I was pondering that article about Zachary Baumkletterer again.
Summary: Zachary Baumkletterer is that guy who had so much empathy for the starving people in the world and felt so guilty about being so much more fortunate than them, that he voluntarily lowered himself to their standard of living, and donated the rest of his income and posessions to charity (which charity? that's critically important!) Unfortunately, that meant that he was starving himself to death.
One way to resolve this situation would have been for Zachary's boss to give him a budget specifically for food, explaining that he must use all of it on food, and must not give any of it away, etc. This budget qualifies as a business expense, since it directly affects Zachary's productivity. Or if the boss really can't afford to give him any raise at all, then he could allocate part of Zachary's current salary for a food budget.
Another option would have been for his boss to threaten to fire him if he refuses to eat enough to stay healthy and productive.
Another option would be for the people who know Zach to invite him to talk and eat with them. He would have had a hard time refusing an opportunity to talk with other people about his mission.
Another option would have been for the people who know him to offer to donate two dollars to charity for every one dollar that Zach spent on himself, up to a certain limit.
Spoiler: But noone, not even Zachary himself, thought of any of these options. They sent him to a mental institution instead. This story fills me with rage. Lots of rage. Even though I'm pretty sure it's fictional.
Two facts remain though:
1) Zachary's strategy is obviously suboptimal from a utilitarian perspective. If Zachary starves himself to death, then he won't be able to help anyone else at all.
2) If everyone in the world followed Zachary's strategy, of lowering their standard of living to match the poorest people in the world, and donated the rest of their income to helping raise the standard of living of the poorest people in the world, then the world would be... a whole lot better than it is now. Though of course there are still some ways that this scenario could go wrong.
Anyway, if Zachary had thought of any of the points I mentioned here, and actually suggested them to people, allowing himself to stay alive without compromising his ethics... then I would have considered him a hero. I would have considered him a role model. Someone who I would like to be more like. Someone who I would actively try to be more like. Someone who I could compare my own performance with, to see how well I'm doing.
But the Zachary that was actually described in the story was... a misguided fanatic. An example of why you sometimes need to resist your sense of empathy. An excuse to be lazy and apathetic. An excuse to be selfish.
Anyway, personally, I think I'll just stick with utilitarianism, and instead of trying to lower my standard of living as much as I can possibly get away with, just out of a sense of guilt, I'll try to maximize the net utility of my actions, even if this means sometimes spending money on luxuries that I could easily live without. For example, in cases where not buying the thing would cost too much willpower. I'll try not to let my sense of empathy and guilt cause me to do stupid and counter-productive things.
I know I'm 5 years late on this but on the offchance someone sees this, I just want to mention I found Yvain's/Scott Alexander's essay on the subject incredibly useful*.
The tl;dr: Use universalizability for your actions moreso than direct utilitarianism. His suggestion is 10% for various reasons, mainly being a round number that's easy to coordinate around and have people give that exact number. Once you've done that, the problems that would be solved by everyone donating 10% of their income to efficient charities are the responsibility of other people who...
During a recent discussion with komponisto about why my fellow LWers are so interested in the Amanda Knox case, his answers made me realize that I had been asking the wrong question. After all, feeling interest or even outrage after seeing a possible case of injustice seems quite natural, so perhaps a better question to ask is why am I so uninterested in the case.
Reflecting upon that, it appears that I've been doing something like Eliezer's "Shut Up and Multiply", except in reverse. Both of us noticed the obvious craziness of scope insensitivity and tried to make our emotions work more rationally. But whereas he decided to multiply his concern for individuals human beings by the population size to an enormous concern for humanity as a whole, I did the opposite. I noticed that my concern for humanity is limited, and therefore decided that it's crazy to care much about random individuals that I happen to come across. (Although I probably haven't consciously thought about it in this way until now.)
The weird thing is that both of these emotional self-modification strategies seem to have worked, at least to a great extent. Eliezer has devoted his life to improving the lot of humanity, and I've managed to pass up news and discussions about Amanda Knox without a second thought. It can't be the case that both of these ways to change how our emotions work are the right thing to do, but the apparent symmetry between them seems hard to break.
What ethical principles can we use to decide between "Shut Up and Multiply" and "Shut Up and Divide"? Why should we derive our values from our native emotional responses to seeing individual suffering, and not from the equally human paucity of response at seeing large portions of humanity suffer in aggregate? Or should we just keep our scope insensitivity, like our boredom?
And an interesting meta-question arises here as well: how much of what we think our values are, is actually the result of not thinking things through, and not realizing the implications and symmetries that exist? And if many of our values are just the result of cognitive errors or limitations, have we lived with them long enough that they've become an essential part of us?