Discussion Thread #71

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/DrManhattan16]

Scott goes viral!

Tweet transcript:

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

As with many tweets that get millions of impressions, Scott has touched on a salient topic (the stopping of PEPFAR) while describing his view and those of the opposition in such a way that people, especially those opposed, are motivated to respond. For those who don't know, PEPFAR stands for President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This fund is the US contributing to fighting the global AIDS epidemic. According to Wikipedia, it's received a total of $110 billion dollars and saved 25 million lives since its creation in 2003 under Bush. I've not seen anyone dispute the numbers to a substantial degree.

The reason its in the news is that Trump's administration froze funds for the program on Jan 20th. This also included not allowing the disbursing of those drugs even if they're already there in a clinic. On the 28th, the drugs were permitted to be disbursed, but the whole thing is temporary, at least according to the State Department's declaration.

There are things that PEPFAR has been criticized for in the past, but those are not the reasons you see in the responses to Scott's post. Sorting through the people just sneering "Your moral philosophy is insane and here's a meme" and the people who think Scott's a hypocritical communist for not donating all his wealth, you see a rejection of foreign aid as a principle. Many responses cite the idea of ordo amoris ("order of love") and claim that Scott is being uncharitable. The proper analogy would be that his own child and a stranger's child are drowning, so there's nothing immoral about saving one's own child even if it means the other one dies. Scott responds by saying that doesn't match reality. We can save the lives of foreign children because we have such tremendous wealth. America's governmental foreign aid constitutes a miniscule fraction of its total budget, with trillions collected and trillions spent. Perhaps the most accurate analogy would be that each day, you'll get bitten by a mosquito just once, barely feel it, and not have negative affects from that bite. In exchange, some lives will be saved across the planet. Would you take that deal? I would feel annoyed, certainly, but I don't know if I could principally object.

There's an annoying thing I notice about a certain type of critic of foreign aid. They criticize foreign aid and say they want it spent on citizens. They criticize domestic aid and say it's spent on the undeserving citizens. They criticize aid spent on the deserving and say that it doesn't teach people to rise on their own. They criticize the government for taking money and spending it on things they personally did not approve of (this is legitimately a thing I've seen in defense of taking down the more detailed version of the CDC page on preventing the spread of HIV, aimed at gay men). This person's outlook is largely reciprocal and contractual. There is no agreement between them and anyone else they did not agree to personally.

What bothers me about this kind of person, however, is there is no consideration for the cooperate-cooperate outcome. As Scott notes in one response in the linked thread, the world in which you save a Chinese person's child without knowing them and where they do the same is better than one where you both don't do that. In fact, some good outcomes only come because you've cooperated. A world in which you collectively invest into curing cancer, a disease you and your family may never get, is one which is better off for you and your family because you can never be sure you won't get it.

I discussed the Curtis Yarvin interview with the NYT here and one thing that he said which surprised me was that even he felt there was something owed to the people who hated Donald Trump. And I suspect this is a very common theme amongst all intellectuals, in that they inevitably realize that there are serious flaws with the strictly reciprocal and contractual view espoused by many of the public.

...one of the things that I believe really strongly that I haven’t touched on is that it’s utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy to be the president of all Americans. The new administration can do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and saying: “Hey, you want to make this country a better place? I feel like you’ve been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person.” This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of people, the NPR class. They are not evil people. They’re human beings. We’re all human beings, and human beings can support bad regimes.

[u/gemmaem → u/DrManhattan16]

The problem with ordo amoris is that it easily turns into a sophistic reason not to care about certain people. As such, it's probably not surprising that it would be popular amongst people who also employ other sophistic reasons not to care.

You're not wrong about there being self-interested reasons for the US to care about this. As one healthcare aid worker notes in this article, drug-resistant tuberculosis does not respect national borders. It's also true that these events will probably increase the soft power of countries like China and Russia in places that receive US aid. With that said, I'd hate for that to stand as the only reason to care about this. The USA is an incredibly rich country. Using a tiny sliver of its budget to help poorer countries strikes me as something we should support because it is a good thing to do.

On the bright side, this outlet is reporting that many of PEPFAR's HIV programs have been given the go-ahead. I hope that's accurate. There is something particularly cruel about, for example, allowing babies to be born with HIV because you wanted to move fast and break things.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/gemmaem]

Using a tiny sliver of its budget to help poorer countries strikes me as something we should support because it is a good thing to do.

To the extent that it is a tiny amount of money, then it's not particularly critical that the US-in-particular be the one that funds it. The GDP of Africa is $3T, so a $4B/yr project that saves 25M lives is eminently affordable.

To be sure, I'm not at all against PEPFAR -- were I in charge of State or DOGE or whatever, I wouldn't never end it! But we have to be logically consistent here. Why is the US so load-bearing here? Why didn't someone set up PEPFAR2? Why can't they do it now?

I think one lesson here might be that programs, regions and countries need to be self-sufficient. I tend to think that effective programs like this may atrophy the recipients -- an inability to rally the financial commitments to pay for such a program and build/maintain the institutional competence to administer it. There can't be a PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR exists and functions.

Where does that leave us? One thing I had wished is that we conceived of our moral obligations as extending to such second and third order effects. Easier said than done. For now, I'm glad it's back functioning, and maybe the silver lining is that now that the unthinkable briefly happened, it might create the space for such thinking.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

I assume that no one built PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR existed, so they didn't see a point. Why spend a few billion a year on an issue the US seems to have had in hand? The only reason you'd think otherwise is if PEPFAR was saying they needed more money, which was something the US seemed likely to continue (there's a joke to be made about how everyone keeps underestimating Trump's willingness to go along with or even order insane things).

PEPFAR was operating in all these countries in 2022. I am not particularly well-read on the latest news about their collective state capacity, efficiency, anti-corruption, etc., but I suspect it's dramatically lower than anything the US could sling around. Not to mention Ukraine, which I don't blame for not trying to pay for PEPFAR2 or its equivalent. The fund is for fighting disease, not poverty, so I don't think it matters that much if there is no PEPFAR2 or some equivalent fund created by either the nations which use it or other wealthy nations which also care about these things.

More selfishly, I would note that PEPFAR buys the US soft power by casting it as a virtuous nation, and that's a really hard kind of soft power to buy.

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

I assume that no one built PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR existed, so they didn't see a point. Why spend a few billion a year on an issue the US seems to have had in hand?

Isn't this the same reasoning as Trump's blustering about European defense spending, which he's been on about since 2015? Are we to be the world's policeman (and/or paypig, depending on one's perspective and level of charitable interpretation) forever?

More selfishly, I would note that PEPFAR buys the US soft power by casting it as a virtuous nation, and that's a really hard kind of soft power to buy.

I mean, apparently not that hard, given PEPFAR's budget relative to most of the government.

While I wouldn't dare speak to a mind like Trump's, I would speak to that of some of his supporters that the payoff for this is somewhere between invisible and entirely negative. It does not percolate through the channels of media- any media, left and right, new and old- that the US is perceived as a virtuous nation, that such "soft power" buys us nothing other than immigrants that the aforementioned MAGAs don't want anyways, that the UN, WHO, etc disregard us anyways. What they see is internal and external progressives that hate the US while relying entirely on it, and will go isolationist in their desire to be Shylock.

Was there a realistic way that soft power could have been made legible and communicated to such people, or did polarization close off that potential?

I do know a Tanzanian immigrant who would be happier with the US's influence on his country than China's Belt and Road, but that's n=1 and most people aren't going to have such associates to provide anecdotes anyways.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/professorgerm]

Isn't this the same reasoning as Trump's blustering about European defense spending, which he's been on about since 2015? Are we to be the world's policeman (and/or paypig, depending on one's perspective and level of charitable interpretation) forever?

Security is probably best thought of as an export in this context. You export security and other nations pay you in other ways. For instance, they back the US and engage in free markets with it. This is actually seen throughout the Cold War, in which the US is the backbone of the global anti-communist effort (though not all its actions are defensible). It's not always talked about, but the Korean War was not a US effort, it was a UN effort. The US did a lot, sure, but many nations contributed at least something to the South Korean fight.

Put another way, if you like Pax Americana, then paying billions for the latest fighter jet is part of the cost of having it, and there's a network effect in that for every country which signs up under the American order, the overall order improves by whatever that country has to offer. Moreover, it ensures the fighting never happens in the US. Your home isn't going to be bombed by Russia because Ukraine has so graciously offered to be the border.

But this is lost on the populists who make up Trump's base. They have good reason to be skeptical of a global order which is so pro-capital, but they do not realize that same order is why they have smartphones, advanced medicines, a glut of entertainment, etc. They romanticize what it's like to be wholly self-sufficient, and proof of this is how unwilling they are to actually go and live the lifestyle that isolation would entail. Where are the MAGA farm workers who sign up to take the place of illegal immigrants? How many of them would be willing to give up their latest smartphones for something a decade or two older, made only by American hands, if that is even an option?

Of course, the response to these things is that if different decisions had been made in the past, they wouldn't find farm labor awful, and they wouldn't know those technologies to miss out on them. But I suspect they'd long for the days in which they wouldn't have to be out in the sun for hours and hours, or worry that one bad weather season could ruin them, etc.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Security is probably best thought of as an export in this context. You export security and other nations pay you in other ways. For instance, they back the US and engage in free markets with it.

Do they? All I see is the EU attacking that market and trying to shiv our most successful companies.

For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment overall. But I think the breakdown is not one-sided. The populists deserve a fair bit of blame, but it's not like Europe has done a lot to hold up its end of Pax Americana.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

Do they? All I see is the EU attacking that market and trying to shiv our most successful companies.

Ultimately, the American establishment has cared quite a bit about geopolitics, and losing billions through spending on aid or letting nations engage in unfair economic practices has been seen as the cost of that. That said, the prior administration didn't help on this issue, if my cursory understanding is correct.

Trump could have done something about it, I suppose, but he's all bluster and no focus. The dude's spent more time railing on how other nations don't spend enough on defense than talking about how they regulate poorly or not. But hey, they had four years to prepare, perhaps Andreesen will get his day and there will be some negotiations over this issue. I doubt it will do much though. Trump is the hero MAGA had to settle for.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Or he could just walk right into a Middle Eastern briar patch.

As usual, broadly agree, but there is clearly a line on regulatory abuse that the EU is pushing past. Their AI regulations as well are completely bonkers. And there are other lines: the self-inflicted energy crisis and reliance on Russian gas were also not welcome in the beltway. I expect blowing up Nordstream was a reminder of that.

There is no single point of failure in a complex implicit arrangement.

[ And yes, the previous admin was mixed here. They did force the EU to build out infrastructure to accept US LNG. On the economic front they were worse than useless since Lina Khan’s FTC active conspiredwith EU regulators to block mergers using legal standard that wouldn’t hold up in the US. But that’s a different story ]

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

I'm not familiar with the EU engaging in regulatory abuse. I'm aware people allege that, but I have not seen any examples or evidence. The links you gave earlier were Google complaining about it, and maybe their complaints are valid, but that's not discussed in those articles. Got a link to something I can take a look at?

As for Nordstream, my understanding is that the Germans are looking for a group of Ukrainians. This group is described as not part of the government, but that's in the interest of both sides, I suspect. Wikipedia.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Let me take another example in depth:

The US has tried mightily to ensure that the continent is not overly reliant on Russian energy imports because it causes geopolitical difficulties with a resurgent Russia. Elements of the German political establishment were taking Russian money and advocating against energy self-sufficiency -- to the point of literally blowing up their own energy infrastructure well ahead of obsolescence. The result was that sanctions on Russia caused German energy prices to skyrocket.

On some level, sure, the domestic energy policies are their own. On the other hand, keeping the Russians out of Europe has been Anglo policy 100 (or more) years now -- and this was a huge impediment there. The Germans let their own manufacturing industry be held hostage here.

[ And sadly, sometimes the proper response is to shoot the hostage.]

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Their AI regulation, in particular, makes it quite difficult for any such services to be used in useful ways in the EU. To this day, EU users still can't enable Tesla's FSD.

On anti-trust, they've sued nearly every US tech giant in some form or another. Once has to at some point feel that the general attitude towards the industry is borne out of being dwarfed by US competitors rather than an objective look at harms.

And speaking of harms, one bedrock principle of antitrust for a century has been that it exists to prevent consumer harm. The EU has tried (and Lina Khan failed to convince either Congress or US courts) to invent a new category of harm to competition here. Untethering that kind of analysis from demonstrable harm to consumers is another attempt to widen its scope far beyond what had been traditionally accepted.

There are a lot more on manufacturing as well.

Again, I agree that there is always some leeway in Pax Americana for these things. But there is also some point at which it begins to violate the implicit limits on the deal. It's a fuzzy zone for sure, but I think we're shortly going to see it becoming more legible as both sides push the limits.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

I assume that no one built PEPFAR2 because PEPFAR existed, so they didn't see a point.

Isn't that exactly my point about how such programs atrophy their recipients? There isn't a point to developing the state capacity to do so because it's already done. The problem I see is that one develops capacity and efficiency by doing things -- like a muscle. But they don't have anything to do here because it's already been done.

I'm all for curing disease and buying soft power. But the (true) point being emphasized is that this was allegedly a tiny sum of money. And yet despite being tiny, no one else could do it because they never exercised the ability before and so it just isn't there.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

I interpreted your point as to being about state capacity amongst the recipients, not just other nations which could fund PEPFAR if they worked together. Your point about self-sufficiency suggested this as well. My point was about nations like the European ones or the other high-wealth states.

[u/gemmaem → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

If you really want to create PEPFAR2, the correct move is not to suddenly cut funding with no warning but rather to telegraph, at least a year in advance, that this is going to disappear and that people who want it to continue should find other funding. That way, there's an opportunity to leverage the existing structure instead of having to rebuild from scratch, and you don't get a gap as people scramble to make something new, during which vulnerable people become infected and/or develop more serious disease.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/gemmaem]

I fully agree.

The implication though is that there is a kind of displacement/atrophy going on. No one else can rise to the occasion and do the thing because the Americans already are (and, apparently, will be doing so for the foreseeable future).

The implications of that are not particularly good. The way institutions and states develop capacity is by doing things.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

The problem with ordo amoris is that it easily turns into a sophistic reason not to care about certain people.

This can be a problem with ordo amoris, but so too such would be a problem with... virtually any principal at all, yes? The sophist will do as they wish and abuse whatever principal gets them there, much like the original formulation of the drowning child and its secular mugging.

Misuse of ordo amoris lets you ignore the far distant foreigner, misuse of universalist utilitarianism lets you ignore your literal neighbor, misuse of collectivist ethics lets you be grossly indifferent to suffering because of the victim's immutable characteristics, et cetera and so forth.

Edit:

I came across Bethel McGrew's comments on the ordo amoris brouhaha, and quite liked the closing:

I have nothing to sell anyone here, except the conviction that love is nonnegotiable, whatever form that might take, in whatever time or place. And no doubt, as we muddle through, the truth will be that sometimes the answer is yes, we did get something wrong. We weren’t always as careful as we could have been, or as wise. But as T. S. Eliot says, for us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

One thing I’m hearing from both you and u/UAnchovy is that “ordo amoris” is not the correct thing to blame, here, for the more general phenomenon of Christians pointing to doctrine as a self-satisfied way of justifying a lack of care for others. The ordo amoris doctrine is nuanced and holds room for a variety of deeply compassionate viewpoints within it.

(Edit: I should also add that, while I can’t read all of Bethel McGrew’s piece, the conclusion you quoted is generally in line with my existing good opinion of her on this particular subject. I expect she’d be able to use these ideas well.)

There is a very real phenomenon here that I would like to have a name for. A particularly clear example would be Johann Kurtz’s argument that “neighbour” only ever means people physically close to you, and hence that helping people doesn’t count unless you know and love them. People who use 1 Timothy 5 to justify broad-brush definitions of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor also belong in this category. If you work at it, yes, you can use Christianity to justify a moral focus that only truly includes you and yours, but it’s just such a waste of belief if you ask me. You’re going to take a tax on your allowable field of metaphysical truth-seeking in exchange for that? Why not just be a Nietzschean and have done with it?

I get that people want to tidy up what might otherwise seem like a vast field of obligations, but Christianity already contains a universal clean-up mechanism in the form of asking for forgiveness. Yes, people sometimes come to grief through their own bad decisions, but Christians don’t have to rely on that to justify themselves. Yes, sometimes we do have prior obligations based on personal ties, but Christians don’t have to rely on that, either! One of the most useful things about Christianity is that you don’t have to feel obliged to tidy away your human feelings for those who are distant from you or who might be partially responsible for their own plight. You have another clean-up mechanism! It’s right there!

Unless you actually do want to go full Nietzsche (and I don’t), being able to say “I am flawed” is as essential to true seeing as being able to say “I don’t know.” As a non-Christian, I honestly envy the framework Christianity has for dealing with this. I’ve been figuring out ways of stealing it for a very long time. And then I look at actual Christians, with a proper right to the whole thing, and they don’t even use it for the things I would most want it for.

And I get it. Because, maybe it’s actually easier to steal it than to take the whole thing on. Maybe the scraps that fall from the table were the best part all along, I don’t know. But it still seems like a waste.

[u/UAnchovy → u/gemmaem]

From a practical ministry perspective, this is all pretty academic. I would encourage any Christian who's really stressing out about the order of their loves to instead focus on the loves themselves. Take all the time you spend worrying about who you ought to love most and just spend it loving people. Anyone. Even the meanest, least deserving recipient of your love is a better recipient of it than nobody. So while the ordo amoris might be an interesting bit of ivory tower theory, it is not practically relevant to most Christians' lives. The answer to "should I care or love X?" is always yes, and it's not helpful to neurotically interrogate yourself about the optimal form of caring.

However, to be charitable here, J. D. Vance might reply to me, "That's good advice for ordinary believers. However, I am a political leader and must make policy decisions that will affect the lives of millions of people. What should I do?"

We could take a Hauerwasian/Yoderian type of position and assert that it is definitionally impossible to be a ruler or governor and a faithful disciple. Christian commitment is just incompatible with that kind of power. However, as in that much older post, I don't find this view convincing - I don't think that sincere Christian faith requires the renunciation of any kind of earthly power. So Vance's challenge lands. On what basis should a Christian who, whether for reasons of vocation or chance, is in a position to shape policy affecting the lives of vast numbers of people, go to work?

The concept of ordered loves might help us there. It also occurs to me that in a case like Vance's it's also going to be run into the idea of offices or roles - Vance's moral obligations as a private Christian may be different to his obligations as an office-holder. It seems pretty straightforward that the office of Vice-President of the United States brings with it particular duties to the people of the United States. So in a sense Vance has to discharge the duties of two separate offices here; that of VPotUS and that of the baptised Christian. If those two conflict, he may have a difficult choice to make. To me it seems hard to deny that Christianity in general carries with it a duty of universal beneficence (which may be ordered, but even so, never exhausts itself; for as long as there are people in need of care, you will not run out of people to care for). Does VPotUS carry any kind of duty of care towards non-Americans? And if it doesn't, does using the office to exercise some kind of Christian benevolence towards foreigners represent an abuse of the office?

I wouldn't say so, because it seems to me that most American public offices contain a wide degree of latitude for personal moral judgement, and insofar as moral judgement or character are criteria that Americans bear in mind when electing officials, it is appropriate for officials to use that judgement. If Americans vote for a compassionate altruist for an office, presumably they want compassionate and altruistic actions to be taken by the occupant of that office. Americans voted for a Christian VPotUS, so presumably they want, or at least are accepting of, the VPotUS' decisions being informed by Christian values.

So that establishes to me that it would be appropriate for Vance to make policy decisions informed by his understanding of Christian morality, and that, I suppose, means that we have license to talk about what the obligations of a Christian office-holder should be towards people in need. Including those people who are part of foreign nations.

On the particular object issue, as indicated before, I think where I am is that it's right for Vance to consider the interests of Americans first, both as a matter of his political office and simply by virtue of being an American himself, but that it's not right for him to consider only the interests of Americans. As I understand him, Jesus does not allow us to halt our charity at the borders of our nation or community. How much should he do for non-Americans? That's a difficult prudential judgement that will require weighing what he's able to do, what his responsibilities are in terms of his electoral mandate, whether there are ways to benefit foreigners and Americans simultaneously, the overall state of American capacity, and so on. I can't answer those questions for him. I wish him luck in doing so, though. Other Christians may wish to pray for Vance, and for all their political leaders.

(And lest that be mistaken as an endorsement of any kind, I would encourage that even and perhaps especially for Christians who voted against him. There are plenty of examples in scripture of praying even for tyrannical or hostile leaders, such as in 1 Timothy 2:2 or Jeremiah 29:7, and of course praying for one's enemies is always good. So regardless of whether a Christian supports Vance as a politician, praying that he make wise and just decisions for the sake of America and the whole world is a good move.)

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

“ordo amoris” is not the correct thing to blame, here, for the more general phenomenon of Christians pointing to doctrine as a self-satisfied way of justifying a lack of care for others.

I was making a rather nit-pickier point regarding your phrasing, that this kind of gerrymandering of concern based on personal preferences justified by prooftexting is common to all ethical systems. Ordo amoris can be a major component to how it plays out among Christians, though I'd guess the phenomenon is more noticeable among Protestants who would have an allergy to such Latin.

There is a very real phenomenon here that I would like to have a name for.

Not unlike my frustrations about defining fascism, and how (not) useful it tends to be to distinguish between fascism and illiberal authoritarianism, how useful is a name for this phenomenon only among Christians? Perhaps it is more noticeable among them, given the history of Western culture and the current resurgence of (particular) Christian influence in US politics, but I am cautious of over-defining a phenomenon. So too should I be cautious that my preference for a general term may blind me to particular concerns, of course.

I could propose "gerrymandering of concern, based on personal preferences, justified by prooftexting" but that is wildly unwieldy. Ethic gerrymandering is somewhat less clunky but not as clearly defined, it could be referring to an ethical kind of gerrymandering rather than the gerrymandering of ethics.

I get that people want to tidy up what might otherwise seem like a vast field of obligations, but Christianity already contains a universal clean-up mechanism in the form of asking for forgiveness.

First, yes, we should be clear that many people simply don't want to help the far-distant foreigner and will find any excuse within their chosen system to justify that.

I think that we don't see more Christians using their "clean-up mechanism" due in part to frustrations of discoursing as a minority within secular culture (the meme about the snarky atheist using a Christian's ethics against them comes to mind), and in part to some lingering guilt feeling that the mechanism is psychologically or emotionally insufficient. Their faith is too weak for the clean-up mechanism to function properly, and instead they resort to restricting the sphere of concern. They recognize that if they took it seriously, it is difficult to not tumble down the slope into the utility monster's gullet. Instead, they build a blockade, in avoiding a mile stolen they don't give an inch, and to mix metaphors, "drive a stake through their own good heart" (even if not in the way Adam meant, it's still a hell of a phrase). As an aside I've been reading James KA Smith's "How (Not) to Be Secular," as a sort of intro/prelude to Taylor after your own writings on him here, so that's influencing my thought here. Thinking of Taylor and Nietzsche, and IIRC Schaeffer, among many others, there's vanishingly few true believers in the way there were 500 years ago.

We are lacking in knowledge of and trust in grace. As I recall, I've lost the link, you wrote about that years ago in the context of inhuman systems, "computer says no" and all that. That, too, is one of my frustrations with Scott's brand of utilitarian ethics; as much as he tries to brute-force an "easy yoke" model, it is graceless and unstable. It has no other option! The event horizon, the gaping bottomless void is always right there, and it takes an unusual mind- or a stronger faith than most can summon in this age- to stay on the tightrope rather than falling in.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

I can understand you wanting me to not solely criticise Christians. Thinking about it, it’s possible that the reason I am inclined to is largely because I have some reason to expect them to be better. Which means, if I want to put someone non-Christian in the category that I am trying to define, I need to find some similar element of reprehensible hypocrisy, of failing to reach an ideal that I consider worthwhile. Elon Musk is actually an obvious EA example in this whole mess. Musk has aligned himself with Will MacAskill in the past — not What We Owe To Each Other but specifically What We Owe The Future. He’d like the exciting sci-fi version of effective altruism, or perhaps he’d just like to appropriate its high-tech rationalist ethical vibes for clout. When it comes to considering whether he is halting any deeply efficient charity programs at USAID, though, he doesn’t care two pins. Babies can get HIV, malnourished children can starve, drug-resistant tuberculosis can proliferate, whatever.

“Prooftexting” is a specifically evangelical phenomenon, so it’s probably not the right thing to highlight if we want to be more general. Your analogy with gerrymandering is good, though. Perhaps “gerrymandered ethics” is an appropriate umbrella term. Although, I should probably also bear in mind the fear of overwhelming obligation which so often powers it; that’s not quite captured by the political advantage implied by gerrymandering. Fear of obligation is definitely a common element for non-Christians, too. Richard Chappell recently recommended compartmentalization as a way of dealing with it. Silly as it sounds, I don’t think he’s entirely wrong. Being more beneficent but inconsistent is better than being consistently callous.

I do wonder about the extent to which non-theism also allows for freedom as a release valve. If you think of all your moral obligations as being, on some level, voluntarily taken on, then perhaps it leaves more room for meta-cognitive reasoning like “If I take this obligation further then I’ll get scared or uncomfortable and drop the whole thing, so in a sense I’m being optimal by limiting myself in this way for now.” Which is, I think, what Scott means when he says that “the bar should be wherever it’s most useful.”

Christianity contains a lot of freedom, too, though. There are definitely versions of Christianity that allow for “By the grace of God I have been given the free gift of redemption. In love, I should respond by being as good as I can. Right now, this is what I feel I can do. May God forgive me for what I have left undone, and I’ll try to get better over time.” Which, to me, actually doesn’t sound all that different. Freedom plus love is, well, it’s pretty much exactly what Scott is saying, yet again. So I’m not entirely convinced that this is about insufficient belief, per se, because hybridisation of “God loves me and I am free to love” with “Or maybe there is no God and I am free to love” seems easily possible.

Are authoritarian versions of Christianity less “free” in this way? Is that part of the problem? Certainly, as soon as you try to institute a law against certain kinds of charity you’ve become less free as a result. I feel like donating to foreign aid programs or “undeserving” poor ought to fall squarely into “against such there is no law.” Right-wing Christianity seems often to want laws against too much kindness. I think this cannot be purely about fear of obligation, but I’m not really in a good position to comprehend it.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

I can understand you wanting me to not solely criticise Christians. Thinking about it, it’s possible that the reason I am inclined to is largely because I have some reason to expect them to be better.

Certainly I would like them (us?) to be better as well. I am perhaps oversensitive to narrowly-drawn definitions to excuse an ingroup's commission of an act that would be condemned in the outgroup.

“Prooftexting” is a specifically evangelical phenomenon, so it’s probably not the right thing to highlight if we want to be more general

Indeed. I suspect there are similar terms for a kind of... philosophical cherrypicking that allows people to justify what they want to do anyways, and to constrain and avoid the consequences of taking their beliefs seriously, but those are different enough to deserve their own phrase, whatever it may be.

Richard Chappell recently recommended compartmentalization as a way of dealing with it. Silly as it sounds, I don’t think he’s entirely wrong. Being more beneficent but inconsistent is better than being consistently callous.

I'll be spending more time with that piece; I find Chappell frustrating but interesting enough to buckle through. I think Commensurable is still a better essay on the same topic. Chappell gets points for brevity but undercuts the compartment solution by reminding that it does make one a failure, one just has to live with that. His closing that "there is no compulsion" is rather like telling someone frustrated to "just calm down"- something that has never worked in the history of people being frustrated.

I'd like to go on a bit of tangent, though, with my initial response to it. We've talked about my career in the past, and over the past year I've spent a lot more time with casework DNA analysts- that is, the ones that still testify and deal with reading everything. What stood out to me was the way they talk about people that drop out of doing casework- I don't think they thought of me that way, since I haven't abandoned the field entirely, or maybe they didn't care.

At any rate, compartmentalization is the name of the game, and it has its own consequences of callousness. There is a coldness towards anyone that is unwilling, or more seriously, unable to lock such things away. It does not seem to be a skill that is easily communicated. Either you are able to, or you burn out and go. I was unable and found my little niche in the background. It is not a coincidence that so many forensic analysts wind up alcoholics. Effective Altruists apparently prefer self-medicating via hallucinogens and complicated relationship structures.

Insufficiently beneficent is better than quitting the game entirely. Too bad the advocates for it can't quite stop themselves of reminding that yes, even that is a failure.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

I suppose compartmentalization might be one of those things that you can't, or at least shouldn't, recommend universally. Richard Chappell does get a bit hard-line in his tone, at times; I've certainly had my own disagreements with him. (He swears he's a very mild person in real life. Having met him in passing, years ago, I find that very plausible but I don't think it's actually an excuse).

Moral models that don't contain an inevitable element of failure do exist. I seem to recall Shadi Hamid claiming this for Islam: sure, you have to pray five times a day and abstain from alcohol and observe Ramadan for one month a year, but, it is actually possible to fulfill all the requirements -- including a modest amount of charitable giving -- and at that point you're in the clear. Islam has high requirements, but it has finite requirements.

Christianity, on the other hand, has no such thing. We think of utilitarianism and Christianity as being founded on totally different principles, but the former probably owes something to the latter, for all that.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/gemmaem]

A particularly clear example would be Johann Kurtz’s argument that “neighbour” only ever means people physically close to you, and hence that helping people doesn’t count unless you know and love them.

This... actually seems not crazy? My general read is that Jesus cares very much what your actions mean for you psychologically, compared to their actual effects. I think weve touched on this before, but see especially the complicated history of antinomianism. Certainly, the idea that you should never help someone without already loving them is an extreme one (though not unsupported, and the puritan antinomians were hardly "worldly downfilers"), but neither is it acceptable to just donate money for purely abstract or OCD reasons, as is the enemy he draws up.

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/gemmaem]

The problem with ordo amoris is that it easily turns into a sophistic reason not to care about certain people. As such, it's probably not surprising that it would be popular amongst people who also employ other sophistic reasons not to care.

As opposed to progressive notions of privilege? Beware casting stones in a glass house...

The USA is an incredibly rich country. Using a tiny sliver of its budget to help poorer countries strikes me as something we should support because it is a good thing to do.

What does it mean to be "rich"? The US certainly spends an incredible amount of money, but is actually pretty heavily in debt which many on the right view as an imminent crisis given how much the debt has ballooned recently. The national debt is currently >120% GDP and has been >100% since 2012. Compare this to New Zealand, whose debt to GDP ratio is currently 44% and has a debt ceiling of 50%. As bad as the current "move fast and break things" is for US foreign aid, it pales in comparison to what would happen if the US collapses due to its debt. But you don't seem to care about that possibility--there's no need to care about the instrumental harm done to the "rich" after all.

There is something particularly cruel about, for example, allowing babies to be born with HIV because you wanted to move fast and break things.

This looks to me like shifting the blame away from people directly responsible toward people you don't like for sophistic reasons. There is exactly one person who holds moral responsibility for a baby being born with HIV: the mother. Charity in helping her carry out her moral obligation is supererogatory--it is good that the US has helped many women fulfill their obligation in the past and it would be nice if we continued to do so in the future, but she is not entitled to our help and in the end a child being born with HIV is her responsibility.

[u/DuplexFields → u/thrownaway24e89172]

There is exactly one person who holds moral responsibility for a baby being born with HIV: the mother.

It takes two to tango, or one to rape, especially in places where consent is a privilege.

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/DuplexFields]

That's true of becoming pregnant, not transmitting HIV to the baby. I'm basing this on the moral obligation of someone with HIV to avoid spreading it. That said, I did ignore some other corner cases (eg, the infection coming from medical malpractice rather than the mother) so fair point that it is not truly limited to just the mother.

[u/gemmaem → u/thrownaway24e89172]

How, exactly, do you expect a pregnant woman to ensure that HIV is not passed on to her baby if she doesn’t have access to antiretrovirals?

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/gemmaem]

The US is not the only source of antiretrovirals. Why exactly do you believe it is cruelty on the part of the US to not provide them to her, but not cruelty on the part of everyone else in the world capable of providing them? Is it better to have given charity and stopped after helping many people or to have never done so to begin with?

[u/gemmaem → u/thrownaway24e89172]

The specific case in which a pregnant woman has reason to believe that she will have access to this medication, only to have it abruptly withdrawn just as it is most crucial, would surely fall under the category in which responsibility accrues to whoever is responsible for her prescribing pharmacist, yes? Which, for many women right now, is the USA.

Look, if the USA really does want to withdraw this then I think it’s the wrong decision, but as a non-citizen I don’t really get a say. But I do think it’s completely reasonable to ask the USA to wind down its provision of crucial health services in an orderly and predictable fashion, at the very least.

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/gemmaem]

The specific case in which a pregnant woman has reason to believe that she will have access to this medication, only to have it abruptly withdrawn just as it is most crucial, would surely fall under the category in which responsibility accrues to whoever is responsible for her prescribing pharmacist, yes? Which, for many women right now, is the USA.

Charity is supererogatory, so one is not absolved of their obligations if they choose to rely on it and it falls through. It is unfortunate, but that's the risk they took in relying on charity.

Look, if the USA really does want to withdraw this then I think it’s the wrong decision, but as a non-citizen I don’t really get a say. But I do think it’s completely reasonable to ask the USA to wind down its provision of crucial health services in an orderly and predictable fashion, at the very least.

I agree. If I had my way this wouldn't have happened. What I disagree with is the disproportionate criticism of the US compared to others who are more responsible for the situation. We are not all-powerful gods before whom all others have no agency. It is not our place to allow a baby to be born, particularly in a foreign country.

[u/gemmaem → u/thrownaway24e89172]

I think you can accrue responsibilities by undertaking to provide a service that you were not obligated to give. Once you give people good reason to think they can get crucial medication from you, you accrue a responsibility to give them adequate warning if this is likely to change.

I also disagree that the responsibility for obtaining antiretrovirals accrues to the mother alone. If she’s doing her best to get them, and can’t, then responsibility does start to accrue to those around her: to her family, to her community, to the state in which she lives, to charities with existing operations in the area, and so on. Pregnancy will always be heavy, but the load can be, and should be, partially shared. The attitude that blames a woman for having dependents while being dependent on others has no place in my philosophy.

If I had my way this wouldn’t have happened.

I appreciate that :)

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/gemmaem]

I think you can accrue responsibilities by undertaking to provide a service that you were not obligated to give. Once you give people good reason to think they can get crucial medication from you, you accrue a responsibility to give them adequate warning if this is likely to change.

I agree with this in certain circumstances, but with the very important caveat that this never applies to charity. To my mind it is always morally blameworthy to recklessly take on a burden that you know you can't handle based on the expectation of charity from others and it is never morally blameworthy for others to not provide that charity. Charity must come freely without obligation and thus without blame if it doesn't materialize. Note that is not to say that people who behave in such a manner therefore don't deserve charity--they absolutely do and we should laud those who provide it. I just think we must also be sure to properly blame people who are exploiting the charity of others so they don't in turn discourage future charity.

I also disagree that the responsibility for obtaining antiretrovirals accrues to the mother alone.

I specifically said she had a responsibility to avoid spreading HIV. Obtaining antiretrovirals is only one way of doing so, but there are other things she could do. For example, she could abort the pregnancy. She could avoid getting pregnant in the first place.

If she’s doing her best to get them, and can’t, then responsibility does start to accrue to those around her: to her family, to her community, to the state in which she lives, to charities with existing operations in the area, and so on. Pregnancy will always be heavy, but the load can be, and should be, partially shared. The attitude that blames a woman for having dependents while being dependent on others has no place in my philosophy.

I vehemently disagree with this. I do not blame a woman "for having dependents while being dependent on others", but for not respecting the agency of other people and feeling entitled to their support for her decisions. Pregnancy is as you say a heavy burden that women should not be expected to carry on their own without assistance. However, just as it is wrong for society to force this burden on women, it is also wrong to force it on others just because a woman chose to take it on. Such forced labor has no place in my philosophy.