It’s stressful living in America when you realize that every time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone.
Can you explain more about what you mean by this, exactly? If I’m killing several people a day, I’d really like to know about it.
By spending that money on yourself, instead of sending it to buy bags of rice for a famine-stricken region, or mosquito nets for malaria-ridden countries, or tin wood stoves, or water pumps, or water filters, or transparent plastic bottles, or latrines, or condoms, or any of the various simple and inexpensive supplies or devices that aid agencies are distributing around the world.
There are a lot of aid agencies that waste money; but there are some that don’t. I don’t know how much money it takes nowadays to save a life; the value keeps changing, and different studies biased in different ways conclude different things. But it’s certainly less than what I spend each month on coffee. It’s less than I could save each month by turning my heat down. It’s much less than I could make over the weekend by taking a second job.
It’s also true that many of the attempts to save lives are foiled by the people whose lives are at stake. Cultural conventions prevent people in one area prevents people from boiling their water, because drinking water that has been heated is believed to be a confession of weakness. In some places, people won’t believe in germs. In some places, the first people who do what the aid workers tell them to are poor people who hope to gain status by associating with foreigners; and this taints whatever it is as “something poor people do”. I remember someone saying they’d gone and built concrete latrines somewhere, and the people refused to use them, because of negative cultural implications of concrete. So they built wooden latrines that wouldn’t last, but that people would use. And the stories of aid workers who give people things that they don’t take care of and so break soon after the foreigners leave are numerous.
I never understood how this morality worked. The problem I see with this view is that you are double counting the value of money.
You work an hour and get $10, but the employer just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
You buy a latte and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
LatteShop pays LatteBoy $10 for an hour of work and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring him instead of sending it for aid
The $10 doesn’t leave the system and everyone who touches it just killed a whole slew of people because they sent it somewhere other than aid. Why are you carrying the moral burden?
Even if you did send it to aid you can blame them for charging $10 for their work instead of $9. (Or whatever company that is selling the rice, nets, stoves, filters, bottles, condoms.)
You could even blame the person receiving the aid for using the aid instead of giving it to someone less fortunate. Or using less of it. Or selling it for $11 and putting the extra money back into aid.
Somewhere in here something goes horribly wrong and it gets ridiculous. Where did I misstep?
EDIT: I really don’t want to give the impression that you shouldn’t give money or help people less fortunate than yourself. I think these are great things. I just don’t understand the jump from “I bought a latte” to “I killed people.”
It actually does. If you see wealth as zero-sum, then you start worrying about how to distribute it, as in the Zachary Baumkletterer reductio ad absurdum above (which was amazing).
However, if you understand capitalism and realize that wealth is positive-sum, and that when someone makes money, the world becomes richer, you can avoid making Zachary’s mistake. In other words, you can help people by creating more wealth, not just by reducing your own.
I agree that understanding capitalism and the fact that wealth distribution is not a zero sum game help avoid Zachary’s mistake. I actually thought that was the obvious moral of MrHen’s example but in retrospect its probably not sufficiently obvious to everyone.
In this chain of money changing hands, only you have a real moral choice. If your employer didn’t hire you and instead gave the $10 to aid, then it wouldn’t have had a service or produce to sell and therefore wouldn’t have gotten that $10 in the first place. Similarly for LatteShop.
But if you didn’t buy a latte, you would still have gotten the $10.
If your employer didn’t hire you and instead gave the $10 to aid, then it wouldn’t have had a service or produce to sell and therefore wouldn’t have gotten that $10 in the first place.
Okay… this makes some sense. I had to work it out like this before I understood it:
My employer hires me
I do work
Employer gets stuff
Employer sells stuff
Employer pays me
I kill people
But I don’t really think this addresses the problem. In this scenario, whoever bought the stuff my employer sold just killed a bunch of people. So… my original question gets changed to:
I work for an hour and get paid $10, but whoever bought the fruits of my labor just killed $10 worth of people
I buy the fruits of someone else’s labor and kill $10 worth of people
Obviously this is simplifying economy and labor and yada, yada. We could go into more detail, but unless you think the answer lies in those details I would rather not.
Yes, assuming that the fruits of your labor that was bought for $10 is another luxury (say a bottle of wine) instead of a necessity, then that person also killed $10 worth of people. Because suppose he had bought $10 worth of mosquito nets, then you could have worked as a mosquito net maker instead of a vintner, and you still would have gotten the $10. The two of you could have saved $20 worth of people, so not doing that is equivalent to each killing $10 worth of people.
I work for an hour and get paid $10, but whoever bought the fruits of my labor just killed $10 worth of people
They almost certainly would have anyway. I really don’t see why this matters. You’re (presumably) not trying to minimize aggregate sinfulness or anything like that, you’re trying to save lives. Therefore, you choose the action with the highest expected lives saved. It’s that simple.
Imagine a 1st world economy where nobody ever spends any money on aid. If you live in that hypothetical world you (anybody) could take $200 that is floating around and prevent a death (which is not the same as killing somebody but that’s a different point). Our world is somewhat like that. I don’t think things are as convenient as you’re implying.
(which is not the same as killing somebody but that’s a different point)
Actually, this is exactly the point. My comment is directly addressing an explanation for this claim:
[E]very time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone.
This claim was backed up with this paragraph:
By spending that money on yourself, instead of sending it to buy bags of rice for a famine-stricken region, or mosquito nets for malaria-ridden countries, or tin wood stoves, or water pumps, or water filters, or transparent plastic bottles, or latrines, or condoms, or any of the various simple and inexpensive supplies or devices that aid agencies are distributing around the world.
Your point is still very valid, which is why I went out of my way to say this:
EDIT: I really don’t want to give the impression that you shouldn’t give money or help people less fortunate than yourself. I think these are great things. I just don’t understand the jump from “I bought a latte” to “I killed people.”
Because everyone is. I’m assuming you meant that comment as saying something like the burden is diluted since so many people touch the money, but I don’t think that is valid.
That phrase did not mean to imply anything about diluted burdens. It is there to ask the question, “Wait, if you’re killing all of these people, isn’t everyone killing all of these people?” Your response seems to be, “Yes, they are.”
The followup question is: If one of the people who receives aid is included in the swath of killers? Theoretically, the recipient could have given the aid to someone else and that person could have lived. Instead, the recipient was selfish and chose to live by killing another person. Actually, everyone who could have received the aid but didn’t and died was killed by the one who did receive.
Possibly that “killing people” is connotationally a horrible unforgivable thing, but you (correctly) perceive that it’s a bad idea to regard letting people die as always a horrible unforgivable thing. Certainly that you’re disputing mere definitions.
I don’t understand a morality system can look at someone who is dying receive aid and blame them for the deaths of the people next to them when the aid ran out. Why in the world should they be given any moral responsibility in the situation?
Agreed. This is part of what I meant by “it’s a bad idea to regard letting people die as always a horrible unforgivable thing”; I also meant that even comfortable First Worlders wouldn’t necessarily do the most good by regarding themselves, or other comfortable First Worlders, as horrible people for acting suboptimally.
(In contexts like this, I see “moral responsibility” as purely instrumental: A’s moral responsibilities are just those things it would be expected-utility-maximizing to hold A responsible for. Ditto praise/blameworthiness and which actions to label as “killing”.)
I have not convinced myself that “drinking lattes is killing people” necessarily leads to “accepting aid is killing people.” I followed a path there, but I am assuming that people who believe “drinking lattes is killing people” don’t believe “accepting aid is killing people.” Where did I step differently?
Others are probably just not willing to bite the bullet of blaming people (if only connotationally) for accepting aid. Or they may be thinking about it instrumentally, like me, in which case the different reasonableness of the demands actually is relevant.
When you make a decision that results in fewer people living than might have lived, Phil Goetz calls that “killing a person”. If you are an aid recipient, then giving up your aid and your life to save another person will not change the number of people who live, so it doesn’t count as “killing a person”.
If, however, you have the means to save two people with the aid you’re receiving, then you’re “killing a person” by not sacrificing your life—assuming your life counts as much as anyone else’s.
I suppose another point to add is that “aid” is worth “one life.” The actual specific life doesn’t matter as long as one life is being redeemed with the aid.
If you do this, than the value of aid could be forecasted to include scenarios where the cost of aid decreases or the amount available to spend on aid increases. It would be okay to spend $10 to get $20 and then turn it into 2 lives saved. So, the question becomes 1 life now, 2 lives later.
Okay, yeah, this makes it work. The trick is valuing $10 at one life. If you are getting less than one life for $10 than you are getting robbed. Or, more accurately, you are saying that whatever you did get for $10 is worth the same as a life.
$10 is just a number. We could put in $X.
So… does this mean anything? If 1 life is $X and a random material thing costs $X, than of course they cost the same. By definition, they have the same dollar value.
Does the question become how much moral value can you get per dollar value? In that case, the best moral value per dollar is spending all of your dollars on lives saved. This throws us back into the field of value systems, but in a way that makes sense.
Okay, so does this actually answer my original question?
I never understood how this morality worked. The problem I see with this view is that you are double counting the value of money.
You work an hour and get $10, but the employer just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
You buy a latte and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
LatteShop pays LatteBoy $10 for an hour of work and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring him instead of sending it for aid
The $10 doesn’t leave the system and everyone who touches it just killed a whole slew of people because they sent it somewhere other than aid. Why are you carrying the moral burden?
It answers the question by saying, since $10 can be spent to save 1 life but you are instead spending the money on a latte, you value a latte as much as you value 1 life. But this is a tautology. The next step is saying, “Therefore, you are killing someone by not saving them and buying a latte instead.”
The implication could be that if X equals Y in one value system than X equals Y in all value systems. But this is obviously false.
The implication could be that you should spend all dollars in a way that maximizes moral value. Or, more accurately, it is more moral to trade dollars for higher moral value. The inverse would be that it is less moral to trade dollars for lower moral value.
I can see the jump from this to the statement, “[E]very time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone.”
The reason my initial criticism actually fails is because a latte costs $10 and the time it takes to earn $10. By the time I get another $10, someone dies.
The next person who touches the $10 has the same moral weight because time is ticking away. This is why we have the question of asking if 1 life now is better than 2 lives later. If the particular 1 life now was included in the 2 lives later the answer would be trivial. The actual question is, 1 life now, or 2 lives and 1 death later.
So the specific answer to my question:
$10 can be translated into time.
I can earn $10 with one hour-value.
The moral value of a life will expire in one hour.
$10 can save a life or buy a latte.
So, with one hour-value I can save a life or buy a latte.
If I don’t save the life, it will expire.
The next person to touch the $10 doesn’t matter because the real value being spent behind the scenes is the hour-value.
Tada! There was an answer.
And it was so close to something Dustin said. If only he had said “one hour” instead of “nothing.”
Part of it is that person let someone else die (theoretically) to save his own life. You let someone die for the Latte.
Note: I drink the Latte (occasionally), but it’s because I think I can be more effective on the big stuff and that not saving is less bad than killing (as we both agree).
Part of it is that person let someone else die (theoretically) to save his own life. You let someone die for the Latte.
He didn’t let someone else die. He let a whole lot of someone elses die. I get the point of there being a difference between him and the latte, but I still think something weird is going on here.
The point is that if, counterfactually, you chose to act to reduce death and suffering in the world today you could save lives. Others could do the same, but both you and they are refraining from doing so. And your post (talking about “money in the system”) sounds like it is confusing money as a medium of exchange for the productive value of your labor (which has a certain market value).
I get the point. What I don’t understand is why the point ends up at:
[E]very time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone.
A weird part of this sentiment is that it has nothing to do with haircuts or Starbucks. If I stop going to movies, I don’t stop killing people. If I spend all of my money not killing people, I don’t stop killing people. No matter how I act, I will always be killing people.
In addition, everyone is always killing people. The people dying are killing people. This is obviously wrong but I don’t see how the beginning parts about drinking Starbucks can be true but the latter parts about everyone killing people can be false.
And your post (talking about “money in the system”) sounds like it is confusing money as a medium of exchange for the productive value of your labor (which has a certain market value).
$10 is an easy way to talk about value. The specifics of monetary systems and their relation to labor isn’t really relevant to the point. (At least, as far as I can tell.)
Under conventional legal and ethical principles, not providing someone with aid that may extend their life is not generally considered the same as killing them. Your personal ethical code may see it that way but you will find many people disagree with you (me included).
I agree. Anyway you also need to consider the “don’t feed stray animals” principle. Will saving lives in the Third World ultimately cause more suffering and misery?
I was a bit surprised to hear that Ethiopia’s population has doubled since the famine there in the 1980s. Where does it end?
I was a bit surprised to hear that Ethiopia’s population has doubled since the famine there in the 1980s. Where does it end?
Expected to double again by 2050.
I think it is a very fair point that by alleviating suffering today we may be compounding it in the future. A rebuttal might be that it is ‘merely’ a matter of doing the right thing today as well as in the future.
I see a couple problems with this: First, is it fair for us (meaning westerners) to leave a problem like this for our descendants to solve?
Second, it seems that these poor folks are growing in numbers much faster than our numbers are growing. So the burden of feeding them may end up getting worse and worse until it’s no longer possible.
I suppose it might be argued in response that if and when the Singularity comes, we will be able to address these other problems. Still, I’m not sure it’s fair to actually bet our descendants’ futures on this.
Does our “solving it” in the present lead to its exacerbation in the future? How will Ethiopians manage to control their population? Will our aid today directly cause 20 million people to starve in 2050?
On your points:
Is it us westerners’ or the Ethiopians’ problem to solve? I mean they’ve so far made it ~2.5 times worse than We are the world.
At some point their birth rate will either have to equal their death rate (+ immigration) or their starvation will not be solvable by anyone or anything short of a Singularity.
The way I see it, the primary responsibility is on Ethiopians. We may alleviate, but we cannot cure.
GDP per capita is a better predictor of fertility than access to contraceptives.
The rejection is only as flimsy as the contraceptive programs are effective, on the margins where increased funding might make a difference. They may not be very effective at all while additional children are still profitable.
“Socioeconomic development is considered the main cause of a decline over time in the benefits of having children and a rise in their costs.”
Well I agree that to the extent that the “aid” we are talking about is contraception, then my “don’t feed stray animals” objection clearly doesn’t apply.
Fair enough. I agree with mattnewport as well, though I’d say that ‘providing someone with aid that may extend their life’ is probably a moral obligation to some extent, in a reasonable extrapolation of my and your revealed values.
I don’t know how much money it takes nowadays to save a life; the value keeps changing, and different studies biased in different ways conclude different things.
According to GiveWell it costs something on the order of $1,000 to save a life.
Also according to Bill Gates. But that calculation is wrong in an important way. In fact (AFAICT) it currently costs something on the order of $1000 x N to save some large number of lives N via any single method whose efficacy has low variance in the number of lives saved.
If you’re willing to use a lot of different methods and only fund them up to some relatively low limit, you can save a lot more expected lives per dollar—but the cheap methods aren’t always scalable due to (e.g.) not enough people with an easily cured fatal disease, and if you’re spending enough money the costs of finding all of the cheap unscalable methods may be fairly high.
If you’re willing to accept a high variance, like p=0.9 of saving no one and p=0.1 of saving tons of people, you can save a lot more expected lives per dollar—but you’re a lot more susceptible to error here, since these methods often don’t have nearly as many data points that show p is really 0.1 and not 0.001.
Can you explain more about what you mean by this, exactly? If I’m killing several people a day, I’d really like to know about it.
By spending that money on yourself, instead of sending it to buy bags of rice for a famine-stricken region, or mosquito nets for malaria-ridden countries, or tin wood stoves, or water pumps, or water filters, or transparent plastic bottles, or latrines, or condoms, or any of the various simple and inexpensive supplies or devices that aid agencies are distributing around the world.
There are a lot of aid agencies that waste money; but there are some that don’t. I don’t know how much money it takes nowadays to save a life; the value keeps changing, and different studies biased in different ways conclude different things. But it’s certainly less than what I spend each month on coffee. It’s less than I could save each month by turning my heat down. It’s much less than I could make over the weekend by taking a second job.
It’s also true that many of the attempts to save lives are foiled by the people whose lives are at stake. Cultural conventions prevent people in one area prevents people from boiling their water, because drinking water that has been heated is believed to be a confession of weakness. In some places, people won’t believe in germs. In some places, the first people who do what the aid workers tell them to are poor people who hope to gain status by associating with foreigners; and this taints whatever it is as “something poor people do”. I remember someone saying they’d gone and built concrete latrines somewhere, and the people refused to use them, because of negative cultural implications of concrete. So they built wooden latrines that wouldn’t last, but that people would use. And the stories of aid workers who give people things that they don’t take care of and so break soon after the foreigners leave are numerous.
I never understood how this morality worked. The problem I see with this view is that you are double counting the value of money.
You work an hour and get $10, but the employer just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
You buy a latte and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring you instead of sending it for aid
LatteShop pays LatteBoy $10 for an hour of work and just killed $10 worth of people by hiring him instead of sending it for aid
The $10 doesn’t leave the system and everyone who touches it just killed a whole slew of people because they sent it somewhere other than aid. Why are you carrying the moral burden?
Even if you did send it to aid you can blame them for charging $10 for their work instead of $9. (Or whatever company that is selling the rice, nets, stoves, filters, bottles, condoms.)
You could even blame the person receiving the aid for using the aid instead of giving it to someone less fortunate. Or using less of it. Or selling it for $11 and putting the extra money back into aid.
Somewhere in here something goes horribly wrong and it gets ridiculous. Where did I misstep?
EDIT: I really don’t want to give the impression that you shouldn’t give money or help people less fortunate than yourself. I think these are great things. I just don’t understand the jump from “I bought a latte” to “I killed people.”
When your employer pays you $10, it’s not as simple as him having $10 and giving it to you. You, in part, created that $10 out of nothing.
Otherwise, what would be the point of hiring you in the first place?
That doesn’t really detract from his point.
It actually does. If you see wealth as zero-sum, then you start worrying about how to distribute it, as in the Zachary Baumkletterer reductio ad absurdum above (which was amazing).
However, if you understand capitalism and realize that wealth is positive-sum, and that when someone makes money, the world becomes richer, you can avoid making Zachary’s mistake. In other words, you can help people by creating more wealth, not just by reducing your own.
Right, yeah, I ended up coming to a similar conclusion. (I think. Your input would be valued. :D )
I agree that understanding capitalism and the fact that wealth distribution is not a zero sum game help avoid Zachary’s mistake. I actually thought that was the obvious moral of MrHen’s example but in retrospect its probably not sufficiently obvious to everyone.
I wasn’t trying to detract from his point. I was merely offering a clarification.
In this chain of money changing hands, only you have a real moral choice. If your employer didn’t hire you and instead gave the $10 to aid, then it wouldn’t have had a service or produce to sell and therefore wouldn’t have gotten that $10 in the first place. Similarly for LatteShop.
But if you didn’t buy a latte, you would still have gotten the $10.
Okay… this makes some sense. I had to work it out like this before I understood it:
My employer hires me
I do work
Employer gets stuff
Employer sells stuff
Employer pays me
I kill people
But I don’t really think this addresses the problem. In this scenario, whoever bought the stuff my employer sold just killed a bunch of people. So… my original question gets changed to:
I work for an hour and get paid $10, but whoever bought the fruits of my labor just killed $10 worth of people
I buy the fruits of someone else’s labor and kill $10 worth of people
Obviously this is simplifying economy and labor and yada, yada. We could go into more detail, but unless you think the answer lies in those details I would rather not.
Yes, assuming that the fruits of your labor that was bought for $10 is another luxury (say a bottle of wine) instead of a necessity, then that person also killed $10 worth of people. Because suppose he had bought $10 worth of mosquito nets, then you could have worked as a mosquito net maker instead of a vintner, and you still would have gotten the $10. The two of you could have saved $20 worth of people, so not doing that is equivalent to each killing $10 worth of people.
Yeah, it finally clicked. The key point I was missing was that $10 costs time for me to obtain. By the time I obtain it, more people die.
Upvoted for clarity.
They almost certainly would have anyway. I really don’t see why this matters. You’re (presumably) not trying to minimize aggregate sinfulness or anything like that, you’re trying to save lives. Therefore, you choose the action with the highest expected lives saved. It’s that simple.
The puzzle has nothing to do with lives saved. The puzzle has to do with assigning moral responsibility.
But elsewhere I figured out my missing piece.
Presumably by providing goods or services to other people who chose not to give their money to aid.
Right at the beginning, when you failed to distinguish between killing and failing to save. These are not morally equivalent.
Imagine a 1st world economy where nobody ever spends any money on aid. If you live in that hypothetical world you (anybody) could take $200 that is floating around and prevent a death (which is not the same as killing somebody but that’s a different point). Our world is somewhat like that. I don’t think things are as convenient as you’re implying.
Actually, this is exactly the point. My comment is directly addressing an explanation for this claim:
This claim was backed up with this paragraph:
Your point is still very valid, which is why I went out of my way to say this:
The point I’m responding to is:
Because everyone is. I’m assuming you meant that comment as saying something like the burden is diluted since so many people touch the money, but I don’t think that is valid.
Ah, okay. Thanks for clarifying.
That phrase did not mean to imply anything about diluted burdens. It is there to ask the question, “Wait, if you’re killing all of these people, isn’t everyone killing all of these people?” Your response seems to be, “Yes, they are.”
The followup question is: If one of the people who receives aid is included in the swath of killers? Theoretically, the recipient could have given the aid to someone else and that person could have lived. Instead, the recipient was selfish and chose to live by killing another person. Actually, everyone who could have received the aid but didn’t and died was killed by the one who did receive.
Something is going wrong here. What is it?
Possibly that “killing people” is connotationally a horrible unforgivable thing, but you (correctly) perceive that it’s a bad idea to regard letting people die as always a horrible unforgivable thing. Certainly that you’re disputing mere definitions.
I don’t understand a morality system can look at someone who is dying receive aid and blame them for the deaths of the people next to them when the aid ran out. Why in the world should they be given any moral responsibility in the situation?
Agreed. This is part of what I meant by “it’s a bad idea to regard letting people die as always a horrible unforgivable thing”; I also meant that even comfortable First Worlders wouldn’t necessarily do the most good by regarding themselves, or other comfortable First Worlders, as horrible people for acting suboptimally.
(In contexts like this, I see “moral responsibility” as purely instrumental: A’s moral responsibilities are just those things it would be expected-utility-maximizing to hold A responsible for. Ditto praise/blameworthiness and which actions to label as “killing”.)
Fair enough.
I have not convinced myself that “drinking lattes is killing people” necessarily leads to “accepting aid is killing people.” I followed a path there, but I am assuming that people who believe “drinking lattes is killing people” don’t believe “accepting aid is killing people.” Where did I step differently?
Others are probably just not willing to bite the bullet of blaming people (if only connotationally) for accepting aid. Or they may be thinking about it instrumentally, like me, in which case the different reasonableness of the demands actually is relevant.
Also, there’s what Nisan said.
When you make a decision that results in fewer people living than might have lived, Phil Goetz calls that “killing a person”. If you are an aid recipient, then giving up your aid and your life to save another person will not change the number of people who live, so it doesn’t count as “killing a person”.
If, however, you have the means to save two people with the aid you’re receiving, then you’re “killing a person” by not sacrificing your life—assuming your life counts as much as anyone else’s.
I suppose another point to add is that “aid” is worth “one life.” The actual specific life doesn’t matter as long as one life is being redeemed with the aid.
If you do this, than the value of aid could be forecasted to include scenarios where the cost of aid decreases or the amount available to spend on aid increases. It would be okay to spend $10 to get $20 and then turn it into 2 lives saved. So, the question becomes 1 life now, 2 lives later.
Okay, yeah, this makes it work. The trick is valuing $10 at one life. If you are getting less than one life for $10 than you are getting robbed. Or, more accurately, you are saying that whatever you did get for $10 is worth the same as a life.
$10 is just a number. We could put in $X.
So… does this mean anything? If 1 life is $X and a random material thing costs $X, than of course they cost the same. By definition, they have the same dollar value.
Does the question become how much moral value can you get per dollar value? In that case, the best moral value per dollar is spending all of your dollars on lives saved. This throws us back into the field of value systems, but in a way that makes sense.
Okay, so does this actually answer my original question?
It answers the question by saying, since $10 can be spent to save 1 life but you are instead spending the money on a latte, you value a latte as much as you value 1 life. But this is a tautology. The next step is saying, “Therefore, you are killing someone by not saving them and buying a latte instead.”
The implication could be that if X equals Y in one value system than X equals Y in all value systems. But this is obviously false.
The implication could be that you should spend all dollars in a way that maximizes moral value. Or, more accurately, it is more moral to trade dollars for higher moral value. The inverse would be that it is less moral to trade dollars for lower moral value.
I can see the jump from this to the statement, “[E]very time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you’re killing someone.”
The reason my initial criticism actually fails is because a latte costs $10 and the time it takes to earn $10. By the time I get another $10, someone dies.
The next person who touches the $10 has the same moral weight because time is ticking away. This is why we have the question of asking if 1 life now is better than 2 lives later. If the particular 1 life now was included in the 2 lives later the answer would be trivial. The actual question is, 1 life now, or 2 lives and 1 death later.
So the specific answer to my question:
$10 can be translated into time.
I can earn $10 with one hour-value.
The moral value of a life will expire in one hour.
$10 can save a life or buy a latte.
So, with one hour-value I can save a life or buy a latte.
If I don’t save the life, it will expire.
The next person to touch the $10 doesn’t matter because the real value being spent behind the scenes is the hour-value.
Tada! There was an answer.
And it was so close to something Dustin said. If only he had said “one hour” instead of “nothing.”
Part of it is that person let someone else die (theoretically) to save his own life. You let someone die for the Latte.
Note: I drink the Latte (occasionally), but it’s because I think I can be more effective on the big stuff and that not saving is less bad than killing (as we both agree).
He didn’t let someone else die. He let a whole lot of someone elses die. I get the point of there being a difference between him and the latte, but I still think something weird is going on here.
The point is that if, counterfactually, you chose to act to reduce death and suffering in the world today you could save lives. Others could do the same, but both you and they are refraining from doing so. And your post (talking about “money in the system”) sounds like it is confusing money as a medium of exchange for the productive value of your labor (which has a certain market value).
I get the point. What I don’t understand is why the point ends up at:
A weird part of this sentiment is that it has nothing to do with haircuts or Starbucks. If I stop going to movies, I don’t stop killing people. If I spend all of my money not killing people, I don’t stop killing people. No matter how I act, I will always be killing people.
In addition, everyone is always killing people. The people dying are killing people. This is obviously wrong but I don’t see how the beginning parts about drinking Starbucks can be true but the latter parts about everyone killing people can be false.
$10 is an easy way to talk about value. The specifics of monetary systems and their relation to labor isn’t really relevant to the point. (At least, as far as I can tell.)
Under conventional legal and ethical principles, not providing someone with aid that may extend their life is not generally considered the same as killing them. Your personal ethical code may see it that way but you will find many people disagree with you (me included).
I agree. Anyway you also need to consider the “don’t feed stray animals” principle. Will saving lives in the Third World ultimately cause more suffering and misery?
I was a bit surprised to hear that Ethiopia’s population has doubled since the famine there in the 1980s. Where does it end?
Expected to double again by 2050.
I think it is a very fair point that by alleviating suffering today we may be compounding it in the future. A rebuttal might be that it is ‘merely’ a matter of doing the right thing today as well as in the future.
I see a couple problems with this: First, is it fair for us (meaning westerners) to leave a problem like this for our descendants to solve?
Second, it seems that these poor folks are growing in numbers much faster than our numbers are growing. So the burden of feeding them may end up getting worse and worse until it’s no longer possible.
I suppose it might be argued in response that if and when the Singularity comes, we will be able to address these other problems. Still, I’m not sure it’s fair to actually bet our descendants’ futures on this.
Does our “solving it” in the present lead to its exacerbation in the future? How will Ethiopians manage to control their population? Will our aid today directly cause 20 million people to starve in 2050?
On your points:
Is it us westerners’ or the Ethiopians’ problem to solve? I mean they’ve so far made it ~2.5 times worse than We are the world.
At some point their birth rate will either have to equal their death rate (+ immigration) or their starvation will not be solvable by anyone or anything short of a Singularity.
The way I see it, the primary responsibility is on Ethiopians. We may alleviate, but we cannot cure.
That’s a flimsy rejection, since Phil mentioned donating to programs that provide contraceptives in the Third World.
GDP per capita is a better predictor of fertility than access to contraceptives.
The rejection is only as flimsy as the contraceptive programs are effective, on the margins where increased funding might make a difference. They may not be very effective at all while additional children are still profitable.
“Socioeconomic development is considered the main cause of a decline over time in the benefits of having children and a rise in their costs.”
“http://www.jstor.org/pss/20058399″
Well I agree that to the extent that the “aid” we are talking about is contraception, then my “don’t feed stray animals” objection clearly doesn’t apply.
Fair enough. I agree with mattnewport as well, though I’d say that ‘providing someone with aid that may extend their life’ is probably a moral obligation to some extent, in a reasonable extrapolation of my and your revealed values.
According to GiveWell it costs something on the order of $1,000 to save a life.
Also according to Bill Gates. But that calculation is wrong in an important way. In fact (AFAICT) it currently costs something on the order of $1000 x N to save some large number of lives N via any single method whose efficacy has low variance in the number of lives saved.
If you’re willing to use a lot of different methods and only fund them up to some relatively low limit, you can save a lot more expected lives per dollar—but the cheap methods aren’t always scalable due to (e.g.) not enough people with an easily cured fatal disease, and if you’re spending enough money the costs of finding all of the cheap unscalable methods may be fairly high.
If you’re willing to accept a high variance, like p=0.9 of saving no one and p=0.1 of saving tons of people, you can save a lot more expected lives per dollar—but you’re a lot more susceptible to error here, since these methods often don’t have nearly as many data points that show p is really 0.1 and not 0.001.