QB: Is Self-Sacrifice Especially Virtuous?
tl;dr: No.
[#3 in my series of excerpts from Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good.]
Charity and volunteering involve an element of self-sacrifice. Does that make these acts more virtuous than improving the world via other means (such as one’s career)? Do the possible reputational rewards of public, ostentatious philanthropy provide us with moral reasons to donate anonymously instead? In this essay, I distinguish moral reasons for action from evidence of virtue, and suggest that we should not be overly concerned about the latter. It is even most virtuous to simply want to do the most good, rather than being overly concerned about whether one’s actions reliably signal altruism or virtue. So even virtue ethicists have reason to encourage a more outward-looking practical outlook.
Reasons and Virtue-Signals
Distinguish (1) doing the right thing, (2) acting for the right reason, and (3) acting in a way that others can see is for the right reason. The first is acting ethically. The second is acting virtuously, esteemably, or with moral worth. And the third signals virtue.1
I suspect that some common views about acting ethically are better understood as views about how to reliably signal virtue. When virtue-signaling conflicts with actually doing good, such signaling becomes morally vicious. Given a choice between actually helping others or looking like we’re helping others, a truly virtuous person will obviously prefer the former. Indeed, an ideally virtuous person would not care about their personal reputation at all (except insofar as it may indirectly help them to more effectively help others).
The distinction between the morality of actions and intentions is a familiar one. We can all imagine someone doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (e.g., saving a drowning child in hopes of getting featured in the news), or performing a morally harmful action from the best of intentions (e.g., saving a drowning child who turns out to be the next Hitler). Often, good acts could plausibly be done from a variety of motives, some more morally laudatory than others. Cynical observers can often hypothesize self-interested reasons that might underlie the actions of an apparent do-gooder. As a result, we cannot simply infer virtue (or good intentions) from ethical action. But because observers are often especially interested in the quality of agents’ moral motivations, they may turn to heuristics that more reliably signal virtue (such as costly signals of altruism). Because virtue-signaling is not the same as actually acting well, this move is morally distorting. By focusing overly much on costly signals of virtue, we lose sight of what really matters—namely, helping others.
In what follows, I’ll step through two examples of this moral distortion: the valorization of anonymous donation, and the valorization of self-sacrifice. I argue that we often have strong moral reasons to prefer both public giving and mutual benefit. Without self-sacrifice, observers cannot so easily tell whether the agent’s motivations are truly altruistic. But that is less important than actually helping more. And since the truly virtuous agent is moved by what’s really important, it turns out that suboptimal philanthropic “virtue signaling” is incompatible with genuine virtue.
Virtue and Anonymous Donation
It’s commonly thought to be more virtuous to give to charity anonymously rather than publicly trumpeting one’s donations. (That way, the thought goes, you ensure that your motivations are pure.) And it is true that there would be something morally distasteful about a donor who cared more about boosting their own reputation than about actually helping others. Such a person would not be acting for the right reasons. But nor would a donor who remains anonymous for fear of seeming a braggart. The truly virtuous agent simply cares about helping others, and will take whatever permissible means best serve this end.
As it happens, others are better helped by our publicizing our philanthropy, as this promotes social norms that prompt others to give more too. As Peter Singer explains:
One of the most significant factors determining whether people give to charity is what others are doing. Those who make it known that they give to charity increase the likelihood that others will do the same … We need to get over our reluctance to speak openly about the good we do. Silent giving will not change a culture that deems it sensible to spend all your money on yourself and your family, rather than to help those in greater need.
There may in fact be personal costs to publicizing one’s philanthropy, due to the phenomenon of ‘do-gooder derogation’—whereby the morally mediocre conspire to ward off threats to their moral self-conception.2 An agent who persists despite these personal costs, because they care even more about helping others via promoting a “culture of giving,” is thereby acting especially selflessly (though others may not be in a position to know this). Another donor who allows themselves to be bullied into silence about the value of philanthropy would not only do less good, they would also be less virtuous. Someone who learned of the second agent’s anonymous donation might mistakenly believe them to be especially virtuous for having donated anonymously, but they would be mistaken in this. It would have done more good to publicize their giving. And it is more virtuous to be motivated to do more good.
As this example shows, trying to do more good (and hence actually being virtuous) may prompt us to act in ways that systematically diverge from conventional assumptions about virtue. The latter seem to more closely match how one would act if trying to signal virtue (at least to oneself); except that, as we have now seen, it does not even reliably do that. To truly signal virtue, you would need to signal that you are simply motivated to do what most helps others, regardless of what signals this sends. But if the acts that most help others could often be performed from a variety of motives, there may not be any straightforward way to signal that one did the action from the correct motives. Of course, a truly virtuous agent won’t care about that. They just want to help others. Alas, we real-life humans tend to have more complex motivations. But whatever our actual mess of motivations may be, it could be worth trying to de-emphasize them, and focus on the moral world beyond our own minds. That’s what the virtuous agent would do, after all.
Altruism and Beneficent Careers
Could volunteering at the local soup kitchen be a bad idea? Well, consider the opportunity costs. A medical researcher working on a new vaccine that could save millions of lives is likely to do vastly more good through their regular work. Or consider a lawyer or entrepreneur who could earn more through working longer hours, and then donate their extra wealth to likewise do vastly more good. For highly skilled professionals, it would be rather incredible if doing unskilled labor was really the best use of their time. Yet volunteering is widely valorized as a way to show that we care. I would prefer for people to think less about how to signal caring, and more about how they can best use their skills to actually make the world a better place.3
I don’t mean to claim that volunteering is never worthwhile. But it makes sense to prioritize work that uses your distinctive skills over labor that doesn’t. Our well-meaning lawyer could surely do a lot more good working pro bono for deserving clients than ladling soup that could just as well be ladled by a high-school dropout.
This contrast is apt to strike many as offensive. Perhaps part of the appeal of volunteering is its egalitarian ethos: no matter how in-demand your skills may be in the professional world, everyone in the soup kitchen is more or less equal when it comes to the task at hand. And perhaps there are moral benefits to slowing down and providing basic services to those in need, face-to-face. But there are also moral benefits to saving more lives, so we can’t just assume that the conventional recommendation wins out as “overall” for the best.
We should be open to the possibility that working more and volunteering less could be the morally better option. The fact that a scientist gets paid for their life-saving research doesn’t make it inherently less moral or worthwhile. (Ideally, price signals serve to indicate where our labor could most productively be used. Although obviously in practice this doesn’t correlate perfectly with beneficent impact, the correlation isn’t negative, either.) Again, we may be misled by the heuristic of using selflessness as a signal of virtue. But this is distorting. We should simply want to do good, not to do good and suffer for it. If we can do good through skilled work that others are willing to pay for, all the better.
In the full book, I go on to have a fun exchange with Ryan Davis about the possibility of “pathological altruism” and self-effacing motivations. I agree that it’s empirically possible that benevolence could prove counterproductive in some circumstances, but (i) doubt that’s true of our actual circumstances (especially when combined with an effectiveness-focus), and (ii) deny that this would undermine its status as a virtue. Still, doing good matters more than being virtuous. So there are possible cases in which we shouldn’t want people to be benevolent/virtuous.
Which is not to say that the agent has necessarily done it for that reason. An act may signal—or provide evidence of—virtue without the agent intending for this to be so.
Minson and Monin 2012. See also Schwitzgebel 2019.
See 80000hours.org for career advice from an Effective Altruist perspective.