Altruism - Peter's notes

Altruism is a tricky idea. Some issues: 1. It has a “moral purity” association, where complete impartiality (viz. lack of self-interest) is expected, at least in pretence. Some issues with this: 1. Insofar as you’ve internalised pro-social values, it’s not clear where self-interest ends and altruism begins. 2. The boundaries of the self are blurry—where does “your” identity come from, after all? 3. Trying to get your personal cares “out of the way” in the name of altruism may make your decisions worse. 4. There isn’t a strictly distinct class of actions or motivations we can categorise as “altruistic”. Rather actions/motivations are distributed along a spectrum between selfishness and altruism. 5. Anti-realist intuitions suggest that a strong notion of impartial value is incoherent: valuing requires a valuer. 2. It has a prioritarian association (“first, help those in need”). This encourages an asymmetry: focus on preventing disvalue (”bad times”) rather than generating value (”good times”). 1. I’m not sure how to compare helping an unhappy person to have a slightly less bad time to helping a happy person have a slightly better time. I actually do have a fairly strong prioritiarian intuition here. Nonetheless, I am nervous about a perspective that has a very strong focus on preventing disvalue. 1. Even the most fortunate humans face a somewhat tragic situation, enduring bad times and leading lives that fall far short of what they might be. 2. Creating and maintaining good things is also difficult. The less obvious and lower status means of doing this are presumably quite neglected. One should be alert to opportunities of both kinds; I’m tempted to say that one should practice both. 1. Notably: creating and preserving the conditions for an optimistic, joyful and ambitious culture seems very important. I worry that people associated with the effective altruism movement sometimes neglect this, partly because of the “altruism” frame. 1. Toby Ord’s book on existential risk did a good job here, though, and what I’ve read of Parfit seems good on this score as well. 2. The “progress studies” crowd seem poised to take up some of the slack. 3. A strong focus on preventing the bad may lead us to forget what is good, to develop a habit of rejection, even to fall out of love with life. Downer. 👎 3. It carries a “personal sacrifice is good” connotation, which encourages us to focus on our level of personal sacrifice rather than the consequences of our actions. The altruism that matters is not centrally about you and your willingness to sacrifice: it’s about you being as useful as you can be. 4. People who make a show of presenting themselves as altruistic often seem graceless, naive or even suspicious. I’m not sure why. Overall I somewhat regret that the word “altruism” appears in the name of the “effective altruism” movement, though I’m not aware of other names on the long list that were better. “Super badass do gooders”, anyone?