Thread 719828412

Spending money on luxuries like video games is very immoral. Here's why

The Drowning Child Argument Is Simply Correct

Failure to donate to effective charities is like walking past drowning children and doing nothing.

Imagine you were walking past a drowning child. The child kicks, screams, and cries as they drown and are about to be resigned to a watery grave when you walk by. You can save them if you jump into the pool and pull them out. But doing so would come at a cost. You’re currently wearing a very expensive suit—about 5,000 dollars—or perhaps your suit is cheap but has a 5,000 dollar bill in your pocket that would be ruined if you save the child (it’s a very deep pocket—you can’t pull it out in time). Clearly, in such a case, even though it would cost significant money, you’d be obligated to jump into the pond to save the child.

>>719828412 (OP)
Jerking off to traps is also, but we stil do it.

just say you're poor

>>719828412 (OP)
Long before I was born, Peter Singer argued that this case shows that we have an obligation to donate to effective charities. The best charities—which you can, at any time, donate to—save lives for a few thousand dollars each. Just as you’re obligated to sacrifice a few thousand dollars to pull the child out of the pond and save them, you’re obligated to sacrifice a few thousand dollars to save a far-away child who would otherwise die of malaria.

In Singer’s original formulation, he used the drowning child case to support the following principle: if you can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral value, you should do so. For example, if you can prevent a woman from being raped or a person from being murdered at the cost of 700 dollars, you should do so, because averting rape and murder is more valuable than 700 dollars. From this, he deduces that you should give your discretionary spending to effective charities. You shouldn’t spend 5,000 dollars going to Hawaii when you could instead save a person’s life.

But I think we can make a much more direct argument: failure to give to effective charities is morally equivalent to walking past drowning children. Therefore, you have an obligation to give to effective charities, just as you would have an obligation to pull drowning children out of ponds (it seems this is how everyone has, in the intervening years, interpreted Singer’s argument, even though it’s not what was originally intended).

In both the case where you pull the child out of a pond and the case where you donate to effective charities, you can avert a death at the cost of just a few thousand dollars. This seems to be the salient feature of the situation—the reason to wade in and save the child seems to be that you can save a life at a small cost.

Screw them kids

>>719828528
>>719828412 (OP)
The alternative is to come up with some gerrymandered explanation of why you should save the child from the pond but not from malaria, but that’s less plausible than the simple account that you should prevent terrible things from happening if you can do so at comparatively minor cost.

Still, lots of people argue that there are important differences between pulling kids from ponds and donating to, say, the Against Malaria Foundation. Let’s address them.

The most common claim is that there’s a difference in terms of proximity. You are only obligated to save the child because they’re near you—if they were far away, you wouldn’t be obligated to save them. This account suffers from two problems: it’s false in a first way, and it’s false in a second way.

First of all, the idea that you’re only obligated to save people who are near you is crazy. Imagine that you could wade into the pond to press a button that would save a child from drowning who was far away. Clearly, you should still do that. But in that case, there’s as much lack of proximity as there is when you donate to effective charities.

Second of all, proximity—at least in the sense of someone being physically close to you in space—is obviously not morally important. Suppose that a child is drowning in a plane and it costs money to press a button that would save them from drowning. Would your reason to save them decrease as they recede into the distance—as they get farther away? Is your obligation to save aliens within one galaxy of you much stronger than your reason to save aliens within two galaxies of you? No, that’s crazy! It doesn’t get less important to save people simply because they’ve taken planes far away.

>>719828606
When claiming that proximity refutes the drowning child argument, lots of people like to say is that you have a great obligation to your friends and family. I don’t know what prompts them to say this in response to the drowning child argument, as it has nothing to do with the argument! Even if you have special obligations to your friends and family, your reasons to save drowning children that you don’t know are still equal to your reasons to save kids you don’t know who might get malaria. The drowning child is not your child—they’re a child that you don’t know personally.

People often claim that you have a greater obligation to those in your own country than to foreigners. I’m doubtful of this, but let’s grant it. Now imagine that you’re on the Mexican border and see a drowning child. They’re not a member of your country. Nevertheless, you should wade in the pond and save them, even at the cost of an expensive suit. Failing to give to effective charities, I claim, is like ignoring the drowning Mexican child—even though they’re not part of your country, you still have an obligation to save them.

Additionally, it’s often claimed that there’s an important difference in that in the drowning child scenario, you’re the only person who can save them, while when giving to charity, others can save them too. I’ve always found this idea super weird: your reason to save people doesn’t evaporate just because other people aren’t following their duty to save people. We can see this by imagining in the drowning children that there are a bunch of nearby assholes ignoring the child as he drowns. Does that eliminate your reason to save the child? No, obviously not. But this case is, in terms of other people not acting to save the child, analogous to real-world charitable donations.

I'm not getting involved in any organization because everything on this planet is infested with greedy "people" that are just gonna siphon every cent they can so they can just go buy more satanic artwork for their house they don't live in. Not my problem.

>>719828695
The final consideration—and this one is the only that bears any weight—is that there are many drowning children. Imagine that there wasn’t just one drowning child, but hundreds of thousands—you could never save them all. It’s plausible that you wouldn’t be obligated to spend your entire life saving children, never enjoying things.

The main thing to note about this is that even if it’s right, maybe it means we’re not all required to spend all of our time saving children, but it still means we’re required to do a lot. A person who never saved even a single drowning child, who ignored the cries of every child who drowned, would be monstrous. So while perhaps you don’t have to give all your money to effective charities, accepting this reasoning would still mean you have an obligation to make charitable giving a main part of your life—say by giving a significant share of your income to effective charities.

I’m also dubious that this justifies spending money on luxuries. In a world where kids were constantly drowning, it doesn’t seem justified to, say, spend thousands of dollars on vacation when you could instead save a child. A child’s life is just so much more important than a trip to Europe. Your reason to save a child doesn’t depend on how many previous children you’ve saved—or so it seems. If I can’t remember whether I lost 10,000 dollars yesterday saving drowning children or gambling, it doesn’t seem I need to figure out which of these I did to decide whether I should save a drowning child.

But if we accept this principle, that whether you previously spent your money on saving children or doing other stuff doesn’t affect whether you should currently spend your money on saving children, then your reason to save children is the same as it would be if you hadn’t saved any children. But clearly, if you were choosing between saving a child from a pond and going on vacation, and you hadn’t saved any children, you’d be obligated to save the child.

>>719828785
It follows then that you have an obligation to save a child if the alternative is going on vacation.

This argument has, since I’ve heard it, struck me as obviously, irrefutably correct. We certainly have an obligation to make saving children—when we can save hundreds at comparatively minor cost—a significant life project. If a person can save a life a year, without majorly jeopardizing their welfare, just by tithing to effective charities, failing to do so seems clearly immoral.

If you’re convinced by this, I’d encourage you to take a Giving What We Can pledge or give to GiveWell charities. Most people are, inadvertently, doing things as bad as walking past drowning children. We have significant reason to stop doing this.
>>719828774
Almost all of the donations to against malaria foundation go directly to mosquito nets. Research and development, administration etc etc are all covered by a small group of wealthy donors.

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.

>>719829135
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.

>>719829226
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 vetted by Animal Charity Evaluators. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/

>>719829319
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!

>>719828412 (OP)
I don't know how to swim

>>719829406
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!

>>719828412 (OP)
you are under 24
or retarded

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>>719829519
hahaha that's okay anon
>>719829530
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
>>719829583
No and no
>>719829596
It's written by Human

Why do pirate fags cope so much to justify their behavior? Nigga just steal and be the bum you are

>>719829686
I'm not a pirate! That's an interesting point though it's also immoral to spend money on luxuries like gaming PCs and consoles not just the software

>>719829652
>It's written by Human

ai slop spam thread

>>719828412 (OP)
I mean, it's a free child, why wouldn't i save it?
I bet it will be very grateful and willing to fight for my cause.

>Save kid
>They grow up and multiply
>Save those kids
>Keep repeating and ballooning the dependent poulation until you run out of shit to give away
>Now you're broke, you've thrown away your dreams and chance at a happy life and accomplished nothing but multiplying the amount of human suffering and death

Singer is a retard who stopped thinking the second he found an excuse to consider himself morally superior. If you really wanted to do good, you would livestream the rape of Peter Singer to dissuade anyone from spreading such dangerously stupid ideas.

>>719829806
>>719829796
https://benthams.substack.com/p/every-objection-to-taking-the-giving
Original sauce
Not ai

>>719828412 (OP)
>effective charities
And this is where your argument falls appart.
There are as many effective charities as there are PS5 games.

>>719829909
Overpopulation is addressed in the second article. You can donate to improve lives rather then saving them like curing blindness.
>>719829962
>There are as many effective charities as there are PS5 games.

I completely agree! Only donate to the effective ones! Givewell and animal charity evaluators are a great place to start

>>719828412 (OP)
>charities
Bait used to be believable.

>>719830117
It's not "bait"

>>719828516
you're poor

>>719829796
Blame 4chan's character limit

Charities are often have flawed aims, are mismanaged, or are outright corrupt. You are just as likely handing it to a swindler as you are a sincere charity. As scammers work full time on their scam it is more likely that legitimate charities are staffed primarily by volunteers, they have jobs and work outside of charity work. The best way to avoid scams is to find ways to give money to trusted individuals who are highly likely to contribute to the charity with little risk of embezzlement. You can do so by participating in the economy and purchasing independently developed games as their creators are far more transparent on social media for you to judge their character.

>>719828412 (OP)
I can understand baiting but do you seriously believe people will read all this? No one will engage with the topic at hand. Anyway, I use my money on stuff I want. The government takes enough from me already to hand it out to the whole world

>>719829909
>Peter Singer

>>719828528
'drowning child argument' is dead in the water because
a) overseas aid charities don't 'save lives' they just perpetuate growth of the dependent class, creating more hungry mouths that can't feed themselves
b) 'lives' are not some absolute good quantity, look up the repugnant conclusion.

So, don't waste your time on it, not to even mention that even if you took on its premises you would have to content with how the kid you rescued jumps back into the pond every time you pull them out, and that there are 10 other kids doing the same thing, and that the parents are no where to be found, and that you'll eventually die after having achieved nothing, if you put every effort into pointlessly temporarily pulling these kids out one after the other

>>719828563
yes

>>719830579
Your tax dollars fund a genocide.
Donations to against malaria foundation don't.
>>719830591
Overpopulation and dependence is addressed in the article. You only read the OP

If I don't buy video games and play them, then I will have a psychotic breakdown and cause harm to myself and others. Therefore, the only moral argument is for me to buy games.

In the time you spent typing (or more likely copy pasting) all this shit and filling out captchas you could have saved a drowning child, hypocrite

>>719830825
skim your other posts you still seem to think arbitrarily that stopping africans from getting malaria is good, but it isn't.

>>719830825
My tax funds get people to come here from all over the world to live on my costs. Supporting malaria foundations would actually make the situation worse for me

>>719831119
Or you could use your free will to grow up
>>719831127
I wish I could make 5k an hour

>>719828785
>Imagine that there wasn’t just one drowning child, but hundreds of thousands—you could never save them all. It’s plausible that you wouldn’t be obligated to spend your entire life saving children, never enjoying things.
>The main thing to note about this is that even if it’s right, maybe it means we’re not all required to spend all of our time saving children, but it still means we’re required to do a lot.
There is no real reason as to why you aren't obligated to spend 100% your free time and resources saving children, if you actually believe everything else written. "Maybe we don't have to" is a cowardly defense because they happily lay out the logic for everything else, but back out for this.

>>719831196
>Or you could use your free will to grow up
Yeah, and the kid could use his free will to stop drowning. Que sera sera!