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DSherron comments on Some reservations about Singer's child-in-the-pond argument - Less Wrong
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Comments (120)
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.
Well, that's just making a trade-off. If you like strawberry ice cream, and you like chocolate ice cream, but you can't afford to eat both, and you like chocolate ice cream more than strawberry ice cream, you won't eat strawberry ice cream even though you like it.
So what would you call it if, in the above scenario, I ate some strawberry ice-cream? Assume that my desires are consistant over time, and that my desiring-parts have been reconciled without contradiction, i.e. that this is not a case of akrasia. Am I describing something impossible? Or am I just behaving irrationally?
Yes, if all the assumptions you made hold (also, no declining marginal utility for any ice cream flavour, no preference for variety for variety's sake, and similar), then I would call eating strawberry ice-cream irrational.
(How likely these assumptions are to be a reasonable approximation to a scenario in real life, that's another story; for example, people get bored when they always do the same things.)
Okay, thanks. So the 'should' of 'you should save the children (if you want to)' is a 'should' of rationality. Now do I have any reason at all to be rational in this way, or do I just have reason to get the thing I want (i.e. by reason of wanting it).
I mean that if I want X, and this is a reason to get X, do I have another reason to get X, namely that to do so would be rational and to fail to do so would be irrational?