You are equivocating on the word fuzzy. There's a contrast between doing something because it feels good and doing something because it actually helps others. Contrast serving food at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, which makes one feel good vs. serving food on some random day in June, which is probably more helpful to the soup kitchen. The first act provides "fuzzy." The second provides more social utility.

None of this asserts that maintaining relationships is not valuable or real. The argument is that transformational relationships have less payout per effort than other social improvement acts (like donating lots of money).

And one point of anti-Aid groups is that international donors are so consumed with "trendy" types of aid that they crowd out both African self-improvement and foreign aid that might help. For more on Dead Aid in particular, you might find this developmental economist's take interesting.

That story sounds suspiciously nice.

Given the choice between being a 'good person' and fostering local relationships of various fuzzy impacts, or saving the lives of ten thousand people, would you really choose the former over the latter? Do you think that actually makes you a good person?

Note that this is not merely a hypothetical; that is effectively the choice the lawyer is making when he works in soup kitchen instead of donating money.

Hi, I really enjoyed your essay. I also enjoyed the first half of the comments. The question it brought me to was: whether or not there is no higher utilty than transformation? I was wondering if I could hear your opinion on this matter.

It seems to me if transformation of external reality is the primer assesment of utility, then humans should ratioanlity question their emotivism based on pratical solutions. But what if the abiilty to transform external reality was not teh primer assesement of utility? Recently I have been immersed in Confucian thinkinng, which places harmony as the pinnicale of importance. If you do not mind I would like to share some thoughts from this perspetive.

When faced with a problem it seems that as humasn our inital solution is to increase the complexity of our interaction with said aspect of the external world through expanding scale, organization, detail, of our involvement with that portion of reality in hopes of transforming that reality to our will. Is this logical? Yes, we have clearly demonstrated a potential to transform reality, but have any of our transformations justify the rationale that transformation will eventually lead to a uptoian plateau? Or to put it another way, does the transformation of one good/bad scenario ever completely deplete the nessecity for further transformation? If anything, it seems that our greatest acheivements of transformation have only created an even more dire need for transformation. The creation of nuclear power/weapons was supposed to end war and provide universal energy; now we are faced with the threat of nuclear waste and global anhilation. Genetically engineering food was supposed to feed the world; in ameriac we have created a obessity epidemic, and the modern agricultral practices of the world walk a fine line between explosive yeild and ecological destruction.

I was somewhat hesitant to say it because of a preceived emotivism of this blog, but what I am questioning is the discourse of progress. Transformation is progress. You say:

"In general, any debate about whether something is "good" or "bad" is sketchy, and can be changed to a more useful form by converting the thing to an action and applying utilitarianism." But is that not soley based on a emotive value of progress?

From the harmonizing perspective emotivism in itself contains utilty because it is in our common irratioanlity that humans can truly relate. If we did institutionally preceed arbitrary value wtih a logic of transformational utility would this not marganilze a huge portion of humanity that is not properly equipped to rationalize action in such a way? It legitimizes intellectual dominace. In my opinion this is no different than if we were to say that whoever wins in an offical arm wrestle/ foot race has the correct values. That may seem completely absurd to you, but I would argue only because you are intellectually rather than physically dominate.

It should be noted that my argument is based on the premise that there are graduated levels of intellegence, and the level required to rationalize one potential transformation over another is sequesterd from the lower tiers.

I also write under the assumption that the discourse of progress (I think I called it utiltiy of transformation?) is emotive not rational in the sense that it is clearly the most effective cogntive paradigm for human evolution. Before my words come back to bite me, my concepts of "progress" and "evolution" are very different here. Progress is power to transform external reality (niche construction), evolution is transformation of the human structure (I will not comment on whether such orgnaic transformation is orthogenic or not)

Your comment tries to answer the question, "How can I make myself more charitable?" rather than the question, "Now that I'm very charitable, how can I maximize my impact?"

If someone is not a very charitable person, yes some learned empathy might fix that, and hands-on experience might be the best way to do that. But such a person would not be asking the first question above.

If someone is already a very charitable person, then they should be concerned with how much of an impact their actions are actually having - then, the work on the beach is inefficient as compared to the thousands of dollars.

I agree with the idea that efficiency should be taken into account when considering charitable actions, but I do not know if I agree with your conclusion of what is most efficient. Alleviating a problem does not cure it. While paying for malaria nets, cleaning up the beach, donating to charities alleviates real social issues, it does not address the issue of their causation. In my opinion, what is most efficient is not concentrating on recuperation, but attacking the sickness. Without changing the causal conditions the disease will continue to grow endlessly no matter how much you suppress it. This is why even after going through successful rehab, addicts will experience relapse if reintroduced into their original environments because nothing has changed to prevent the same symptoms from arising again.
What then is the cause of social travesties? I would argue a lack of high-level empathy. In my opinion the question then becomes does financial donation increase a person's empathetic capacity? I do not think it does. It definitely increase the amount of pure capital being pushed at a problem, but i do not think that necessarily cures the problem. I know that some of the poorest schools in America have recently gotten state of the art equipment, smart rooms, i-pads, new schools, but their test scores are not changing. That is because the problem is the values being pushed into the kids not the amount of money. What does promote empathy? Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent sociologist who is best known for the idea of habitus. The general idea of habitus is that cognitive and emotional patterns are shaped by human physicality. Aristole's virtue ethics represent the idea that morality is developed through habitus. Mencius, the second most famous confucian moralist, also had notions of empathy being like a muscle that must be strengthened within people. From this theoretical framework the type of charity proposed in the essay above would be inefficient. While I cannot for certain say what action/ environments cultivate empathy/morality; I think it is a safe bet to say that working to make more money and spending money does not. if that was the case, then the most successful business men and women would also be the most empathetic people. No, it seems more likely that empathy would be developed through committing time to people and places that are not readily identified with the actor's self. Meaning that the lawyer taking an hour each day to work on the beach would increase his virtue/empathetic capacity, making that working more valuable than the thousands of dollars that he could have earned in that time seeing as there is no way to buy morals.

I am not sure if my idea is correct. If the author of this essay writes from a fundamentally economic frame, I write from a fundamentally sociological/anthropological/confucian one. The correct answer is probably a mediation of the two depending on type of charity and circumstance. Thanks for your thoughtful writing.

Genes give rise to the sociality in the first place; this is one of the paradoxes of trying to fight one's genes, as it were. It's hairy meta-ethics: where do your desires and morals come from and what justifies them?

-In some cases, human beings have evolved in such fashion as to think that they are doing X for prosocial reason Y, but when human beings actually do X, other adaptations execute to promote self-benefiting consequence.

No, again you're not following the precise lines. An adaptation doesn't necessarily benefit one's 'self': it's supposed to help one's genes or one's genes in another person (or even just a gene at the expense of all the others). Kin selection, right? Fisher's famous "I would not sacrifice myself to save a brother, but would for 2 brothers, 4 cousins...'

So again, this corrupted hardware business is not identical with selfishness or self-interest, however you seem to be using either.

If a file is corrupted with noise, or a portion of RAM is corrupted by some cosmic rays, is that file or portion of memory now filled with evil? No; it is simply not what it was intended to be. Whether there are any moral connotations beyond that depends on additional details and considerations.

For example, Robin Hanson (or maybe it was Katja Grace?) has argued that the proper response to discovering the powerful and pervasive missions of one's evolved subconscious - aims that may not be shared by the conscious - is not to regard the subconscious as one's enemy corrupting one's actions towards its own goals, but as simply part of oneself, to embrace its goals as perfectly valid as the conscious mind's goals. Other LWers disagree and think the subconscious biases are just that, biases to be opposed like any other source of noise/bias/corruption.

(I hope you see how this Hansonian argument does not fit in with a simplistic 'human nature is good' or 'evil' take on the idea that the mind has hidden motives. It's pretty rare for anyone to seriously argue that just because human nature is flawed, we should give up on morality entirely and become immoral evil monsters.)

I now return to your premise that "humans run on corrupted hardware." It is a new way to phrase an old idea: that humans are by nature evil. It is an idea I disagree with.

The hardware is corrupted, that's not the same as evil. The corruptedness can easily lead to 'nice' or 'good' prosocial actions - 'I am doing this soup kitchen work because I am a good person' (as opposed to trying to look good or impress this potential ally or signal nurturing characteristics to a potential mate etc.).