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SaidAchmiz comments on On Caring - Less Wrong
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I accept all the argument for why one should be an effective altruist, and yet I am not, personally, an EA. This post gives a pretty good avenue for explaining how and why. I'm in Daniel's position up through chunk 4, and reach the state of mind where
and find it literally unbearable. All of a sudden, it's clear that to be a good person is to accept the weight of the world on your shoulders. This is where my path diverges; EA says "OK, then, that's what I'll do, as best I can"; from my perspective, it's swallowing the bullet. At this point, your modus ponens is my modus tollens; I can't deal with what the argument would require of me, so I reject the premise. I concluded that I am not a good person and won't be for the foreseeable future, and limited myself to the weight of my chosen community and narrowly-defined ingroup.
I don't think you're wrong to try to convert people to EA. It does bear remembering, though, that not everyone is equipped to deal with this outlook, and some people will find that trying to shut up and multiply is lastingly unpleasant, such that an altruistic outlook becomes significantly aversive.
Understanding the emotional pain of others, on a non-verbal level, can lead in at least two directions, which I've usually seen called "sympathy" and "personal distress" in the psych literature. Personal distress involves seeing the problem as (primarily, or at least importantly) as one's own. Sympathy involves seeing it as that person's. Some people, including Albert Schweitzer, claim(ed) to be able to feel sympathy without significant personal distress, and as far as I can see that seems to be true. Being more like them strikes me as a worthwhile (sub)goal. (Until I get there, if ever - I feel your pain. Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Hey I just realized - if you can master that, and then apply the sympathy-without-personal-distress trick to yourself as well, that looks like it would achieve one of the aims of Buddhism.
If you do this, would not the result be that you do not feel distress from your own misfortunes? And if you don't feel distress, what, exactly, is there to sympathize with?
Wouldn't you just shrug and dismiss the misfortune as irrelevant?
If you could switch off pain at will would you consider the tissue damage caused by burning yourself irrelevant?
I would not. This is a fair point.
Follow-up question: are all things that we consider misfortunes similar to the "burn yourself" situation, in that there is some sort of "damage" that is part of what makes the misfortune bad, separately from and additionally to the distress/discomfort/pain involved?
Consider a possible invention called a neuronic whip (taken from Asimov's Foundation series). The neuronic whip, when fired at someone, does no direct damage but triggers all of the "pain" nerves at a given intensity.
Assume that Jim is hit by a neuronic whip, briefly and at low intensity. There is no damage, but there is pain. Because there is pain, Jim would almost certainly consider this a misfortune, and would prefer that it had not happened; yet there is no damage.
So, considering this counterexample, I'd say that no, not every possible misfortune includes damage. Though I imagine that most do.
No need for sci-fi.
Much of what could be called damage in this context wouldn't necessarily happen within your body, you can take damage to your reputation for example.
You can certainly be deluded about receiving damage especially in the social game.
That is true; but it's enough to create a single counterexample, so I can simply specify the neuronic whip being used under circumstances where there is no social damage (e.g. the neuronic whip was discharged accidentally, no-one know Jim was there to be hit by it).
Yes. I didn't mean to refute your idea in any way and quite liked it. Forgot to upvote it though. I merely wanted to add a real world example.
Let's say you cut your finger while chopping vegetables. If you don't feel distress, you still feel the pain. But probably less pain: the CNS contains a lot of feedback loops affecting how pain is felt. For example, see this story from Scientific American. So sympathize with whatever relatively-attitude-independent problem remains, and act upon that. Even if there would be no pain and just tissue damage, as hyporational suggests, that could be sufficient for action.