It’s a good project because, you know, doing good is important and we should want to do good better rather than worse. It’s utterly absurd because everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well, and acting as though you and your friends alone are the first to hit upon the idea of trying to do it is the kind of galactic hubris that only subcultures that have metastasized on the internet can really achieve.
This seems wrong to me. Just this week, I went on a date with someone who told me the only reason she volunteers is that it makes her feel good about herself, and she doesn’t particularly care much about the impact. And you know what, props to her for admitting something that I expect a lot of other people do as well. I don’t think there’s something wrong with it, I’m just saying that “everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well” seems wrong to me.
When I was more active in Quaker circles, I’d hear versions of a quote attributed to Mother Teresa: “we are not called to be successful, but to be faithful.” There was a lot of attention to trying to do good, but the focus was on following where you were being spiritually led, and being in relationship with those you were helping, not effectiveness. Like if you felt a spiritual leading to help people in some ineffective way, people would have thought that was fine.
deBoer overstated it, but his point is that trying to be effective when being altruistic is in no way an original idea:
Every single moral philosophy and religion in the history of the world has had a goal of doing good well. You cannot find a text that attempts to define the good that does not also explain the difference between doing the good well and doing it poorly. Buddhism has whole lines of inquiry devoted to the idea of people who follow Buddha’s teachings to the letter and still arrive at the wrong conclusions entirely. If you’re a Christian, you could argue that the New Testament is mostly a matter of God sending his son to Earth to explain to human beings how they were failing to live up to the rules in the Old Testament. “Do good well” is not a new idea and certainly not an interesting one, and I’m perpetually put out by how many EA enthusiasts seem to think that they’re playing a powerful Pokemon when they whip that definition out.
Where I think he goes wrong is that EA is often defined or interpreted in a maximalist way in terms of doing good well—it’s not about doing some good effectively, it’s about doing the most good from an impartial bent. And this idea is indeed rarer than just doing good well, albeit far from novel.
This seems wrong to me. Just this week, I went on a date with someone who told me the only reason she volunteers is that it makes her feel good about herself, and she doesn’t particularly care much about the impact. And you know what, props to her for admitting something that I expect a lot of other people do as well. I don’t think there’s something wrong with it, I’m just saying that “everyone who has ever wanted to do good has wanted to do good well” seems wrong to me.
When I was more active in Quaker circles, I’d hear versions of a quote attributed to Mother Teresa: “we are not called to be successful, but to be faithful.” There was a lot of attention to trying to do good, but the focus was on following where you were being spiritually led, and being in relationship with those you were helping, not effectiveness. Like if you felt a spiritual leading to help people in some ineffective way, people would have thought that was fine.
deBoer overstated it, but his point is that trying to be effective when being altruistic is in no way an original idea:
Where I think he goes wrong is that EA is often defined or interpreted in a maximalist way in terms of doing good well—it’s not about doing some good effectively, it’s about doing the most good from an impartial bent. And this idea is indeed rarer than just doing good well, albeit far from novel.