Epistemic status: fiction. A variation on a parable of Peter Singer.
A man walked by a pond, where he saw that a little girl had fallen in, and would drown. But he was wearing a very fine suit and did not want to ruin it by wading into the pond to save her. He was not callous, for he was on his way to meet some very wealthy people, to solicit donations for the charity that he ran, and they would never take him seriously if he showed up late, muddy, and bedraggled. With these funds he would save far more lives than that of one little girl.
Rescue the girl and plan to explain to the wealthy people what happened. Possibly try to bring her with him, for purposes including lending credence to his story.
Second-order effects matter. Doing X is not only doing X. Becoming the type of person who does things in the reference class of X is one of the effects of your actions. Your reputation can likewise be affected. Your behavior can be copied by others, sometimes lossily. If it would be downright catastrophic for a chunk of society to do things vaguely shaped like X on a regular basis, you probably shouldn’t do X.
If a utilitarian calculus concludes that you should do something that strongly violates societal norms of morality (a la virtue effects and deontology), your math is probably bad. Be humble. (You probably didn’t invent new physics while doing your math homework, you probably didn’t discover that “letting kids drown is sometimes good actually.”)
Be suspicious of unintuitive moral conclusions that violate norms in your favor.
I thought another one:
4. Beware of simplifying assumptions and the Either/Or fallacy. You do not live in a moral philosophy dilemma. Reality has high dimensionality and the trade-offs are not always obvious and clean.
A general response to the responses to this fable.
The story ends where it ends. It is fiction, so there is no more to it than the story itself. It does not say what the man did. Anyone continuing it or adding further details, whether convenient or inconvenient, is writing their own fanfiction of the story to express their own response to the hypothetical.
There are two obvious continuations: “The decision was clear, he told himself, and walked on”, and “The decision was clear, he told himself, and waded into the pond.”[1] All further elaboration would be adding detail to make the story come out the way one would like.
For a lower stakes version of this story, consider the highly-paid lawyer who donates some time to working at a soup kitchen. This is a standard example in EA of Ineffective Altruism. The lawyer should instead (it is said) work those hours at lawyer rates and donate the money to do more good, or accept that he is working in the soup kitchen for the warm fuzzies, not to do all the good that he might. Is this different from the high-flying charity fund-raiser who can be more effective if he passes by the drowning girl? If he saves her, should he take care to be mindful that he is only doing it for the fuzzies, a concession to his imperfection, a necessary evil undertaken only to preserve his effectiveness?
I find myself somewhat disappointed that the scenario and the response don’t seem to have much to say. I actually thought the original scenario was meant as a thinly-veiled scathing critique of naive utilitarianism. For any non-psychopath who is actually in the scenario, saving the drowning girl doesn’t require any moral argumentation, and I wouldn’t feel safe being in community with anyone who sincerely preferred the other ending.
I think when people first discover rationalism and effective altruism, they often descend into a valley of learning to “shut up and multiply” and casting their intuitions aside. It’s very dangerous to remain in that valley without gaining humility about the limits of those tools. To be one of the good guys, you do have to rejoin human society and continue to love people in normal ways, and that isn’t only about one’s own personal warm fuzzies.
The neutrality of your follow-up reveals the original scenario as something like a scaffold upon which to hang one’s perspective and observe other perspectives being hung. The original example leaves me with a lingering itch, though, because the alternate perspective is not something that anyone should be encouraged to entertain.
I gave no resolution of the problem raised by this fable, because I do not have one.
Besides the decision the man is faced with, the story raises a deeper problem about morality. As far as I have seen in the literature, philosophical or theological, no-one has a solution. I shall call it the Problem of Totalisation.
Peter Singer preaches totalising morality. “The Good That We Can Do”, to quote the title of one of his books, is the good that we must do. That good (he argues) must weigh everyone everywhere equally. The little girl in danger of drowning before your eyes is worth exactly the same as every child everywhere in danger of death. To fail to do all you can to save all the people you can is morally equivalent to passing by the drowning girl. (Bought a new car? How many dead children did it cost?) You should not value your own children any more highly than a starving child on the other side of the world that you will never see and whose fate you will never know. He who would be Good must think of nothing else, do nothing else.
This conflicts with almost everyone’s intuitions. It conflicts with yours. It conflicts with mine. But who will argue against altruism? Who will argue, as inspirationally as Singer, that duty is bounded, that I do not have to do all the good that I can, that I will not sacrifice everything to the egregore Tutulma, and not merely as a grudging concession to my frailty? That no-one can live up to the demand is, for Singer, no refutation. “Yes,” he says (imagine the Chad YES meme here), “it is demanding.” Failing to live up to the standard is just that, a failure.
So there is the problem. Meanwhile, I don’t let myself get hijacked by clever words just because I don’t have cleverer words to set against them.
he called rescuers, thereby advancing the Pareto frontier and avoiding pesky utilitarian calculations (which are mostly incomputable for humans anyway).
Epistemic status: fiction. A variation on a parable of Peter Singer.
A man walked by a pond, where he saw that a little girl had fallen in, and would drown. But he was wearing a very fine suit and did not want to ruin it by wading into the pond to save her. He was not callous, for he was on his way to meet some very wealthy people, to solicit donations for the charity that he ran, and they would never take him seriously if he showed up late, muddy, and bedraggled. With these funds he would save far more lives than that of one little girl.
The decision was clear, he told himself, and
Rescue the girl and plan to explain to the wealthy people what happened. Possibly try to bring her with him, for purposes including lending credence to his story.
Second-order effects matter. Doing X is not only doing X. Becoming the type of person who does things in the reference class of X is one of the effects of your actions. Your reputation can likewise be affected. Your behavior can be copied by others, sometimes lossily. If it would be downright catastrophic for a chunk of society to do things vaguely shaped like X on a regular basis, you probably shouldn’t do X.
If a utilitarian calculus concludes that you should do something that strongly violates societal norms of morality (a la virtue effects and deontology), your math is probably bad. Be humble. (You probably didn’t invent new physics while doing your math homework, you probably didn’t discover that “letting kids drown is sometimes good actually.”)
Be suspicious of unintuitive moral conclusions that violate norms in your favor.
I thought another one: 4. Beware of simplifying assumptions and the Either/Or fallacy. You do not live in a moral philosophy dilemma. Reality has high dimensionality and the trade-offs are not always obvious and clean.
A general response to the responses to this fable.
The story ends where it ends. It is fiction, so there is no more to it than the story itself. It does not say what the man did. Anyone continuing it or adding further details, whether convenient or inconvenient, is writing their own fanfiction of the story to express their own response to the hypothetical.
There are two obvious continuations: “The decision was clear, he told himself, and walked on”, and “The decision was clear, he told himself, and waded into the pond.”[1] All further elaboration would be adding detail to make the story come out the way one would like.
For a lower stakes version of this story, consider the highly-paid lawyer who donates some time to working at a soup kitchen. This is a standard example in EA of Ineffective Altruism. The lawyer should instead (it is said) work those hours at lawyer rates and donate the money to do more good, or accept that he is working in the soup kitchen for the warm fuzzies, not to do all the good that he might. Is this different from the high-flying charity fund-raiser who can be more effective if he passes by the drowning girl? If he saves her, should he take care to be mindful that he is only doing it for the fuzzies, a concession to his imperfection, a necessary evil undertaken only to preserve his effectiveness?
Regarding types of response to hypotheticals:
“Don’t fight the hypothetical!”
The Least Convenient Possible World.
“Do fight the hypothetical!”
“Question the hypothetical!”
Steelmanning.
“Against Devil’s Advocacy.”
Tagging those who commented: @Haiku, @Roman Malov, @localdeity, @Szeth, @Sting.
The latter continuation has something in common with Huckleberry Finn’s decision whether to betray an escaped slave. ↩︎
I find myself somewhat disappointed that the scenario and the response don’t seem to have much to say. I actually thought the original scenario was meant as a thinly-veiled scathing critique of naive utilitarianism. For any non-psychopath who is actually in the scenario, saving the drowning girl doesn’t require any moral argumentation, and I wouldn’t feel safe being in community with anyone who sincerely preferred the other ending.
I think when people first discover rationalism and effective altruism, they often descend into a valley of learning to “shut up and multiply” and casting their intuitions aside. It’s very dangerous to remain in that valley without gaining humility about the limits of those tools. To be one of the good guys, you do have to rejoin human society and continue to love people in normal ways, and that isn’t only about one’s own personal warm fuzzies.
The neutrality of your follow-up reveals the original scenario as something like a scaffold upon which to hang one’s perspective and observe other perspectives being hung. The original example leaves me with a lingering itch, though, because the alternate perspective is not something that anyone should be encouraged to entertain.
I gave no resolution of the problem raised by this fable, because I do not have one.
Besides the decision the man is faced with, the story raises a deeper problem about morality. As far as I have seen in the literature, philosophical or theological, no-one has a solution. I shall call it the Problem of Totalisation.
Peter Singer preaches totalising morality. “The Good That We Can Do”, to quote the title of one of his books, is the good that we must do. That good (he argues) must weigh everyone everywhere equally. The little girl in danger of drowning before your eyes is worth exactly the same as every child everywhere in danger of death. To fail to do all you can to save all the people you can is morally equivalent to passing by the drowning girl. (Bought a new car? How many dead children did it cost?) You should not value your own children any more highly than a starving child on the other side of the world that you will never see and whose fate you will never know. He who would be Good must think of nothing else, do nothing else.
This conflicts with almost everyone’s intuitions. It conflicts with yours. It conflicts with mine. But who will argue against altruism? Who will argue, as inspirationally as Singer, that duty is bounded, that I do not have to do all the good that I can, that I will not sacrifice everything to the egregore Tutulma, and not merely as a grudging concession to my frailty? That no-one can live up to the demand is, for Singer, no refutation. “Yes,” he says (imagine the Chad YES meme here), “it is demanding.” Failing to live up to the standard is just that, a failure.
So there is the problem. Meanwhile, I don’t let myself get hijacked by clever words just because I don’t have cleverer words to set against them.
he called rescuers, thereby advancing the Pareto frontier and avoiding pesky utilitarian calculations (which are mostly incomputable for humans anyway).
Strong upvoted. Is it missing the ending, or
The story appears exactly as I intended it to.
Am I stupid why does this cut off at the end? Assuming that’s a concious choice
I’ll see if any discussion develops before giving the Word of God on the subject.