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kalium comments on Some reservations about Singer's child-in-the-pond argument - Less Wrong
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Comments (120)
I don't find this reservation very compelling. Just say you're wearing a nice suit as well as expensive shoes, and you're almost there.
A more meaningful difference to me is whether there's a clear endpoint. If you ruin your suit saving the kid in the pond, well, there probably aren't any other drowning children in sight and you can go home and feel good about yourself. But as soon as I acknowledge an obligation to help people I have never met, there is nowhere I can stop and still feel decent. It is far, far easier to live with myself if I choose never to give anything than if I save ten lives and then decide that saving an eleventh would cost me too much.
Living with this constant moral pressure is unlikely to make you most effective. A better alternative is to budget your money in advance, and give yourself a modest amount that you are free to use as you please. Jeff Kaufman's Keeping Choices Donation Neutral argues for an approach along these lines. If I remember correctly, Toby Ord makes a similar point in an early unpublished essay.
This is an excellent objection, and very similar to what I thought when I read the post. Here's some more thoughts in the same direction.
Let's say that after diving into the pond to save the child, and ruining all of my clothes in the process (which still don't add up to $2000; no complete set of clothes I own adds up to that much), the very next day, I am walking across the same pond (in new clothes), and the kid's drowning again.
So of course I save him again and am out a bunch of money/inconvenience again.
And then the next day another kid's drowning there.
And the next day.
At this point, most of my clothes are ruined, so I'm pretty upset. But more than that: I'm angry. Who the heck is letting these kids play in the pond? Where are their parents? Shouldn't someone put up a giant sign that says "DON'T PLAY IN THE POND, YOU IDIOT KIDS", or a fence, or an electrified fence? Is relying on strangers walking across the pond and ruining their clothes to save these hapless kids really the best solution to this problem? Why am I on the hook for this?
At that point, I might complain to the police, say, or the city government, apprise them of the pond situation, and then go to work by a different route, avoiding the pond henceforth.
The analogy should be clear. There are children whom I can save by donating large sums of money per child to get them mosquito nets? Why am I on the hook for this? This will never end. Are there not more systematic ways of dealing with the whole situation? Some sort of mosquito-net mass production program? Eradicate the mosquitoes somehow? Stop having children?
Essentially, the intuition here is that there is someone, somewhere (possibly many someones in different places), shirking responsibility or otherwise behaving in a morally blameworthy fashion, the consequence of which behavior is kids continually being placed in life-threatening situations, which I ostensibly then have the moral obligation to save them from. Well, the end result of me having a policy of simply going ahead and fulfilling this supposed obligation is that there will always be more kids to save, forever. This does not seem like a positive result for anyone, with the possible exception of the aforementioned obligation-shirkers.
If you make this particular change to the example, then the thing you're trading off against your new shoes and clothes isn't "saving a child's life" but "saving one day of a child's life". It's reasonable to value that rather less (which is not to say that it's reasonable to value it less than your shoes).
Make it another child (as you do in the next paragraph) and it's more to the point.
But. Part of the reason why "keep saving these children, one by one, at great personal cost" might not be the right answer is that, as you point out, there are other things that are likely to be more effective and efficient, and other people better placed than you to address the problem, who will probably do so if you let them know.
None of that applies in the case of people dying of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, so far as I can see. There aren't obviously better approaches than malaria nets, which is why AMF is allegedly one of the most effective charities in good done per unit cost. And, while there are certainly people better placed to address the problem than you are, just telling them "hey, there are people dying of malaria" probably won't do much to make them do it.
I try in general to replace the "lives saved" metric with the "QALYs gained" metric for precisely this reason; maximizing lives saved has some very strange properties. (My go-to example is that it leads me to prefer to avoid curing a condition that causes periodic life-threatening seizures, preferring to treat each seizure as it occurs.)
You can get around that particular example by disvaluing lives lost, rather than valuing lives saved. Of course I agree that actually QALYs or something similar are a far better metric.
It's not that I think there are more effective solutions to "save these kids from malaria" than AMF, it's that the problem of "there are kids to be saved from malaria" is continual and open-ended. There will (it seems) always be kids to be saved from malaria, or something or other. The idea that I am morally obligated to keep doing this, forever, is what seems incorrect.
To view it from another perspective: one of the reasons I would save the drowning kid from the pond is that I want to live in a world where if something bad happens to someone, like "oh no, I am drowning in a pond", nearby people who are able to help, do so, even at some (not entirely unreasonable) one-time expense. However, I don't want to live in a world where bad things happening to people is just a fact of life, and other people end up having to reduce themselves to pauper status to continually fix the bad things.
Saving the child is a causal step toward the former world. Donating to AMF seems to be a causal step toward the latter world. Show me a way to fix the problem forever, and I might be interested. "Eradicate all the mosquitoes" seems like a possibility (we did it here in the U.S.). "Stop having children" might be another (though I'm not sure what would be the best way to accomplish that).
Historically, societies with high child mortality have also had high birthrates. If the demographic transition model is right, letting the child die is likely to encourage a continued high birthrate, and saving the child may lower the birthrate.
As far as I can tell, decline in birth rates is caused by availability of contraception and some other factors related to industrialization and technological growth, not by a lowered death rate per se, which by itself simply leads to population growth. Wikipedia also suggests that the demographic transition model may not apply to less-developed countries with widespread disease (AIDS, bacterial infections) such as many in Africa.
What we should be looking for is ways to discourage people from having children, at all, in places and situations where we expect that the kids are likely to need such outside "saving" as discussed in the OP.
"None of that applies in the case of people dying of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, so far as I can see. There aren't obviously better approaches than malaria nets, which is why AMF is allegedly one of the most effective charities in good done per unit cost. And, while there are certainly people better placed to address the problem than you are, just telling them "hey, there are people dying of malaria" probably won't do much to make them do it."
Well, but then the more important question becomes "how can you convince these people to address the problem".
Not necessarily more important. (If it turns out that actually there isn't any realistic way to convince them to address the problem, then "ok, so what else can we do?" is a higher-value question.)
Well worth addressing, though, for sure. Getting governments and very rich people to spend more on helping the neediest parts of the world might be a very valuable activity.
How would you know there isn't any realistic way to impact them using your resources? Donation to a think-tank seems one possible option.
Probably hard to know with much confidence. So I suppose the question might be (in so far as this makes sense) objectively unimportant but subjectively important,
It's more accurate to think of bed nets as one fork of the malaria eradication problem. Since malaria parasites need both primary (mosquitoes) and intermediate hosts (infected humans or other vertebrates) in order to reproduce, anything that breaks transmission of the disease or kills its vectors is also going to help reduce its prevalence, and insecticide-treated netting is one of the more cost-effective ways of doing both; it's not the only one, but it is simple and parallelizable enough to lend itself to charitable funding. Reading about previous successful eradication efforts might be helpful if you're interested in vector control more generally.
Last I heard, the AMF and similar organizations were aiming to eliminate malaria in Africa within this decade. That sounds a little ambitious to me, but even if that goal's not met it's certainly not the open-ended problem you're painting it as.
If that's true, I think they absolutely should advertise that fact strongly, as that seems to me to be one of the most persuasive reasons to donate. "You can save a child's life!" and "We are aiming to fix this problem forever and you can help" are very different.
You're not "on the hook" or anything of the sort. You're not morally obligated to save the kids, any more than you're morally obligated to care about people you care about, or buy lunch from the place you like that's also cheaper than the other option which you don't like. But, if you do happen to care about saving children, then you should want to do it. If you don't, that's fine; it's a conditional for a reason. Consequentialism wins the day; take the action that leads most to the world you, personally, want to see. If you really do value the kids more than your clothes though, you should save them, up until the point where you value your clothing more (say it's your last piece), and then you stop. If you have a better solution to save the kids, then do it. But saying "it's not my obligation" doesn't get you to the world you most desire, probably.
Well, unless what you happen to value is discharging your obligations, in which case the whole consequentialist/deontologist divide fades away altogether.
Right, that's the thought that motivated the "probably" at the end. Although it feels pretty strongly like motivated cognition to actually propose such an argument.
Possibly vaguely relevant
This sounds tautological. I would be reasonably sure I knew what you were saying if not for that line, which confuses me.
I make a relevant rule-consequentialist argument here.
It is tautological, but it's something you're ignoring in both this post and the linked reply. If you care about saving children as a part of a complex preference structure, then saving children, all other things being equal, fulfills your preferences more than not saving those children does. Thus, you want to do it. I'm trying to avoid saying you should do it, because I think you'll read that in the traditional moral framework sense of "you must do this or you are a bad person" or something like that. In reality, there is no such thing as "being a bad person" or "being a good person", except as individuals or society construct the concepts. Moral obligations don't exist, period. You don't have an obligation to save children, but if you prefer children being saved more than you prefer not paying the costs to do so then you don't need a moral obligation to do it any more than you need a moral obligation to get you to eat lunch at (great and cheap restaurant A) instead of (expensive and bad restaurant B).
Taboo "moral obligation". No one (important) is telling you that you're a bad person for not saving the children, or a good person for doing so. You can't just talk about how you refuse to adopt a rule about always saving children; I agree that would be stupid. No one asked you to do so. If you reach a point (and that can be now) where you care more about the money it would take to save a life than you do about the life you could save, don't spend the money. Any other response will not fulfill your preferences as well (and yours are the only ones that matter). Save a few kids, if you want, but don't sell everything to save them. And sure, if you have a better idea to save more kids with less money then do it. If you don't, don't complain that no one has an even better solution than the one you're offered.
I suspect that part of the problem is that you don't have a mental self-image as a person who cares about money more than children, and admitting that there are situations where you do makes you feel bad because of that mental image. If this is the case, and it may not be, then you should try to change your mental image.
Note: just because I used the term preferences does not equate what I'm saying to any philosophical or moral position about what we really value or anything like that. I'm using it to denote "those things that you, on reflection, really actually want", whatever that means.
Yeah, agree with almost everything you say in the first two paragraphs. Your overall points, as I read them, are not new to me; mostly I was confused by what seemed to me a strange formulation. What I thought you were saying and what I am now pretty sure you are saying are the same thing.
Some quibbles:
Well, no comment on who's important and who's not, but I definitely read some posters/commenters here as saying that people who save children are good people, etc. That's not to say I am necessarily bothered by this.
It seems mistaken to say that I (or anyone) care about money as such. Money buys things. It's more like: I care about some things that money can buy (books, say? luxury food products?) more than I care about other things that money can buy (the lives of children in Africa, say). In any case, I try not to base my decisions on a self-image; that seems backwards.
P.S. I have to note that your comments don't seem to address what I said in the comment I linked (but maybe you did not intend to do so). That comment does speak directly to what my preferences in fact are, and what actions of mine I think would lead to their satisfaction.
So you said that if you want to save children, you should do it (where 'should' shouldn't be heard as a moral imperative or anything like that). Suppose I do want to save children, and therefore (non-morally) should save them, but I don't. What do you call me or my behavior?
Akrasia?
That's qualitatively the same as you wanting to work but actually ending up spending the whole afternoon on TVTropes or whatnot, or wanting to stop smoking but not doing so, as far as I can tell.
Hmm, that's a good answer. But akratic cases seem to me to be at least a little bit different: in the case of akrasia, I want to keep working but I also clearly want to read TVTropes (otherwise, why would I be tempted?). And so it's not as if I'm just failing to do what I want, I'm just doing what I want less instead of what I want more.
Now that I put it like that...I'm starting to wonder how akrasia is even a coherent idea. What could it mean for my desire to read TVTropes to overwhelm my desire to work except that I want to read TVTropes more? And if I want to read TVTropes more than I want to work, in what sense am I making a mistake?
And in the case of giving money to save children, you want the children to be saved but you also want to keep your money to spend it on other stuff.
It can described as different parts of you, or different time-slices of you, wanting different things: i.e., what you-yesterday wanted is different from what you-today wish you-yesterday had done: maybe you now regret spending all afternoon reading TVTropes rather than working.
Sorry, I was thinking of a crazier kind of situation. I'm thinking of a situation where you want to save the kids, and this is your all-things-considered preference. There are other things you want, but you've reflected and you want this more than anything else (and lets say you're not self-deceived about this). It follows then that you should save the kids. But say you don't, what do we call that? And I want to grant straight off that there may be some kind of impossibility in my description. Only, there probably should be no impossibility here, otherwise I'm at a loss as to how the word 'should' is being used.
Thanks for the link, I'll think this over.
Relevant parable: The Upstream Story.
Does GiveWell take "acting upstream" into account in its assessment of charity effectiveness?
The link is just a google search which doesn't give an obvious source for a parable.
Some versions of the parable
There's something to these concerns (see the first and third bullet points here), but I believe that the broad picture is that if donors to AMF didn't step in then the children wouldn't be covered by mosquito nets. That said, I think that your concerns do reduce AMF's expected value somewhat.
I don't own a suit anywhere near that expensive, and I don't think that most people in the developed world do either. Do you?
Because of diminishing marginal utility, the more you donate, the greater the personal cost becomes. The personal cost of a pair of shoes is a lot higher when you can't afford to replace it than it is for most people in the developed world at the margin. So the common sense intuition in Singer's hypothetical starts to break down progressively more as you donate more
This relates to my post, which is about the personal cost per life saved being a lot higher than in Singer's hypothetical.
No, I don't own a suit at all, but there are many other possible examples. Perhaps instead I am wearing a watch that my mother gave to me before she died and it has great sentimental value, or perhaps I have some document, hidden away in an inner pocket, that would be expensive to replace or whose destruction risks getting me fired. The exact details don't seem that important. I don't happen to have either of these items, any more than I have shoes worth over $20, but it is not too hard to imagine.
It's true that, by the point I have made my own life as unpleasant or unsafe as that of the people I am trying to help, diminishing marginal utility means I can definitely stop without guilt. Realistically, I am not going to go that far. I am not a saint, and if I accept the obligation but stop giving earlier I will feel guilty and hypocritical and awful about doing so.
I gave the Unger example at the end of my post.
I agree with Pablo.
My post is relevant to triaging with respect to different altruistic efforts.
Alternatively, one could give up the obligation.
Which is what I do. Singer has a point, and argues it well; he makes it live. And yet I find myself unmoved, and answer Singer's modus ponens with modus tollens. I make few charitable donations, and those I have made have been to things I fortuitously had some personal connection with.
This is not a recommendation to anyone else to do the same, just a statement that it is possible to refuse the chalice. I will not make of myself a slave to an ethical system. Look where it got George Price. Look where it fictionally gets Superman.
It (in that fiction) gets him enabling the transition from our present (frankly rather rubbish) world to a glorious future of peace and plenty for all. Not so bad, if you find fictional evidence compelling.
How Superman is treated in that strip is how we treat our machines. We run an electricity generator for years, stopping it only for the minimal time necessary for maintenance, and when it is worn out or obsolete, take it apart for scrap. Of course it is fine to treat a (non-sentient) machine like that. That is what we make the machines for. But if reasoning leads to the conclusion that we should treat ourselves like that, then I conclude that the reasoning is broken, even if I don't know where it went wrong.
You may well be right about the real world. But in the fictional world of that SMBC comic, it seems to me that (miserable Superman + billions of people living in peace and prosperity) is plausibly an outcome that even Superman might prefer to (happy Superman + billions of people suffering war, poverty, disease, etc.).
In other words, I don't think your fictional example is good support for your thesis. Which is too bad, because (like much else at SMBC) it's a funny and thought-provoking comic.
Happy Superman + billions of people living in peace and prosperity is better than both. Some hypotheticals should be fought.
In the hypothetical world, Superman brings the whole planet to properity and then... he has a problem to find a job, and then he ends up working at the museum.
Why exactly is the person who saved the whole planet required to work? Did the humanity meanwhile evolve beyond the use of "thank you"? How about just asking some volunteers to donate 0.1% of their monthly income to Superman? If just one person in a few thousands agrees, Superman can retire happily.
The problem with the comix story is not just the extreme altruism, but that humanity appears unable to cooperate on Prisonners' Dilemma with the Superman. (I am not saying that's necessarily an incorrect description of the humanity. Just a sad one.)
I agree that some hypotheticals should be fought. But it seems to me that you're objecting to the basic premise of the strip and also trying to use it as fictional evidence.
In the fictional world depicted there, how do you get to happy Superman + happy billions?
In our actual world, how do you get to (if I'm understanding correctly the analogy you want to draw) comfortable first-worlders not needing to sacrifice anything + less malaria, starvation, etc., in the poorer parts of the world?
(From the other things you've said in this thread it seems like you're actually happy to get to comfortable first-worlders not needing to sacrifice anything + starvation and misery in the developing world. Fair enough; your values are what they are and I'm not going to try to change them. But then what does the hypothetical outcome (happy Superman + happy billions) have to do with anything?)
I am not using the strip as evidence of anything. The strip is just an illustration of a certain imaginary situation, and implicitly poses the question, is it a good one, or a bad one? An answer to which must consider what alternatives are on offer. The strip itself presents Superman's original behaviour, and his revised mission. But while reality has limits, hard choices, and problems without attainable solutions, fiction does not.
If Superman can fight crime retail, and then fight poverty wholesale, why should he not instead create the means of fighting poverty wholesale? Well, in canon, because he is not known for his brains. All he can really do is hit things very hard. No matter, after the "This began to wear on the hero" frame, introduce some genius superhero to point this out to Superman. The genius can do the inventing while Superman helps with the grunt work of building it, and humanity gets muon fusion engines decades earlier. My first fanfic.
In the same way as the author: by imagining it. The question is, why do you choose to imagine only the two scenarios in the strip, and reject the legitimacy of imagining the third?
Not happy, but I'm not willing to level the peaks of civilisation to fill in the troughs.
It's a result I think we would prefer to either of the others. In the real world, the question is how to get there. Distributing anti-malarial nets is all very well, but as SaidAchmiz has been saying, there needs to also be a larger strategy.
Then at least one of us is confused.
If you're just pointing to the strip as an illustration of something bad, then I disagree about its badness (even from hypothetical-Superman's vantage point): the strip shows Superman putting up with something pretty bad, but achieving something good for it, and I think even hypothetical-Superman would agree that the overall outcome is a good one.
Once you start arguing about what alternatives there might have been within the fiction, and saying "while reality has limits ... fiction does not", well, it seems like you're saying "It's bad to ask the fortunate few to sacrifice their interests for the sake of the miserable many, and we can see that because in my reimagining of the fictional world of this comic Superman does this but -- so I decree -- doesn't need to", and I don't see what you're gaining by appealing to the comic.
You're welcome to imagine anything you like. I just don't see the point of saying "So-and-so is bad; see, here's an imaginary situation a bit like so-and-so, in which I've decided what's possible and what isn't, and it turns out to be a bad situation".
Well, supposedly AMF thinks the nets are part of a larger strategy, and IIRC the Gates Foundation is trying to wipe out malaria. But, in any case, I don't see how to get from "there should be a larger strategy" to "it's OK for me not to do anything concrete". Of course it might be OK for you not to do anything concrete, but what I don't see is why the fact that there ought to be a larger strategy is any support for not doing anything concrete.
If I can imagine being at a switch deciding whether a train will kill five people or one, I can also imagine everyone getting off the train and the train derailing where it doesn't kill anybody. But that would defeat the whole point of imagining the train in the first place.
In the original comics, Superman invented things that were far ahead of even modern technology; including a series of robot duplicates that were visually indistinguishable from himself (not as powerful, of course, but he occasionally dressed one of them up as Clark Kent in order to maintain his disguise). In fact, super-intelligence was supposed to be one of his powers.
Exactly why he never produced a range of android butlers, or otherwise advanced technology, is a mystery to me. The only possible reason that I can think of is that the authors wanted to keep the world's visible technology levels more-or-less familiar to their readers.
He is certainly always able to think at the same speed he can do everything else. eg. Clark can write a Daily Prophet article in seconds, leaving the keyboard smoking. Even with only an IQ of, say 130 he should be comfortably ahead of any mere human for the purpose of achieving any particular intellectual task. Spending 10,000 subjective hours on something does wonders for achieving expert performance.
Personally, I find there's a difference between picking a percentage of my income to give away and letting homeless people move into my house. I would not do the latter.
For people who enjoy giving, there are ways to avoid or minimize these sorts of guilty feelings. For example, some religious folk (perhaps unwittingly) use tithing as a sort of a schelling fence to prevent themselves from feeling bad about not giving more.
I don't think I've ever worn anywhere near $2300's worth of clothes at the same time. In fact, I'm not even sure I've ever worn $2300's worth of anything at all (not counting money in the debit card in my wallet) in the past few years -- my netbook cost about €300 when I bought it several years ago.
Fair enough, I haven't either and I definitely didn't choose the best example there, but my reply to JonahSinick downthread addresses this:
Yes, I could imagine some weird situation where I can dive into a pond but only by destroying $2300's worth of value in the process -- but such a situation would be so far removed from the situations I usually deal with in my daily life that I'm not at all confident about whether I would feel obligated to save the child.
(Yes, I know in principle I could say this about any thought experiment, but...)