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Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.
Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.
Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.
If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?
Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria? If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it? EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.
If there was already an abundance of bed nets and it'd cost millions to save a single more life even in the most efficient way possible, where as they could open a local art museum that served thousands for just $10k, they'd probably start donating to local art. But right now art is already pretty well funded, and people dying of malaria are relatively underfunded. Although EA has certainly done a lot to change that and I think they have more money than they know how to spend. You could probably post an essay to their website about why donating to local art is the most moral thing to do if you can write out a clear argument for it.
I do have empathy for them. But empathy enough isn't a good enough reason to do something, not when I'm already groaning under the unmet weight of already-extant duty:
I have a duty to my ancestors who made my life possible, and to carry on that line into the future.
I have a duty to my family who worked and sweated and sacrificed to raise me, and must pay that forward by working and sweating and sacrificing for my future children.
I have a duty to the people who I work with, who have invested in and rely upon me.
I have a duty to the people who live near me, who I share streets and parks and utilities and schools and commerce with, and who have to share those things with me.
I have a duty to my countrymen, who in times of danger are sworn to lay down their lives for me, and for whom I may be called to lay down my life in turn.
Out and out in concentric, relational circles. That's a LOT of duty in the modern world, and I'm not at all certain even all my effort and resources and will is doing a good enough job. Thought and resources I devote to things outside those concentric rings of responsibility is, in a real sense, a defection against those important things. Moreover, because those outside things are far from me and I'm not enmeshed in iterated responsibility with them, I'm not likely to understand what any intervention would do, outside of the most superficially-obvious results.
Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.
This strikes me as a weak moral argument.
There isn't any good ethical basis for privileging one human being over another based on their proximity—genetically or geographically—to you. Of course there is a biological basis for this, and it may be practically impossible for most people to overcome this bias. But that doesn't really have any effect on the ethical math.
You just have strong preferences that run counter to ethical concerns.
This is false.
You could, right now, give money directly to impoverished people across the globe to save/transform their lives.
If you want to participate in morality, you are just as ethically bound to them, you just don't feel it.
There absolutely are several.
(1) Practicality. An ethics which people are not likely to follow will not be implemented widely or for long. However noble its aims, such an ethic fails by its own terms. By contrast, an ethics which people are likely to follow, even if slightly less noble, will be implemented widely and for a longer period of time and thus result in more good. As you said, there is a biological bias in favor of genetic or geographic (and I'd add "sociocultural" as well) proximity. If that bias can be taken advantage of to build solidarity, care, and harmony, then it should!
(2) Accessibility. Proximity Bias is a simple concept, common to most human civilizations. It is simple to explain, and thus easy to spread. Moreover, it is also simpler for people of all different capability strata to implement, even without supervision. It's not perfect, and people being people it will sometimes be implemented poorly. But it's easier.
(3) Iterativity. Proximity Bias stresses that individuals should spend their resources on people and things close to them, which are likely to be things which the individual will interact with frequently. This provides for frequent feedback between all parties and frequent assessment of progress. Thus, it limits the ability of middlemen to grift or divert efforts and resources away from the object, as well as generally unlocking the beneficial dynamics present in iterated games more generally. It also allows for short feedback loops to identify and address unforeseen consequences rapidly.
(4) Resiliency. Though Proximity Bias may be less globally efficient, it does allow for the building of general reserves of both physical and social capital which can be leveraged to counteract/mitigate emergencies. Further, because it is decentralized, there is no single point of failure in the system.
Sorry, nope. Ties go both ways, or not at all. I am bound to those who have some duty to me. Beyond that, I have a duty to cause no unnecessary harm. If, after I have fulfilled my local duties, I still have resources left over, then, and only then, can I look outwards to perform charity on complete strangers. But that's a very high bar to clear.
You seem to be confusing is/ought.
If you choose not to give your life to save 10 people, you are a selfish coward.
I don't mean that as harshly as it sounds, as we are all born selfish cowards, wired that way as a result of billions of years of evolution. And then it's reinforced by our culture. It's super hard not to be a selfish coward.
We don't like to think of ourselves as selfish cowards, so we imagine ourselves to be moral, even when the evidence is clear.
3 million children die of starvation each year. You can literally, truly, concretely, actually save a number of their lives. Say, 10 lives. Just by forgoing insanely lavish luxuries that we all treat "middle class" in the West. You wouldn't even have to forfeit your life, just a bunch of your stuff.
Now, I don't believe people should be forced to sacrifice themselves or sell their shit. It's a personal decision they should arrive at after doing the rational/ethical math.
But the math is clear.
I deny that human morality is math at all. People are not indistinguishable, interchangeable, widgets. The essence of humanity is sociability - our particular relationships and cooperation with each other. Your cold math at best ignores it, and at worst denigrates it as pernicious. That's a recipe for trouble.
Ha. You feel attacked. I get it. :)
You're placing a higher value on the lives of some people due to their proximity to you. This is because you are selfish, by nature. Reputation, reciprocation, kin selection, etc. These are all "is" considerations. (It's cool we all feel it.)
It's only because conscious experience exists that morality exists; it's only by rationally thinking through the implication of this that you can participate in morality. The moral way of assessing value is by measuring the capacity to suffer, or the other end, experience happiness/flourishing. And it's when you do that you realize there is no (unselfish) basis to place a higher value on anyone. You'll see that it's only your selfishness that blinds you to this simple truth.
A man you've never met in Kenya is of equal moral value to your father. This sentence flies in the face of everything we feel, but it's obviously morally true.
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