= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MichaelVassar comments on So you say you're an altruist... - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (106)
Can you imagine a world where everyone followed this advice? I don't really know what would happen but it seems possible if all disposable income is given to people who don't have an income in regions that don't have an economy that this would choke economies and bringing the entire world population down to a subsistence level.
I'm pretty sure that if everyone did what their explicit morality told them to we would have endless global religious wars, but that doesn't mean that a world where people who build sane explicit moralities for themselves wouldn't make the world better by following those moralities in so far as they can.
Well I had to reread the original article as it was written more than a year ago...
But what the speaker was suggesting was if people agree to his scenario where giving up all but subsistence income to save 10 lives, then they should in fact now give every dollar they make beyond a basic subsistence level to charities that would distribute it to places were people want for food or clean water.
So it was not proposing a "middle-ground"; at least in my reading of it. You could almost extrapolate that he believes it immoral to posses above a subsistence level if there are people in the world still starving.
My point was that some people starve because they live in broken economies, and funneling money out of functioning economies into broken ones may not be very optimal in its performance against the speaker's assumed preferences.
ETA: I shouldn't say that is actually the speaker's viewpoint. I think he was trying to challenge his audience's beliefs about their own morality more than suggest a particular one.