I wonder if in some interesting way the idea that the scope of what needs doing for other people is so massive as to preclude any rational response then to work full time on it is related to the insight that voting doesn’t matter. In both cases, the math seems to preclude bothering to do something which will be easy, but will help in the aggregate.
My dog recently tore both of her ACL’s, and required two operations and a total of about 10 weeks recovery. My vet suggested I had a choice as to whether to do the 2X $3100 operations on the knees. I realized with the amount of money that I have, $6200 just simply wasn’t an important enough amount for me to consider killing my dog at the age of 7 because she couldn’t walk. But I was also acutely aware of being goddamn glad that I had only two dogs I cared about, because I sure as hell wasn’t interested in discovering the upper limit to how much I would spend before I would start killing off my dogs. Meanwhile, I can live with all the dogs in shelters that will be killed even though they can walk just fine, because they are not my dogs.
I don’t want to care any more about the billions of poor people in the world than I already do. I am willing to “blame” their parents: those parents did know, or should have, what they were dooming their children to, approximately when they decided to have them. If I spend my resources to help these poor people, they will be that much healthier that they will proceed to generate that many poor people in the next generation tugging at the heart strings or mind strings of my children. What kind of a father would I be to dump that kind of problem in my kids’ lap?
I don’t consider it rational to let my moral sentiments run roughshod over my own self interest. I donate, essentially, when I can’t help myself, when my sentiments are already involved. To me it seems irrational to spend one iota more effort or money on problems than my sentimental moral self already requires.
“I don’t consider it rational to let my moral sentiments run roughshod over my own self interest.”
To be clear, do you consider the choice to repair your dog’s knees an expression of what you’re labelling “moral sentiments” here, or what you’re labelling “self-interest”?
Spending $6200 to fix my 7 year old dog’s knees was primarily moral sentiments at work. I could get a healthy 1 year old dog for a fraction of that price. My 7 year old dog will die very likely within the next 3 or 4 years, larger dogs don’t tend to live that long. So I haven’t saved myself from experiencing the loss of her death, I’ve just put that off. The dog keeps me from doing all sorts of other things I’d like to do, I have to come home to check on her and feed her and so on, precluding just going on and doing social stuff after work when I want to.
Its important to keep in mind that we are not “homo economicus.” We do not have a single utility function with a crank that can be turned to determine the optimum thing to do, and even if in some formal sense we did have such a thing, our reaction to it would not be a deep acceptance of its results.
What we do have is a mess and a mass of competing impulses. I want to do stuff after work. I want to “take care” of those in my charge. My urge to take care of those in my charge presumably arises in me because my humans before me who had less of that urge got competed out of the gene pool.
100,000 years ago, some wolves started hacking humans and as part of that hack, got themselves triggering the stuff that humans have for taking care of their babies. Including the fact that these wolves were pretty good “kids,” able to help with a variety of things, we hacked them back and made them even more to our liking by selective killing of the ones we didn’t like, and then selective breeding of the ones we did like. At this point, we love our babies more than our dogs, but our babies grow into teenagers. But our dogs always stay baby like in their hacked relationship with us.
My wife took my human children and left me a few years ago, but she left the dogs she had bought. I’m not going to abandon them, the hack is strong in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love them. That doesn’t mean I am happy about it, or at least not consistently happy about it.
I wonder if in some interesting way the idea that the scope of what needs doing for other people is so massive as to preclude any rational response then to work full time on it is related to the insight that voting doesn’t matter. In both cases, the math seems to preclude bothering to do something which will be easy, but will help in the aggregate.
My dog recently tore both of her ACL’s, and required two operations and a total of about 10 weeks recovery. My vet suggested I had a choice as to whether to do the 2X $3100 operations on the knees. I realized with the amount of money that I have, $6200 just simply wasn’t an important enough amount for me to consider killing my dog at the age of 7 because she couldn’t walk. But I was also acutely aware of being goddamn glad that I had only two dogs I cared about, because I sure as hell wasn’t interested in discovering the upper limit to how much I would spend before I would start killing off my dogs. Meanwhile, I can live with all the dogs in shelters that will be killed even though they can walk just fine, because they are not my dogs.
I don’t want to care any more about the billions of poor people in the world than I already do. I am willing to “blame” their parents: those parents did know, or should have, what they were dooming their children to, approximately when they decided to have them. If I spend my resources to help these poor people, they will be that much healthier that they will proceed to generate that many poor people in the next generation tugging at the heart strings or mind strings of my children. What kind of a father would I be to dump that kind of problem in my kids’ lap?
I don’t consider it rational to let my moral sentiments run roughshod over my own self interest. I donate, essentially, when I can’t help myself, when my sentiments are already involved. To me it seems irrational to spend one iota more effort or money on problems than my sentimental moral self already requires.
“I don’t consider it rational to let my moral sentiments run roughshod over my own self interest.”
To be clear, do you consider the choice to repair your dog’s knees an expression of what you’re labelling “moral sentiments” here, or what you’re labelling “self-interest”?
Spending $6200 to fix my 7 year old dog’s knees was primarily moral sentiments at work. I could get a healthy 1 year old dog for a fraction of that price. My 7 year old dog will die very likely within the next 3 or 4 years, larger dogs don’t tend to live that long. So I haven’t saved myself from experiencing the loss of her death, I’ve just put that off. The dog keeps me from doing all sorts of other things I’d like to do, I have to come home to check on her and feed her and so on, precluding just going on and doing social stuff after work when I want to.
Its important to keep in mind that we are not “homo economicus.” We do not have a single utility function with a crank that can be turned to determine the optimum thing to do, and even if in some formal sense we did have such a thing, our reaction to it would not be a deep acceptance of its results.
What we do have is a mess and a mass of competing impulses. I want to do stuff after work. I want to “take care” of those in my charge. My urge to take care of those in my charge presumably arises in me because my humans before me who had less of that urge got competed out of the gene pool.
100,000 years ago, some wolves started hacking humans and as part of that hack, got themselves triggering the stuff that humans have for taking care of their babies. Including the fact that these wolves were pretty good “kids,” able to help with a variety of things, we hacked them back and made them even more to our liking by selective killing of the ones we didn’t like, and then selective breeding of the ones we did like. At this point, we love our babies more than our dogs, but our babies grow into teenagers. But our dogs always stay baby like in their hacked relationship with us.
My wife took my human children and left me a few years ago, but she left the dogs she had bought. I’m not going to abandon them, the hack is strong in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love them. That doesn’t mean I am happy about it, or at least not consistently happy about it.
(nods)
Thanks for clarifying.