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In which I argue that our ideals are only useful as guides for moral progress when coupled with counterfactuals and context. The alternative is hopelessness.

The bait

In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, Peter Singer claims that:

if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

The switch

If you agree with the above, then you acknowledge the moral obligation to sacrifice everything in your life that is not of comparable importance to the tremendous suffering of people all around the world.

In financial terms, you would only be fulfilling your moral obligation to others if you have given up enough of your money so that the value of an additional dollar to you is equal to the value of an additional dollar to the worst-off human being on the planet.

This got dark fast! Most of us try to wriggle out of this implication, though we seem to accept it in the case of other people that have outrageous amounts of money: “of course it’s gross that billionaires buy a second megayacht – they could be helping thousands with those funds!”

Sadly, there is no clear dividing line between disgusting, wasteful luxury and “a reasonable treat because I had a tough day”. Those $7 I just spent on a latte could have bought a malaria net and saved a life.

But they’re really far away! I don’t even know them!

If you’re a utilitarian like Singer, you shouldn’t care about where the suffering people are; every person is worth the same, and so the funds should go help those who would benefit the most. Why does distance matter, especially when we have a global financial system, charities, travel, etc.?

If you’re not a utilitarian – i.e. if you have an ethical system that isn’t based on how many people you help and how badly they need it – this is easier. Though most religions encourage charity, many get out of this whole mess by just telling you to donate 10% of your income, or 2.5% of your wealth on annual basis.

(Buddhism, as usual, leaves it to your discretion saying you should give as much as you can but not pauperize yourself, which then leaves you with the same problem.)

Most religions (and people’s common-sense morality) also say something about us having more of an obligation to our dependents, family members, and people in our community than people far away. Very well! Then you only need to donate money up to the point where it’s no more useful to you than to the worst-off member of your family / local community.

We continue to be hooped, it seems.

What about uncertainty?

You could argue that, whereas the benefit of that latte for me is tangible and certain, it’s much less certain that the $7 will be of much greater use to someone halfway across the world.

Point taken! You should probably shave some of the expected value of those funds due to how hard it is to actually help other people, how difficult it is to know whether the money actually reached the right person, etc. Precisely how much you should shave off is a matter of great debate in the global aid & development literature.

However, the difference between how useful a dollar is to me vs. how useful it is to, say, the average recipient of a GiveDirectly grant, is so gigantic that it remains a much better thing to do for the world for me to donate that money than to buy that coffee in pretty much every plausible scenario.

Morality = 1, Us = 0.

But nobody can sustain that!

Other than literal saints, that’s true. This, however, doesn’t change the moral ideal. And that’s point: it’s an ideal. It is largely unattainable. It is meant as a North star, an asymptote.

Nobody should sustain that

There is an ideal for pretty much any moral value that you can think of: a vegan ideal is to cause zero harm to other animals, an environmentalist ideal is to have zero carbon footprint, etc.

A rare few folks get close to achieving their ideal on one front or another. Most of us, however, not only do not get close to it but also hold a lot of values that compete for our resources. If it is highly implausible to achieve the ideal for one value, it is impossible to do so across several.

The upshot is that, viewed from the point of any one of your ideals, you will always come up short.

That’s depressing

It is. Trying to achieve something unattainable is literally a cause of depression.

Inspiration from certain failure

Fallibilism is the epistemological thesis that no belief (theory, view, thesis, and so on) can ever be rationally supported or justified in a conclusive way.

Moral fallibilism is the idea that no way of life can ever be justified as morally perfect or ideal.

You’re always getting it kind of wrong; this is not a bug of the system, it’s a feature. You’re supposed to be always inching, as much as you can, towards something better. And when you get to that better place, you are in no position to brag or to feel superior to others – you’re probably still getting it wrong. Just keep going.

As important as your ideals are to you, you should not use them to evaluate your progress, or else you will burn yourself out. You should still hold firmly to ideals, however, since they provide the direction towards which you should improve. The alternative is to give up all effort towards improvement since the ideal is unattainable, which, I don’t know. Maybe don’t give in to that if you can, Daniel.

Just keep going

The trick is to have standards that make progress achievable without allowing you to fool yourself into complacency. If you’re the kind of person that tends towards abstract ideals, you should add more concrete benchmarks to your evaluation of how you’re doing:

• Where were you a year ago? Ten years ago?
• How good has the median person in human history been on this front? How good has the median mammal in their history?
• How good are most people in circumstances similar to yours?

If you’re the kind of person that takes most of your cues from those around you, maybe you need to add in an ideal benchmark to remind yourself that something better is possible.

It is difficult to have both perspectives in your head at the same time, but it is easier than recovering from burnout.