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lackofcheese comments on On Caring - Less Wrong
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The point is that the fact that someone happens to be your close friend seems like the wrong reason to care about them.
Let's say, for example, that:
1. If X was my close friend, I would care about X
2. If Y was my close friend, I would care about Y
3. X and Y could not both be close friends of mine simultaneously.
Why should whether I care for X or care for Y depend on which one I happen to end up being close friends with? Rather, why shouldn't I just care about both X and Y regardless of whether they are my close friends or not?
Why do you think so? It seems to me the fact that someone is my close friend is an excellent reason to care about her.
I think it depends on what you mean by "care".
If you mean "devote time and effort to", sure; I completely agree that it makes a lot of sense to do this for your friends, and you can't do that for everyone.
If you mean "value as a human being and desire their well-being", then I think it's not justifiable to afford special privilege in this regard to close friends.
By "care" I mean allocating a considerably higher value to his particular human compared to a random one.
Yes, I understand you do, but why do you think so?
I don't think the worth of a human being should be decided upon almost entirely circumstantial grounds, namely their proximity and/or relation to myself. If anything it should be a function of the qualities or the nature of that person, or perhaps even blanket equality.
If I believe that my friends are more valuable, it should be because of the qualities that led to them being my friend rather than simply the fact that they are my friends. However, if that's so then there are many, many other people in the world who have similar qualities but are not my friends.
I assume you would pay your own mortgage. Would you mind paying my mortgage as well?
I can't pay everyone's mortgage, and nor can anyone else, so different people will need to pay for different mortgages.
Which approach works better, me paying my mortgage and you paying yours, or me paying your mortgage and you paying mine?
If you care equally for two people, your money should go to the one with the greatest need. It is very unlikely that in a country with many mortgage-payers, the person with the greatest need is you. So you should be paying down people's mortgages until the mortgages of everyone in the world leave them no worse than you with respect to mortgages; only then should you then pay anything to yourself.
And even if it's impractical to distribute your money to all mortgage payers in the world, surely you could find a specific mortgage payer who is so bad off that paying the mortgage of just this one person satisfies a greater need than paying off your own.
But you don't. And you can't. And everyone doesn't and can't, not just for mortgages, but for, say, food or malaria nets. You don't send all your income above survival level to third-worlders who need malaria nets (or whatever other intervention people need the most); you don't care for them and yourself equally.
Yes, if I really ought to value other human beings equally then it means I ought to devote a significant amount of time and/or money to altruistic causes, but is that really such an absurd conclusion?
Perhaps I don't do those things, but that doesn't mean I can't and it doesn't mean I shouldn't.
You can say either
You appear to be claiming 2 and denying 1. However, I don't see a significant difference between 1 and 2; 1 and 2 result in exactly the same actions by you and it ends up just being a matter of semantics.
As usual, the word "better" hides a lot of relevant detail. Better for whom? By what measure?
Shockingly, in at least some cases by some measures, though, it works better for us if I pay your debt and you pay my debt, because it is possible for a third party to get much, much better terms on repayment than the original borrower. In many cases, debts can be sold for pennies on the dollar to anyone except the original borrower. See any of these articles
Ah. It seems we have been talking about somewhat different things.
You are talking about the worth of a human being. I'm talking about my personal perception of the value of a human being under the assumption that other people can and usually do have different perceptions of the same value.
I try not to pass judgement of the worth of humans, but I am quite content with assigning my personal values to people based, in part, on "their proximity and/or relation to myself".
I'm not entirely sure what a "personal perception of the value of a human being" is, as distinct from the value or worth of a human being. Surely the latter is what the former is about?
Granted, I guess you could simply be talking about their instrumental value to yourself (e.g. "they make me happy"), but I don't think that's really the main thrust of what "caring" is.
The "worth a human being" implies that there is one, correct, "objective" value for that human being. We may not be able to observe it directly so we just estimate it, with some unavoidable noise and errors, but theoretically the estimates will converge to the "true" value. The worth of a human being is a function with one argument: that human being.
The "personal perception of the value of a human being" implies that there are multiple, different, "subjective" values for the same human being. There is no single underlying value to which the estimates converge. The personal perception of a value is a function with two arguments: who is evaluated and who does the evaluation.
So, either there is such a thing as the "objective" value and hence, implicitly, you should seek to approach that value, or there is not.
I don't see any reason to believe in an objective worth of this kind, but I don't really think it matters that much. If these is no single underlying value, then the act of assigning your own personal values to people is still the same thing as "passing judgement on the worth of humans", because it's the only thing those words could refer to; you can't avoid the issue simply by calling it a subjective matter.
In my view, regardless of whether the value in question is "subjective" or "objective", I don't think it should be determined by the mere circumstance of whether I happened to meet that person or not.
So, for example, you believe that to a mother the value of her own child should be similar to that of a random person anywhere on Earth -- right? It's a "mere circumstance" that this particular human happens to be her child.
Perhaps I have a limited amount of caring available and I am only able to care for a certain number of people. If I tried to care for both X and Y I would go over my limit and would have to reduce the amount of caring for other people to make up for it. In fact, "only X or Y could be my close friend, but not both" may be an effect of that.
It's not "they're my close friend, and that's the reason to care about them", it's "they're under my caring limit, and that allows me to care about them". "Is my close friend" is just another way to express "this person happened, by chance, to be added while I was still under my limit". There is nothing special about this person, compared to the pool of all possible close friends, except that this person happened to have been added at the right time (or under randomly advantageous circumstances that don't affect their merit as a person, such as living closer to you).
Of course, this sounds bad because of platitudes we like to say but never really mean. We like to say that our friends are special. They aren't; if you had lived somewhere else or had different random experiences, you'd have had different close friends.
I think I would state a similar claim in a very different way. Friends are allies; both of us have implicitly agreed to reserve resources for the use of the other person in the friendship. (Resources are often as simple as 'time devoted to a common activity' or 'emotional availability.') Potential friends and friends might be indistinguishable to an outside observer, but to me (or them) there's an obvious difference in that a friend can expect to ask me for something and get it, and a potential friend can't.
(Friendships in this view don't have to be symmetric- there are people that I'd listen to them complain that I don't expect they'd listen to me complain, and the reverse exists as well.)
I think that it's reasonable to call facts 'special' relative to counterfacts- yes, I would have had different college friends if I had gone to a different college, but I did actually go to the college I went to, and actually did make the friends I did there.
That's a solid point, and to a significant extent I agree.
There are quite a lot of things that people can spend these kinds of resources on that are very effective at a small scale. This is an entirely sufficient basis to justify the idea of friends, or indeed "allies", which is a more accurate term in this context. A network of local interconnections of such friends/allies who devote time and effort to one another is quite simply a highly efficient way to improve overall human well-being.
This also leads to a very simple, unbiased moral justification for devoting resources to your close friends; it's simply that you, more so than other people, are in a unique position to affect the well-being of your friends, and vice versa. That kind of argument is also an entirely sufficient basis for some amount of "selfishness"--ceteris paribus, you yourself are in a better position to improve your own well-being than anyone else is.
However, this is not the same thing as "caring" in the sense So8res is using the term; I think he's using the term more in the sense of "value". For the above reasons, you can value your friends equally to anyone else while still devoting more time and effort to them. In general, you're going to be better able to help your close friends than you are a random stranger on the street.
The way you put it, it seems like you want to care for both X and Y but are unable to.
However, if that's the case then So8res's point carries, because the core argument in the post translates to "if you think you ought to care about both X and Y but find yourself unable to, then you can still try to act the way that you would if you did, in fact, care about both X and Y".
"I want to care for an arbitrarily chosen person from the set of X and Y" is not "I want to care for X and Y". It's "I want to care for X or Y".