Re:Can “effective altruism” maximise the bang for each chari...
by ajkjk on Friday June 01, 2018 @02:40PM
(#17208617)
It's useless according to your metric of usefulness, not according to someone else's.
I think it is 100% a valid moral stance to care about your community or your nation, and not feel any moral obligation to help people outside of that. The world is too big and chaotic for every human to feel the same degree of moral obligation for every other human.
Moreover, maybe Make-A-Wish's main positive outcome is not that one kid gets a wish, but that everyone gets to 'live in a society where Make-A-Wish exists', thus kindling optimism and community and reminding us that the world is still kind in big ways. It is not hard to see that the net result on one's society of Make-a-Wish could, for some systems of evaluating morality of actions, be far higher than well-intentioned throwing money at some faraway place where you would never see any result, either if you care much more about local effects, or if you think signaling effects can be comparable in magnitude to actual 'good'.
Anyway, the crux of it is that your way of accounting for the morality of actions is actually pretty particular and you're demanding everyone else follow it and then shaming them if they don't. Not your morality, your system of accounting, which is far less 'obviously' right.
I think it is 100% a valid moral stance to care about your community or your nation, and not feel any moral obligation to help people outside of that. The world is too big and chaotic for every human to feel the same degree of moral obligation for every other human.
Moreover, maybe Make-A-Wish's main positive outcome is not that one kid gets a wish, but that everyone gets to 'live in a society where Make-A-Wish exists', thus kindling optimism and community and reminding us that the world is still kind in big ways. It is not hard to see that the net result on one's society of Make-a-Wish could, for some systems of evaluating morality of actions, be far higher than well-intentioned throwing money at some faraway place where you would never see any result, either if you care much more about local effects, or if you think signaling effects can be comparable in magnitude to actual 'good'.
Anyway, the crux of it is that your way of accounting for the morality of actions is actually pretty particular and you're demanding everyone else follow it and then shaming them if they don't. Not your morality, your system of accounting, which is far less 'obviously' right.