nobody likes to be reminded, even implicitly, of his own selfishness.
September 25, 2015 8:29 AM Subscribe

"Julia is a do-gooder – which is to say, a human character who arouses conflicting emotions. By 'do-gooder' here I do not mean a part-time, normal do-gooder – someone who has a worthy job, or volunteers at a charity, and returns to an ordinary family life in the evenings. I mean a person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible. I mean a person who is drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean someone who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy."
posted by divined by radio (123 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite

I laud people who can be that level of selfless for others. I try my best to give when and where I can, but I am also aware of my own moral failings. That said, I think there's a bizarre and sad level of cynicism in the world these days who would happily and gleefully judge people like Julia and her husband.
posted by Kitteh at 8:35 AM on September 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

Mrs. Jellyby, 2015.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:39 AM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

I laud people who can be that level of selfless for others.

I don't. I think it's actually a very dangerous mentality that subsumes one's own needs in favor of society's. (Look up the JOY acronym for a good example of the concept.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:41 AM on September 25, 2015 [9 favorites]

by having children of her own she would be in effect killing other people’s children

This window into her head and how she thinks feels very odd. Highly universalist and rational, but somehow cold and inhuman at the same time. Subjecting typical human impulses to this universalist calculus feels kind of brutal - it's sort of like algorithmically optimizing your life to serve other people, and not even those close to you, but the most distant.

Interesting article!
posted by theorique at 8:43 AM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

I wonder if founders of religions are more prone to this than others. I certainly hear it in some of what Jesus said about family. The Buddha, too?
posted by clawsoon at 8:50 AM on September 25, 2015

"To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right."

Loving-kindness and compassion need to start from within and expand outward.

Julia doesn't seem very kind to herself.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:58 AM on September 25, 2015 [18 favorites]

Uneasy, because of high possibility that a martyr is in the making.
posted by yesster at 9:01 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

But, what if you're deeply suspicious of charities and already believe that we have what we need to move beyond a scarcity economy? If you think that political change is now the most efficient way to help the most people? Correspondingly, you're troubled by the fact that giving to a political campaign is possibly the worst possible use of donated money?

I guess that's when you just sigh and donate to Doctors Without Borders instead and settle for good enough.
posted by Strudel at 9:03 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

"and to cultivate our personal life,"

We must first have food and shelter and leisure time.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:04 AM on September 25, 2015

There's some religious and belief systems that have a proscription against giving over a certain amount of one's income to charity. I suspect at least part of the reason is to have a firm basis for people to not spend their lives in guilty self-deprivation.
posted by griphus at 9:06 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Speaking of doing good, I was actually pretty uncomfortable with the constant use of "he" as a default pronoun, especially when the intro focused on a woman (and it was written by someone with a female-sounding name). Is that a Guardian convention? It's been so long since I've read something like that that it felt inherently offensive and WRONG to me, as if it were a deliberate attempt to put women down.

Weird.
posted by St. Hubbins at 9:06 AM on September 25, 2015 [27 favorites]

Speaking of doing good, I was actually pretty uncomfortable with the constant use of "he" as a default pronoun...

Ugh that bugged the shit out of me as well. The editing on the piece was generally kind of sloppy (e.g. "Aids" instead of "AIDS") which hey I guess the Grauniad got its name for a reason.
posted by griphus at 9:07 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

NoxAeternum: Look up the JOY acronym for a good example of the concept.

Googling [JOY acronym] doesn't really narrow it down enough to know what you're referring to. I'd be interested in seeing a link or explanation, if you have a moment to add it.
posted by amtho at 9:08 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

well, you know how Julie would answer on the "train full of passengers is going to crash, but if you pull this level, someone else dies" philosophical question..

(And we here at mefi argue about beanplating .. I'd think Julie could easily be diagnosible.. )
posted by k5.user at 9:08 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

People tie themselves into such knots to avoid a life buttressed by exploitation. Maybe just lean into it. Read some Kipling, buy an iPhone 6S, stop the boats, etc.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 9:09 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Uneasy, because of high possibility that a martyr is in the making.

Well, I think it's OK to admire martyrs -- say what you will about some of Martin Luther's later writings, his "Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me" is a really power declaration of principled defiance of power -- but it's very different if you goal is to be a martyr. That's a kind of madness of the spirit that often goes to very bad places.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:10 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Aids" instead of "AIDS"

This is a weird britishism with acronyms, although it seems to be somewhat haphazardly applied IMO.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:10 AM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Father was good.

That is the hard part to explain to everyone, and it is the thing my aunt is trying to explain, too. If you meet her and she starts telling you about him, how scary he could be, and things moving themselves and the Vanished People coming down the street and knocking on her door, that is what you have to remember if you want to understand.

If somebody frightens people, everybody thinks he has to be bad. But when you were around Father you were practically always scared to death, scared that he might really find out one day the way you were and do something about it.

I was not going to tell why I did not like his bird, but I will just to get you to understand. It was not really a nice bird at all. It was dirty, and it did not sing. It was noisy sometimes when I did not want it to be, and it would eat fish guts and rotten meat. After I got to know Father (this was in Dorp and on Wijzer's boat) I could see that the bird was exactly like me, except that it was a bird and I was a person. Father knew exactly how bad we were but he loved us just the same. Deep down, I think he loved everybody, even Jahlee and Juganu. He loved some people more than others, our mother especially. But he loved everybody, and until you meet somebody like him, you will never know how scary that was.

He was good, like I said up there. He was probably the best man alive, and I think that when somebody is really, really good, as good as he was, the rules change.

Return to the Whorl, Gene Wolfe
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:15 AM on September 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

I think about this kind of thing a lot. I have a lot of daydreams about if-I-won-the-lottery situations, and a lot of internal arguments about the best way to spend the money. I don't have/need a lot of cash to get by, but it seems like in the current world we live in (the USA anyway) it would be a good idea to shove a decent chunk of it in a bank to earn interest (depending on how much you won) and as an emergency fund for health issues, etc so you don't end up being a societal burden. But with the excess when it comes down to 'give money directly to people or good charities' approaches as opposed to 'dump money into the political system to try to affect larger systematic change which will ultimately positively affect more lives' there's a major split for me. One seems like cheap feel-good giving and the other feels like implicitly buying into a broken system. But there's a lot of more recent evidence that giving money directly to people has the greatest outcome, and it's immediate rather than long-term.

The mental calculation is, frankly, exhausting, and I'm not going to even win the damn lottery anyway, especially considering that I don't waste the money playing. As it is, one of the simplest and best things you can do environmentally on an individual level is stop eating meat. Animal agriculture is a huge cut-and-dried negative for the environment, meat is more expensive than a healthy non meat diet, etc. etc. But I can't go vegan because of allergy and health issues, so there's that. Blargh.

And I have my own mental health to take care of which is a major drain on my pocketbook and my general ability to expend energy on this kind of thing, so here we are. But I think I respect what she and her husband are doing at a basic level, and I definitely understand the frustration in trying to talk to other people about it. I think it's the same kind of push-back against vegans/vegetarians face (which, for the record, I often share because most of the vegans I've personally interacted with are completely unaware of the classist issues inherent in THAT particular discussion) in that it inherently seems like a moral judgment, and I'm not really sure what can be done about that.
posted by nogoodverybad at 9:16 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Bread and roses.

There's having more to eat, but there's also having more beautiful things to do and see and share. Effective altruism reduces people to survival only and life is more than survival. People, the very poor and very hurt just as much, want beauty and justice and hope too. They want the squishy uncountable things too.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:17 AM on September 25, 2015 [19 favorites]

It's hard for me to read about these kinds of people without thinking of Amy from Enlightened.
posted by koeselitz at 9:18 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

amtho:

JOY apparently stands for one's intended priorities: Jesus, Others, then Yourself. An link:

http://www.courageouschristianfather.com/2-christian-acronyms-family-joy/

I've learned something new and sort of weird today!
posted by XtinaS at 9:20 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

I admire the devotion to giving and caring, but the constant moral calculation sounds exhausting. I've mostly been an idealistic person, but I have developed more cynicism of late. Her lack of cynicism is astonishing to me.
posted by theora55 at 9:20 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've found, since entering Zen practice, that it's a lot harder to dismiss people or be callous about them, even those who aren't very nice. Damage to a relationship, even a casual one, seems much larger a thing to me than it used to be.

I'm not at the level of sensitivity of Julia and her husband. I'm not sure I'd want to be. But for someone who suffers from depression, like Julia, to be so outward-focused is rare and laudable.

As others have commented above, though, charity begins at home. The nice thing about following an established spiritual path like Buddhism is that you are reminded frequently that compassion should be extended to yourself AND to others. I hope that Julia and her family have a reliable community of people to help pull them back if they aren't taking proper care of themselves.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 9:22 AM on September 25, 2015 [9 favorites]

But, what if you're deeply suspicious of charities and already believe that we have what we need to move beyond a scarcity economy? If you think that political change is now the most efficient way to help the most people? Correspondingly, you're troubled by the fact that giving to a political campaign is possibly the worst possible use of donated money?

given that you are apparently disillusioned with bourgeois electoral politics, and apparently believe that the products of industrial production could under a different political order produce universal prosperity, you should probably:

identify your favorite revolutionary socialist party or organization and then
give them your time and money.

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:23 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've noticed lately that I'm fairly neutral: the other day, I was stopped at a traffic light facing a bike lane in the crossing street.

Two women on bikes crashed right in front of me, fairly spectacularly but harmlessly: they both flew off their bikes, but were wearing helmets and didn't suffer any actual damage.

They sprawled in front of my car and I had 2 choices: 1) I could be good, get out of the car and go offer help or 2) I could be a major asshole and honk on my horn so they'd get out of the way (or less of an asshole and drive around them while they were lying in the road).

I chose 3) do nothing, wait patiently for them to get up, get their bikes out of the street, not getting out of my car, not offering any assistance, then, once the way was clear and they were in no danger, going on my way.

I find myself doing this sort of thing a lot: I'm 'good' in the sense that I don't go out of my way to harm people, and I generally try to avoid hurting anybody, but I also don't do anything active to help strangers. Passive good, I guess. Or just passive.

Also, read How to be Good.
posted by signal at 9:25 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

This is a weird britishism with acronyms, although it seems to be somewhat haphazardly applied IMO.

It's done with acronyms that are pronounced as if they are words (e.g. Aids) instead of spelled out (e.g. USA). I agree with it being weird.

posted by Celsius1414 at 9:26 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm glad I'm not the type of person in this article, nor would I recommend to people I know that they take this path, and yet - I'm glad that there are people like this.
posted by entropone at 9:28 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Saint Bridget was
A problem child.
Although a lass
Demure and mild,
And one who strove
To please her dad,
Saint Bridget drove
The family mad.
For here's the fault in Bridget lay:
She Would give everything away.
To any soul
Whose luck was out
She'd give her bowl
Of stirabout;
She'd give her shawl,
Divide her purse
With one or all.
And what was worse,
When she ran out of things to give
She'd borrow from a relative.
Her father's gold,
Her grandsire's dinner,
She'd hand to cold
and hungry sinner;
Give wine, give meat,
No matter whose;
Take from her feet
The very shoes,
And when her shoes had gone to others,
Fetch forth her sister's and her mother's.
She could not quit.
She had to share;
Gave bit by bit
The silverware,
The barnyard geese,
The parlor rug,
Her little niece-
's christening mug,
Even her bed to those in want,
And then the mattress of her aunt.
An easy touch
For poor and lowly,
She gave so much
And grew so holy
That when she died
Of years and fame,
The countryside
Put on her name,
And still the Isles of Erin fidget
With generous girls named Bride or Bridget.

Well, one must love her.
Nonetheless,
In thinking of her
Givingness,
There's no denial
She must have been
A sort of trial
Unto her kin.
The moral, too, seems rather quaint.
WHO had the patience of a saint,
From evidence presented here?
Saint Bridget? Or her near and dear?
posted by pretentious illiterate at 9:29 AM on September 25, 2015 [38 favorites]

In case others get bogged down in the article: There's a section just past the middle about this organization that seems worth investigating: Giving What We Can.

I am consoled to know that people like this exist.

I think this kind of thinking is behind the celibacy requirement of some religious orders. I mean, obviously it is, but the deep feelings of these ethical trades makes it clearer.

I sure hope their daughter feels the same way. It will be a hard road for her if her personality is different.
posted by amtho at 9:29 AM on September 25, 2015

By which I mean: The husband is easily the most fascinating character in this story.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 9:29 AM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

It will be a hard road for her if her personality is different.

Yeah I read that whole 'becoming a parent' section thinking that even if they raise her with love and kindness and devotion (and I have no reason to think they won't) it's still even money that she ends up Gordon Gekko 2050.
posted by griphus at 9:33 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Being selfless--or aspiring to be--in your moral calculations makes the math come out wrong by one. So I always try to include myself in whatever reckoning I do; I just try as much as possible not to count myself more than once as is the natural tendency.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:37 AM on September 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

This hit me really hard - I frequently feel conflicted about spending money on myself rather than charity, and wrestle with the idea that if I don't do all that I can for others, then I'm a bad person undeserving of the good life I have.

But I have too many fears to not save money (who will take care of me and my wife now if we lose our jobs or in the future when we're old), and too high a degree of selfishness to resist that candied apple. (And I don't even cry about it.)

Uncomfortable is exactly right.
posted by harujion at 9:37 AM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

I can't relate to anything in that article, least of all the simplistic morality Ord espouses. If that makes me a selfish asshole, so be it. Making myself miserable in an attempt to average out the misery of the world is anathema to me.
posted by Sternmeyer at 9:41 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

(This idea of extreme altruism seems like it would make a wreck of one's ability to meet more basic social responsibilities, like you'd necessarily have to short some more immediate, natural moral responsibility in order to serve your more adventurous altruistic impulses. I'm skeptical this doesn't just play out as a form of white-knighting or self-martyrdom that takes an unfair toll on others who aren't signing up to be so self-sacrificing in the real world.)
posted by saulgoodman at 9:42 AM on September 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

To a do-gooder, taking care of family can seem like a kind of moral alibi – something that may look like selflessness, but is really just an extension of taking care of yourself.

No, do-gooder, this is not correct. Different people are different. They have different feelings, different values, and should be allowed to make their own choices about what of themselves to sacrifice. When you sacrifice a family member, you are sacrificing someone else, not yourself.

I have no problem with choosing self-sacrifice, I applaud it. But sacrificing the wellbeing of a living responsibility you took on yourself, who is incapable of making that choice themself, is exactly where I draw the line.

That said, I have no evidence that the wellbeing of Lily was sacrificed here. Parents go back to work all the time. Their kids turn out fine. But the idea that it's ok to sacrifice the wellbeing a child or a pet (in general) offends me.
posted by yeolcoatl at 9:42 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

"He said to another man, 'Follow me.' But he replied, 'Lord, first let me go and bury my father.' Jesus said to him, 'Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.' Still another said, 'I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.' Jesus replied, 'No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.'"
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 9:44 AM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

One thing that I wonder, reading this, is how much of that implicit discomfort is coming from a self-pressure to do more, do more, always more--and self-criticism for not doing enough. I mean, I could feel that mindset coming right off the page.

I could probably be doing more than I am; I could certainly donate more financially than I do, but part of the reason I'm not better about that is that my mental and emotional energy is sapped by donating emotional labor and work to the communities I'm part of and there isn't much left to budget to, well, budgeting as carefully as she does. Self-denial and the kind of self-control she clearly relies on takes up a lot of mental and emotional energy, too. How do we quantify the kinds of 'giving' that we do? How do we weigh the contributions we can provide against the howling void of need, and how can we ever do enough to satisfy the nagging worry that we could be doing better?

And of course I find I do have more time and energy when I invest in self-care, when I don't deny myself everything, when I jealously and selfishly block out time and small luxuries to replenish myself. I have more energy when I make the time to eat properly, sleep well, and take time to not teach or help or volunteer my time. I have a dog and a cat who take a significant portion of my resources, but their presence certainly decreases my anxiety and lets me allocate more attention elsewhere. What's the minimum that I should take for myself in order to give more? Should I take anything? And that anxiety--that calculation of acceptable rest and worrying that it's too much--that makes a weight on my mental energy, too, which I could be directing to something more useful. How do you weigh the cost of anxiety?

Perhaps I'm rationalizing here; of course I feel guilty that I'm not doing more! And perhaps I'm just trying to feel more comfortable about my limited contributions to... well, many of the causes I care about and much of the need that is most evident to me. But I wonder how that plays into this kind of giving. I'd feel so much better if we had decent social/financial/safety nets for everyone, so I didn't feel so compelled to pour energy into improving the ones I have. And again, I don't do that much--not as compared to the swathes of work I see that needs doing, anyway.

One thing strikes me: I am wholly unsurprised that the person the main article is based around is female, and that most of traditions of people who have nothing in order to give everything they can (financially) to less well-off that I now about are also female. (I'm thinking primarily of orders of nuns and Christian martyrs here, of course; I'm less familiar with traditions of charitable giving like this which don't have the Christian history of viewing self-sacrifice as holy.) Women are socialized to give more and ask for less than men, and women are used to providing labor which doesn't get accorded actual value. I was rather surprised given that that the author just... completely ignored that axis of evaluation in her writing about Julia and her moral philosophy.
posted by sciatrix at 9:49 AM on September 25, 2015 [14 favorites]

Being selfless--or aspiring to be--in your moral calculations makes the math come out wrong by one. So I always try to include myself in whatever reckoning I do; I just try as much as possible not to count myself more than once as is the natural tendency.

The article had an interesting (and frankly, rather condescending-sounding) quote from Professor Ord:

Well, it turns out that we can save 1,000 people’s lives. If you don’t do that, then you have to say that it’s permissible to value yourself more than 1,000 times as much as you value strangers. Does that sound plausible? I don’t think that sounds very plausible. If you think that, your theory’s just stupid.

Most people probably treat themselves (and their families) many times better than they treat random strangers. Ord's analysis is a little bit off in that there are basic social niceties that many/most people practice that shift the balance to something less than 1000x - tipping, doing a charity fundraiser, giving a beggar a dollar, those kind of things. But most people are still going to count themselves (and their families) as much more valuable than random strangers.

Thought experiment: Press button A and your child dies. Press button B and N random strangers die (people whom you would never have met in your life and never would have influenced your life). How big does N have to get before you start feeling bad or guilty about it?

For Julia, this number N would apparently be very, very small. If I were her child, I would feel rather unnerved by this. I find it fascinating that this moral calculation being made by Julia goes against biological bonds of family and tribe that go pretty deep down in our DNA and cultural organization.
posted by theorique at 9:53 AM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

"He said to another man, 'Follow me.' But he replied, 'Lord, first let me go and bury my father.' Jesus said to him, 'Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.' Still another said, 'I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.' Jesus replied, 'No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.'"

Wow, way to be a dick, Jesus.

Next thing you know, he'll be cursing at trees for not having fruit off-season.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:56 AM on September 25, 2015 [9 favorites]

Thanks for posting this -- it put me in mind of Susan Wolf's famous essay "Moral Saints". The first paragraph:

I don't know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them. By moral saint I mean a person whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be. Though I shall in a moment acknowledge the variety of types of person that might be thought to satisfy this description, it seems to me that none of these types serve as unequivocally compelling personal ideals. In other words, I believe that moral perfection, in the sense of moral saintliness, does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive.

Julia is precisely the sort of character that Wolf was discussing, and her life seems (to a decidedly unsaintly person like me, anyway) to illustrate many of the deficiencies she warned of.
posted by informavore at 9:56 AM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

That said, I have no evidence that the wellbeing of Lily was sacrificed here. Parents go back to work all the time. Their kids turn out fine. But the idea that it's ok to sacrifice the wellbeing a child or a pet (in general) offends me.

Me, too. Even if you can retroactively justify your choices by saying, "Hey, they still turned out okay!" it seems to me the responsibility is to do the best you can. If you aren't guided in your choices by the desire to do the best you possibly can as a parent, without sacrificing yourself so much you can't sustain it, then you aren't really taking your job as a parent seriously enough. Its the most serious kind of job there is, in my opinion. That doesn't mean it can't and shouldn't be fun--you can't really do it right if there's not some room for fun in the mix, I think--but fun isn't the goal and even personal satisfaction isn't the goal. The goal is taking care of your kids as best you can because you dragged them into this mess. This goes doubly true, in my opinion, for people who planned their families consciously and deliberately.

One thing that I wonder, reading this, is how much of that implicit discomfort is coming from a self-pressure to do more, do more, always more--and self-criticism for not doing enough.

Interestingly, encouraging excessive self-criticism has always been a key component of brain-washing/indoctrination programs under authoritarian systems like Korea and in cults. Here, we use it on ourselves, and with Facebook in our lives to make us feel ashamed if we're not being 100% awesome all the time, it's a wonder we haven't all brainwashed ourselves into oblivion by now.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:58 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Siddhartha Gautama already figured this out. Extreme self-denial is a form of attachment, which perpetuates dukkha.

The middle way, girlfriend. THE MIDDLE WAY.
posted by gsh at 9:58 AM on September 25, 2015 [31 favorites]

Judging by how tapped-flat I feel much of the time, and how much we scramble to pay for regular life things like medical care, I really don't worry that we're not giving enough financially and emotionally. If we gave much more, we'd be the ones in need of help. Many days I'm just hoping we won't end up that way, but in this country, there's a lot less security about that these days.

Also, I think trying to save the world through personal righteousness is an impossible task. You should be kind and compassionate to your fellows, but you should not think that you alone can help everyone. To really help a lot of people you need to change systems. To change systems, you need strategy and numbers.

Nowhere in this calculus is guilt particularly useful. Often it is paralyzing. Anger at injustice and flat-out determination to fight it will get you much further. But not alone; again, you need allies, numbers and strategy.
posted by emjaybee at 9:59 AM on September 25, 2015 [12 favorites]

But most people are still going to count themselves (and their families) as much more valuable than random strangers.

IMO, they should. Family members do things for and share valuable relationships with each other. You owe stuff to yourself and to close family members because you've already got a history of reciprocal altruism with them that is more valuable than the relationship you have to strangers.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:04 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I would be failing in my moral duties if I didn't see to it that the concept of supererogation was mentioned here.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:13 AM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

The minute I saw "Julia" and "do gooder who makes people uncomfortable" I knew exactly who this article would be about. I went to college with Julia and Jeff. I haven't seen them in a few years now, but we ran in a bunch of the same social circles in school and still have mutual friends.

My memories of her are of the joy-bringing things she does that this article doesn't highlight: contra dancing, singing out of Rise Up Singing (she taught me Julian of Norwich, one of my favorite songs in the entire book), eating raspberry pie down by the creek at our school on her birthday.

But rather than rely entirely on this article and my hazy not-really-related memories, why not read Julia in her own words?

Cheerfully, about giving without burning yourself out.

Bread and Roses, about giving as a means of promoting creativity among recipients of the aid.

Newness, about introducing her daughter to life's joys.
posted by ActionPopulated at 10:16 AM on September 25, 2015 [63 favorites]

Julia's extreme do-gooder mentality seems penny wise and pound foolish to me. If the candied apple can bring her a moment of joy, it seems likely that this joy will give her the energy to do good many more times as valuable as the candied apple. Even if she believes that her only reason to exist is to have a positive impact on the world, it seems to me that the obsessive focus on every nickel of spending is going to lessen that impact in the long run.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:34 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I hated getting hounded for money from groups I gave to.

I suspect that NPR spent at least half of what I sent them that one time on mailings to try to get me to give them more.
posted by griphus at 10:35 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

When you sacrifice a family member, you are sacrificing someone else, not yourself.

The problem is that almost anything can be rationalized as a "sacrifice." I can't vote for raising the marginal tax rate in order to adequately fund the food stamp program because that would mean sacrificing my daughter's monthly trips to Europe!
posted by straight at 10:42 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Save yourself, and thousands around you will be saved." - St Seraphim of Sarov
posted by koeselitz at 11:06 AM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Avenger: No one here has called her weird, crazy, or quote literally insane unquote.
posted by XtinaS at 11:11 AM on September 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

someone who carefully and conscientiously arranges their lives to minimize harm and suffering

There's "careful and conscientious" and then there's "single-minded and monomaniacal".

Denying yourself the simple pleasure of spending $2 on a candy apple, because someone else a world away needs that $2 more - is that charitable or is it unhealthily obsessive? If Julia's happy with her approach, then I wish her well. But not everyone is wired this way - and the whole point of the article is that it is a very unusual way to be wired (if a non-trivial fraction of the population did this, it probably wouldn't be worth an article).
posted by theorique at 11:12 AM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

I wonder if people realize that the "best way to help the world is to take care of yourself" attitude is basically just libertarianism, and is indeed the root of libertarianism, and is also indeed the root of lowering taxes until the poor starve to death in their hovels. [...]
posted by Avenger

I get this and all but I know at least for me if I'm not careful to take care of myself I end up not being able to get through basic daily functions, get out of bed for weeks on end, or become, you know, dead. so yeah. forgive me for taking some of those liberties.

and I'm not sure how I feel about your stating that myself and others prioritizing our own health "isn't some kind of morally or politically neutral statement of rational self-care." I feel like you’re being really uncharitable to people in this thread here, but moreover I feel like you’re talking on a philosophical level which, personally, I think too often are arguments that overshadow the reality in which a lot of us live. I’m not really buying the black and white/slippery slope you seem to be suggesting here. I mean, if you're looking at melting ice caps and destruction of resource yeah the planet would be better off if I just killed myself. like, objectively that would probably be the way to go for myself and a large percentage of the population. but once you move off the paper in the real world to me that seems pretty unreasonable.

but now we've gotten to the 'makes people uneasy' part, which is kind of interesting. the super-judgy tone of your comment aside, by rejecting the particular viewpoint that you're suggesting is immoral ('I should take care of myself') I could like. die? or honestly worse, just succumb to literal madness. no joke or hyperbole here. and yeah. right or wrong that implication, that I'm wrong in making the decision to take care of myself, makes me uneasy.

this might not be (probably isn't?) where you meant to go with this but it's what I'm taking away from it. I always worry about the philosophical overriding the practical and I feel like this is what I'm seeing here. [edit: the tone of this is meant to be pretty neutral btw. I'm not mad.]
posted by nogoodverybad at 11:43 AM on September 25, 2015 [10 favorites]

honestly, about halfway through the article I realized that I probably would love to hang out with Julia and Jeff — I figured I'd find them inspiring rather than exhausting, and suspect that they'd be delightful people to talk with — like, they strike me as people who know how to pick conversational topics well.

I'm glad to hear that they actually are great, inspirational people. Yay Julia and Jeff!
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:56 AM on September 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

I'll double down on Avenger's comment. Julie and Jeff exist at one pole; Ayn Rand and her acolytes occupy the other. I know toward which pole I'd like to aim, given my resources and privilege. If that means giving up some frivolities, well, good. Consumption and the tyranny of (often exploitative) choice comes with its own anxiety. Better to forego the rat race and ease the privation of others.

However, if your mental health depends on regularly treating yourself to candy apples, indulge, please.
posted by MetalFingerz at 11:57 AM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

Well, that's kind of my point. If self-care isn't at all on the priority list, it won't happen, and for a lot of us that is a slippery slope down to a bad, bad mental health place.

I am concerned, to be clear, less about the effect of regularly treating myself to candy apples on my mental health than I am on the effect of regularly asking myself if I could be doing more on my mental health. Sure, I could always cut out something else... and something else... and something else again. It's not about the candy apple in and of itself. It's about the mindset that you yourself are worth nothing and that your entire worth is based on your utility to others and your ability to, personally, throw your work to fill a yawning void of need.

Sure, I'm a bit focused on that. I'm focused on that because I keep stepping down that path and going "I don't really need that small nice thing... I could use that to do better for someone else!" and then wondering why I'm depressed and exhausted and anxiety-ridden and unable to focus on my work. It's easy to wind up in a place that is not sustainable, and easier yet to wind up in a place where a tiny mishap fucks you over royally.
posted by sciatrix at 12:07 PM on September 25, 2015 [16 favorites]

The Koch brothers give more to charity in a month than Julie and Jeff will during their natural lives. Their extreme altruism is certainly admirable in it's own way, but it's also an eccentric hobby more than a meaningful gesture.
posted by MattD at 12:38 PM on September 25, 2015

I'm not very far into the article yet. But I know already from the tone it is written in that Julia, none of whose specific actions have been described yet, should be thought of as totally unreasonable, maybe kind of scary, and definitely unsympathetic.

In other words, it's not written in a particularly neutral way.

On the other hand, I don't know yet what the author's main point is, aside from that she (I don't know the author's gender, but I'm not too worried about it given the author's erasure of everyone of my gender from her consideration) finds Julia scary or intimidating.

Apparently I am not one of these discomfitingly saintly people of the type the author is describing, because this raises my suspicions; my non-uncomfortably-saintly uncharitable reading of the article so far is that it is a hit piece and that I don't like the author.

But perhaps I have enough of that discomfiting saintliness in me, since I am planing on continuing to read the article to the end, and potentially reserving judgement until I've read the whole thing.
posted by eviemath at 12:40 PM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

Matt: I'm glad you agree that they should be working to expropriate the wealth of big thieves like the Koches instead of just indulging in individual charity :)
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:42 PM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's an interesting conversation. Why is charitable giving outside the realm of self-care? I feel greater and longer-lasting satisfaction when I volunteer or donate than when I "treat myself" to something nice (and like the majority of people in my demographic, I do both). I submit, however, that many people don't necessarily have the same reaction. Is this a function of modern American culture, where our focus is intensely and squarely on individual behavior and achievements? Why are "treat yourself" indulgences better for our mental health than "treat others" indulgences?

I could always cut out something else... and something else... and something else again. It's not about the candy apple in and of itself. It's about the mindset that you yourself are worth nothing and that your entire worth is based on your utility to others and your ability to, personally, throw your work to fill a yawning void of need.

Would it make a difference to reframe "cutting out" or "sacrificing" as "fulfilling my duty to help others" or something else? It's perhaps telling that adjusting our moral calculus to think a little more of strangers in foreign countries, those who suffer the worst privation in the world, should somehow mean adopting a mindset that ourselves and our families are worth nothing.
posted by MetalFingerz at 12:47 PM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

Having read it, some of the takes above are awfully odd. They seem to have acknowledged the importance of taking care of themselves as well and not agonizing over every treat, and carefully budgeted out their life to account for this. They've accounted for the fact that trying to make the most money possible won't work if they hate what they are doing. When facing such major choices as whether to have a child, they discussed it and came to a conclusion that satisfied them.

It's not a life I could ever live, but it seems to satisfy them, and according to their friend above, a life that has plenty of joy in it. I think them quite lucky to have found each other.
posted by tavella at 12:49 PM on September 25, 2015 [9 favorites]

Ok, now I've gotten to right before the part about Julia and Jeff having kids. It has settled into a slightly more descriptive tone, fortunately. My analysis of systemic issues is that capitalism is itself a systemic problem, so I'm unsold on this "working to give" philosophy as being any sort of moral optimization. But what I've read of their actual life choice so far hasn't sounded too extreme to me. Julia doesn't yet seem like she fits the archetype described in the intro rhetoric, for example.
posted by eviemath at 12:53 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

sciatrix: It's about the mindset that you yourself are worth nothing and that your entire worth is based on your utility to others and your ability to, personally, throw your work to fill a yawning void of need.

I think you hit the nail on the head about what bothered me about the article.

Human misery is abundant and there's always more resources that people can throw after it. The implication made by Professor Ord, that the morally correct choice is always to send resources that you control to assist the least well off, and that no personal luxuries or indulgences may be justified in the face of this ocean of misery - it's a very extreme view, but he throws it out there without proof, like it's a law of physics.

But some people do better when they treat themselves a little better, with small indulgences and luxuries. It's the metaphor of the oxygen mask on the airplane - helping others put on their mask without putting on yours first may be 'noble' in some sense, but it may also be foolhardy. YMMV.
posted by theorique at 12:56 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I feel greater and longer-lasting satisfaction when I volunteer or donate than when I "treat myself" to something nice

People always say that it's better to give than to receive and I'm always like, well, somebody's gotta be the receiver, it might as well be me ...
posted by octobersurprise at 1:01 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

And now, having finished the article, I still find the tone to be a completely bizarre hit piece style. In the first place, all of the "do-gooding" that the article talks about is monetary giving. So, there's this couple that has budgeted what they have determined is enough for their family needs, and what they decide to do with the remainder is to give it away. That's not exactly self-sacrificing. If the author believes in a greater degree of selfishness, then why is she (*see my first comment for note on author gender pronoun usage) so hung up on how some other people spend their spending money, anyway? The author seems to have a rather bizarre definition of altruism (extreme or otherwise).

Now, the links from Julia's own blog posted upthread also seem to focus on charitable giving almost exclusively. Which I think is a pretty restricted form of altruism. But I've only read the three links, so that could be selection bias. At least Julia and Jeff seem to have made career choices that place them in the middle to upper middle class but aren't of that extreme "I'm going to become a robber barron and make billions so that I can give it away as I choose and control" mindset (that is definitely not altruistic). In other words, they seem to have a sense of enough, which ameliorates their seemingly narrow focus on charitable giving, in my mind.

Julia certainly seems much less judgemental, rather mostly only concerned about talking from and about her own experience, than the fpp author; so I'm much more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
posted by eviemath at 1:12 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's interesting and disappointing that our idea of self-care is so tied in to buying things for ourselves. I'm not saying I'm immune to this, though.
posted by kitcat at 1:17 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I really don't get some of the reactions here.

Out of the remainder of Jeff’s salary, he allotted an allowance to each of them of $38 a week, which they would use to pay for everything other than rent and food – things such as clothes, shoes, transportation and treats like candy apples.

They budget for luxury items. They aren't wearing saffron robes wandering around with begging bowls, they aren't ascetics self-flagellating and denying every pleasure. At no point in their altruistic calculus do they say "I'm going to give these poors the shoes off my feet even if I end up cut and bleeding". They seem to be healthy and taking care of themselves first just fine, with an understanding of their own limits.

I think maybe some people might just be overreacting, underestimating how much fat they have in their own budgets. Is your daily pumpkin spice latte actually that critical to your well being, or could you skip it and donate that money to a worthwhile cause? Proper self-care doesn't have to include "retail therapy" for everybody.

Why is the idea of sacrificing temporary fleeting pleasures in order to make sure that other people don't die considered "extreme"?
posted by Feyala at 1:21 PM on September 25, 2015 [12 favorites]

> Having read it, some of the takes above are awfully odd. They seem to have acknowledged the importance of taking care of themselves as well and not agonizing over every treat, and carefully budgeted out their life to account for this. They've accounted for the fact that trying to make the most money possible won't work if they hate what they are doing. When facing such major choices as whether to have a child, they discussed it and came to a conclusion that satisfied them.

It's not a life I could ever live, but it seems to satisfy them, and according to their friend above, a life that has plenty of joy in it. I think them quite lucky to have found each other.

This is my take on it as well, so I'm just quoting tavella. I'm pleased that there's not more defensive pushback against Julia; she is who she is ("She could not help it; she had always been this way, since she was a child") and she's making the world a better place. Good for her and her husband! (I agree, however, with those who suspect their daughter is going to disappoint them by being more human-all-too-human than they are.)
posted by languagehat at 1:22 PM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

Julia is engaged in some dangerous black-and-white thinking, and it's not at all universalist. Sure, I can make an argument that on a global scale, it's better for me to be a reasonably-happy hedge-fund manager who donates $XXX to charity than a miserable social worker who can only give away $x. But the world, and the community, needs social workers and teachers and garbage collectors and plumbers. I might make choices (especially career choices) to maximize my own charitable giving, but is that really better for society? I mean, the world isn't going to run out of hedge-fund managers, is it?
posted by math at 1:54 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Considering that Julia is a social worker, I'm not sure you can accurately attribute the belief to her that it's better to be a hedge fund manager than a social worker.

A lot of people seem to be taking some of the philosophical arguments mentioned in passing in the article to their illogical extreme.
posted by MetalFingerz at 2:02 PM on September 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

Count me as those who are also surprised by the reactions here on Metafilter. I have to admit, my thinking about charity is quite along the same lines as hers, I just don't have it in me to entirely follow through on my convictions. So while I donate just a few percent of my pre-tax income, she and her husband have managed to donate more than half! To which I say, kudos to them. I don't see any sense that they are depriving themselves of anything important - they have clothes and a home they have bought and can bring up their daughter. Who are we to judge how they spend their money?

I agree with them about the importance of thinking about people in faraway places, and not just about those who are right around me. I live in Boston right now, but I know there are people starving in Uganda. I do think it is somewhat self-indulgent of me to give 5 dollars to the homeless person near my work, simply because I know he is much more likely to get 5 dollars from someone else than the starving person in Uganda. Still, I do it all the same, because I sometimes value the pleasure I get from giving someone something immediately over a faraway family.

My grandmother has Parkinson's and I love her very much, but I would honestly never dream of giving my money to Parkinson's research. I'm cynical about how much impact that would actually have, given the profit motives present and the fact that the major problems with the world's healthcare is in terms of lack of access not innovation.

I hope you don't think that makes me heartless. I do love my family very very much. I just have a broader definition of the people to whom we have a responsibility.
posted by peacheater at 2:06 PM on September 25, 2015 [10 favorites]

Sure, the recognition of one's privilege can be discomfiting, particularly when one considers (for those of us in an "Advanced Industrial Economy") much of that privilege depends on a history of exploitation of the world's worst off. There may not be "a right answer" to solving this imbalance of privilege, power, and living standards, but there are certainly many right answers to begin addressing this inequality. Julia and Jeff present one model. Political action is another. There are many more, oftentimes not mutually exclusive. The dismissal of Julia and Jeff's actions seems more like an attempt to rationalize our selfishness, a selfishness that is consistently reinforced in mainstream American culture. I would like to consider Metafilter a progressive space that's willing to push against the dominant culture to explore how we might be better people.

There's another privilege implicit in my comments, however, which is good mental health. It's not taxing for me to reflect and consider how I might be more charitable or more progressive or more whatever. For those of you where this is a struggle, please don't read my comments as an attack. I'm operating under the assumption that there's more most Americans can do to help others in our own country and around the world. But the precarity (both real and perceived) of the American condition as a result of our current political situation can be frustrating, and for some, anxiety or depression inducing. God bless as we struggle for a better tomorrow for all.
posted by MetalFingerz at 4:22 PM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

Jeff and Julia remind me a bit of the evangelical Christians interviewed on This American Life who were haunted every moment they weren't out saving souls, because it meant their inaction and laziness was causing people to go to hell. It's a tough way to live. But the EA folks are better people than I am, and as long as they can make it work for their lives, more power to them.
posted by phoenixy at 5:32 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

My job requires part-time service and drains the bejeezus out of me and I have definitely hit compassion fatigue. If someone's banging on the door and we're closed, I'm all "don't go out there." Hell, I saw a girl fall off her bike today on my way back from work (not close to me at all, but it was a long street and I was probably the only one within a few hundred yards), but did I run over to help? Nope. I was all "eh, she seems okay, I just want to go home and get the hell away from humans right now." I doubt I would have done that if she looked like she'd broken something, but I didn't have enough extra in me to dig up if it wasn't an emergency and I didn't even see blood.

I'm coming to think more and more that this fundamental discomfort with living our privileged lives while others don't enjoy the same is just something we have to shut up and deal with. It's part of the deal. You were born with a more or less relative amount of privilege, depending on who you are, and now you have to live with that discomfort. There's not a right answer to solving it, and trying to find one misses the point. Live with it. Be present with it. Accept that it exists, and use it to fuel what you do.

Yup. I am...pretty much afraid of a good chunk of homeless people, I've had some bad experiences and I just don't want to hand out money to a stranger (open my wallet on the street? heck no) or interact with someone who might be mentally ill and/or go creeper on me again. I feel like an asshole every time I see a person and wonder what's wrong with me that I don't think "Oh noes, let me help you! Here is all of my money and let me find you some food and perhaps a place to stay!" but instead cross the street to get away, pretend I don't see them, refuse to answer back, etc. I think I just have to accept that I'm an asshole because I don't want to help, and I'm supposed to want to.

"My grandmother has Parkinson's and I love her very much, but I would honestly never dream of giving my money to Parkinson's research. I'm cynical about how much impact that would actually have"

I'm not even sure how that works or how effective it is to donate to the medical causes. I think that's one reason why I'm not too into donating to random charities: it has zero effect on me other than "I have less money than I used to and beats me if it actually helped anyone, I'll never know."
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:24 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

sacrificing temporary fleeting pleasures in order to make sure that other people don't die considered "extreme"?

No objections to that idea, but to be fair, the fpp article frames its own subject as being about "extreme altruism."
posted by saulgoodman at 7:50 PM on September 25, 2015

I was reading this and thinking "yeah, this does raise some important questions" and then it turned into being about effective altruism, and that made things very difficult. The thing with effective altruism is that it saves middle and upper middle class people (like Jeff) from being unimportant. Money, they can give up, but being tech people? Bankers? Professional people before whom the world bows? Nope, not that. And speaking as a working class person, I have some moral doubts about the whole thing. It's the spiritual equivalent of expensive minimalism. And it's very convenient - of course you can make a squillion bucks disrupting working class jobs or whatever in the US, because after all, working class jobs are so much less important than the lives of starving children in AfricaTM (because it's not that white people in the first world have ever used the excuse of generic starving children in Africa to forward their own agendas.)

If anything, effective altruism is really class war - it's saying that working class people in the developed world should be destroyed by an elite altruist class so that the altruist class can use their profits to remake the developing world. It's profoundly undemocratic and gross.

Someone who wants to distrupt my job out of existence or engage in financial or legal dealings which destroy my community is my enemy, no matter what they're doing with their profits.
posted by Frowner at 8:14 PM on September 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

I would have more time for effective altruists if they had a "first, do no harm" principle, but that would get in the way of making lots of money by smashing up the trivial lives of spoiled working class people in the interests of the authentically immiserated.
posted by Frowner at 8:16 PM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm coming to think more and more that this fundamental discomfort with living our privileged lives while others don't enjoy the same is just something we have to shut up and deal with. It's part of the deal. You were born with a more or less relative amount of privilege, depending on who you are, and now you have to live with that discomfort. There's not a right answer to solving it, and trying to find one misses the point. Live with it. Be present with it. Accept that it exists, and use it to fuel what you do.

I'm not sure who this is directed at - Julia? If so, it sounds like she actually has found a way to "deal with it." and use it to fuel what she does. And no, she didn't shut up, but that seems like a weird requirement given that humans are social, verbal animals who like to share our perspectives and experiences with others.

I've known a few people like Julia. I've lived with a couple. They are lovely people but, unsurprisingly, make difficult housemates. I have to say, their lives seemed very constrained to me. Not necessarily materially (we were all broke college students or post-grads), but emotionally. They all had a lot of personal walls around what they thought of as acceptable. There was joy, but not necessarily a lot of frivolous fun.

The interesting thing is that I've spent most of my career working for nonprofit advocacy organizations, and you almost never run into people like this in those organizations. I think this speaks to a different kind of "do-gooding." Less individualistic (ie, my personal choices about the resources I control are the best way to effect change) and more collective/political (ie, the best way to effect change is to change systems).
posted by lunasol at 8:26 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

And I add that all this is really zero-sum - like there's a fixed amount of prosperity in the world and it needs to be spread out in the thinnest layer possible (under the direction of unaccountable, unelected "altruistic" elites! these people remind me of the late medieval Catholic church). So if people here have health insurance and houses and so on, that's because people in Africa don't have mosquito nets, not because there are concrete political causes that could be addressed in a systemic way.

This whole analysis fucking neglects colonialism and hypervalues charity relationships. "Africa" is poor because of colonialism, not because of some intrinsic state. "We're going to make money to give to the starving poor, because the poor you will always have with you" is not a radical statement, and the Guardian shouldn't be giving it a platform.

If people personally want to give away as much of their money as possible, sure, fine - as long as that money isn't gained by destroying others' livelihoods. But playing up the personal while ignoring the structural seems really self-indulgent to me - self-indulgence doesn't just lie with purchasing candy apples.
posted by Frowner at 8:31 PM on September 25, 2015 [12 favorites]

If anything, effective altruism is really class war - it's saying that working class people in the developed world should be destroyed by an elite altruist class so that the altruist class can use their profits to remake the developing world. It's profoundly undemocratic and gross.

Frowner, can you talk more about what you mean by this? My understanding of effective altruism on the giving side is simply that you give to groups that are the most effective, rather than those with the lowest overhead. This sort of seems to me like it could have a positive impact on the working class in impacted communities, as it would create more jobs and be less concerned with cutting costs (ie, pay and working conditions).

Obviously, definitions of "effective" can be subject to lots of subjectivity and I can see how someone with, for instance, a neoliberal ideology could favor charities that would be harmful to working classes, but that doesn't seem to be innate to the concept of effective altruism.
posted by lunasol at 8:32 PM on September 25, 2015

I think "do-gooders" make us uncomfortable because they seem unencumbered by doubt.
I think it's fascinating that the author is married to Philip Gourevitch and has written a book about "moral extremity".
I think if we met Julia we would be surprised by how "normal" and nice she was.
I think being unencumbered by doubt is one of the most dangerous things you can be but luckily Julia isn't hacking up her neighbours or running for office.
posted by fullerine at 8:47 PM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

Okay, so the point of effective altruism is that people with fancy degrees should make as much money as possible to give away, right? (Not that a secretary - like me! - couldn't be an effective altruist, but it's really aimed at the professional classes.)

Most of the ways to make as much money as possible destroy working class lives here in the US, because you end up at least moderately high up in banking, law, accounting, tech, etc. Sure, maybe you're not the person deciding "my company will buy up all these foreclosed houses which we will then rent at crushing rates" or "we are going to set this condition upon health insurance payouts which will kill some people" or whatever, but making lots of money is very frequently going to actually cause you to exploit people right here.

But! That's not important, because compared to the theoretical starving child somewhere in Africa, that's fine, right? After all, if I die at fifty because I can't access the medical treatment I need, or if my mother dies of infected bedsores in a charity nursing home (you can make quite good money running nursing home chains, many shitty) that doesn't matter, because we're still better off than the theoretical starving child. Even if I lose my home to foreclosure and live on the street, hell, I'm a grown adult, so I've had more life than the starving kid.

I have never seen one fucking thing from effective altruists saying that they should not take jobs that smash up communities and destroy working class lives.

So these people - if you want to dignify them with that appellation! - make their money, get worldly respect (and if you're a not a working class person, you'd be surprised how stressful and painful the chronic contempt toward working class people at work and in bureaucracies can be) and have the satisfaction of knowing that they are using their money to remake the world - profits that they've stolen from working class people right here. I didn't agree to have banks fuck up my neighborhood so that you, the manager of client services at your investment firm, can make a good salary; I did not agree to a system of predatory loans so that you, the IT person developing a new piece of financial software, could get a fat raise; I did not agree that if I work for minimum wage in the bowels of your company and you invest your christmas bonus in mosquito nets, then good is being done in the world. Hell, I didn't even vote for a politician who turned around and made those decisions; you made them off your own bat and I can't do shit about it.

It doesn't matter if the elite class is expropriating working people here to dish the profits out to other working people elsewhere. Just as the article says with the murder example, you can't commit a crime in the name of a higher good. And again, it's undemocratic - "I am justified in working for Slimy Tech Developers LLC because I give my $30,000 annual bonus to the Gates Foundation" is just saying that decisions about social policy in the developing world should be heavily influenced by foreign wealth, not by the popular will in the developing world.

It's class war because it's about putting more power in the hands of the well off - power both here (to make money) and there (to dish out the money and decide what it's for). It suggests that working people - here and elsewhere - cannot and should not have control over the conditions under which they work. This should be decided for them by elites and administered undemocratically by corporate rule here and nonprofit decison-making there.

Implicit in effective altruism is the understanding that power is all - you don't need to buy a yacht or live in a palace when you can have the yes and the no over thousands of human lives.
posted by Frowner at 8:54 PM on September 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

Also, let's say that you're an effective altruist senior manager somewhere awful, and your husband gets an expensive chronic disease. Not only do you have good health care, but you can always change your mind about giving away all your money. After all, you really need it now, right? Of course, the night janitor who cleans your office whose husband has an expensive chronic condition is just screwed, right? But again, that's not very important because she's not starving in Africa - sure, maybe she's Somali and is over here in the first place because of colonialist disruption of her region, but whatever.

There are lots of benefits to being part of the elite that are not summed up in your take-home pay, that's another thing I'm saying.
posted by Frowner at 9:04 PM on September 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

So these people - if you want to dignify them with that appellation!

Yes I do! People are still people, even if they have careers you find morally repugnant.

Okay, so the point of effective altruism is that people with fancy degrees should make as much money as possible to give away, right? (Not that a secretary - like me! - couldn't be an effective altruist, but it's really aimed at the professional classes.)

Honestly, I have never heard that it has to be about people with fancy degrees making a lot of money. When I've heard it talked about, it's about making donation choices based on outcomes rather than overhead. I dunno, maybe I missed something - I don't really follow trends in charitable giving to development work that closely so it's certainly possible. But there's no reason a secretary couldn't be an effective altruist.

Again, I'm more concerned with political change myself, so I'm not really into the effective altruism hype (hence not really following it as closely), but if accountants or lawyers are going to give money, it seems better for them to base giving decisions based on outcomes than overhead, because this allows NGOs to operate under more humane working conditions (and hopefully be more effective).
posted by lunasol at 9:12 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

You might find this entry on "earning to give" of interest - an article which reveals, weirdly enough, that the "Jeff" in the OP works at Google. (Which I didn't really expect to be true, precisely because it's too pat - "Oh, I'm giving away a big chunk of the money I make working for a company that actively promotes class war in the Bay Area and is extremely dodgy in its investments, future planning and ties to various unsavory state activities worldwide, no bigs." I genuinely assumed that while people like me would imagine this coming from a Google engineer, that this would just be because we're a bunch of hateful stereotypers.)
posted by Frowner at 9:22 PM on September 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

I mean, that earning to give thing actually quotes its proponents saying that whatever harm they do (in finance! which is the profession they recommend! fucking finance, which makes working for the Googs look like being a kindergarten teacher!) is as naught compared to the benefits to starving children, etc.

Until we don't have finance as a lucrative career, the poor we will always have with us, you bet.
posted by Frowner at 9:27 PM on September 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

Higher taxation would be the easiest and fairest way to redistribute wealth. But often the kind of person who enjoys giving to charity doesn't want higher taxes, they enjoy "being a philanthropist", and feeling like Lady Bountiful. I agree with Frowner that the power dynamics inherent in that are dubious.
posted by tinkletown at 2:21 AM on September 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

lunasol: I've known a few people like Julia. I've lived with a couple. They are lovely people but, unsurprisingly, make difficult housemates. I have to say, their lives seemed very constrained to me. Not necessarily materially (we were all broke college students or post-grads), but emotionally. They all had a lot of personal walls around what they thought of as acceptable. There was joy, but not necessarily a lot of frivolous fun.

I think this gets to the heart of why the "Julias" of the world can be challenging for other people. They have made very stark moral choices - "personal walls around what they thought of as acceptable" - and they live out the consequences of those choices every day.
In modern, First World, industrial societies there exist certain set of consensual assumptions about what's "normal" to do and what's not. If five friends go out for beers and wings, and they know that their sixth friend is staying home because he donated all his money for mosquito nets in Africa, the behavior of #6 is a challenge to the status quo. Mere proximity to a saintly person can feel like a judgment of your own "shallow" or "indulgent" behavior, even if he doesn't say anything about it.

lunasol: The interesting thing is that I've spent most of my career working for nonprofit advocacy organizations, and you almost never run into people like this in those organizations. I think this speaks to a different kind of "do-gooding." Less individualistic (ie, my personal choices about the resources I control are the best way to effect change) and more collective/political (ie, the best way to effect change is to change systems).

This feels like a more typical lifestyle that also consciously helps others, even if it's less mathematically optimized. Working in a helping profession and living a "normal" has more opportunity to change systems and patterns than an aggressively optimized strategy of "help the most people with $N that I personally control". But it takes all kinds.
posted by theorique at 3:00 AM on September 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

But playing up the personal while ignoring the structural seems really self-indulgent to me - self-indulgence doesn't just lie with purchasing candy apples.

Well, but that's kind of the whole premise of capitalism, isn't it? I dunno, I feel like you're forgetting that bourgeoisie are still workers from a Marxist perspective, and in many ways still victims of the system - everyone is except for capitalists.

Whilst I think one certainly can flame these - and effective altruists, and giving what you can people - for a kind of techno-libertarian-utopian naivety, I do think expecting them to cleave to a undiluted Marxism is a very high bar indeed to set. If it's the element of hypocrisy that specifically makes your gorge rise, I think they are really no more or less hypocritical than anyone in a capitalist system; that's the whole point of the system.
posted by smoke at 3:09 AM on September 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also Frowner - though I disagree with it - the giving what you can people argue that someone will be working in those jobs, and it may as well be them, who will donate thousands of dollars to aid, rather than someone who won't.

Again, that's the lowest common denominator aspect of capitalism, the bar is very low. And to be fair, if you are working in a capitalist society than it's an understandable perspective.

I dunno, as I say I view that crowd as misguided in many respects, but I feel like they are trying to square the circle that is our existence here in the west, in the world right now. I don't think there is one answer for trying to do this, or perhaps even many answers, I just don't know.

Forgive me, but I feel like your righteous certainty actually has more in common with that crowd than you might wish.
posted by smoke at 3:13 AM on September 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was one of the people up there who spoke out pro these people and seem to be on the side of effective altruism. I just want to reiterate that this is no way means I am not in favor of more taxation and organizing politically to effect policy changes. In fact, I think charity is an extremely inefficient way of ensuring that everyone is fed and clothed and has access to healthcare.

I will say though that I don't feel any particular loyalty to one nation over others. I'm not American, though I live here, but I would say the same thing about India, where I grew up. I think all human lives are valuable, and yes, I do think that the type of poverty you see in India and Africa is a of a more urgent kind than the kind you see in the US. However, I will always vote in favor of politicians that try their best to help the working class (well, if I could vote). I'm certainly not in favor of any of the things Frowner ascribes to effective altruists up there. And, while I do have one of those professional jobs that Frowner probably despises, all I can say is I do my best every day to think about the actions I am taking, and the "First, do no harm" principle. Frankly, nobody in this capitalist society doesn't have some blood on their hands, and you're kidding yourself if you think your hands are clean.
posted by peacheater at 6:58 AM on September 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

My comment wasn't directed at Julia in particular, but rather at the idea that if we could just come up with the perfect way to make the world equal, everything would be okay. Peacheater is right, we all have blood on our hands (though I will say that some people have rather more than others, and we need to be careful not to absolve corporations, governments, people in power, etc. of their shirking of responsibility), and the sooner we come to terms with that, the sooner we can stop feeling guilty and start effecting structural change. Guilt isn't a particularly useful emotion. Do the work.

I agree with everything Frowner has said. The problem with this charitable model is...well, who gets to set the priorities? An engineer at Google? A social worker? People from the upper middle class? People from the 1%? Bill Gates? Rarely is the answer "the people who know what they need," and that is the whole point.
posted by Ragini at 8:36 AM on September 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Frowner, while I understand and empathize with your class-based indignation, I think you may not have read the piece all that carefully. Here:

It was bad enough to worry about these questions in retrospect, but they became far more pressing when Julia had to think about a career. She had wanted to be a social worker for years, but she could earn far more money doing something else. Was it OK for her to be a social worker anyway? How much was she entitled to consider her own happiness? She could justify not going for the absolute maximum she could earn on the grounds that she would be so crushingly miserable in finance or law that she would have a breakdown within a few years, and then she would have lost the money she had spent on law school or business school or whatever it took to get into the field in the first place. But obviously there were lots of jobs that paid less than finance, yet more than social work. How could she justify going into a field that paid so little? All of this was much less of a problem for Jeff. He liked working as a programmer, and he imagined that even if he had no charitable duties he would probably be doing something pretty similar. It was not hard to make him happy.

What she wanted was to be a social worker; she struggled with the decision to earn more money so as to be able to give more away. It's fine to criticize her choice, but it's not fair to say she's just using altruism as a cover for her craving the life of a highly paid professional. And as for Jeff, is being a programmer really that oppressive to working people?
posted by languagehat at 9:00 AM on September 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

Actually, I think that being a programmer really can be that oppressive. It makes me sad, because I tend to get along extremely well with the older school, pre-brogrammer crowd, preferentially well, if anything - but writ large, what's going on with tech right now? Increasing the precarity of working class jobs, for one thing, if not getting rid of them altogether. Increasing the powers of the state and big corporations, surveillance-wise. Making it easier to manufacture and ship more of the extremely cheap, planet-destroying crap that we all - including me - overbuy, and without even the bad excuse of creating jobs. God knows what robotics is going to do to war, but obviously nothing good.

Julia is married to a guy at Google. Very typical - the dude makes lots of money so that the wife can pursue a genteel helping profession. (And actually, "social workers" are not an unambiguous good - the stories that one of my formerly homeless Native friends could tell you about his interactions with white lady social workers would curl your hair, and I've had some pretty shitty dealings with them when trying to get a friend state assistance. I expect that Julia is probably a nice one since she seems quite sincere and thoughtful, but we tend to invoke "social worker" as if it indicates someone who is unambiguously good, kind and decent - and that is very far from the case.)

It's not that I have a particular distaste for professional class jobs - we all have to eat. I have a particular distaste for people who make a lot of money, have a lot of social power, have a lot of baked-in advantages (in terms of health insurance, retirement options, prestige, options if they change fields, etc) and - just because they give a lot of money that is used without popular accountability by NGOs in the developing world - think they're engaged in some kind of glorious moral adventure. And apparently think that there's nothing self-serving about what they do, either emotionally or materially.

I think it's incredibly dangerous, in fact, when elites start with this kind of moral adventurism - it's like Bolsheviks turned inside out, it's the mission civilatrice, it's...well, it's bad enough when they say that they deserve their giant bonuses and massive social power because of the invisible hand of the market; it's much worse when they say they deserve that stuff because they're saintly.

I find it particularly gross when people in finance - the field that basically crashed the planet in 2008 and has been responsible for immense amounts of suffering and death worldwide - tell themselves that because they're dishing out their money to NGOs instead of spending it on, like, trophy wives and cocaine, they're gunning for sainthood.
posted by Frowner at 12:23 PM on September 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

(Some of my best friends - literally! - are programmers. I feel bad complaining about programmers, because we tend to get on like a house afire, although frankly in my experience a lot of programmers could stand to be more pro-active on the doing-dishes front. I would prefer there to be less structural inequality so that everyone could program uninhibitedly in good conscience, and I think that making lots of money so that you can give lots to charity is the opposite of getting rid of structural inequality.)
posted by Frowner at 12:32 PM on September 26, 2015 [5 favorites]

Programmer here, but not one of those Silicon Valley types who's worked for startups or anything flashy like that. I want to caution against over generalizing about my field. A lot of programmers work almost exclusively in the public sector or for the state, and the culture and daily realities of that sector of the IT market couldn't be more different than the Silicon Valley scene most people think of when they think of IT. It's not nearly as prestigious or glamorous a world, and tends to be a lot more blue collar in character than you'd expect. Lots of people who work very long hours for piffulous pay and very little appreciation, as well as outright exploitative contracting situations for some. Not all programming markets are created equal, FWIW.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:29 PM on September 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

Don't worry, folks! If you meet someone with a steadfast ethical position, I'm sure you can apply cleverness to find an ethical dilemma which will debunk this position and everyone can just give up and be selfish slobs again!

Phew!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:11 PM on September 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

Man, I kept waiting for the word "retirement." First in the article, and then in the thread. Are they saving for retirement at all? If not, are they expecting their daughter to support them? Counting on social security and medicaid (ie, their fellow Americans?)

I get that a lot of people do not have retirement savings, but for people who could afford to not to have any seems like a weird kind of "moral" choice. It's deciding to be a burden on others, eventually. Or if they are saving for retirement, well, how can they afford to, giving away 100% of Julia's income and 50% of Jeff's?

I think that this kind of life is what critics of utilitarianism would call "being a happiness pump." Utilitarianism is not the only moral philosophy, though. (See up thread, "THE MIDDLE WAY" for instance.)

Personally I tend toward a view that a life without such simple pleasures as candy apples is not worth living (I guess Julia would agree, more or less, based on what she says about why she had a child in the blog), and that ultimately no matter what the rich or relatively rich spend their money on, as long as they spend it, it goes back into the economy and pays the salary of someone who would otherwise be poor. The only exceptions are gold, land, etc, non-consumables which just sit there being worth a lot.

I feel morally obligated not to hoard wealth in those forms , but I don't feel morally obligated to give all my money away, to be a "happiness pump." And I really don't get the logic of giving your savings away rather than holding on to them for when you're inevitably too sick to work, some day.
posted by OnceUponATime at 5:13 PM on September 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

(I don't have any significant retirement savings or other valuable assets. Nor any savings for my kids' future education. My wife and I are probably going to be a major burden on our kids in retirement and when we die, due to our massive unsettled debt load. Is that moral? Being a lifelong burden to the people you involuntarily enlisted in life? Seems morally dubious to me. But what do I know.)
posted by saulgoodman at 9:26 PM on September 26, 2015

From Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene:

The ideal utilitarian “moral diet” is simply incompatible with the life for which our brains were designed [evolved]. Our brains were not designed to care deeply about the happiness of strangers. Indeed, our brains might even be designed for indifference or malevolence toward strangers. Thus, a real-world, flesh-and-blood utilitarian must cut herself a lot of slack, even more than a real-world healthy eater...Being a flesh-and-blood utilitarian does not mean trying to turn yourself into a happiness pump. To see why, one need only consider what would happen if you were to try: First, you wouldn’t even try. Second, if you were to try, you would be miserable, depriving yourself of nearly all of the things that motivate you to get out of bed in the morning (that is, if you still have a bed). As a halfhearted happiness pump, you would quickly rationalize your way out of your philosophy, or simply resign yourself to hypocrisy, at which point you’d be back where you started, trying to figure out how much of a hypocrite, and how much of a hero, you’re willing to be. ...

At the same time, being a flesh-and-blood utilitarian doesn’t mean being a complete hypocrite, giving yourself a free pass. Your inability to be a perfect utilitarian doesn’t get you off the hook any more than your inability to eat a perfect diet justifies gorging yourself at every meal.

Julia and Jeff don't sound like full-on happiness pumps, though. There's more "slack" in the blog posts than the candy apple story would suggest. It just sounds luke Julia has a hard time forgiving herself for not being one.
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:44 AM on September 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I find it hard to believe that anyone can disagree with the idea that someone else's suffering is as bad as mine -- at least, if we imagine someone else as the subject. So it's clear that all whinging about the self is just special pleading - I am different than other people, so I shouldn't be subject to the same reasoning or rules as they (this includes rules like "for any person, they should value themselves more than others", which are just incoherent).

Stop making excuses: accept your moral inadequacy, or own your chauvinism. I have no patience for people that act poorly but still want to think they're good.

In an objective, abstract sense - certainly the suffering of others is 'equal' to that of 'I'. Other people presumably feel pain, discomfort, and so forth.

The key wrinkle is that subjectively, the suffering of people is a set of concentric circles. It could be something like: 'I', immediate family, extended family and friends, acquaintances and colleagues, countrymen, the world. This is what you would probably call chauvinism but is it really 'acting poorly'? - it's a common, even universal, human trait.

Why is it 'incoherent' for a person to weight his own pleasure/pain, higher than that of other people? There's a fundamental difference due to 'ownership', control, and experience of one's own body. If I buy myself a falafel for $5, I experience the consequences of that; if I instead spend the $5 on a mosquito net in Africa, I don't experience the safety from malaria (though I do experience the positive sensation of having done something charitable and prosocial).

Part of the issue, I think, is that the default settings of society lie far away from where Julia operates. Maybe if more people did as she did, it would appear more normal.
posted by theorique at 6:53 AM on September 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was expecting a reference in the article to the grand-daddy of this line of thought, Peter Singer, and his article "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", the key sentence being "It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away." Please note that Singer also holds the view that handicapped babies should not be allowed to live and that animals should be treated on an equal footing with humans (he authored the book Animal Liberation which kicked off the animal rights movement).

Several questions in my mind after reading this article:

* As Newsweek once put it, all the recycling you do in your life will never impact the environment as much as one decision taken by the CEO of ExxonMobil. Given that this couple wants to make the maximum impact in the developed world, why not try to gain some influence over the chief decision-makers in that field? How about they get on the boards of some charities, or start their own? How about they run for Congress so they can advocate for more funds to USAID? As it is, it seems they are practicing a kind of monasticism with donations taking the place of prayer--which in turn seems to be more about themselves than the people they are helping.

* Has the couple ever visited one of the charities they give so much money to, so that they can see how their money is spent? As a previous commenter said, they seem to be totally idealistic and lack cynicism. I'll bet some cynicism would creep in as soon as they saw that charities in fact lack halos. Perhaps they are afraid such a visit would destroy their illusions?

* A charity would certainly take notice of someone who gives them $100,000. Might the administrators be uncomfortable since it is so out of the ordinary coming from one couple? Is it right to take advantage of people who seem to be addicted to charitable giving? Just as a conscientious bartender sends his problem clients to AA, is there someone they could have the couple talk to?
posted by mjklin at 8:01 AM on September 27, 2015

I recommend that everyone who might feel the need to speculate on Julia's mental state or question why she isn't thinking about the bigger picture or doing something like joining the board of a charity should read her blog as posted above before attacking strawmen again.

Specifically: "So test your boundaries, and see what changes you can make that will help others without costing you too dearly. But when you find something is making you bitter, stop. Effective altruism is not about driving yourself to a breakdown."

She joined GiveWell's board of directors in June.

She's not just into donating to feel good, but donating in ways that make the most difference in people's lives. Preferably with studies that guide those decisions.

No, it's not politically radical, nor is it especially saintly. It's people who have higher incomes than the average American family (and know it) living within modest means and giving the rest to help others in dire need.

Maybe they could be spending their surplus on causes that promote far-reaching political or socioeconomic structural change. Maybe they've decided that paying for eradication of a disease in the next five years is a better bet (in terms of efficacy and certainty in reducing human suffering) than donating to a political party or lobbying group. In any case, the choice isn't between Google engineers who donate most of their income to charity, and Google engineers who quit their morally problematic jobs and become full-time political activists; it's between Google engineers who donate most of their income to charity, and their peers who spend the money on expensive cars, big houses, and $25,000 4K TVs instead. One would think that the people who benefit from an unjust system* and don't do much of anything to help others (except when forced to by taxes) would be more under attack here than those who benefit from an unjust system but at least realize that and voluntarily try to do something to help others.

*e.g. all Americans

I mean, smashing global capitalism may very well be the best long-term solution to widespread poverty, but it's kind of a long shot, donation-wise, and I think that reasonable people can in good faith decide to spend their money elsewhere to definitely help people right now.
posted by skoosh at 10:57 AM on September 27, 2015 [10 favorites]

(Not to pick on you specifically theorique, you just phrased this quotably well.)

I totally judge people who feel judged or threatened by other people's actions that don't involve them as shallow(*).

(* Doesn't mean they're a bad person, necessarily.)

No worries, I don't feel judged. ;)

On the one hand, other peoples' actions indeed don't "involve" the person having the emotional response, but on the other hand, any input that enters our consciousness through our senses "involves us" in some manner. A lot of people evaluate a situation by thinking about "how would I behave in that situation?".

I've seen people this kind of response to persons of the "activist type" before - a person with well-defined, and very strongly held, political and social views almost can often induce a stronger emotional response in others than a person with weakly held or vaguely-defined views. I think it's because the presence of such a person often induces others to ask questions about themselves - "How did I come to believe what I believe? What do I believe? Should I do what they are doing?" and so forth.

The title of the post describes it well: "nobody likes to be reminded, even implicitly, of his own selfishness".
posted by theorique at 9:40 AM on September 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

rum-soaked space hobo: "Don't worry, folks! If you meet someone with a steadfast ethical position, I'm sure you can apply cleverness to find an ethical dilemma which will debunk this position and everyone can just give up and be selfish slobs again! Phew!"

First of all, "have a steadfast ethical position" and "be a selfish slob" are not the only two possibilities here. Second of all, speaking of clever ethical dilemmas, doesn't the fact that a fellow quoted in this piece has recourse to a quite strange and cleverly constructed ethical dilemma to justify his views – "Morality can demand a lot. Let’s say you’ve been falsely accused of murder, you’ve been sentenced to death, and you realise that you can escape if you kill one of your guards..." – doesn't that indicate that this is more muddy, and more complicated, than it may seem at first?
posted by koeselitz at 1:32 PM on September 28, 2015

Second of all, speaking of clever ethical dilemmas, doesn't the fact that a fellow quoted in this piece has recourse to a quite strange and cleverly constructed ethical dilemma to justify his views – "Morality can demand a lot. Let’s say you’ve been falsely accused of murder, you’ve been sentenced to death, and you realise that you can escape if you kill one of your guards..." – doesn't that indicate that this is more muddy, and more complicated, than it may seem at first?

Professor Ord goes on to say: "Morality says you can’t kill him, even though it means you’re going to lose your life. That’s just how it is."

Is that just how it is? I thought these were the kind of questions, without obvious answers, that people grappled with in philosophy class. There's plenty of "on the one hand" / "on the other hand" to confound philosophers for hours. It's a bit too pat for Ord - a professor of philosophy - to say "That's just how it is".

It's an interesting dilemma that he sets up: if you go to your death sentence, then you die an innocent man, which is obviously wrong; if you kill your guard and escape, then you become the guilty man, the person you were accused of being in the first place, which is also wrong. You can go back and forth with further gedankenexperiments ad infinitum.

(Personally, I like the idea that since the guard is participating in an unjust system which convicted an innocent man, he is not himself innocent and thus you can kill him without guilt. But maybe that's just a convenient rationalization to pick the alternative that feels more appealing.)
posted by theorique at 6:54 PM on September 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

> Personally, I like the idea that since the guard is participating in an unjust system which convicted an innocent man, he is not himself innocent and thus you can kill him without guilt. But maybe that's just a convenient rationalization to pick the alternative that feels more appealing.

Yes, that is just a convenient rationalization, and I would urge you to struggle against it. It's natural to want to live, but that doesn't mean anything we do to keep ourselves alive is morally OK. We are all "participating in an unjust system," and anyone with a grudge and a weapon can decide it's morally OK to kill us. This is what motivates suicide bombers. "But it's me, and I'm a good person, so it's OK!" is not an answer. The only answer, if you analyze it well and consistently enough, is that killing is wrong.
posted by languagehat at 6:17 AM on September 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yes, that is just a convenient rationalization

I read a horrifying article years ago about orphanages in (I think) Romania just after Ceaușescu. They were overcrowded and so underfunded that they were pretty much just holding cells for unwanted children who were lucky not to starve to death. Part of the article was an interview with a... attendant? guard? where the journalist asked him "How can you work there?" And the man said "I hate it, and it makes me sick, but it's the only job here, and if I don't do it, my children will end up in that place." Talk about being part of an unjust system! Maybe it was just a rationalization on his part, but the thought of having to live with a decision like that every day... well, it's stuck with me.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:33 AM on September 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

mjklin: Please note that Singer also holds the view that handicapped babies should not be allowed to live and that animals should be treated on an equal footing with humans...

What about handicapped animal babies?
posted by clawsoon at 2:58 PM on September 29, 2015

What about Muppet Babies?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:06 PM on September 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

The only answer, if you analyze it well and consistently enough, is that killing is wrong.

It's a good guiding principle but there still exist special cases and overrides - for example, self-defense or protection of innocent third-parties generates a lot of exceptions. So we can still agree that killing is wrong, but (for example) killing an armed home invader is less wrong than letting him kill you or your loved ones.
posted by theorique at 3:13 AM on September 30, 2015

The problem is that it's all too easy to decide that any killing one happens to favor is one of those exceptions. One of the good things about religion (I'm an atheist) is that it enables people to hold out against the pressure to make exceptions; humans are good at rationalization, and if you have rational arguments against killing you can be talked out of them by a good rationalizer, but if your objection is religious (i.e., irrational), you can just say "Nope, God said killing is wrong and I'm sticking with that." (Yes, of course I'm aware that religion also enables plenty of bad behavior; can we not get into that? Like I said, I'm an atheist.) I don't agree with conservative philosophers like Burke that mankind needs religion to keep us from running amuck, but I understand why they think that; the track record of mankind since much of it decided to junk religion isn't very inspiring. As annoyed as I get with Jehovah's Witnesses (for example) for their proselytizing, my respect for their consistent refusal to have any truck with government-organized killing trumps my annoyance. It's hard to be moral in this world, and whatever helps people do that is a good thing.

And I would remind you that people are far, far more likely to be called upon to support government-organized killing (war, executions) than they are to confront the choice between killing an armed home invader and "letting him kill you or your loved ones" (most home invaders just want to take your stuff, and I hope you agree it's not right to kill someone for that).
posted by languagehat at 8:36 AM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

And I would remind you that people are far, far more likely to be called upon to support government-organized killing (war, executions) than they are to confront the choice between killing an armed home invader and "letting him kill you or your loved ones"

Agreed. Most of us probably cause far more deaths with our tax dollars than we do with our personal CCWs and home defense weapons. Very few of even the most ardent Second Amendment defenders have ever used violence to defend themselves, their families, and their property. (And this is a good thing - society is not quite as dangerous or violent as the most paranoid among us believe.)

(most home invaders just want to take your stuff, and I hope you agree it's not right to kill someone for that).

I agree in principle that the moral wrong of petty or even grand theft is less than the moral wrong of killing a human being. The challenge here is that when these situations arise, they don't come packaged up as thought experiments.

In a home invasion, more information is missing than present. Suppose a homeowner hears breaking glass at 2:30 AM, sees a clear stranger/intruder enter the house on his living room security camera, goes downstairs with a shotgun. The homeowner doesn't know the mental state and intent of the intruder, whether he is armed or not, whether he is high or sober. I suspect that most people would rather err on the side of "protect my family from a clear but incompletely understood threat" rather than "maybe there's an explanation for this".
posted by theorique at 6:17 AM on October 1, 2015

A few comments deleted; just rewinding briefly at poster request.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:46 AM on October 1, 2015

In case people are wondering - I had posted an anecdote about a home invasion that I experienced. The situation was very scary and weird.

I realized after posting that I had unintentionally written a sentence in a way that could be read as really callous and racist, even though my original intent had been to highlight the racist assumptions underpinning how I had learned to think about crime. I asked the mods to delete it because it was written in a way that I felt was hurtful and did not advance the discussion.

The takeaway from my experience:

Home invasions are not like you think they will be, and situations can be very ambiguous.

I am really glad we didn't have a gun in the house and didn't have the option of shooting someone out of hand.

Our particular home invader was unarmed and on the run from dangerous people, as it turned out, but I would never have known that if I'd shot first and asked questions later. As soon as I talked to him, it became clear that we were not in danger from him.

Something else I didn't think of: when you're talking about home invasions, consider the young Black men and women who have been killed while looking for help. Our guy was looking for help, and I think about what a nightmare it must have been to be running from someone so scary that your only option was to break into a house, try to wedge the door and hope for the best.
posted by Frowner at 8:19 AM on October 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

> I suspect that most people would rather err on the side of "protect my family from a clear but incompletely understood threat" rather than "maybe there's an explanation for this".

Yes, of course, but "how most people would feel in an urgent and scary situation" isn't a good basis for morality. Most people would feel a visceral desire to harm, perhaps kill, someone who hurt or killed someone they loved, but there's a good reason revenge isn't a basis of most moral codes. I'm ashamed of some of the things I thought and felt when my first marriage was ending, and I'm glad I didn't act on them; the fact that I can understand why people sometimes do things they shouldn't under such circumstances doesn't make those things OK. And one of the reasons for my deciding to file as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War was that, although I was very clear in my own mind that killing, even under government orders, was wrong, I was also aware that if I were drafted and became part of a platoon under constant threat in a country strange to me where none of us knew the language there was a very good chance that I would become a killer as a result of the combined effects of fear, alienation, and peer pressure. I might then come back to the US and resent everyone who attacked the war and said killing was wrong. That's how humans work. If I wanted to live up to my morality, I had to avoid putting myself in a situation where I might well wind up violating it.
posted by languagehat at 9:04 AM on October 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

Philanthrocapitalism: A self-love story
posted by eviemath at 4:05 AM on October 14, 2015

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