Inequality has reached obscene limits in our time, considering the technological advances. A social system that allows such immorality cannot be stable. Moreover, history shows that labor productivity and technological progress can occur under all kinds of social conditions. And greed is not necessarily related to increased productivity.
idea21
Karma: 8
Altruism and Minority Influence
Leo Tolstoy’s Philosophy: Altruism and Non-Violence
Altruistic Economy and Altruistic Behavior
Failure of political, educational and technological social changes
Moral dilemmas should never be an obstacle to making moral decisions. Morality, above all, is a way of life, that is, it is “practice of virtue.” Considering a moral dilemma must be done in the context of a moral attitude within a cultural conception. Errors or exceptions constantly appear in moral dilemmas. Should I save the lives of a million chickens even at the cost of the life of a human being? In my opinion, your action of saving a million chickens at the cost of a human life would not be considered virtuous in the culture in which you find yourself. And you would not be a virtuous person if the attitude of the majority were indifferent to you to that extent.
All moral progress implies nonconformity, an overcoming of the resistance of the majority, but this virtuous action must imply a lifestyle in accordance with virtue itself in understandable terms.
For example, conscientious objection to military service may be considered a betrayal of a politically respectable ideal (as in Ukraine now invaded by Russia) and an immoral act for most people… but if the conscientious objector expresses his commitment to pacifism, altruism and benevolence in a convincing way, he will still be within the realm of comprehensible virtue and may lead to moral progress. And that does not imply that a moral dilemma has been resolved.
Impressive work, but it is not difficult to convince people of the risks of capitalism when it comes to facing longtermism challenges. We have the “social market economy”, in which there are supposedly democratic controls on capitalism.
But from an imaginative perspective, an alternative to capitalism based on a purely altruistic economy is not inconceivable. An altruistic economy should not be confused with a socialist economy (legislation for the common good), but rather should be related to individualistic cultural conceptions such as the ethics of caring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_care
Since EA is an organization that promotes prosocial activity outside of politics, it is worth asking whether it would not be more valuable to consider the non-political factors that enable social change. Note that there is a flaw in the Darwinian (and Machiavellian) interpretation of human relations because it presupposes that power relations are not affected by internalized cultural changes over time. How can Marx or Machiavelli explain that the oppressing classes that crushed Spartacus gave in to British workers unions in the Victorian era?
In fact, Darwin might have been able to explain it with his vision of “group selection.”
Let’s look beyond politics.
Whether EA is considered an autonomous social movement or part of a more complex social change movement, it cannot be considered “conservative” as long as it is based on a rational analysis of human relations that it considers perfectible in the future in the sense of extreme prosociality. Without traditions and without prejudices, conservatism is not possible.
However, every movement for social change appeals to the logical judgment of individuals and it may be quite obvious that a non-political social change would not be part of the threats that are usually perceived by many conservatives.
In a civilizational sense, the best interpretation of a movement like EA is as part of a cultural evolution—moral evolution—that promotes empathy, benevolence and control of aggression. This will not be seen as a threat by all conservatives.
It is possible to draw a parallel with the monastic phenomenon in the Middle Ages. Nobles and kings promoted communities of unconventional lifestyle where charity, poverty and control of aggression—or “sin”—were practiced. Nothing could be further from the lifestyle of conservative elites. Promoting virtue was considered to pacify the social order.
This is a question of cultural evolution. Infanticide was acceptable in Old Rome—but not tolerable to early Christians. It would be difficult to explain the cultural understanding of the right to life in each specific case. In my opinion, those of us interested in moral progress should put first the mutual perception of empathy and benevolence as the basis of human relations of extreme trust.
I understand “democratic culture” as a conventionalism referring to the consideration of rights and freedoms in Western societies (say, the European Union). The right to abortion as part of “Human Rights” is controversial in other contexts.
Defining inequality as violence or aggression is effectively a stance in favor of violence, because it makes it impossible to discuss alternatives.
The answer to violence does not have to be violent. On the contrary, an understanding of the phenomenon of violence (including the phenomenon of economic inequality as systemically exploitative) must lead us to establish non-violent cultural alternatives. This implies that those who are singled out as exploiters are not so from the point of view of distributive justice, but as defenders of a different cultural model that assumes a certain degree of aggression as inevitable. It is not about class struggle or about legislating economic equality, but about promoting altruistic cultural development in the sense of developing empathy, benevolence and mutual care also on an economic way.
On the other hand, those who defend equality in the sense of a rational allocation of resources according to the needs of individuals will have to demonstrate that their cultural model is also capable of generating economic efficiency. Something that the supporters of class struggle have demonstrably failed to do.
In a world without evil, without aggression (prosocial) there will be no avoidable deaths from malaria, there will be no abortions, and the diet will be vegan.
Of all the courses of action that an individual committed to a prosocial culture can follow TODAY, which one offers us the greatest guarantee of helping to build a better world?Those who oppose abortion come into conflict with the personal freedom of women in the context of today’s democratic culture.
We have ample evidence from the course of history that some or many animal rights advocates are not always prosocial when it comes to human suffering.
All the avoidable suffering of our fellow human beings has an unequivocal character in terms of the emotions of empathy, compassion, and affection that are the psychological basis of the non-aggressive, benevolent, and rationally introspective ethos of a possible prosocial culture that can already begin to be built today as an active minority.
The latter—along the lines of “virtue ethics”? - seems to me to be a more effective altruism.
It certainly doesn’t seem like a trivial debate to me. Thanks for the previous statements.
Food-insecure places should get food yes, but help their agriculture as well, give them mechanization and the know-how, help them out with money. A tractor costs the same everywhere, but a farmer earning 10-15k$ per year will never afford a 20-30k$ tractor, therefore he will be stuck doing manual labor on a small field with small inputs and very underperforming outputs.
You are wrong
Neither deontology nor utilitarianism: virtue ethics. It is the only one that considers human behavior in its sense of cultural evolution. Kant’s deontology did not allow him to take a rational and impartial position on ethical issues such as women’s rights, extreme social inequality or slavery, in which he was dependent on the prejudices of his time. And consequentialism-utilitarianism is not consequentialist enough if it ignores that all human action depends on internalized patterns of moral behavior: lifestyle, ethos.
If we want to develop the greatest good for the greatest number, the most convenient thing is to develop the most benevolent, empathetic and rational human behavior possible as a lifestyle and foundation of a prosocial culture.
Hunger, malnutrition… it is just a question of food. What a shame!
Possible importance of Effective Altruism in the civilizing process
In my view, nothing is stance-independently valuable. Things are only valuable because they are valued.
It is difficult to understand why awareness of moral evaluation changes with cultural changes and, above all, why we can also voluntarily educate ourselves to value things. This happens in the processes of moral conversion.
Altruism does not have so much to do with the phenomenon of economic inequality but with an evolution of moral sensitivity through the use of new symbolic cognitive instruments throughout the civilizational process. It is not inequality that becomes morally intolerable, but empathic sensitization that makes the suffering of others emotionally intolerable. Economic inequality has often been called “systemic violence” and that is the dimension in which altruism has to be addressed: as an element of development of the control of aggression, which is in reality the authentic human problem par excellence.
Thank you for your comment. I start from the idea that the most effective altruism is not based so much on mutual support—in the material sense—as on participation within a culture of altruistic values where support is above all of an emotional, affective nature. We would then be more in the field of “virtue ethics” than of a utilitarian type. Economic acts would be a necessary material consequence of an emotional state. Here I am with Hume: reason is the slave of the passions (but we can rationally shape our own passions: that is psychology).
The most intelligent altruistic action would be to help build that emotional state that would compose an altruistic ethos. That was what the so-called “compassionate religions” did before, but today we have more cognitive instruments… apart from those they already had. Jonathan Haidt comments that the ancients did not know much about science but were good psychologists, and he himself names an “emotion of elevation” as a motivator of behavior.
On the other hand, in books such as Larissa MacFarquhart’s “Strangers Drowning” we find contemporary evidence of sufficiently motivated altruistic actors. What is missing is an ideology of behavioural improvement.