Like any major institution there are bad apples, but on there are ways to find effective charities. I personally like GiveDirectly which facilitates direct transfers. People tend to know how best to help themselves in my experience, but some issues need bigger interventions.
no, high costs for bureaucracy don't touch the argument at all. even if a lot of the money doesn't directly go to poor people, it's still needed because institutions can't work without bureaucracy and the rest of your money still helps people directly. saying the argument wouldn't work because of bureaucracy costs is like saying you'd stop working for money because you'd have to pay taxes. No matter how much taxes you pay, you still need money and a part of your income still benefits you. And no matter how much bureaucracy costs, the money is still needed and helps poor people.
@@propotkunin445 but it's the vast majority of the donation, where you make it sound like how defense spending in the US is 10%. Supporting someone's small business will have way more positive impact.
Simplifying all human behavior and the implied morally expected followup/applications down to the most basic societal virtues of right vs wrong is an overly broad and unrealistic foundation on which to even begin building an argument because not only is it based off a reality that doesn’t exist, but operates in a mode that self-aware beings don’t behave like or would ever behave as such in even a hypothetical computer simulation if humans and any human-based instincts are involved. Restating it as an if/then shows how childlike the approach is: If some act is a good deed, then perform all acts considered good deeds. You were thrust into a situation you did not choose to be faced with, and saving the child may be considered less of a good deed and more like the alternative of not saving the child being considered an evil deed. There may be other motivations behind the choice to save the child that aren’t necessarily purely based on it being the widely agree-on “morally good thing’ to do. It may be to protect yourself from any negative consequences of not saving the child when you legally were capable of doing it physically and had no other legitimate reason to not do such. Plus, I think the equivalent act of saving one life would be to find one specific child suffering from starvation somewhere and to do what you must to help save that starving child’s life and ensure a life free of being in need again.
Yeah, one of the problems with Singer's thought experiment is how reductive it is. A single act of rescue doesn't really match the complex institutionalisation needed to alleviate poverty. He also, as you point out, gives a simplified model of human psychology.
This is a well-written video about Singer's critique of ethics. The slippery slope is not a fallacy because a principle, if true, applies universally. For whose purpose do we live our lives? Singer suggests that if the principle of altruism applies locally on the smallest scale, it should also apply at great cost on a global scale. I see this as more of a refutation of altruism than advocacy of it.
Interesting point, Singer doesn’t really consider if the failure of compliance at a global level can tell you something about immediate altruistic behaviour
This seems more of a false equivalency to me. 1. To save the child, as you said, I am sacrificing time. I'm also not putting myself at risk since, in this case, it is a child and I am confident in my ability to swim. 2. Using the monetary argument again, I am sacrificing time not money, but to donate all or most of my money, am I not sacrificing both time and money? Would the equivalent be to donate the time I can in order to make the world a better place? If I spend 60 minutes to save a child, I could very well spend 60 minutes volunteering at a local charity or community project.
I'm pretty sympathetic to what you are saying. I think Singer's argument is powerful in its simplicity, but it misses out on some pretty big issues. He mistakes a one off rescue with ongoing social cooperation which raises issues about justice and power. He also is asking a lot, even in his moderated claims. Ethics that doesn't leave room for important social goods like friendship, leisure, art, and so on doesn't seem fit for people as they are.
If you know about Aristotle's Golden Mean - would you agree that some virtues are universally good, but too little or too much of a good thing is destructive?
To offer some interesting challenges to these ideas… 0. Would a person actually save the child? I think this is a far more nuanced question than people suggest. The rational sociopath in this hypothetical isn’t going to think “ugh forget this child”, they’re going to think “yes, I get to be the local hero for no significant effort”. The parents will be grateful, society will laud you for your humanitarian efforts. To disentangle this to the point where a rational sociopath would actually say “no” because the costs outweigh the benefits would require absurd hypotheticals like you suggest you dislike. But there is no benefit to admitting that the internal small emotional ping doesn’t matter comparative to the social status it can bring, at least outside of philosophy like this, so ‘of course’ everyone will say “Yes I would save the child” and never elaborate or even have deep thoughts on “why”. 1. Too Demanding I’d say that “Bill Gates” and other wealthy people don’t qualify as ‘average’. I would say that when it comes to giving up a significant portion of your wealth to charities and other foundations, this should be limited to people who can keep an amount of wealth that would otherwise assure them, and possibly their immediate loved ones, a safe and secure modest life for their expected lifespan. Otherwise one financial hardship or unexpected medical emergency can lead to ‘you’ becoming one of those ‘people in need’. That’s certainly not the ‘average’ person. Further, the ‘saving a drowning child’ example draws so much emotional weight because it is such a low effort to high reward example. There is no charity you can give a single 5 dollar payment to to that will be able to use it to take a child from ‘dead’ to ‘living out an entirely healthy childhood in a middle class suburbia, college and all’, especially if we believe charities apply their money in anything resembling a ‘put the money where the most good can be done’ manner.
When you watch a movie, what personal benefit are you seeking by watching a protagonist resolve their conflict and become self actualized? Does a person need to conceive of some external benefit before acting in the world, or are there internal, selfish reasons for pulling a child out of a lake? I believe that if someone values their own life, they will value others as well.
Interesting points. You are right to question Singer’s argument that there is nothing to distinguish an act of rescue to alleviating poverty. It is more complex than he recognises and this makes his argument less plausible.
You find the counter-arguments here apply to a tremendous span of social theories and practices, including economics and disaster relief. An economy, for example, is founded on a network of supply and demand, where selfish actors (in terms of goals rather than morality) fulfil their own wants, thereby creating a network of trade. Search-and-rescue best practice is to ensure that the person or people offering aid are safe and capable of assisting. And the moral justification for a free-market economy, where people seek to fulfill their own needs based on a currency, happens to be the same as it is for search-and-rescue. A person is best suited to understand their own needs, and by fulfilling them will ensure that they are not a burden to others. And as mentioned, this is exactly the case of giving your earnings to charity. It's not possible to determine, with certainty, what good can be caused from assistance that you are not directly managing (as you would be if you were saving a drowning child). Keeping the money, however, allows a direct and total understanding of the prosperity that affords because you experience that directly. Which means ultimately charitable giving is not managed by an individual's personal commitment to charity and universal wellbeing, but rather a combination of charity, trust in the respective institutions that spend (or vet spending) of gifts, and personal confidence that one will not be rendered a burden to others due to some unknown future despondancy that could have been resolved by keeping the money.
Thanks for the comment. I think you are right that Singer doesn’t pay enough attention to institutions and human psychology. This is something that effective altruists have tried to account for with variable success. More on that soon.
either i don't understand the point made at the end of the video - or i disagree. of course power abuse is a big problem an i guess those institutions need some deep self-reflection and immense effords to shrink the issue - but is there really a link to singer's argument? he basically says it's immoral not to do what we can (without giving up too much of what makes us happy) to save people from dying. and while the abuse is horrible and must be tackled, to me, his point is valid, nevertheless. with or without abusive assholes in the ngos, giving money to them helps way more than not giving, which obviously doesn't help at all. besides that, a great video!
Thanks for the comment. My disagreement with Singer isn’t about giving, it’s about how we give. Singer’s work tends to be too focussed on outcomes rather than the institutions needed to achieve them which is no surprise he is a famous consequentialist. However when dealing with institutions that effect people’s basic interests we need to make sure that they have some power over them. Otherwise we are setting up a benevolent despotism. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense. I’ll be talking more about this as the book progresses. Hope you keep watching.
Giving money to charity does not alleviate poverty (as a whole country-(or world)-wide phenomenon), but worsens the wellbeing of the (non-rich) giver. Giving money to charity is not guaranteed to help even one poor soul, but guarantees to worsen the well-being of the (non-rich) giver. (While saving the child guarantees saving the child and does not guarantee worsening of saviour's well-being, and in this "experiment" is guaranteed to have very minor (if any) negative impact on the saviour.) (If saving a child is very dangerous, a common (non-hero and/or non-sports-swimmer) man should think twice, or he may NOT save the child and die himself). Giving money to charity is not guaranteed to help even one poor soul, and there is also a probability of charity artificially increasing number of "poor souls" to pump up revenue. Giving money to charity is not guaranteed to help even one poor soul, but it is guaranteed to help its top manager. Giving money to charity is a continous endeavor and commitment, saving a child once is not. Giving money to charity is guaranteed to worsen well-being of the (non-rich) giver, but he may use those money to have better recreation, be ultimately more productive due to that, and contribute more to the society as a result, eventually helping alleviate poverty through his work, not through wasting mooney on charity's CEO's new Jaguar (or on drunkards' free Thursday Soup).
@@grandmabutters8502 Because this "experiment" assumes a charity will help, but it is not guaranteed to, and the video goes on for 12 minutes, and each minute is a minute of that assumption... So I dare say I was very reserved in my use of the mentioned sentence =P Also you may want to edit your RUclips "handle" so it does not have that random number at the end.
Charity isn’t as corrupt and inefficient as you think. If you want to find a good one just check out something like GiveWell (www.givewell.org) Or go for direct transfers like GiveDirectly (www.givedirectly.org). Money gets to people with a bit of due diligence. This objection is sort of like saying the chance of stepping on a single nail in the shallow pond is sufficient risk to not to save the child.
As mentioned, some charity is inefficient or corrupt but not all and there are ways of finding effective ones. Now that doesn't make charity morally problematic at times, but I'm not oncinved by the efficiency argument.
Lol true, there is definitely something to the ‘instead keep on pulling kids out of the pond maybe we should build a fence’ line of thought. Singer seems to think we should keep on giving while waiting for change.
Well, when you know how much of a charity goes to bureaucracy, the argument falls apart, as well.
And... you mentioned it.
Like any major institution there are bad apples, but on there are ways to find effective charities. I personally like GiveDirectly which facilitates direct transfers. People tend to know how best to help themselves in my experience, but some issues need bigger interventions.
no, high costs for bureaucracy don't touch the argument at all. even if a lot of the money doesn't directly go to poor people, it's still needed because institutions can't work without bureaucracy and the rest of your money still helps people directly.
saying the argument wouldn't work because of bureaucracy costs is like saying you'd stop working for money because you'd have to pay taxes. No matter how much taxes you pay, you still need money and a part of your income still benefits you. And no matter how much bureaucracy costs, the money is still needed and helps poor people.
@@propotkunin445 but it's the vast majority of the donation, where you make it sound like how defense spending in the US is 10%. Supporting someone's small business will have way more positive impact.
@@DanFradenburgh really poor people don't have a business, they starve to death because they don't even have enough food for themselves.
Simplifying all human behavior and the implied morally expected followup/applications down to the most basic societal virtues of right vs wrong is an overly broad and unrealistic foundation on which to even begin building an argument because not only is it based off a reality that doesn’t exist, but operates in a mode that self-aware beings don’t behave like or would ever behave as such in even a hypothetical computer simulation if humans and any human-based instincts are involved.
Restating it as an if/then shows how childlike the approach is:
If some act is a good deed, then perform all acts considered good deeds.
You were thrust into a situation you did not choose to be faced with, and saving the child may be considered less of a good deed and more like the alternative of not saving the child being considered an evil deed. There may be other motivations behind the choice to save the child that aren’t necessarily purely based on it being the widely agree-on “morally good thing’ to do. It may be to protect yourself from any negative consequences of not saving the child when you legally were capable of doing it physically and had no other legitimate reason to not do such.
Plus, I think the equivalent act of saving one life would be to find one specific child suffering from starvation somewhere and to do what you must to help save that starving child’s life and ensure a life free of being in need again.
Yeah, one of the problems with Singer's thought experiment is how reductive it is. A single act of rescue doesn't really match the complex institutionalisation needed to alleviate poverty. He also, as you point out, gives a simplified model of human psychology.
What are your thoughts on principles necessarily applying universally?
This is a well-written video about Singer's critique of ethics. The slippery slope is not a fallacy because a principle, if true, applies universally.
For whose purpose do we live our lives? Singer suggests that if the principle of altruism applies locally on the smallest scale, it should also apply at great cost on a global scale.
I see this as more of a refutation of altruism than advocacy of it.
Interesting point, Singer doesn’t really consider if the failure of compliance at a global level can tell you something about immediate altruistic behaviour
This seems more of a false equivalency to me. 1. To save the child, as you said, I am sacrificing time. I'm also not putting myself at risk since, in this case, it is a child and I am confident in my ability to swim. 2. Using the monetary argument again, I am sacrificing time not money, but to donate all or most of my money, am I not sacrificing both time and money? Would the equivalent be to donate the time I can in order to make the world a better place? If I spend 60 minutes to save a child, I could very well spend 60 minutes volunteering at a local charity or community project.
I'm pretty sympathetic to what you are saying. I think Singer's argument is powerful in its simplicity, but it misses out on some pretty big issues. He mistakes a one off rescue with ongoing social cooperation which raises issues about justice and power. He also is asking a lot, even in his moderated claims. Ethics that doesn't leave room for important social goods like friendship, leisure, art, and so on doesn't seem fit for people as they are.
If you know about Aristotle's Golden Mean - would you agree that some virtues are universally good, but too little or too much of a good thing is destructive?
To offer some interesting challenges to these ideas…
0. Would a person actually save the child?
I think this is a far more nuanced question than people suggest. The rational sociopath in this hypothetical isn’t going to think “ugh forget this child”, they’re going to think “yes, I get to be the local hero for no significant effort”. The parents will be grateful, society will laud you for your humanitarian efforts. To disentangle this to the point where a rational sociopath would actually say “no” because the costs outweigh the benefits would require absurd hypotheticals like you suggest you dislike.
But there is no benefit to admitting that the internal small emotional ping doesn’t matter comparative to the social status it can bring, at least outside of philosophy like this, so ‘of course’ everyone will say “Yes I would save the child” and never elaborate or even have deep thoughts on “why”.
1. Too Demanding
I’d say that “Bill Gates” and other wealthy people don’t qualify as ‘average’. I would say that when it comes to giving up a significant portion of your wealth to charities and other foundations, this should be limited to people who can keep an amount of wealth that would otherwise assure them, and possibly their immediate loved ones, a safe and secure modest life for their expected lifespan. Otherwise one financial hardship or unexpected medical emergency can lead to ‘you’ becoming one of those ‘people in need’. That’s certainly not the ‘average’ person.
Further, the ‘saving a drowning child’ example draws so much emotional weight because it is such a low effort to high reward example. There is no charity you can give a single 5 dollar payment to to that will be able to use it to take a child from ‘dead’ to ‘living out an entirely healthy childhood in a middle class suburbia, college and all’, especially if we believe charities apply their money in anything resembling a ‘put the money where the most good can be done’ manner.
When you watch a movie, what personal benefit are you seeking by watching a protagonist resolve their conflict and become self actualized? Does a person need to conceive of some external benefit before acting in the world, or are there internal, selfish reasons for pulling a child out of a lake?
I believe that if someone values their own life, they will value others as well.
Interesting points. You are right to question Singer’s argument that there is nothing to distinguish an act of rescue to alleviating poverty. It is more complex than he recognises and this makes his argument less plausible.
You find the counter-arguments here apply to a tremendous span of social theories and practices, including economics and disaster relief.
An economy, for example, is founded on a network of supply and demand, where selfish actors (in terms of goals rather than morality) fulfil their own wants, thereby creating a network of trade. Search-and-rescue best practice is to ensure that the person or people offering aid are safe and capable of assisting.
And the moral justification for a free-market economy, where people seek to fulfill their own needs based on a currency, happens to be the same as it is for search-and-rescue. A person is best suited to understand their own needs, and by fulfilling them will ensure that they are not a burden to others.
And as mentioned, this is exactly the case of giving your earnings to charity. It's not possible to determine, with certainty, what good can be caused from assistance that you are not directly managing (as you would be if you were saving a drowning child). Keeping the money, however, allows a direct and total understanding of the prosperity that affords because you experience that directly.
Which means ultimately charitable giving is not managed by an individual's personal commitment to charity and universal wellbeing, but rather a combination of charity, trust in the respective institutions that spend (or vet spending) of gifts, and personal confidence that one will not be rendered a burden to others due to some unknown future despondancy that could have been resolved by keeping the money.
Thanks for the comment. I think you are right that Singer doesn’t pay enough attention to institutions and human psychology. This is something that effective altruists have tried to account for with variable success. More on that soon.
For me it depends what time it is, if I save the child and be able to get to school on time, then yes but if I’m running late, then no
Cold as ice
@@drblunt The fact that I'm always late to school
either i don't understand the point made at the end of the video - or i disagree.
of course power abuse is a big problem an i guess those institutions need some deep self-reflection and immense effords to shrink the issue - but is there really a link to singer's argument?
he basically says it's immoral not to do what we can (without giving up too much of what makes us happy) to save people from dying. and while the abuse is horrible and must be tackled, to me, his point is valid, nevertheless. with or without abusive assholes in the ngos, giving money to them helps way more than not giving, which obviously doesn't help at all.
besides that, a great video!
Thanks for the comment. My disagreement with Singer isn’t about giving, it’s about how we give. Singer’s work tends to be too focussed on outcomes rather than the institutions needed to achieve them which is no surprise he is a famous consequentialist. However when dealing with institutions that effect people’s basic interests we need to make sure that they have some power over them. Otherwise we are setting up a benevolent despotism. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense. I’ll be talking more about this as the book progresses. Hope you keep watching.
Giving money to charity does not alleviate poverty (as a whole country-(or world)-wide phenomenon), but worsens the wellbeing of the (non-rich) giver.
Giving money to charity is not guaranteed to help even one poor soul, but guarantees to worsen the well-being of the (non-rich) giver.
(While saving the child guarantees saving the child and does not guarantee worsening of saviour's well-being, and in this "experiment" is guaranteed to have very minor (if any) negative impact on the saviour.)
(If saving a child is very dangerous, a common (non-hero and/or non-sports-swimmer) man should think twice, or he may NOT save the child and die himself).
Giving money to charity is not guaranteed to help even one poor soul, and there is also a probability of charity artificially increasing number of "poor souls" to pump up revenue.
Giving money to charity is not guaranteed to help even one poor soul, but it is guaranteed to help its top manager.
Giving money to charity is a continous endeavor and commitment, saving a child once is not.
Giving money to charity is guaranteed to worsen well-being of the (non-rich) giver, but he may use those money to have better recreation, be ultimately more productive due to that, and contribute more to the society as a result, eventually helping alleviate poverty through his work, not through wasting mooney on charity's CEO's new Jaguar (or on drunkards' free Thursday Soup).
Is charity not guaranteed to help one poor soul? I don't think you repeated it enough for me to tell. Maybe say it 4 more times
@@grandmabutters8502 Because this "experiment" assumes a charity will help, but it is not guaranteed to, and the video goes on for 12 minutes, and each minute is a minute of that assumption... So I dare say I was very reserved in my use of the mentioned sentence =P
Also you may want to edit your RUclips "handle" so it does not have that random number at the end.
Charity isn’t as corrupt and inefficient as you think. If you want to find a good one just check out something like GiveWell (www.givewell.org) Or go for direct transfers like GiveDirectly (www.givedirectly.org). Money gets to people with a bit of due diligence.
This objection is sort of like saying the chance of stepping on a single nail in the shallow pond is sufficient risk to not to save the child.
As mentioned, some charity is inefficient or corrupt but not all and there are ways of finding effective ones. Now that doesn't make charity morally problematic at times, but I'm not oncinved by the efficiency argument.
I would 100% save that child. I'm already pretty broke lol I can't get extra broke.... right?
Lol true, there is definitely something to the ‘instead keep on pulling kids out of the pond maybe we should build a fence’ line of thought. Singer seems to think we should keep on giving while waiting for change.
No thanks, I'll stick to liking fb posts that say "1 like = 1 prayer for these starving children".
You may not be the hero we need, but you are the hero we deserve
@@drblunt isn't that the other way ar- oh. Yeah :(