So how do I accept that other people need my money more without giving up on being happy myself?
Personally, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m not perfectly altruistic...even though I might wish for strangers to be perfectly altruistic. Even if you are a utilitarian, that doesn’t mean your “utility function” is utilitarian.
I might estimate that giving $100 to the AMF does about as much good as being vegan for a year, so if I decided to go ahead with being vegan I would decrease my annual donations by $100 and allocate another $100 to spend on myself
If you had a utility function (which you don’t, really, since you are human) it wouldn’t work this way. If Veganism generate positive utils, and $100 donations generate positive utils, you would do both, rather than one or the other...unless there was some weird interaction effect whereby donating $100 made veganism less satisfying or vice versa. I suppose technically guilt alleviation does create an interaction effect...but you created this interaction yourself, by mentally deciding that one good deed makes up for not doing another.
But my point is that if you take messy emotions like guilt out of the equation, “trading” one good deed for another doesn’t really make sense. If you instead accept that you are selfish and disregard guilt, the thought process might look more like this:
1) I’m selfish and want resources for myself and my loved ones. However, I’m also altruistic, and there are diminishing returns to spending on myself—once I control at least X resources, it pleases me better to give all the rest of my money to these other people.
2) Eating meat pleases me, but killing animals displeases me more, therefore I will not eat meat.
The utility of each separate action is considered separately—without the confound of guilt atonement, there is no interaction between these two decisions.
Of course, there is no rule saying that you have to behave as if you didn’t have emotions such as guilt...I just thought I’d point out how one might balance selfishness against altruism if guilt weren’t a factor, since that knowledge might help to encourage altruism without guilt as a motivation.
EDIT: just realized we had this conversation before...oops...
Personally, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m not perfectly altruistic...even though I might wish for strangers to be perfectly altruistic. Even if you are a utilitarian, that doesn’t mean your “utility function” is utilitarian.
If you had a utility function (which you don’t, really, since you are human) it wouldn’t work this way. If Veganism generate positive utils, and $100 donations generate positive utils, you would do both, rather than one or the other...unless there was some weird interaction effect whereby donating $100 made veganism less satisfying or vice versa. I suppose technically guilt alleviation does create an interaction effect...but you created this interaction yourself, by mentally deciding that one good deed makes up for not doing another.
But my point is that if you take messy emotions like guilt out of the equation, “trading” one good deed for another doesn’t really make sense. If you instead accept that you are selfish and disregard guilt, the thought process might look more like this:
1) I’m selfish and want resources for myself and my loved ones. However, I’m also altruistic, and there are diminishing returns to spending on myself—once I control at least X resources, it pleases me better to give all the rest of my money to these other people.
2) Eating meat pleases me, but killing animals displeases me more, therefore I will not eat meat.
The utility of each separate action is considered separately—without the confound of guilt atonement, there is no interaction between these two decisions.
Of course, there is no rule saying that you have to behave as if you didn’t have emotions such as guilt...I just thought I’d point out how one might balance selfishness against altruism if guilt weren’t a factor, since that knowledge might help to encourage altruism without guilt as a motivation.
EDIT: just realized we had this conversation before...oops...