuable contributions on this forum. Take care.
In that case, I apologize. I don’t know you and I don’t know your background or intentions, and apparently I was wrong about both.
I think the experience you’re describing — of feeling a sense of guilt or grief or sadness or obligation that’s so big you don’t know how to handle it — is something that probably the majority of people who have participated in the effective altruist movement have felt at one time or another. I’ve seen many people describe feeling this way, both online and in real life.
When I was an organizer at my university’s effective altruist group, several of the friends I made through that group expressed these kinds of feelings. This stuff weighed on us heavily.
I haven’t read the book Strangers Drowning, but I’ve heard it described, and I know it’s about people who go to extreme lengths to answer the call of moral obligation. Maybe that book would interest you. I don’t know.
This topic goes beyond the domain of ethical theory into a territory that is different parts existential, spiritual, and psychotherapeutic. It can be dangerous not to handle this topic with care because it can get out of control. It can contribute to clinical depression and anxiety, it can motivate people to inflict pain on others, or people can become overzealous, overconfident, and adopt an unfair sense of superiority to other people.
I find it useful to draw on examples from fantasy and sci-fi to think about this sort of thing. In the Marvel universe, the Infinity Stones can only be wielded safely by god-like beings and normal humans or mortals die when they try to use them. The Stones even pose a danger to some superhuman beings, like Thanos and the Hulk. In Star Trek: Picard, there is an ancient message left by an unknown, advanced civilization. When people try to watch/listen to the message, it drives most of them to madness. There are other examples of this sort of thing — something so powerful that coming into contact with it, even coming near it, is incredibly dangerous.
To try to reckon with the suffering of the whole world is like that. Not impossible, not something to be avoided forever, but something dangerous to be approached with caution. People who approach it recklessly can destroy themselves, destroy others, or succumb to madness.
There is a connection between reckoning with the world’s suffering and one’s own personal suffering. In two different ways. First, how we think and feel about one influences how we think and feel about the other. Second, I think a lot of the wisdom about how people should reckon with their own suffering probably applies well to reckoning with the world’s suffering. With someone’s personal trauma or grief, we know (or at least people who go to therapy know) that it’s important for that person to find a safe container to express their thoughts and feelings about it. Talking about it just anywhere or to just anyone, without regard for whether that’s a safe container, is unsafe and unwise.
We know that — after the initial shock of a loss or a traumatic event — it isn’t healthy for a person to focus on their trauma or grief all the time, to the exclusion of other things. But trying to completely avoid forever it isn’t a good strategy either.
We know that the path is never simple, clean, or easy. Connection to other people who have been through or who are going through similar things is often helpful, as is the counsel of a helping professional like a therapist or social worker (or in some cases a spiritual or religious leader), but the help doesn’t come in the form of outlining a straightforward step-by-step process. What helps someone reckon with or make sense of their own emotional suffering is often personal to that individual and not generally applicable.
For example, in the beautiful — and unfairly maligned — memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a point in her life when she feels completely crushed, and when she’s seriously, clinically unwell. She describes how when nothing else feels enjoyable or interesting, she discovers desperately needed pleasure in learning Italian.
I don’t think in the lowest times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. I don’t think in the best or most mediocre times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. The specific thing that helps is usually not generalizable to everyone who’s suffering (which, ultimately, is everyone) and is usually not predictable in advance, including by the person who it ends up helping.
So, the question of how to face the world’s darkness or the world’s suffering, or how to recover from a breakdown when the world’s darkness or suffering seems too much, is an answerable question, but it’s not answerable in a universal, simple, or direct way. It’s about your relationship with the universe, which is something for you and the universe to figure out.
As I indicated above, I like to take things from fantasy and sci-fi to make sense of the world. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell laments that society lacks modern myths. He names Star Wars as the rare exception. (Return of the Jedi came out a few years before The Power of Myth was recorded.) Nowadays, there are lots of modern myths, if you count things like Star Trek, Marvel, X-Men, and Dungeons & Dragons.
I also rely a lot on spiritual and religious teachings. This episode of the RobCast with Rob Bell is relevant to this topic and a great episode. Another great episode, also relevant, is “Light Heavy Light”.
In the more psychotherapeutic realm, I love everything Brené Brown has done — her books, her TV show, her audio programs, her TED Talks. I’ve never heard her directly talk about global poverty, but she talks about so much that is relevant to the questions you asked in one way or another. In her book Rising Strong, she talks about her emotional difficulty facing (literally and figuratively) the people in her city who are homeless. Initially, she decided what she needed to do to resolve this emotional difficulty was to do more to help. She did, but she didn’t feel any differently. This led to a deeper exploration.
In her book Braving the Wilderness, she talks about how she processed collective tragedies like the Challenger disaster and the killings of the kids and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This is what you’re asking about — how to process grief over tragedies that are collective and shared by the world, not personal just to you.
Finally, a warning. In my opinion, a lot of people in effective altruism, including on the Effective Altruism Forum, have not found healthy ways of reckoning with the suffering of the world. There are a few who are so broken by the suffering of the world that they believe life was a mistake and we would be better off returning to non-existence. (In the Dungeons & Dragons lore, these people would be like the worshippers of Shar.) Many are swept up in another kind of madness: eschatological prophecies around artificial general intelligence. Many numb, detach, or intellectualize rather than feel. A lot of energy goes into fighting.
So, the wisdom you are seeking you will probably not find here. You will find good debates on charity effectiveness. Maybe some okay discussions of ethical theory. Not wisdom on how to deal with the human condition.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate your apology and adjustment of tone. I hope that this can inform future dialogues in a way that is helpful for you and for the movement.
I’m not sure whether strangers drowning has the answers I’m hoping for. I listened to a podcast about it, and mostly it sounds like the people who face the world in that way end up extremely unhappy.
Your advice about a container is very wise. It’s a useful technique I discovered through therapy and I’m glad that more people know about it, and to have that faith in the idea validated.
I agree with you that the answer to this question will likely be very individual. Sometimes to the extent where it can be quite lonely.
Thanks for the RobCast recommendation. I’ll listen to it. Likewise for Rising Strong. I like D&D but have struggled with most scifi, apart from more feminist sci fi like Ursula LeGuin.
I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the ability of EAs on average for processing these feelings. I’d love to make it a bigger part of EA—I think many people could hugely benefit from it. And also I believe that it makes your ability to do good so much greater—it has for me at least. Both in terms of having energy to take action, and
If you’re looking for recommendations for your own journey on this, I can really recommend reading ‘a field guide to climate anxiety’. It helped me a lot.