Scott Alexander & Mountainhead's Moses

Scott Alexander tweets-  

People had lots of questions about my drowning child tweet yesterday - e.g. do I believe in infinite moral obligation?

 Nothing wrong in doing so. In some respects our moral capacities are infinite and hence capable of discharging infinite moral obligations- e.g. holding ultracrepidarian assholes in infinite contempt. Sadly our economic resources aren't infinite. Thus there is no moral obligation which involves an infinite economic liability. 

Rather than try to answer piecemeal, I'll just give my whole theory of morality and charity here so you can criticize it or let me know if it has unexpected horrible implications. I think it's virtuous to help others, including strangers, foreigners, and whichever animals are conscious.

Nothing wrong with that. Still, it may be more virtuous to first help those one is obligated to help and then, if you have left over resources, to then try to help strangers and dolphins and so forth. The problem here is that obligations are open ended. There is no supremum or upper bound. True, there is a 'reasonable man' test. One may say, if you have done as much as a reasonable man would consider sufficient, then the obligation has been fulfilled. But doing just enough to fulfil an obligation is not the same thing as being virtuous.  

I don't think you have an obligation to do this.

But, if you have any obligations at all, then being virtuous means lexically preferencing those you are obligated to before you can start being charitable to strangers. Consider the parable of the Vineyard workers. Under Jewish law, the owner of the vineyard did wrong by paying the 'marginal' workers hired towards the end of the day more, pro rata, than those who had started work earlier in the day. Why did Lord Jesus make such a stupid mistake? The answer is that he was saying the World to Come is completely unlike this World. The fact is a Vineyard owner who pays latecomers more, pro rata, will find, the very next year, that he can't get anyone to work for him till the day is almost done. 

I think the word "obligation" should be reserved for explicit or implicit promises.

This is a justiciable matter. Courts are welcome to 'read in' promises which were neither. The purpose is to make an incomplete contract useful as a coordinating mechanism.  

You're obligated to pay back debt, because you explicitly promised to do so.

You may be, you may not be. This is a justiciable matter.  

You're obligated to take care of your kids, because you accepted an implicit promise to do so by giving birth to them.

Scott gives birth to children even though he has a penis. He is indeed a versatile fellow. Still, even if he is incessantly giving birth to butt babies, he may have no obligation to them whatsoever. This is a justiciable matter. 

You're obligated to follow the law, because of the implicit social contract.

You may be. You may not be. Social Contracts are incomplete. For any given law there may be an obligation to punish those who follow it because it is halachah vein morin kein. Trust me on this. I'm a Rabbi when I'm not too busy being Pope.  

This is a really weak sense of obligation! It's not even clear you're "obligated" in this sense to save the literal drowning child in front of you!

There may be a 'Good Samaritan' law in this respect. In any case, 'obligation' is 'Hohfeldian' and thus justiciable. Even if it is not a crime to let a child drown, you may be liable under an action in tort. Either way, there is a 'reputational' cost. Also, the mother of the child may beat the shit out of you.  

I endorse this view - who obligated you to help them? When did you promise it?

Promises aren't binding save for consideration- though this may be 'reputational' or in furtherance of some other aim beneficial to you.  

So I think in most things we should strive towards some level higher than simple obligation.

Only if we have indeed fulfilled all our obligations.  

Let's call this "virtue".

Why? It is no such thing. I am constantly striving to move our galaxy to a nicer part of the Universe. I have no virtue to speak off.  

As a parent, you're obligated to feed and clothe your kid and not abuse them.

Unless you surrendered parental rights or have no knowledge of the child in question. Back in the Sixties, though married to Mary Poppins, I had sex with many of the great stars of stage and screen ALL OF WHOM HAD VAGINAS and none of whom were Rock Hudson. Virendra Fernandes is lying when he suggests otherwise. My point is I probably am the father of many people whom I had no obligation to feed or clothe.  

But to be a virtuous parent, you need to do more - love them, get to know them as a person, go to their soccer games, etc.

No. A virtuous parent is virtuous. Tony Soprano may love his kids and cheer them on as they knife or bludgeon Soccer players belonging to the rival team. But Tony is not virtuous.  

For me the difference between obligation and virtue is that if you fail an obligation,

you may still be virtuous.  

you should be punished by either legal consequences or social opprobrium.

Nonsense! A guy who can't take care of his kids because he was hit by a bus and is in a coma won't be punished. Yes, he failed in his obligations and this may be a reason to terminate his parental rights and permit someone else to adopt his kids. But the man himself may still be known to have been highly virtuous.  

If you fail at being virtuous,

you are like everybody else. Your friends will sympathize with you and recount various shameful episodes from their own past. When you fail at a thing, good people tell you they too failed at some time or another. This gives you a sense of hope. 

Scott thinks differently-  

then . . . I don't know, maybe your close friends should take you aside in private and remind you that you can do better, and if you

stab them? 

tell them to shut up, they should drop the issue until they think you're ready to hear it.

Not if you did a good job with the stabbing.  

The bar for virtue isn't infinitely high.

It may be. In some, non-economic, respects we have infinite capabilities- e.g. my ability to hate all sentient beings in an infinite multi-verse.  

You can be a good parent by supporting your kid and going to soccer games, but you don't have to sell your beloved gold watch which is the only memory of your dead grandfather just so you can buy your kid a slightly shinier soccer ball.

Scott is clearly the Jewish David Beckham.  

Where should the bar be set?

The proper question is where is the bar? When is Happy Hour?  

I don't think The Moral Law (TM) has any specific answer,

Sure it does. Don't talk ultracrepidarian shite unless that is what you are paid to do.  

but for purely practical reasons I would set it at a place that's just slightly above where you would land otherwise - high enough that you have to work for it, but not so high that it's obviously out of reach and you'll never get there and you should just give up.

Sadly, if you are doing stupid shit, it does not make sense to set the bar at doing stupider shit.  

I think it's virtuous in this sense to try to help others.

I try to help others by phoning them up in the middle of the night and shouting 'stop being such a cunt, you fucking cunt!' This is why everybody considers me a highly virtuous man.  

What's the bar? I think a natural one is "give between 1% and 10% of your income to a really well-thought-out charity,

Charities may start out well but they soon get captured by antagonomic nutters. Look at USAID or the Ford Foundation. Still, there is nothing wrong in making money transfers to people poorer than you or those who need money for an expensive operation or something of that sort. But those addicted to vice can do so just as well as the 'unco guid'.  

or something else approximately equally effortful" - but I'm not attached to that. I would actually be okay with ANY careful thought process that ends in a specific nonzero commitment that you're willing to defend, even if that commitment is 0.1%, or an hour a month in a soup kitchen, or whatever. (but be careful - when you die and go to Heaven, the exact number you pledged will appear on your forehead in gold ink forever)

No it won't. Don't be silly.  

This obviously doesn't require you to sacrifice your family, or to work yourself ragged, or to give up all hope of a happy life.

Sadly, under some circumstances, that is precisely what virtue demands.  

It's about the same percent of income as the average smoker spends on cigarettes.

So, giving money to charity is like smoking. Both contribute to a public nuisance.  

Why am I satisfied with so low a bar, when an even higher bar could save even more people?

It won't. What saves people is higher productivity & more 'risk pooling' (i.e. insurance)  not cold charity.  

A couple of reasons (sorry, I keep trying to write this part in a way that doesn't sound like a lecture, and failing, so here's the lecture): First, 1 - 10%, spent effectively, is enough to save the world.

Nonsense! Saving the world involves being able to get off it and gain resources from other planets or Solar systems.  

Total American household income is $20 trillion, so if every American donated 1%, that's $200 billion/year. That's about twice as much as PEPFAR

which was misconceived and suffered mission creep- e.g. shifting from AIDS to abortion and LGBTQ nuttiness.  

+ all other foreign aid

Thankfully, USAID is gone.  

+ all Gates Foundation donations

which, on balance, did more harm than good. Still, it wasn't as shit as Soros's Open Society.  

+ all other billionaire philanthropy

see above 

+ all effective altruist donations combined.

all of which was shit.  

If everyone donated 10%, it would be 20x as much as all of those things combined.

Also if everybody cut off their dick, there would be no more rape save of the Lesbian sort.  

I can't say with certainty that there would be no problems left in the world at this rate - but I think we would have cleared a floor of getting rid of the ones that money can quickly solve.

But, where there is a pile of cash, there is an incentive for nutters to get control of it and spend it in mischievous ways. 

Granted that in reality not everyone will give this amount, I still think it's a useful thought experiment in where to set the bar so that you're doing "your share".

We do our share when we tell Scott he has shit for brains.  

Second, the overwhelming majority of your impact comes not from how much you donate, but from how thoughtfully you spend it. Toby Ord thinks that the best charities do 10,000x more good than the worst;

But, on balance, they may still impose higher Social Costs than they provide Benefits. Raising productivity is good in itself. Charity may prevent this happening.  

if you picked two random charities, on average one would be 100x more effective than the other.

On average, both will be shit.  

If someone donated 100% of their income to an average charity, nobody could claim they weren't doing enough. But by donating 1% of your income to a great charity, you do more good than that person.

No. What matters is the 'opportunity cost'. A guy who spends his money on kidnapping, raping and killing kids, should donate 100 percent of his income and wealth to a charity which simply burns up the money.  

You can 80-20 this by donating to whoever's at the top of GiveWell's Top Charities leaderboard this year.

e.g. 'Against Malaria Foundation? GiveWell estimated in 2023 that AMF's bed net program costs on average US$5,500 per life saved. Yet a chemically treated bed net costs just 5 dollars to produce and distribute. India's anti-Malaria program is much much cheaper and is better integrated into grass roots public health provision. 

Or if you have more time you can double-check their work and form your own opinions.

Is the thing tax deductible? That's what you check.  

Third, I'm emphasizing the "sit down, think about it, and make a commitment, however small" aspect, because I think most people already want to be moral, they're just kind of haphazard and thoughtless about it.

Most people want a bigger dick or, in the case of my wife, access to one. What they find immoral is funding the killing of fetuses with their tax dollars.  

If an angel presented you with two paths, one of which you spent 100% of your resources on yourself forever, and the other you spend 99% of resources on your self but spent the occasional dollar or hour-of-volunteer-time doing good, and you could just choose one and the angel would make sure that circumstances conspired to make it happen, I think almost everyone would choose the second.

If such an angel existed, the Muth rational solution would be to choose the first option. that way the angel would have to ensure everybody was sufficiently productive, or had sufficient insurance, not to have to rely on 'volunteers' or 'the occasional donor'.  

They might even try to get the angel to upsell them - "Only 1%? Do you have anything better on offer?" If people fail to give 1% to charity - and most people do - I think it's out of a failure to achieve their own preferences, the same as a scatterbrained person who doesn't file their taxes on time and gets hit with a pointless penalty.

Just as the reason most men aren't chopping off their own dick- even though dicks are RAPING the Environment- is because they are a bit scatter-brained.  

When I tweet, I pick on the rare people who insist openly that they really don't care about foreigners,

if you truly cared about foreigners you would send your children to suck them off.  Also, you should top yourself. Many foreigners don't like us and would be happier if we were dead. 

but I think even they are mostly missing some kind of self-knowledge -

Scott is chock full of self-knowledge. I suppose he spent a lot of his nerdish youth knowing himself in the Biblical sense. I certainly did.  

maybe trying to repress their caring in order to avoid what they fear would be infinite obligation and personal/social misery.

not to mention having to chop their dick off to appease the Feminists  

If they could prove that they had some sort of crystalline logical omniscience and utterly in the most profound sense didn't care, I would shrug, tell them they were weird, and leave them alone.

You'd have to be very weird indeed if you didn't want Scott to leave you alone.  

Fourth, the bar should be wherever it's most useful.

i.e.- up Scott's arse 

Reality has no bar; you can just keep doing more forever. If you devote 99% of your time/energy/money to parenting, you can always ask yourself whether you're failing your kid by not giving 100%. If it's 100%, why not skip sleep and use the time gained to prepare extra-special advanced lesson plans for your home schooling pod?

Why not chop off your own head so that your kids can play Soccer with it?  

But obviously this will drive you crazy and won't be good for you OR your kid. So in practice, we set a bar as a sort of social technology to encourage low-performers to do better and remind high-performers not to kill themselves.

We do no such thing. Still, if there is enough tax revenue, the State may be able to pay to take kids away from bad parents and ensure they are raised to become muggers and prostitutes in properly run Municipal facilities.  

As I said before, the best place for the bar is somewhere where it will serve as inspiration (because it's attainable with more effort) rather than discouragement (because then you know you'll never reach it so why bother). I think 1-10% is a good place to put this.

Whereas I think the bar should be carefully but very thoroughly inserted up Scott's bum. 

Isn't it still true that there are people suffering horribly, and if you do one unit more work than the bar, you can always save an extra person?

No. There are diminishing, and sometimes negative, returns to work effort. Moreover most work is not of a life-saving nature.  

Yes. Effective altruists didn't make this true, and dunking on us on Twitter won't make it stop being true.

Because if Scott says it is true, it is true- for him.  

It's a brute fact about the world.

Spend an extra hour working at McDonalds and you will save a person's life. That's what Scott thinks is a 'brute fact' about the world.  

I don't think any moral system can handle it, and ours is no exception. But I think we do a better job than most of staring at the abyss, acknowledging that it's very scary and abyssal, and then trying to do good work regardless.

For Utilitarianism, doing good is substantive, or first order, and involves global opportunity cost. The theory of comparative advantage applies. Don't do good if someone else who is doing it has a lower opportunity cost ratio in that respect. 

I'm not a Christian, but one thing I admire about Christianity is that it admits we'll all fall impossibly short of moral perfection no matter what we do, then tells us to shut up and get to work being decent people anyway.

That's not Christianity. It is gaslighting. I frequently tell members of my sex-cult that they will never be able to give me the perfect beejay, but they should shut up and just keep trying anyway. 

It even grants us permission to be happy while we're working at it (except for Calvinism, I guess)***.

Scott needs permission to be happy. Sadly, I refuse to recruit him to my sex-cult.  

I think effective altruism does better than most other philosophies (possibly excepting some of the really good sects of Judeo-Christianity, which are also excellent at this!) at getting charitable work out of people,

Fuck off! Religion says you get a big mansion in Heaven for ever and ever. Effective altruism merely demonstrates its ignorance of economics in between running a Ponzi scheme.  

while equalling them on how happy and meaningful its adherents' lives are. If you don't have a better alternative, then I think criticizing us for not solving the unsolveable abyss at the heart of everything is unproductive.

What is productive is saying you are stupid unless you are actually con-artists in which case you are cunning but evil.  

The opposite question from the other direction would be - if you don't have an obligation to do charity, why should you do it at all? I think the answer here is the same as "if you don't have an obligation to go to your kids' soccer game, why do it at all?"

Obligations arise only if there is a benefit to the holder of a Hohfeldian right or entitlement. There are some relationships where you benefit when you see the other person receive a benefit.  

Ideally you do it out of love. If you don't feel love, you do it out of some sense that it's part of being a dignified well-rounded human and you endorse it in some kind of aesthetic sense even if you don't feel the emotions at this exact second.

No. You don't love the kid but like seeing him happy. If going to his game makes him happy, you feel happy. This is plain Utilitarianism.  

If you can't find any sort of generalized compassion instinct anywhere, and you don't share the intuition that it's more rational/dignified/human to be altruistic than not, then (as long as you at least have normal human feelings towards your family members) I suggest trying to have kids. I'm not a very emotional person myself, but having kids gave me a really strong sense of what it is to love someone really really hard. Then I think about the fact that a bunch of kids are dying of preventable diseases in India or wherever, that they have parents just like me, and that those parents would feel just as devastated if their kids died as I would feel if mine did. I don't like thinking about this too much because it's a good way to send yourself into a horror-depression spiral, but being able to think like this when needed helps restrain my natural tendency to end up as one of those guys tweeting stuff like "why save African children when they barely contribute anything to GDP?".

Tweet back with facts and figures showing why we benefit by preventing the spread of infectious diseases. If some humans have high pathogen load, then viruses which could fucking kill us get a space where they can burgeon and mutate. Well fed people with good sanitary arrangements are likely to have lower pathogen load. This reduces our own risk of sudden disease and death. 

There is nothing wrong with feeling empathy for starving kids somewhere far away. Sadly, this could also justify costly 'regime change' type interventions. There's nothing wrong with being stupid and ignorant. In some respects we all are imbeciles. But there is no reason to inflict our ultracrepidarian stupidity and ignorance on others. Scott is doing so because he thinks he is terribly smart and virtuous. But he isn't really. Still, at least he isn't a 'Mountainhead' type billionaire. We must be thankful for small mercies.