I feel like this passage is a bit unclear about whether it is about beneficence generally (which I take to be any and all forms of bringing about good ends, perhaps with the assumption that what makes an end good is that it is good for various individuals) or about saving lives in particular (as opposed to benefiting individuals by reducing the amount they are affected by transphobia or pollution or whatever).
To me, it seems that there's a stronger argument against engaging in the culture war on the grounds that the culture war is less effective than some apparently more roundabout means at reducing the effects of transphobia and pollution on individuals, than there is that engaging in the culture war comes at the opportunity cost of saving lives.
Writing checks to the Against Malaria Foundation doesn't take much time or attention, and thus leaves you with a question of whether there are effective and beneficent things to do with that time and attention. It makes sense to me that one would want to use that time and attention on the things it is most effective at, which will often be local causes, often including fighting those -isms that you mention. But my claim would be that denouncing those -ists and heating up the culture war is just a much less effective way to do that than many other options, even though it may feel more emotionally satisfying.
I don't mean to restrict beneficence to only saving lives. But I would like to prompt people to (i) consider how they might do more good, and (ii) cast a wide net in doing so. I expect that time and attention to local causes could often be used to greater effect in other ways (e.g., encouraging others in one's local network to donate to AMF and generally focus more on global problems; working overtime and donating the extra money, etc.).
Given the ways that time can be turned into money and vice versa, I'm generally suspicious of the idea that it makes sense to spend a lot of time on local causes if it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on them. I'd expect the optimal cause to exert a greater gravitational pull on beneficent efforts than you seem to be imagining. But it's ultimately an empirical question -- my background assumptions/expectations here could be mistaken.
I think that one's personal time is likely to have more comparative advantages based on specialized standpoint knowledge than one's money is. Money is extremely fungible and can be sent to someone else's best-informed target. But time/labor/attention is a lot more specialized, and so there's going to be greater benefit from spending it on its particular comparative advantage.
It may well be that a lot of that comparative advantage is just earn-to-give of applying one's skills to get money that is then donated. But I think that we should expect a non-trivial number of people to have specialized skills or knowledge or location that makes their optimal contribution be different from the globally-optimal recipients of money.
On the empirical question I think it's probably the opposite. Whether it's beneficence is a different matter but my sense is that social activities involve people in ways checks don't and usually lead them to donate more money as well.
That doesn't seem to settle the question of whether one's (morally tinged) social activities should be centered around local or global causes. Going to EA meetups might lead one to do more good than one would in locally-focused activism groups.
Ohh fair enough, I just took that for granted because my experience is that many places don't have in person groups focused on anything but local issues. Or i just don't know where to look.
Thanks Richard. How do you see the concepts of beneficence and non-maleficence relating to each other? Is non-maleficence a sub-set of beneficence for you (so not harming someone is itself a beneficent act) or is it an additional, distinct obligation: not causing harm to other sentient beings as opposed to helping them?
I don't see a fundamental difference between them. But in practice, as a general rule, doing harm can reflect unusually bad character in a way that mere failures to benefit often don't. But there are exceptions to this general rule. For example, I think failure to save a child drowning in a pond right before your eyes would seem more vicious than buying a burger, even though the latter harms and the former fails to benefit.
Thanks Richard. I was less thinking about their relative importance (although that's important of course) than how they relate/overlap as concepts or types of obligation.
I tend to think of non-maleficence as the minimally demanding obligation implied by moral consideration. If we harm/exploit/kill someone without sufficient justification (maleficence) that seems to imply we've excluded them from meaningful moral consideration?
So non-maleficence could be a subset of beneficence in that if we show beneficence to someone of course we wouldn't needlessly harm them. But beneficence is also very open-ended on the benefit side.
I'm not sure if it works formally but I hope that means we can be very clear on a baseline non-maleficence obligation towards moral patients even while continuing to debate the thorny demandingness issues re: positive beneficence?
Made me realise (somewhat surprisingly) that I never REALLY considered political causes to be directly moral causes. I think of them as being subject to moral judgement, of course (some appear evil, other morally good) but I don't think of the MOTIVATION to pursue them as chiefly moral, it feels like it lies somewhere between self-interest and a broader social project. Not dissimilar to building something, or an industrial enterprise, for example. I wonder if it's because my personal mortality is almost entirely about beneficence (tho not universal/utilitarian in flavour) AND because I very rarely pursue goals for purely moral reasons (so for example much of my day to day helpfulness or community engagement is only tangentially a moral enterprise).
Hmm, I'm more inclined to take that as an example of how generally decent (albeit negligent) people can end up indirectly contributing to significant harms. That's different from the kind of outright malice I take to be implied by the term 'evil'.
Usually, it's very hard to persuade people to go vegan, or to even significantly reduce their personal consumption of factory-farmed animal products. You're right that it's not sadistic, but for most people it borders on psychopathic indifference.
Given the already radical conclusions implied by "one's personal character isn't the main factor contributing to one's goodness", I don't see why we should avoid "most people are evil despite their seemingly decent character" either.
Once you both admit an ordering on possible worlds by overall value/worthwhileness -- seems implicit in measuring the net value a person contributes -- and admit that maximizing this value should take priority why bother we the rest of the machinery you think is part of being a moral realist (eg the idea that there need to be facts about what you should and shouldn't do).
Can't you get most of what people want out of moral claims merely by this global -- and apparently prior -- notion of value? If you are already taking such a revisionist approach isn't the extra simplicity here an appealing property?
Or do I have the relationship wrong and you don't mean to ground your moral claims in these claims about value?
I don't understand. You seem to be suggesting a distinction between the claim that "value should take priority" and the claim that value determines "what you should and shouldn't do", and I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be. What is value taking priority *for*, if not for determining *what we should do*? Do you have in mind some other way of completing the phrase, "value should take priority for..."?
I feel like this passage is a bit unclear about whether it is about beneficence generally (which I take to be any and all forms of bringing about good ends, perhaps with the assumption that what makes an end good is that it is good for various individuals) or about saving lives in particular (as opposed to benefiting individuals by reducing the amount they are affected by transphobia or pollution or whatever).
To me, it seems that there's a stronger argument against engaging in the culture war on the grounds that the culture war is less effective than some apparently more roundabout means at reducing the effects of transphobia and pollution on individuals, than there is that engaging in the culture war comes at the opportunity cost of saving lives.
Writing checks to the Against Malaria Foundation doesn't take much time or attention, and thus leaves you with a question of whether there are effective and beneficent things to do with that time and attention. It makes sense to me that one would want to use that time and attention on the things it is most effective at, which will often be local causes, often including fighting those -isms that you mention. But my claim would be that denouncing those -ists and heating up the culture war is just a much less effective way to do that than many other options, even though it may feel more emotionally satisfying.
I don't mean to restrict beneficence to only saving lives. But I would like to prompt people to (i) consider how they might do more good, and (ii) cast a wide net in doing so. I expect that time and attention to local causes could often be used to greater effect in other ways (e.g., encouraging others in one's local network to donate to AMF and generally focus more on global problems; working overtime and donating the extra money, etc.).
Given the ways that time can be turned into money and vice versa, I'm generally suspicious of the idea that it makes sense to spend a lot of time on local causes if it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on them. I'd expect the optimal cause to exert a greater gravitational pull on beneficent efforts than you seem to be imagining. But it's ultimately an empirical question -- my background assumptions/expectations here could be mistaken.
I think that one's personal time is likely to have more comparative advantages based on specialized standpoint knowledge than one's money is. Money is extremely fungible and can be sent to someone else's best-informed target. But time/labor/attention is a lot more specialized, and so there's going to be greater benefit from spending it on its particular comparative advantage.
It may well be that a lot of that comparative advantage is just earn-to-give of applying one's skills to get money that is then donated. But I think that we should expect a non-trivial number of people to have specialized skills or knowledge or location that makes their optimal contribution be different from the globally-optimal recipients of money.
Fair enough, thanks for explaining!
On the empirical question I think it's probably the opposite. Whether it's beneficence is a different matter but my sense is that social activities involve people in ways checks don't and usually lead them to donate more money as well.
That doesn't seem to settle the question of whether one's (morally tinged) social activities should be centered around local or global causes. Going to EA meetups might lead one to do more good than one would in locally-focused activism groups.
Ohh fair enough, I just took that for granted because my experience is that many places don't have in person groups focused on anything but local issues. Or i just don't know where to look.
Thanks Richard. How do you see the concepts of beneficence and non-maleficence relating to each other? Is non-maleficence a sub-set of beneficence for you (so not harming someone is itself a beneficent act) or is it an additional, distinct obligation: not causing harm to other sentient beings as opposed to helping them?
I don't see a fundamental difference between them. But in practice, as a general rule, doing harm can reflect unusually bad character in a way that mere failures to benefit often don't. But there are exceptions to this general rule. For example, I think failure to save a child drowning in a pond right before your eyes would seem more vicious than buying a burger, even though the latter harms and the former fails to benefit.
See 'Virtue and Salience' for related discussion: https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVAS-3
Thanks Richard. I was less thinking about their relative importance (although that's important of course) than how they relate/overlap as concepts or types of obligation.
I tend to think of non-maleficence as the minimally demanding obligation implied by moral consideration. If we harm/exploit/kill someone without sufficient justification (maleficence) that seems to imply we've excluded them from meaningful moral consideration?
So non-maleficence could be a subset of beneficence in that if we show beneficence to someone of course we wouldn't needlessly harm them. But beneficence is also very open-ended on the benefit side.
I'm not sure if it works formally but I hope that means we can be very clear on a baseline non-maleficence obligation towards moral patients even while continuing to debate the thorny demandingness issues re: positive beneficence?
Made me realise (somewhat surprisingly) that I never REALLY considered political causes to be directly moral causes. I think of them as being subject to moral judgement, of course (some appear evil, other morally good) but I don't think of the MOTIVATION to pursue them as chiefly moral, it feels like it lies somewhere between self-interest and a broader social project. Not dissimilar to building something, or an industrial enterprise, for example. I wonder if it's because my personal mortality is almost entirely about beneficence (tho not universal/utilitarian in flavour) AND because I very rarely pursue goals for purely moral reasons (so for example much of my day to day helpfulness or community engagement is only tangentially a moral enterprise).
All in all, really interesting, thank you.
> Most people presumably meet the minimal standards for not being evil
I fear that's an assumption one needs to defend, given widespread participation in factory farming.
Hmm, I'm more inclined to take that as an example of how generally decent (albeit negligent) people can end up indirectly contributing to significant harms. That's different from the kind of outright malice I take to be implied by the term 'evil'.
Usually, it's very hard to persuade people to go vegan, or to even significantly reduce their personal consumption of factory-farmed animal products. You're right that it's not sadistic, but for most people it borders on psychopathic indifference.
Given the already radical conclusions implied by "one's personal character isn't the main factor contributing to one's goodness", I don't see why we should avoid "most people are evil despite their seemingly decent character" either.
Once you both admit an ordering on possible worlds by overall value/worthwhileness -- seems implicit in measuring the net value a person contributes -- and admit that maximizing this value should take priority why bother we the rest of the machinery you think is part of being a moral realist (eg the idea that there need to be facts about what you should and shouldn't do).
Can't you get most of what people want out of moral claims merely by this global -- and apparently prior -- notion of value? If you are already taking such a revisionist approach isn't the extra simplicity here an appealing property?
Or do I have the relationship wrong and you don't mean to ground your moral claims in these claims about value?
I don't understand. You seem to be suggesting a distinction between the claim that "value should take priority" and the claim that value determines "what you should and shouldn't do", and I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be. What is value taking priority *for*, if not for determining *what we should do*? Do you have in mind some other way of completing the phrase, "value should take priority for..."?