The easiest way to promote altruism is to focus on helping the worst-off. But insofar as the world is just, this will often be people who are badly-off as a consequence of their own misbehavior. And so this kind of altruism can easily undermine justice.
That seems right, but at a global scope, the world is clearly not just, and so there’s not a conflict between altruism and justice.
eg Most of a human’s personal welfare depends on the country of their birth which is not due to their own behavior.
Within more limited scopes, individuals wealfare is much more loaded on their personal choices. And in those limited scopes, there does seem to be a conflict where trying to help the worst off disproportionately focuses on the least responsible.
“eg Most of a human’s personal welfare depends on the country of their birth which is not due to their own behavior.”
But it was dependent on their ancestors’ behavior. And so insofar as you view tribes/ethnic groups/countries as playing games with/against each other, then the same logic applies at that higher level.
Now you might reject that viewpoint, and take a purely individualist stance. But my claim above is (loosely, I haven’t made it precise yet) that the point of ethics is to move us beyond thinking of ourselves as individual units, so that we can make decisions as a larger-scale moral agent.
And from the perspective of the larger moral agent you’re instantiated within, there’s a big difference between people who were born in your home country and people born on other continents—because the former are part of that same moral agent to a much greater degree than the latter. (And yes, they may be worse at “being part of the moral superagent” than a foreigner would be. But this is all negotiated via Schelling points in games between millions of agents, so you can’t just pick and choose your coalition. You need an initiation ritual like a naturalization process or a judicial trial to change that coalition.) Analogously, some of your time-slices are less good at “being Eli” (according to your dominant identity narrative) than time-slices of some other people. But it’s still just for them to benefit or lose out based on the actions of your other time-slices.
(Written quickly on phone, please forgive infelicities of phrasing.)
It seems like we maybe have to decompose notions of moral patienthood and notions of moral agency.
Where a moral patient is someone who’s welfare value, and a moral agent is someone who you regard as responsible for their choices.
(This is already a fairly natural distinction, for me at least. I regard most mammals as moral patients, but mostly only humans as moral agents.)
But we run into problems when there are moral patients inside of, or under the care and responsibility of moral agents (that might or might not be moral patients in of themselves), because attending to the wellbeing of the inner moral patient entails violating the boundary of the larger moral agent or otherwise distorting just treatment of that agent.
Examples:
A person born into a country that enacted bad policies 50 years ago, and still hasn’t recovered.
A conscript to the military of an aggressor nation.
A child who is malnourished, because their parent spends all the money on booze.
(Naively, it’s good to intervene and feed that child, but that is effectively a subsidy to the parent’s drinking habit, if they tradeoff booze food for their kid even a little bit. It’s maybe bad decision theory to take care of the child because that gives the parent more leniency to not bother feeding them in the first place.)
I’m totally unwilling to write those people off because they happen to have been born into an unlucky situation. But it does seem like there’s some philosophy to figure out here about how to help those people without creating bad incentives for the moral agents that they’re contained within.
But we run into problems when there are moral patients inside of, or under the care and responsibility of moral agents (that might or might not be moral patients in of themselves), because attending to the wellbeing of the inner moral patient entails violating the boundary of the larger moral agent or otherwise distorting just treatment of that agent.
Yepp, this is a great way of putting it.
I’m totally unwilling to write those people off because they happen to have been born into an unlucky situation. But it does seem like there’s some philosophy to figure out here about how to help those people without creating bad incentives for the moral agents that they’re contained within.
Yeah, agree that we shouldn’t write them off, and that there’s some way to balance these two things. (One way I think about politics is that one faction has refused to consider “without creating bad incentives” and in response the other faction is now polarizing towards refusing to consider “help those people”. And we’ve now reached the point where these refusals commonly serve as vice signals on each side.)
Relatedly, my phrasing “the point of ethics” in my earlier message was too strong. I should have instead said something like “Although ethics has facets related to dealing with moral patients and other facets related to dealing with moral agents, the latter should generally have primacy, because (mis)aligning other moral agents is a big force multiplier (positively or negatively).”
That seems right, but at a global scope, the world is clearly not just, and so there’s not a conflict between altruism and justice.
eg Most of a human’s personal welfare depends on the country of their birth which is not due to their own behavior.
Within more limited scopes, individuals wealfare is much more loaded on their personal choices. And in those limited scopes, there does seem to be a conflict where trying to help the worst off disproportionately focuses on the least responsible.
“eg Most of a human’s personal welfare depends on the country of their birth which is not due to their own behavior.”
But it was dependent on their ancestors’ behavior. And so insofar as you view tribes/ethnic groups/countries as playing games with/against each other, then the same logic applies at that higher level.
Now you might reject that viewpoint, and take a purely individualist stance. But my claim above is (loosely, I haven’t made it precise yet) that the point of ethics is to move us beyond thinking of ourselves as individual units, so that we can make decisions as a larger-scale moral agent.
And from the perspective of the larger moral agent you’re instantiated within, there’s a big difference between people who were born in your home country and people born on other continents—because the former are part of that same moral agent to a much greater degree than the latter. (And yes, they may be worse at “being part of the moral superagent” than a foreigner would be. But this is all negotiated via Schelling points in games between millions of agents, so you can’t just pick and choose your coalition. You need an initiation ritual like a naturalization process or a judicial trial to change that coalition.) Analogously, some of your time-slices are less good at “being Eli” (according to your dominant identity narrative) than time-slices of some other people. But it’s still just for them to benefit or lose out based on the actions of your other time-slices.
(Written quickly on phone, please forgive infelicities of phrasing.)
Spitballing:
It seems like we maybe have to decompose notions of moral patienthood and notions of moral agency.
Where a moral patient is someone who’s welfare value, and a moral agent is someone who you regard as responsible for their choices.
(This is already a fairly natural distinction, for me at least. I regard most mammals as moral patients, but mostly only humans as moral agents.)
But we run into problems when there are moral patients inside of, or under the care and responsibility of moral agents (that might or might not be moral patients in of themselves), because attending to the wellbeing of the inner moral patient entails violating the boundary of the larger moral agent or otherwise distorting just treatment of that agent.
Examples:
A person born into a country that enacted bad policies 50 years ago, and still hasn’t recovered.
A conscript to the military of an aggressor nation.
A child who is malnourished, because their parent spends all the money on booze.
(Naively, it’s good to intervene and feed that child, but that is effectively a subsidy to the parent’s drinking habit, if they tradeoff booze food for their kid even a little bit. It’s maybe bad decision theory to take care of the child because that gives the parent more leniency to not bother feeding them in the first place.)
I’m totally unwilling to write those people off because they happen to have been born into an unlucky situation. But it does seem like there’s some philosophy to figure out here about how to help those people without creating bad incentives for the moral agents that they’re contained within.
Yepp, this is a great way of putting it.
Yeah, agree that we shouldn’t write them off, and that there’s some way to balance these two things. (One way I think about politics is that one faction has refused to consider “without creating bad incentives” and in response the other faction is now polarizing towards refusing to consider “help those people”. And we’ve now reached the point where these refusals commonly serve as vice signals on each side.)
Relatedly, my phrasing “the point of ethics” in my earlier message was too strong. I should have instead said something like “Although ethics has facets related to dealing with moral patients and other facets related to dealing with moral agents, the latter should generally have primacy, because (mis)aligning other moral agents is a big force multiplier (positively or negatively).”