“The problem with these comparisons is that they’re totally made up.”
I don’t think this is true. I think Toby has been giving >50% of his funds and works on FHI full-time. I’ve used my savings to implement a career change that I wouldn’t pursue for selfish reasons. So I do think we’re bottlenecked substantially by our available resources at this point, making the comparison legitimate.
I think that it’s good to be a bit softer on people who are partially altruistic though. Dewey has said that effective altruism is what he calls the part of his life where he takes the demandingness of ethics seriously. Jeff Kaufman has written about making a budget for spending on others so one does not go insane about self/other tradeoffs during every visit to the supermarket. Utilitarianism gets roundly criticised for its vulnerability to this objection of ‘demandingness’ and some people find it quite psychologically challenging to (Jess’ recent post here). So I lean toward including people who give only a smaller fraction of themselves to others.
I guess this might be the underlying disagreement. You see this as harmful because it will discourage a beneficial act (even though I don’t think it’s that beneficial, I admit that this is the part that gives me the most pause), whereas on balance, I think the main issue at stake here is our inclusiveness.
There’s a further question of how seriously to take these opportunity cost arguments in general, which I think will be picked up in Katja’s thread on vegetarianism.
“The problem with these comparisons is that they’re totally made up.” I don’t think this is true. I think Toby has been giving >50% of his funds and works on FHI full-time. I’ve used my savings to implement a career change that I wouldn’t pursue for selfish reasons. So I do think we’re bottlenecked substantially by our available resources at this point, making the comparison legitimate.
I think that it’s good to be a bit softer on people who are partially altruistic though. Dewey has said that effective altruism is what he calls the part of his life where he takes the demandingness of ethics seriously. Jeff Kaufman has written about making a budget for spending on others so one does not go insane about self/other tradeoffs during every visit to the supermarket. Utilitarianism gets roundly criticised for its vulnerability to this objection of ‘demandingness’ and some people find it quite psychologically challenging to (Jess’ recent post here). So I lean toward including people who give only a smaller fraction of themselves to others.
I guess this might be the underlying disagreement. You see this as harmful because it will discourage a beneficial act (even though I don’t think it’s that beneficial, I admit that this is the part that gives me the most pause), whereas on balance, I think the main issue at stake here is our inclusiveness.
There’s a further question of how seriously to take these opportunity cost arguments in general, which I think will be picked up in Katja’s thread on vegetarianism.