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Zack_M_Davis comments on Shut Up and Divide? - Less Wrong
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I don't read these as equivalent:
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I see it as equivalent if your cost-benefit calculation values that which is functional and creative.
Which is more functional and creative: A child who gets vaccinated at the nearby clinic, or the same child getting polio and losing the use of their legs because there was no nearby clinic.
Your portrayal of charity is accurate if you look at what you get if you try to vote for charity, but it is not an accurate description of the best charities that have been discussed in this thread.
I would say it depends on the child.
Which is more functional and creative: a community that leverages its own potential and builds its own clinic, or a community that relies on outsiders to provide that clinic?
Which is more functional: An investment that leverages its own potential and uses its own resources, or an investment that leverages the resources of outsiders?
A good investment is a good investment, regardless of where the resources are coming from. Bickering about which investments are better than others is fine and should be done, but I am not willing to write off all investments in others simply because they are unable to come up with the resources on their own.
Communities where the latter is an option are not prime targets for the project I was referring to. If you're in a poor community, scattered over a large swath of rural Africa, and the first thing you need to do to get a clinic is to build a few thousand klicks of road to someplace where you can get vaccines, what potential do you think that you can leverage to get that done?
Also, have you actually been to Africa? I recommend visiting for a prolonged period several times. You might see it in a different perspective then.
Looks like you're just going to have to build that road then.
You are focusing on the immediate needs of people now, whereas I am focusing on the dysfunctionality that's going to continue into the future.
Freebies from the Western world aren't going to improve the lot of Africa. The only way their lot can be sustainably improved is by them reorganizing the way their communities work. No outsider can do that, and if they don't, no amount of external aid will help.
Cost-benefit calculations are about contingent facts, which may be different in different cases; they do not indict the very nature of activities such as charity. I too value that which is functional and creative, and I agree that simply giving people money creates harmful incentive problems, but that just means that specific charitable programs must be carefully evaluated for their actual effectiveness. Money is indeed a useful mechanism, but this doesn't mean that the default market outcome is the best possible; it would be awfully strange if deliberate altruism had no power whatsoever.
I think cost-benefit calculations usually take this kind of form. You know, "X is net bad under specific conditions A and B which usually obtain, unless C; however, ancillary considerations D, E, and F; therefore recommend Y until we get better evidence." Not: "X is bad and you're stupid for supporting it." Policy debates should not &c.
That is generally true. In extreme cases, however, things can get near black and white. The case I was responding to does seem such an extreme case to me.
I hardly think that linking to Robin Hanson is a good way to backup a criticism that someone is 'redrawing the sphere of moral concern in an unusual way'. Robin Hanson's ethics/moral concerns are among the most unusual I've encountered.
True.
I also think it is worth noting that although utilitarianism remains a bafflingly (to me) popular ethical position around here it is very unusual in the broader population. Broadly libertarian ethics are probably less unusual in the general population than strict utilitarian ethics.
I'm pretty sure the prevailing view here is actually some sort of consequentialist egoism, not utilitarianism in a sense recognizable to an ethicist. Planning a top-level post about that.
I'd rather see a definition than a label. Calling it 'consequentialist egoism rather than utilitarianism' is perhaps useful to professional or enthusiast ethical philosophers, but it doesn't convey much information to me. A list of properties used in the ethical system would be far more useful.
Agreed. Thus the planned top-level post.
I'm not a Randian Objectivist, nor do I insist on everything leading to libertarian policies.
You seem to have misinterpreted me based on a preconceived notion of what other things are usually said by people who say this sort of thing. But I'm not one of those people.
And this unoriginal bashing of a view not represented here is also boring.