Thread 214522695

If I could convince my readers to do just one thing, it would be taking the Giving What We Can pledge. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge It’s a pledge to give away 10% of your earnings to effective charities, though you can give less if you want. You can also wait to give until you have a more significant income even if you sign the pledge. If you take the pledge and earn the income of the average American, you can save about a hundred lives over the course of your lifetime, and you can improve the conditions for hundreds of thousands of animals. And, of course, if you give to the shrimp, you can plausibly benefit hundreds of millions of them! https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think

I’ve taken the pledge https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-just-took-the-giving-what-we?utm_source=publication-search and think there are very strong moral reasons to do so. Money donated to effective charities does staggeringly large amounts of good! You personally can do as much good for the world as Ted Bundy did evil. You can save many people’s lives. I want to stress—this is a thing you can do right now, or later today, or tomorrow, and if you do it, many fewer people will die horribly. You can be the reason why hundreds of parents don’t have to bury a child, and hundreds of children get to live to an old age, when they otherwise wouldn’t have made it to their fifth birthday.

I think a lot of the reason people don’t take the pledge is that they just don’t want to give away a sizeable portion of their wealth. But some people have principled objections to taking the pledge. Most of the objections are easily addressed, so I thought I’d explain why I don’t think there are any good in-principle objections to giving away a bunch of money to effective charities.

>>214522695 (OP)
A first worry people have is that requiring them to take the pledge is too demanding. Just as you can’t be expected to give your life for a stranger, can you really be expected to give away 10% of your earnings purely for altruistic reasons? Can morality demand so much?

I think it can. First of all, I don’t actually think taking the pledge will make you less happy. Those who are more charitable tend to be happier, https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/rationales-for-giving/psychological/ even controlling for other things. Knowing that your life is meaningful, that you are making a difference to the lives of countless others, that you better the world with every dollar you earn, makes your life happier. Those who spend their dollars saving other people’s lives are more fulfilled than those who spend their dollars on watches, cars, and fancy vacations.

But also, I think morality does sometimes require you to make sacrifices for the sake of others. Other people matter! If you can spare them from a horrible and lethal fate for just a few thousand dollars, this seems like a good thing to do. The median American is vastly richer than almost anyone who ever lived—and almost at the top 1% of global wealth. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=70000&countryCode=USA&numAdults=1&numChildren=0 We currently live like kings in the Middle Ages. [YouTube] good time to be alive? (embed) Demanding that we abstain from luxuries of the sort that most of history couldn’t dream of to prevent many children from dying and many animals from being tortured doesn’t seem like a big ask.

Most importantly, you can think that taking the pledge is a good idea even if it’s not a moral requirement. Calling your mother is a nice thing to do. It’s not a moral obligation, but you should still do it if you haven’t recently. Even if you’re not obligated to give away money to effective charities, it’s still a really amazing opportunity to make the world a lot better.

>>214522753
It’s one thing to think morality doesn’t demand you give away all your wealth. That’s perfectly reasonable. But I think it’s clear that if donating can do huge amounts of good, then morality at least demands serious donations. It demands that one makes helping others effectively a non-trivial part of their life.

Imagine looking at this from the perspective of an animal on a factory farm or a child in a foreign country. These people know suffering of a sort that most of us can scarcely imagine. Does it really seem so demanding to ask us to make comparatively small sacrifices for their sake? Probably every single dollar we give away to effective animal charities prevents more suffering than all our lifetime donations will cost us. Certainly if we had the perspective of those helped by our donations, rather than exclusively our own, taking the pledge would seem like a no-brainer. Why does morality demand that they give up their lives, when the alternative is us abstaining from a nice vacation or an upgraded car?

Another objection: how do we know these charities are working? We’ve all heard about scam charities that pretend to do good but don’t really. Can we really trust these charities?

This is a reasonable concern to have, but fortunately there are very effective charities that have been extensively vetted. High quality randomized control trials—the gold standard in scientific evidence—have been carried out by experts, analyzing the effectiveness of charities. GiveWell has done extensive research https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities to identify the most effective charities. So while you should be skeptical if you hear about a random charity from your friend crackhead Bob who fell for eleven crypto-scams last year alone, GiveWell charities can be trusted. Similar points apply to charities helping animals, which have also been carefully vetted by Animal Charity Evaluators. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/

Wow, that's a lot of words, too bad I'm not reading them.

tldr

>>214522801
Another concern: perhaps donating to effective charities that save lives will produce overpopulation. This will hold the nations they affect back economically and socially. Now, it is true that donating to life-saving charities likely raises the population somewhat, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.11388 but I don’t think this means that they’ll hold the affected nations back.

First of all, being stricken by horrendous diseases tends to hold nations back economically. This effect seems vastly more significant https://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/15/flow-through-effects/ than the negative economic impact of a slightly larger population, particularly because it’s not clear whether a larger population will develop more slowly or more quickly. America is better-off economically than we were in the 1800s, when the population was lower and disease was a greater burden.


Second, it looks like effective charities tend to lower the fertility rate somewhat but this effect is counterbalanced by the lives saved. But things go much better in society if fewer people are born and die, rather than if more people both are born and die. Vast amounts of resources are wasted if people die shortly after birth.


Third, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities. Give to charities that make people’s lives better—e.g. by curing blindness— https://www.givewell.org/charities/helen-keller-international or that help animals on factory farms. https://www.farmkind.giving/ If you end up concluding that charities saving lives are bad, then just give elsewhere! It would be shocking, and suspiciously convenient, if every single charity on the planet did more harm than good!
>>214522806
I don't know how to simplify it for you
>>214522849

>>214522909
Fourth, I find this idea pretty intuitively repugnant. Imagine that you could save an African child drowning in a pond. This line of reasoning would seem to imply that doing so would be actively bad because of the impact on overpopulation. This kind of reasoning is not something we’d normally take seriously. Suspiciously, it only crops up when people are justifying not giving away their money. Hmm…

Another concern: shouldn’t we donate locally? Why should we help people overseas when those around us are suffering?

The answer is that it’s much easier to help people overseas. Most of the people who have fallen through the cracks in wealthy country are hard to help. It’s hard to help a homeless person who is on the streets. In contrast, saving lives overseas is cheap and easy—it costs just around 5,000 dollars to save someone’s life. https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities Plausibly, therefore, giving overseas does tens or hundreds of times more good than donating locally. So unless people in your city matter hundreds of times more than people overseas, it’s probably better to donate overseas.

I also find the idea pretty weird that we have extremely strong obligations to the people around us rather than far away. If you could save someone drowning in a pond, would it matter how far away they were? Would it matter if they were an American citizen? If people in your country matter more than people in another country, then people start mattering way more after they fly in a plane and fill out paperwork to become a citizen. But that’s very unintuitive. The reasons to save your life shouldn’t change because you signed some paperwork! In fact, holding that we have strong duties to our countrymen that don’t apply to foreigners often implies https://benthams.substack.com/p/america-second?utm_source=publication-search we should perform actions that harm one person and benefit no one!

>>214522948
But even if you buy this argument, then just donate to local effective charities! You should still take the pledge, but just donate differently—maybe splitting your donations globally and locally.

A final concern: aren’t scholars unsure if foreign aid works? Aren’t there lots of smart people who think foreign aid backfires? If so, shouldn’t we be skeptical about efforts to provide foreign aid?

It’s true that some kinds of foreign aid are controversial among scholars. Some people think that economic development aid entraps countries and leaves them in poverty. But crucially, none of the kinds of foreign aid promoted by GiveWell are controversial. Among scholars, there is no serious debate about whether, say, anti-malarial bednets are good. https://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/06/the-lack-of-controversy-over-well-targeted-aid/ The most prominent critics of foreign aid support these kinds of programs. High quality studies have been done on them and have confirmed their efficacy. There is not serious room for doubt.

And, once again, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities, like the charities https://www.farmkind.giving/donate that prevent animals from languishing in a cage for ten years per dollar they raise. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/lewis-bollard Or give to the organizations working to prevent the extinction of life on Earth. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/long-term-future-fund

In my view, there are not any decisive objections to taking the Giving What We Can pledge. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge It is very likely the best thing you will ever do, and because of it, plausibly hundreds fewer people will die and/or hundreds of thousands fewer animals will suffer horrors beyond comprehension. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-bone-chilling-evil-of-factory

https://benthams.substack.com/p/every-objection-to-taking-the-giving

>>214522695 (OP)
maybe if niggers and indians didn't overbreed they'd be able to take care of their children and finance their lives :(

>>214523111
Overpopulation is addressed in the article and the links in it
Maybe try reading them before you say something stupid

>>214523168
I ain't reading all that shit. I hope all niggers starve so only the fittest survive

Bump

>>214522695 (OP)
Thank you for sharing this, as I do think people have a responsibility to give to others, especially knowing that you might save their life (though, I think more fundamental virtue likely comes from how you act towards those around you in your day-to-day). That said, I have to question the idea that saving hundreds of millions of shrimp is more worthwhile than giving to save human beings.

I did read the Shrimp Welfare Project substack article, and so I'm aware that the argument is partially addressed there, but I don't think the responses there are satisfactory. I'm not sure that you can perform mathematical calculations on moral questions (such as the '% of suffering * number of beings' argument mentioned). Also, re: this point:
>This is ill-thought out; that pleasure and pain are not the only things that matter doesn’t mean they don’t matter at all. Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain.
It could be that the 'other things' that matter may matter significantly more than pain and pleasure, perhaps in such a way that no amount of mild pains can add up to it (despite your disagreeing with this; I admit that I didn't read what you linked on this specific issue yet, forgive my laziness for now).

My intuitions lead me to think about a case where you would ask, would you rather give 1,000,000 people a minor bruise or kill someone instantly and painlessly? It seems to me intuitively that you ought to choose to give people the minor bruise, and then increasing the # of people doesn't eventually mean you should choose to kill the single person over choosing the bruising. Relevantly, one would need to formulate why, if what we care about *primarily* is suffering, does it seem so heinous a moral crime to kill someone, even painlessly (perhaps, even if they have no relatives to mourn them)? Maybe we have a clash of intuitions here, though.

By the way, are you the author of those articles?

>>214522695 (OP)
99.9999% goes straight to help hungry jewish widows in israel

>>214524976
Hi thank you.

I think the torture dust speck problem addresses this well

No I'm not the author I'm just reposting

fuck them kids lmao

>>214522695 (OP)
>donating in capitalism
Let richfags do it.

>>214525284
Many people who consider themselves poor are rich. If you make 50k USA dollars a year or the equivalent in your local currency you are part of the wealthiest 1% in the world.

>>214525072
As in his counterarguments to that problem? Found here?
https://benthams.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-wins-outright-part-336?s=w

I find these arguments particularly weak, to be honest. He essentially assumes the core truth of utilitarianism in point 1 without presenting a real argument for it, just the assumption that 'badness' must be like concepts of size and that morality must just be about preventing badness.

Here's an easy counter example. Imagine you could actually ask each and every person who will receive the dust speck if they accept the dust speck in order to save the person from torture. They are told that when one person refuses, automatically the dust speck option is rejected and the torture option occurs, so at the moment of asking each person has the power to condemn the subject of the torture scenario to said torture, or to merely accept a dust speck in their eye. According to this it would actually be a virtuous act for a person to refuse to accept the dust speck and condemn the subject of the other scenario to 50 years of torture. Is that not absurd?