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Ah. Hm. Well look, regarding what @WhiningCoil meant and whether my interpretation was uncharitable/a strawman, what he wrote was:
I had interpreted his tongue-in-cheek restatement of the progressive point of view as two distinct clauses, separated by the comma and the "and". That is,
That is, I took it to be the case that "because resources aren't finite" was only meant to 'go' with the "keep giving more and more forever" bit, and as such, was not intended as a justification or modifier for the basic "feed, clothe and house them" bit. Whereas from the way you italicized "because resources are finite" in your second bullet-point restatement, you clearly interpreted "because resources are(n't) finite" as applying to the whole of the sentence. If I misunderstood WC's syntax here, it was a sincere miscommunication, not strawmanning; and I thought that it was grounds for me to dispute the first half of the sentence, the 'A' clause about the basic feeding-clothing-and-housing, without getting into the weeds of whether or not we should "keep giving them more and more forever" on top of that. I take the point that my reading was perhaps uncharitable, though again, if so, it was an honest mistake.
I deny that "with no caveats" was a lie, though. I did not say "without justification". By "caveats" I meant something of the form "except for [X amount of extremely narrow basic-needs social welfare or whatever]", not a justification for the zero-charity policy. As far as I can see there are no caveats in WhiningCoil's posts, in the sense of stated exceptions to his preferred no-free-stuff policy.
Not precisely. What I meant was that, having in advance taken the time to ask myself what an ideal world would look like, in general, I am able in any given situation to readily compare things-as-they-are to what-the-world-ought-to-be. In any given situation this gives me a strong, almost aching sense of the sheer tragedy of the status quo, and yet at the same time gives me a specific target to aim at, motivating me to do what I can to close the gap in a given narrow area where I do have influence. I don't sit there picturing specific sci-fi scenarios as I'm considering a particular crisis/misfortune, it's just a constant background awareness, kind of like that LW post by Yudkowsky about the badly-designed fire alarm as a constant reminder of "it's not Eliezer Yudkowsky who's wrong, the rest of the planet is mad". Nor am I specifically asking myself what frictionless-transhuman-Wanderer would do about a given problem, so much as what frictionless-transhuman-Wanderer's reality would look like that the problem never arose in the first place, and what that implies about what aspects of the actual status quo should be regarded as problems to be solved. Often this is a more abstract process than imagining specific circumstances, of course; the "worldbuilding" exercise is more a way to crystallize my opinions on things.
But it does give me a sense of… well, let's take a very abstract, pedestrian, non-doxxy example, because again, there are things I volunteer at, work I've done, that are too specific to get into without getting too close to Googlable for comfort. But suppose if I walk past a homeless person, I don't move on like they're something dirty I don't want to step into. Because I don't think of poverty and homelessness as some great inevitability that we just have to live with. A world with zero homelessness and starvation is not just conceivable but something I have conceived, something that lives always within my heart. I look at the beggar and my immediate sentiment is, in a world that had its shit together this guy would be my neighbor. Not a close friend, necessarily, but a neighbor, someone on my street. What would I do for a neighbor who'd abruptly lost his home or all his savings or something? Certainly I wouldn't make myself a beggar and give him everything I've got, but I wouldn't walk past him while avoiding his gaze. I wouldn't just give him a token coin or two, either. No, the least I could decently do is simply ask him straight if there's anything I can do. So (provided the guy is sober enough for conversation) I do! I ask what I can do for him, not in the tone of a patronizing, self-conscious Minister To The Needy but in a familiar, neighborly, casual sort of way. I break out of that arch, let-this-moment-be-over-ASAP vibe that even people who give to the homeless tend to have when dealing with them. And typically they'll tell me, and it'll be something that for someone in my income bracket is perfectly reasonable, something I might have spent on an impulse-purchase myself, something I wouldn't give a second thought to. A warm meal, a new backpack.
And it's a small thing, but it's a small thing that they didn't dare hope for when they strapped in for another cold afternoon spent standing around on a street corner pleading silently for a pittance, and suddenly it's there in their hands. There's just no feeling like this, the feeling that just for a moment something fundamentally wrong with the world has been healed, that just for a minute the guy and I both get to live in the world that has its head screwed on right, the world where mutual assistance is a self-evident "sure thing, man. here, I hope you'll enjoy it" deal rather than something to be begged for, bled for, or even granted in a jarringly mechanical way by some centralized bureaucratic process trying to make up for the crushing Molochness of everything. It's such a wonderful feeling, and it has nothing to do with some self-flagellating death-drive - indeed my approach to existence puts paid to that. I don't feel ashamed or guilty for the nice things I get to enjoy, because I know in my bones that in the Good Universe That We Should All Be Living In If There Was A God Worth A Rat's Ass, I also have all those nice things, and enjoy them uncomplicatedly. There are just more people beside me who enjoy all the same things, because we all should. And if we told the denizens of the World That Should Be about our dear old shithole where half the planet lacks those Nice Things, I know with perfect clarity that the last thing they'd want is for those lucky 'survivors' to feel bad about enjoying what others 'lost' relative to the perfect world.
I'm sorry but I must ask this. How frequently do you pass homeless people that you can take this time to do this? I walk my commute to work each day, down to the very heart of Chicago near the dead center of the loop, a 40 minute walk door to door. In a given day I pass dozens of homeless people, and different ones most days. Your parable about never walking past a homeless person is neat but it just doesn't work like that, I'd never get to work if I did that. The city spends something like $40k/year/homeless person to not solve the problem. It's easy enough to say you'd never walk past someone down on their luck or whatever you want to call the homeless when it's an uncommon occurrence. Forgetting about the cost of helping these people with small acts of kindness, even working efficiently I wouldn't have the time necessary to do this individual care for each one.
And then there is pulling back the camera and not focusing on these vistas of individual charity at the EA perspective and recognizing the festering wounds that are developing nations. Unless you blinker yourself to some kind of "only poverty that I can see counts and I live far away from it" then yes, the fact that resources are finite will quickly assert itself.
It's difficult to answer your question without self-doxxing. Certainly I live somewhere rather smaller and accordingly homeless-saturated than Chicago. The kind of encounter I described is more on the order of a few times a month. It's also worth noting that this is something I do when shopping for groceries or the like, i.e. when I have time to myself; I don't tend to travel on foot when it comes to getting to & off work. I'm talking about the kinds of people you'll find lurking as near to the supermarket as supermarket security will allow, and the like. People at bus stops. Very, very occasionally, people who knock at my door.
But in any case, yes, obviously this doesn't work if you encounter ten beggars every single day. The point of the anecdote is not "never walk past a homeless person" but "never walk past a homeless person just because you screen out their existence as a neutral fact of the universe". If you can't help then you can't help; I wouldn't personally help every single neighbor on my street if every house but mine got rubbled overnight, either.
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Why, specifically, a neighbor? Out of sheer statistical likelihood, this is extremely improbable. He would almost certainly be one of the billions of people in the world you never met and never will.
I have a hard time believing any of this interaction you are describing actually happened, because this reads like fiction. How do you know what they hoped for and what went through your minds? You didn't, you're simply writing a morality play with yourself as the altruistic moral savior of humanity.
I certainly understand the impulse to want to make the world a marginally nicer place, but I do it by doing things for friends and family and actual neighbors. I do it for people I know personally who are more blameless than not for their own misfortune. Because I know in my bones that no matter how good the world is, yes, even in literal Star Trek Utopia, there will inevitably be some shitty people in it, utility monsters who intuitively victimize themselves of their own free will, and if I spend my time enabling their shittiness, all I've probably done is make the world a marginally worse place. The beautiful thing is my vision of ethical behavior also universalizes, because if everyone tends to their own garden as well as that of the people they personally know, it's only the antisocial who are excluded from the benefits of society, which is just.
IME, beggars hereabouts are either professional panhandlers, or conspicuously poor people who will ask for money to buy food but refuse offers of food. (My dad watched one immediately take the gifted money and rush into the liquer store, socks and no shoes). Even if the pros are bums rather than downtrodden, they at least know that gifted food means more of their alms go to something else. There's two axes, I guess—functionality and malice—and the problem is that the tails of each dominate, and the malicious above a certain level of functionality are better at pretending to be more benign.
Certain levels of disfunctional warrant institutional care. Above a certain level of malice, policing is required. The window of homelessness that is not covered by these has widened dramatically with the closing of asylums and the defanging of police, meaning that the tails kind of ruin it for the rest of the homeless, who already have it bad enough!
There are public long-term care facilities for sufficiently disfunctional adults in some areas in the US. Since I work at one, I am contractually obligated not to opine on whether or not people should use their services. I will say the state should just buy some Roombas, FFS.
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Obviously I can only guess. Though for what it's worth I didn't necessarily mean to imply that the target of such small acts of kindness are thinking of the situation in the same terms I am, so the only real guess about the recipient's unknowable mind-state is that they didn't expect that they'd meet someone willing to spend double-digit sums on them out of the blue rather than chickenfeed, and I don't think this is an unreasonable or overly romanticized assumption.
In terms of emotionless fact, the interaction I am describing (and it's an abstracted summary of many, not a direct account of a single one) is "homeless guy approaches me/addresses me as I'm walking around town, asking for a bit of cash; I reply in more than one-word sentences and ask them what, in fact, they need, possibly telling them I was on my way to a nearby store if relevant; over a few sentences they actually come up with something that they'd need that is easy for me to purchase, I purchase it and hand it to them". I don't see what's so hard to believe about that. If you just think that the person I give stuff to must be thinking something more like "har, har, what a sucker" than "yay fundamental human brotherhood, I'd do the same for you if our positions were revesed", well, sure, some of them at least, but I don't really care. The fact that they got the stuff still means I made their day better, which is what I wanted to achieve. If you believe that beggars wouldn't make such reasonable requests in response to the open-ended offer… again, sure, some of them shoot for the moon, but I don't blame them. And by and large, beggars can't be choosers is an expression for a reason; I've never met one who when I replied that "an iPhone" is maybe out of my price range here, failed to back down to a more achievable idea.
Oh, I do that too, which is in fact the answer to "why, specifically, a neighbor" - because the level to which I care about and help my neighbors is something that is already an established pattern of behavior I can default to.
I do not feel the same. I believe very heartily that a world in which everyone has everything they want is superior to one in which only the virtuous do (although I'm comfortable with prioritizing the virtuous if it's necessary to prioritize someone, a la this SSC post).
Have you ever consider that what the unvirtuous want could be zero sum with what the virtuous want? Say, for example, to murder me, bath in my blood and rape my wife. Or maybe break into random homes and stab children to death cause YOLO why not?
Evil exists and requires planning around. Not enabling because you want everyone to get what they want and be happy.
Certainly I've considered it. I would, on the whole, be surprised if there were very many whose preferences along those lines were innate to such a precise degree that nothing else - not violent sports, not hardcore BDSM - could sate their desires. Especially, in terms of the Glorious Transhumanist Future, once we bring VR into it. Now of course, again as per Scott's "short end of a trade-off" concept, I'm not saying that fulfilling those specific preferences for that tiny fringe of humanity should be a priority. But in terms of envisioning the utopia at the end of the rainbow, then yes, I do think a world in which we contrive some way for them to live out their violent fantasies, or something close to them, without actually hurting anyone is preferable to a world in which we simply keep them denied because we deem their desires Wrong.
Anyway, I don't think we were especially talking about the fulfillment of unvirtuous desires, necessarily. I think pusher_robot was saying that the unvirtuous shouldn't get common-sense nice things even if they want them, while I think the unvirtuous should indeed get nice houses and good food and safety and so on (at least once everybody else has got them).
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