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My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things. What trade-offs one is prepared to countenance in the name of acquiring nice things to give to sentient beings is an entirely different question and not the topic of this thread. Many libertarians take the line of "yes, it is good to give to the poor, it's just that it's also wrong to steal, and one doesn't cancel out the other" and I have no beef with that.
Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
I don't want to put words in @WhiningCoil's mouth. I, for one, would be more than happy to house, feed, clothe etc. poor people in the post-Singularity, post-scarcity gay luxury space communism future that surely awaits us. That society being, of course, the only society in which your policy proposal would actually work, and which wouldn't impose horrific externalities and create perverse incentives for every inhabitant therein.
If I had to parse @WhiningCoil's comment, he was scoffing at the idea that feeding, housing, clothing etc. poor people is the moral thing to do in our universe, with all of its attendant restrictions, limitations and trade-offs. I know that you think the correct approach is to imagine what the right thing to do would be if there were no constraints, and then try to get as close to that target as possible, given the constraints placed upon us. I know because you explicitly told me:
Fair enough. But the thing is: imagining what the right thing to do would be in a universe with no constraints really isn't that hard. Utopias are a dime a dozen, specifically because they skip over all those difficult problems that real life imposes upon us. In light of this, most people (myself included) prefer to just skip the imagining-what-to-do-in-a-universe-without-constraints step, and instead focus on trying to decide the best course of action in our universe, with the constraints we are operating under. But you seem convinced that we're bad people unless we go through the motions of announcing "this is what the right thing to do would be [in the counterfactual universe with no constraints, limitations or trade-offs]... however, given that we live in a universe with constraints, limitations or trade-offs-"
Dude. We KNOW we live in a universe with constraints, limitations and trade-offs. That's why we're discussing optimal solutions in light of those constraints, rather than wasting our time with navel-gazing on what the right thing to do would be without them. I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking this insistence that we go through the motions of determining what the right thing to do would be in a counterfactual universe with no constraints seems sort of... performative? Do we have to say grace before eating our dinner? Must we do the land acknowledgement before we discuss optimal property tax rates? Do we have to listen to the elevator pitch for your fantasy novel before we can talk about whether or not performing a double mastectomy on a teenage girl is a good idea?*
I know, I know, I know: if we don't reflexively go through the motions of imagining a utopia, we won't notice when we've accidentally created a dystopia. Or as you put it:
But frankly, I don't think anyone here is at risk for advocating the latter position; some of the most moral and decent people I've ever met have been those most acutely aware of the very real trade-offs and constraints life places upon us (while some of the most selfish and inconsiderate were those who spent much of their waking life in hypothetical utopias); and I think your belief that imagining hypothetical utopias is the thing that prevents you from endorsing the democide of starving Ethiopians is both untrue from a psychological perspective and tremendously self-serving.
*My God, imagine if every profession was like this:
Oncologist: In an ideal world, your husband would never have developed prostate cancer. But in our world, he has, and here are your treatment options.
Police officer: In an ideal world, your wife would never have been murdered. But in our world, she has been, and we have a good idea of who did it.
Engineer: In an ideal world, this bridge would never have collapsed. But in our world, it has, and forty-six people are believed to have been killed.
First of all, I do want thank you for the elaborate reply, and especially for quoting past posts of mine. Maybe it's strange to thank someone for remembering past points you made just so that they can continue to disagree with them but I do find it earnestly validating, and a credit to this forum as a discussion space, to be able to have a debate with that level of engagement, without having to start every argument from scratch.
Well, what can I say? This started with WhiningCoil deriding the very idea of clothing, feeding and housing the disadvantaged, with no caveats. For all your attempts to justify and soften his statement, that fact does not fill me with the same confidence. By no means do I think such people - "ghouls" in my fanciful terminology above - are a majority here, even among the more far-right posters. But they do exist. I know this because they frequently boast about their ghoulishness, sneering about universalist altruism being a pathological, contemptible, or just literally incomprehensible impulse whenever the opportunity arises. I'm not trying to start a witch-hunt - when you say that's not where you stand I'm happy to believe you! I'm just gesturing at all the people wearing big conspicuous pointy hats and handing out entry vouchers for the next satanic mass.
I think perhaps you've slightly misunderstood what I was advocating. I didn't mean that in any given dilemma you should literally stop and ask yourself "what would
Jesusmy omnipotent transhuman future self with infinite resources do?". I think the Utopia-designing is a useful implementation of the kind of abstract thinking you have to do to formulate principles - to create a framework of moral philosophy, coin a system of values, whatever you want to call it. Indeed, the post you linked clarifies that I think this is something you should do when engaged in formulating principles, not what you should do every time you want to solve a specific policy question. Arguments I participate in on this forum just keep coming back to this kind of thought experiment partly because I don't have the benefit of an already-established share moral framework with the people I argue with even when we're talking about policy; and partly because a lot of those arguments are questions of moral philosophy where we fight about principles, not pragmatic policy debates, owing to us all being a bunch of geeks who enjoy abstract thinking in our off-time, not policy wonks with actual object-level debates to really sink our teeth into in a systematic way.I would also object strongly to the claim that it's "self-serving". I have found this kind of thinking a useful steering mechanism for my conscience, and it has driven me on many occasions to do good in the world in material ways that cost me, but which, looking back, I'm proud of. That doesn't preclude you thinking that I'm an anomaly and the average person shouldn't do it because they'll get lost in their pie-in-the-sky utopias at the expense of actually doing good - but (for what it's worth to say it on an anonymous forum with no verifiability) I am not a champagne socialist cooped up in my ivory tower.
Well, that's an outright lie right there, and you know it. What he said was:
That is a very explicit caveat. As he said to you himself, finish the sentence. There's a world of difference between
and
Your refusal to acknowledge this shows the weakness of your hand, you're making a straw man of @WhiningCoil's point, and you should knock it off.
This space is based in large part around the principle of charity: one of the top-line rules literally flagged in the description of this very thread is "Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said." When @WhiningCoil very clearly and explicitly says that feeding, clothing and housing poor people with no strings attached forever is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that he's making a dog-whistle statement and he would be equally opposed to this even in the counterfactual world where resources are infinite — well, that doesn't strike me as a very charitable interpretation of what he said, and I think you would resent having words put in your mouth in this fashion.
In that case, why when @WhiningCoil pointed out that feeding, clothing, housing etc. poor people with no strings attached is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, did you immediately retort something to the effect that it wouldn't be a bad idea if resources were infinite? How is that a productive contribution to the discussion, when @WhiningCoil had already made the delineations of the point he was making perfectly clear? Again, it just strikes me as self-serving, like you want to give yourself a pat on the back for explicitly stating your belief that, in the counterfactual world where X, we should do Y, and the fact that @WhiningCoil didn't go to the trouble proves that he's a doubleplusungood badthinker.
For clarity's sake: so there were occasions on which you were debating what action to take, you imagined what the hypothetical version of you in a universe with infinite resources would do, and that motivated you to take a particular action? I'm not asking you to doxx yourself, but you could be a little bit more specific? I'm genuinely curious.
I believe you, sincerely.
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.
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.
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).
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