Last week an article I wrote on global poverty was published on the Effective Altruism and Christians blog. Check it out here.
Thanks to Vesa and JD at EACH for thinking of me, and to J and J for their comments on drafts.
I had a few goals moving to Kenya, and I achieved all of them!
Gain experience and credibility working and living in a low-middle income country: Definitely done. It’s been clear when talking to people at different companies/NGOs/”development” actors how much more valuable I would be as an employee from having worked in Nairobi for a year
Decide if I would be comfortable living abroad for longer than a year and if I like and do well at the type of work aimed at eliminating extreme poverty: Definitely. I love it here, and see myself living here for at least 1-2 years more, maybe longer. At this point my thinking is that for me to move away from Kenya I would need to have some specific job in another country that seemed more impactful than whatever I’m working on in Kenya (though very possible that my thinking will change in a few years!)
If I like it, find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution (1): In the near term, the startup space is for me. In the long term that could change, but I don’t see myself at any point wanting to work at a government organization or large NGO. I have worked with these types of organizations in consulting, and don’t think they are very effective at helping people (2). I also don’t enjoy that type of work (or consulting work) very much. I’m very excited by the idea of helping to build a company, and I think I have the strongest chance to have impact in on people living in extreme poverty by sustainably creating jobs, decreasing prices, and driving economic growth. I also am more open to working at an Effective-Altruism-aligned charity in the medium-to-long term
Learn about the different ideas and actors in global development / global health: Done. I’ve been lucky to work on three projects in the development space while at BCG. Plus you can’t go to one party or ultimate frisbee game without meeting people who work at embassies, impact startups, UNESCO, local charities, etc. (3) which has lead to tons of great conversations about global development and global health
Refine my views on what the world - and in particular Americans - should do differently from what we’re doing now in order to improve life for everyone on the planet: With regards to extreme poverty, I wrote up my thoughts in a previous post. I’ve also updated my thinking that lots of people should be working harder to improve the long-term future of humanity, but that’s a bit outside the remit of this post as it’s not anything I learned from being in Africa in particular (4).
So what does all this mean in terms of my next steps? I am leaving BCG but staying in Nairobi, to work at a startup in Nairobi! (I will not be founding a startup myself, though maybe in few years I will decide to). Things are not 100% settled yet, but I will share an update when they are.
I’m so grateful for having had the opportunity to move to and work in Nairobi, and am excited for the adventure to continue. And I’m so grateful for everyone who reads this either out of pity for me or because it’s genuinely interesting to you - either way I appreciate it! If you haven’t been reading along and are interested in more about what I’ve learned and done in Kenya, my favorite posts are Reflections from my first two weeks, Iowa vs. Kenyan corn, and on helping people in extreme poverty (5)).
If anyone, from anywhere on the internet is reading this, is thinking about helping to end extreme poverty, and is interested in talking, let me know! Email me at ljeure@gmail.com
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1. I’ve moved away from saying “I want to work in development” and towards “I want to help end extreme poverty”, though sometimes I am cowardly and still say the former
2. For a lot (but not all!) of these organizations, you shouldn’t even think of their purpose to be helping people as much as possible. Their main purposes (in terms of what these organizations are actually set up to do) are to expand the soft power of their host countries (in the case of government orgs) or meet impact metrics, prove value to funders, and expand their scope of activities (a cynical view of many NGOs)
3. A perspective shift from meeting all these people has been “wow there are tons of people in situations similar to mine trying to do work similar to what I’m doing”. It’s been humbling - I’m not as special as I thought I was. On the other hand, none of these people seem to have exactly the same approach as I do, which is probably good - lots of different but overlapping perspectives trying to solve problems
4. Basically I was persuaded that I had been underweighting Effective Altruism arguments around the neglectedness of humanity’s future. I now think it’s quite a bit more likely that in the medium or long term I work at an Effective Altruism organization on topics related to existential risk And in the short term I’m helping to start an Effective Altruism group in Nairobi
5. My donation matching offer is still valid for the last one:
Link here - probably only interesting for those who care about Effective Altruism
For the past couple weeks I went back to Iowa USA for a friend’s wedding (congrats guys! They should know who they are). While I was back, a few people asked me variations on the following question:
Is there anything the typical American can do to help address extreme poverty?
This post is my answer to that question since I feel that I didn’t give great answers on the spot. (The short answer is “Yes - you can donate money.”)
You can break down “addressing extreme poverty” into two parts:
#1 - Small-picture improvements: Improve the lives of some people who are living in extreme poverty
#2 - Big picture improvements: Contribute to creating social and economic systems that lead to the sustained elimination of extreme poverty
It’s easy for an individual to contribute to #1. Just give money to help people in extreme poverty. The median American makes $31K per year. There are 600M people who live on under $1.90 per day (~$700 per year). Your money is worth way more to those people than it is to you (1).
I encourage you to donate more to help those in extreme poverty! I think this is really important, so in case it’s an incentive: I will match donations to effective charities helping those in extreme poverty for any reader of this blog who is on the fence about donating (2)!
It’s much harder for a typical American to contribute to #2. Enabling the social and economic systems that will eliminate extreme poverty involves a set of really complex problems. There just isn’t much most people can do here unless your career touches people in extreme poverty (e.g., working in international health, managing supply chains from poor countries).
In this regard, the big-picture problem of extreme poverty is like the problem of national cybersecurity. Poverty and national cybersecurity are both extremely important, and extremely complex. In your spare time you can’t contribute to national cybersecurity. If you’re exceptionally well-informed you could take political action (e.g., maybe writing to their legislator), but that’s about it.
It’s the same for extreme poverty (3). Poverty might seem more addressable by the everyday American than national cybersecurity, but the fact that it hasn’t been solved over the past 70 years shows that it’s not. Plus, the people most able to solve problems related to extreme poverty are those in the poorest countries, not Americans.
In conclusion, my view is that the best way for the typical American to help people in extreme poverty is to donate money to an effective charity. Donating can measurably improve someone’s life though it doesn’t create systems that will consistently lift people from poverty.
But don’t let the inability to drain the ocean of poverty stop you from helping where you can! What is the ocean but a multitude of drops?
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1. Other than donating, I really don’t think there’s much a typical American can do here. Doing a mission trip might be good for you spiritually, but probably doesn’t help the people in the country you’re visiting unless you have very specialized skills (e.g., you can do heart surgery).
There’s also a case for adopting someone who would otherwise grow up in extreme poverty - but this is a very complicated issue that I don’t have a strong view on
2. Eligible charities:
Malaria Consortium: Cheap malaria-preventing medicine to people in Africa and Southeast Asia
GiveDirectly: Give cash directly to poor people in Kenya
GiveWell: Charity evaluator that does rigorous evaluations of charities and give you the option to allocate a donate to several highly effective charities (includes the above two charities)
Does not directly help those in extreme poverty, but I’ll also match in case you want to directly give money in a way that might be personally more meaningful: The president of my ultimate frisbee club in Nairobi, Emmanual Kameri, is raising money to help cover his tuition at Oklahoma Christian University where he would play ultimate. You can support him here. Note I don’t know details of Kameri’s financial situation and do NOT mean to imply that he lives in extreme poverty, only that he can’t afford tuition on his own (despite his ultimate frisbee scholarship! He’s very good)
Some ground rules:
For every dollar you donate to one of the charities/fundraisers listed above, I will donate a dollar
You can’t already have been planning to donate to any of these, or another GiveWell recommended charity (on your honor)
The donation I make to “match” yours will be above the amount I was already planning to donate this year (on my honor)
Message me any way you like (email (ljeure@gmail.com), comment on blog, Facebook messenger, Venmo) if you have questions or want me to match. If there’s another charity you think is close in cost-effectiveness to the charities above, let me know
As an edge case constraint: I will match up to a max of $100 per person on donations to Kameri’s tuition fund. I won’t have any such limit per person on the other three charities. This is because I think the other three charities are more effective at truly helping the worst off in the world (if anyone is willing to donate more than $100 to Kameri, I will consider this post wildly successful)
Another edge case constraint: I will cap my overall donation matching at some point if this post becomes wildly successful
3. If you want to write to your legislator to help end extreme poverty, ask them to reduce subsidies to US producers that harm producers in poor countries. I may do a whole blog post on this at some point, but for now see this stat from Wikipedia:
“Oxfam estimates that the removal of U.S. cotton subsidies alone would increase prices 6-14% and thus increase the average household income in West Africa 2-9%- enough to support food expenditure for 1 million people” (source).
There have been other studies that have found similar (negative) effects of US trade policy on the livelihoods of people in poor countries. In 2003 when Mississippi catfish farmers successfully placed tariffs against Vietnamese catfish farmers, per capita income for the Vietnamese catfish farmers dropped by 40% (1). As Nathan Nunn says: “If we [found] an intervention that increased real per capita incomes by 40% it would be the closest thing we have to a panacea for economic development. However, we effectively have a policy intervention that does this, which is to not impose these policies which significantly harm developing countries” (page 11 here).
In moving to Nairobi that one of my goals has been to find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution to improving others’ lives. I still don’t know what exactly I do want to do, but I’ve ruled some things out: Working at a government organization or large NGO (e.g., USAID, UN humanitarian agencies, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is not the best way for me to help those in extreme poverty.
Being in the orbit of (and even consulting for some of) these organizations here has shown me that most of the common critiques of these orgs are basically right: They are bureaucratic, lots of money goes to writing reports rather than actually helping people, they don’t get enough input from or give enough agency to the people who they are ostensibly helping, there is little-to-no accountability for results, etc (1). Historically, these orgs have not been good at improving peoples’ lives given the amount of money they consume (2).
This was all good to learn, but not surprising. But there have been two things I’ve learned about these organizations that have been surprising and interesting to me:
Firstly: Everyone who I’ve talked to who works at these orgs basically agrees with all these critiques.
Secondly: Relative to other jobs (e.g., working at a startup, a local company, or at a small nonprofit) these positions are very comfortable from an economic and social status point of view, in ways that have nothing to do with how much these jobs actually help people:
They pay well (relative to higher-impact jobs you might take)
They are stable (relative to higher-impact jobs you might take)
They are prestigious (ditto)
In many roles, you work steady 40-hour weeks
It’s easy to explain what you do to others and they can immediately see that you’re trying to do good in the world
They allow travel around to many different parts of the world (3) (4)
All of these are compelling reasons to either convince yourself that working at this org is in fact very effective at helping other people, or to decide to make a tradeoff in favor of your own comfort at the expense of potentially helping others more.
To be clear: everyone I’ve met who works at one of these orgs has very good intentions, and probably does help people - just not as much as they probably could in other positions (in my view - I could be wrong though nobody has pushed back on this point to me when I’ve raised it). And it’s not as if the problems of promoting human flourishing are easy. But I find it very troublesome that the global development jobs that people in the space complain about most are also those that are the most comfortable.
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1. For me, The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly summarized the problems the best. Noam Chomsky also has great critiques from a very different angle
2. In fact, it’s a mistake to even think of the purpose of “humanitarian” government orgs as helping people. As USAID Administrator Samantha Power said on Colbert this week, USAID “is the soft power arsenal” of the United States Government. Though most people who work for these orgs really do want to help people (and the orgs do end up doing some good), the purpose is ultimately to serve political goals for powerful countries
3. In fact, UNICEF requires its people in certain management roles to move countries every few years. “If you understand infant health in India then you also understand it pretty well in Ghana” seems to be the implicit philosophy
4. Of course all of this is also true of management consulting
European countries, led by Germany, have paused administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The US has not even begun to administer it yet.
There are 7 instances of blood clotting in 1.6M AstraZeneca shots in Germany. IF that’s causal ,which it looks like it isn’t, that means you have a .0004% chance of getting blood clotting if you get the AstraZeneca vaccine
Extremely conservatively, let’s say AstraZeneca reduces your chances of dying by 60%. Currently 74K people have died in Germany from COVID, out of a population of 80M. So getting the shot can reduce your chance of COVID death by 0.05%.
Given that we know COVID is killing people, and it looks like you’re 100 times more likely to die of COVID if you don’t get the vaccine than you are to get blood clotting if you do get the vaccine (which does not necessarily even kill you), it makes far more sense to err on the side of continuing (or beginning @USA) administration of the vaccine. By all means investigate the blood clots, but don’t stop administration of something we know will protect us from the virus until we get convincing evidence that halting vaccinations is safer than continuing them.
I don’t want to work in global health or global development. I want global poverty to end.
I’ve noticed over the past few years a bunch of ways in which people have subtly encouraged not to give voice to big dreams. I think the cumulative effect of all this is bad for me, and probably also bad for other people who are in similar circles to me.
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For the most part, the people I work with in consulting are either people fresh out of college who don’t know what they want to do with their lives, or people fresh out of MBAs/PhDs who are doing a mid-career pivot. Neither of these groups of people are (broadly speaking) full of individuals who are single-mindedly pursuing a dream. They’re people who want to figure out what kind of career they want to have.
Friends, both from work and not from work, don’t love their jobs but continue at them because they think they will lead to something better, or because they’re fine spending a large amount of their time working for something they don’t love.
Partially as a result of not liking their jobs, they put a heavy importance on work-life balance. This encourages me to think “this time that I’m not being productive is good for me, and actually I shouldn’t want to work so hard.” It’s understood that you have to sacrifice if you want to achieve something great. But because many of us at our core aren’t driven to actually achieve whatever it is we’re working for (in my case, bringing value to the client), we don’t want to sacrifice too much.
Lots of people I talk to speak about entertainment as a passion. They get extremely excited when talking about a great restaurant they’ve been to or a great weekend trip they’ve taken. There’s an assumption that everyone is binging Netflix during quarantine, and people say things like “Ah I haven’t seen ‘Westworld’ yet — I should really watch it,” as if they’re missing out on life by having not seen it.
People apply to MBA programs because it’s the next step, buy a Peloton with their bonus, and refine their wine palates because they want to expand the horizons of the pleasures they can experience (1).
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Each of these things are fine and maybe even good in themselves! It’s fine to not know what your life’s work is, work life balance is important (especially if you don’t love your job), and I love watching movies. But the cumulative effect of all of this, combined with a lack of most people in my circles truly pursuing passions, discourages me from being idealistic about what I live and work, and work hard, for. And so I say things like “I’d like to try working in global development or global health” because that makes it sound like the next logical career step.
Phrasing my goals this way makes sense. Maybe that’s the kind of work that I will find satisfying or impactful, so that I will like my job. Maybe development work will help me build some skills that will serve me well later in my career. Or maybe living in a foreign country will expose me to great natural beauty, and what non-American lives and cultures are like, which will be an enriching experience.
And honestly, all those things will be nice. But at my core — or at least what I hope and act like is my core — I really don’t care about what experiences or skills I have, and my goal isn’t to feel that my career is satisfying or impactful.
What I care about is that 600+ million people in the world live on less than $1.90 / day and that 5 million children per year die before the age of 5. And my goal is for that to stop.
That’s ~8% of people and ~4% of births. Based on UN projections, by the time I die at the ripe old age of 103, the extreme poverty rate could be far below 5%, and the under-five mortality rate could be 1%. My life’s work is to accelerate the downward slope of those lines as much as I can. I hope I am willing to work hard and sacrifice to make that happen.
I think this kind of idealism is important in order to get things done that matter. We should be excited at the opportunity we have in living to make a difference, both because it makes life more enjoyable, and because it will make you better at what you do.
I want to move closer to Neal Stephenson’s ideal of the business founder: “After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and foregoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert...On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].”
I probably won’t be able to work as hard as I should, or be willing to sacrifice as much as is demanded of me. But I’m at least going to stop pretending that the main thing driving me is to have a nice career when there is real stuff to do in the world — real problems that I can devote myself to solving.
1. Sorry for the super bougie examples — there are definitely less expensive ways to make the next step or broaden the horizons of pleasure you can experience. But I find it especially demoralizing when people spend a lot of money on these things.
The US can and should take more steps to curb the human rights abuses being committed by the People’s Republic of China in Xinjiang (up to 1.8 million people being detained and subject to forced labor and torture). This is an opportunity for the US to act as the leader of the free world that we imagine ourselves to be.
This ChinaTalk article has a great overview of what we should do to pressure the PRC into reducing its actions in Xinjiang (see also Vox). In summary:
The executive branch could instruct Customs and Border Patrol to issue a Withhold Release Orders against products like cotton and tomatoes produced in Xinjiang. This would prevent these products, created using forced labor, from entering the US
Congress could increase the budget for CBP to give it more capacity to do the above (current budget is only $2M)
The senate could pass H. R. 6210 which requires companies to disclose ties with Xinjiang. Congress could go further by introducing and passing a bill requiring companies that have ties with Xinjiang to be fined or to be delisted from US stock exchanges
The US could file a complaint against the PRC in the International Labor Organization (a UN agency), or raise it in the UN general assembly or Security Council
Working with other countries is likely essential to success here, both in leading by example and in coordinated efforts. The point of all of these measures would be both to embarrass the PRC into halting their actions, or else provide economic incentives to do so. If only the US is criticizing and sanctioning you, it’s relatively easy to simply point out the US’s flaws and find other trading partners. You can’t do this if many of the world’s most powerful countries are pointing their fingers at you to hold you accountable.
What can you personally do ? As far as I can tell the best action an individual can take is to spend 5 minutes and call (or email) your senator and/or congressperson, expressing your concern about what’s happening in Xinjiang. For talking points you could say you’d like them to:
Give more budget to the Customs and Border Patrol so they can increase enforcement on imports from Xinjiang
Pass H. R. 6210, and introduce a new bill to require sanctions against companies with ties to Xinjiang
Call for complaints by US representatives to the UN against the PRC’s actions in Xinjiang
If you have other ideas about effective ways an individual could help on this issue, let me know!
Morality tells us what things we should do, and what things that we should not do. Much of western philosophy is concerned with describing morality similarly to how we describe the natural world: using reason to determine the “rules” of morality that we should follow strictly. For example, utilitarianism says “always maximize utility”. Kantian deontology says “there are certain things you can never do”.
Mengzi, the Chinese Confucian sage (also known by the latinized name “Mencius”), approaches this effort of becoming more moral very differently. He’s not concerned with providing an overarching moral framework for his teachings, or in laying out hard-and-fast rules. He acknowledges the importance of the moral rules of ritual priority, implying that one should be willing to die for the sake of being treated with the proper respect (Mengzi, 3B1). But it is important to abandon what is ritually proper when the ritual would cause you to deviate from the Way: “It is the ritual that men and women should not touch… but if your sister-in-law is drowning, to pull her out with your hand is a matter of discretion” (4A17).
So according to Mengzi, becoming an honorable person means developing our faculties of discretion, which will help us to make decisions (and, importantly, to form our motivations) in accordance with the Way. Mengzi’s teachings in themselves don’t correspond with the Way, and neither does ritual propriety. Both are methods to help his students cultivate the discretion needed to see what’s truly right.
The takeaway from this for me is that you can have a coherent system of morality without requiring that every action you take be backed up by rational reasoning. If moral obligations exist outside the natural world, then perhaps they’re things that can’t be well-described through a system of rules the same way physical laws can. And maybe utilitarianism and deontology are mistaken in assuming there is a set of abstract rules that describe morality, and what each of us should truly aim for is becoming wise enough that we no longer need hard-and-fast rules to guide us.
In this post I want to explore how the standards we hold ourselves to affect the way we view other people. So I’m going to write about the standards that I hold myself to because I have better insight into my own standards and viewpoints than I do into anyone else’s. The particular standards I mention may not be right, but I am pretty confident that there is a universal obligation to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to do good.
Also, I believe there is such a thing that there is objective goodness in the world. Bu if you don’t I think my reasoning will be applicable to you as long you have some standards that you wish everybody would follow (e.g., if you believe that “setting aside 30 minutes every afternoon for tea and biscuits” is a standard that everyone in your life should follow, then replace the words “do good” in the rest of this post with “set aside 30 minutes every day for tea and biscuits”).
Claim #1: We should all strive all our lives to do good more perfectly, and doing that requires holding ourselves to high standards
Holding myself to high standards means being kind of nitpicky with myself — being vigilant about times when I may not be doing as much good as I could be, and pushing myself to do better. I’m causing animals to be tortured by eating meat, so I’ll be vegetarian. I’ve been quiet about how the way we live our lives contributes to systemic racism, so I’m trying to speak out more. I waste too much time on YouTube so I should stop watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews — I haven’t been as successful on this front (my favorite).
Once I’ve identified a standard I want to hold myself to, I can motivate myself by thinking about how this standard really ought to be followed by everyone and isn’t just some arbitrary rule I’ve decided to follow — this isn’t the case with all the standards I try to hold myself too, but it is with a lot of them. If I’m at a restaurant and there’s a great-looking steak on the menu, I can convince myself to not order it because I think it would be wrong for anyone in my position to contribute to cows being tortured, and would be disappointed in myself if I did something I thought was wrong.
Claim #2: It’s not reasonable nor good to expect others to be perfectly good all the time, and other people will often fail to meet the high standards we try to hold ourselves to
This leads to a problem: If I’m disappointed in myself when I don’t meet my own standards, and I believe the standards I hold myself too are common standards (i.e., they’re not just unique to me; other people should follow them too), then there’s danger in me constantly being disappointed in other people when they don’t meet these common standards.
So what do I do when other people don’t meet these standards that I set for myself? If I know that I would look down on myself if I ordered a meat dish, does that mean I should look down on other people when they order meat dishes?
Basically, in trying to improve myself, I’m in danger of slipping into judgement of others. I propose five rules of thumb to help keep this at bay:
Hold yourself to high standards
Consistently push yourself out of your comfort zone to be a better person
Recognize that not every standard you hold yourself to is a common standard
e.g., I limit the amount of TV I watch because I generally don’t get very much out of it for the time I put in, but that’s not the case for everyone
Recognize that other people have life struggles that you don’t, which may make it harder for them to meet even those standards that are common
e.g., I think that everyone should do as much as they can to help other people, and that I and many others struggle with not being selfless enough. But I know that there are also people who struggle with making sure to take care of themselves enough (not to imply that being selfless and self-care are opposites, but they can appear to be in conflict sometimes). So I shouldn’t tell someone “be more selfless” unless I was reasonably sure that self-care wasn't something they struggled with (and even so I probably wouldn’t phrase it like that)
It helps to remember that you don’t always meet the ideal standards either
If you are in the appropriate position to do so, encourage others as best you can to act better
What the most effective way of “encouraging others to be better” looks like varies depending on the situation and your relationship to the other people:
It may mean saying nothing and leading by example
It may mean having a conversation with them about their actions and/or motivations and really listening to them
It may mean encouraging them to do better
It may mean calling people out explicitly and telling them to be better (especially if behavior is particularly egregious or you are in a position of authority like a teacher or a boss or a parent)
You also need to be open to others encouraging you to be better
Be open about your beliefs, but focus your attention on where your attention can make the largest positive impact
Here’s an example of me trying to live this out: I think that both looting and the perpetuation of systemic racism are evil acts. But when I have conversations with people recently I always tried to focus on systemic racism, because that is the bigger problem, and the one that I’m more likely to be able to contribute to progress on. If I were in the position of the people who had the opportunity to loot during recent protests, I would hope I would hold myself to the standard of “don’t steal”. But I was not in that position, and as it is it would be wrong to focus on the fact that people looting weren’t meeting the moral standard of not stealing while ignoring the way society fails to meet the moral standard of not being racist
Articulating these rules of thumb has helped me resolve the cognitive dissonance I hold myself to higher standards than others (though I’m sure there are areas where I hold others to higher standards than I hold myself, which is wrong to do). Maybe it will help you too! Or maybe this cognitive dissonance was just a problem for me and all I’ve done is climbed out of a hole I dug myself in the first place.
Terminology alert: “Virtue signalling” is a phrase which here means “demonstrations that you hold values or behave in ways that people should approve of”
“Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds” - Matthew 5:16
“Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them” - Matthew 6:1
Virtue signalling gets a bad reputation. It’s easy to look around cynically and have a view like “the people on Facebook who are posting about how black lives matter are doing that mostly to show off to their friends that they are good people, not because they really care about black lives.”
I think this is sometimes a fair critique. But virtue signaling can also be useful because it helps set communal norms. Speaking out about your values and talking about the good things that you do is good if it inspires others to be better, but is reduced to “mere virtue signaling” if all it accomplishes is convincing others that you are a good person.
So when discussing honorable views that we have or actions we’ve taken, we want to make sure we’re helping to change people’s minds, and not just yelling about how good we are. I think there are two criteria that together make virtue signalling valuable from a norm-setting perspective:
The view you are signalling is at least somewhat contentious in your community. Sending out signals like, “people shouldn’t use racial slurs”, or “police shouldn’t kill people in custody”, or “I once had the opportunity to steal this thing but then I didn’t” is not useful. Nearly everyone agrees that explicit racism, police killings, and theft are bad, so by signalling your agreement you aren’t changing anyone’s mind, just demonstrating that you eat the recommended daily dose of moral fiber.
And this contentiousness is context-specific. The extent to which signalling “I think people ought to do something about climate change” is useful from a norm-setting perspective depends on whether the people around you already think it’s obvious that we should do something about climate change. If they all agree, then it’s useful. If they don’t, it’s not.
Similarly, “I think de jure racial segregation is wrong” would have been a useful thing to signal in 1940s America, when this was not the prevailing view. But if you said that now, people would do things like roll their eyes, or call you names like “Sherlock,” or suspect that you might have some pretty alarming views if you think that the evil of government-supported explicit segregation needs to be stated as if it’s up for discussion.
You seek the ear of those who don’t already agree with you rather than the approbation of those who do. This means understanding where the people within range of your signal are coming from, and framing your view in a way that will make sense to those who don’t already agree with you.
If I were to tell people “I wear a mask in public because I believe in science and am not selfish”, I won’t convince anyone to wear a mask who is not already inclined to do so. All I’m doing is showing to the people that agree with me that I’m a good person. Posting political memes that make me and my friends laugh at the stupidity/lack of moral fiber/sheep-like following of those who disagree with us doesn’t do anything to set better communal norms.
(Note that while as a speaker you should always try to frame your views in a manner that your interlocutors will be receptive to, as a listener you should not disregard an argument because you don’t like the way it’s presented. Hold yourself to a higher standard than others, both as a speaker and a listener)
There’s certainly a lot of non-useful virtue signalling out there. But what looks like virtue signalling may actually just be an expression of values in a good-faith attempt to change people’s views or make them consider perspectives that they wouldn’t have otherwise. We often go along with the crowd and do things that are wrong. Let’s speak up in the few instances where we’re able to do what’s right, so that we might inspire others to do the same.
Quick post today: A back-of-the-envelope calculation of how worried I should be about going to the grocery store that I’m giving somebody COVID-19.
(These numbers are a little bit out-dated now — I originally did this calculation a week ago, when I was in Chicago. I am now in Des Moines IA, and am not going to the grocery store any more.)
Chances I kill somebody through COVID-19 when I go to the grocery store = (chance I have COVID-19) x (chance I transmit the virus if I have it) x (chance the person I give the virus to dies of the virus)
There is a 0.4% chance I am carrying COVID-19
1.7% of people in Cook County are carrying the disease
5.2M people live in Cook County
93,000 likely carriers in Cook County
186 deaths in Cook County (and 8,034 confirmed cases)
.2% death rate (Source). 186 / .2% = 93,000 carriers
93,000 / 5.2M = 1.7%
~1/4 people who have the disease are asymptomatic, and I am asymptomatic. So there is a 1.7%/4 = 0.4% chance I am carrying COVID
4.5% chance that I give someone COVID when I go to the store if I have COVID-19
2.5% chance I transmit by coughing on someone
This number is totally made up. It is likely lower, because I have not been coughing at all when going out, have been wearing a cotton mask when near people, and have been staying more than 6 feet away from people
2% chance I transmit by touching someone with my hands. These numbers are all totally made up as well
15% chance virus goes onto something I touch with my bare hands
15% chance someone else picks up virus after touching that thing
2.5% + 2% = 4.5%
Sense check: R0 is ~1, you have the disease for 14 days, so the average odds you give someone else the disease each day is ~7% if you have COVID. I would estimate that I’ve had far less social contact with people since the outbreak started than most of the people who are driving the spread of the disease, so my personal R0 would probably be much lower than 1
(I’m not sure if “my personal R0” is a meaningful thing to say — maybe R0 is only defined for a population? But I can’t fit the research that would be needed to find that out on the back of this envelope)
.6% chance that person dies from COVID-19
.2% chance someone dies if they have COVID-19
Of course, if they have the disease, then there is some chance they give it to someone else, and on it goes. So let’s multiply this number by 3 to get .6%. Perhaps it should be much higher — I think this is the biggest weakness in my methodology
This means my chances of killing someone when I to the grocery store is 1.1 x 10^-6
For context, this is approximately equal to your chances of killing someone while driving ~100 miles if you get in the average number of fatal car accidents / mile.
For a different kind of context, if a human life is valued at $10M (I believe this is what the department of energy uses when doing nuclear power cost/benefit calculations), then the equivalent cost of my trip to the grocery store is $11.
Now I’m not saying that the value of human lives can be directly translated to dollars, but I think that these kinds of utilitarian calculations are useful to get a sense of the magnitude of what we’re talking about. I don’t really have a sense for what 1.1 x 10^-6 means — my imagination isn’t that good. But I know what $11 means. It means that if I would be willing to pay an $11 “grocery shopping fee” then it’s probably alright to go get groceries. I should be moderately worried about going outside, but if I get groceries or go for a run, I don’t need to feel waves of guilt, as long as I am taking precautions.
You can plug in your own updated numbers or use different assumptions to get a different result for your likelihood of killing people when you do various activities. It’s fun! And allows you to compare the relative riskiness of different activities, and to prioritize your worrying towards the things that are truly the most worrisome.
Terminology alert: Competition = “A situation in which two or more people are working towards the same goal without necessarily cooperating”
People are motivated by competition. Like any other source of motivation (love, fear, pity, hunger, etc.), competition can push us towards being the best versions of ourselves, or push us towards destructive behavior. In this post I’ll explore the different mechanisms through which competition can motivate us to action, and then discuss how we can harness our competitive nature in a way that pushes us to do good.
There are a few different ways that we might be motivated by the knowledge that somebody else is striving for the same goal that we are. Here are all the different manifestations of competitive motivation I can think of:
If the goal is rival, so my success in achieving the goal depends on your failure to achieve the goal (e.g. in winning a sports competition, getting a contract, winning an election), then the desire to achieve this goal equates to a desire to be better than you.
Even if the goal is not rival, I can still be motivated by my own pride to be better than you just because I don’t like the idea of someone being better than me at something (e.g., playing the harmonica, expounding poetically about jazz music, baking cookies, the kinds of things we all are really prideful about).
Other people with the same goals as me can serve as a reflection of the type of person I want to be. It’s much easier to imagine myself writing a novel when I see my friend do it. And it’s much harder for me to make excuses for not working towards my goals when I see somebody else working hard.
So how can we harness these feelings of competitive pressure in order to be the best versions of ourselves possible? I propose a couple general guidelines:
Reframe your rival goals as non-rival goals: Competition for rival goals tends to be the type of competition that brings out the worst in us. Because basically, if the only way I can succeed is for you to fail, then I am incentivized to hurt you and disposed to rejoice at your misfortune — neither of which are healthy. But in many cases (not quite all, but maybe most cases), I can shift my goal away from succeeding in this zero-sum competition, and towards a more fundamental achievement of excellence.
Some examples:
Instead of having my goal be to win a swimming race, my goal can be to swim the best race that I can possibly swim.
I can reframe a desire to get a job at someone else’s expense to be a desire for me to be extremely capable so that the employer has great options when deciding who to choose for the job.
Even when competing in an election, you could reframe your fundamental goal from being “I want to win this election” to being “I want to ensure that the people clearly understand what I would do if I win this election, so that they can make the best decision about who to vote for”.
Reframing goals in this way is not always easy and requires a degree of selflessness and ego-control. But the times I have been able to do it, I have a degree of peace and confidence that I don’t feel when my goal is to achieve at someone else’s expense.
Pride is a crutch for when your intrinsic motivation isn’t enough. Imagine that, much to the delight of the kids in my neighborhood, I put up crazy amounts of Christmas decorations every year (including lights that flash in sequence, actual reindeer, animatronic nutcrackers performing a synchronized dance to a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song, the whole deal). It would be great if I was motivated to do this out of a fundamental desire to bring joy to the kids in my neighborhood. But maybe if I’m honest with myself, the real reason I work so hard at putting up these decorations is because Brian across the street just got a giant inflatable Santa, and there’s no way in heck I’m going to let him out-do me this year.
It’s still better to act based on this prideful motivation than to not act at all (as long as I don’t go so far as to sneak over at night and stab Santa in the kidneys with a carving knife). The kids are still getting the joy of my decorations, regardless of my motivations. So I can accept that in this case my intrinsic desire to delight the children of my neighborhood isn’t enough, and I can harness my prideful desire to be better than Brian to motivate me to do good. Maybe next year I’ll be a better person, but for now I’ve got to work with what I have.
Things are not great. This has all the appearances of a great adventure.
The world is facing a deadly threat. Everyone’s lives has changed in a matter of weeks. Nobody knows what to do. There are enormous stakes.
The future is uncertain. The fate of our families, communities, nations, world hang in the balance. There’s great opportunity for each of us to have an impact on what life is like in a month, in a year, in a decade. Our actions matter.
You have to grow up fast, to overcome obstacles, to change your life. You to focus on what’s important. You pull close to the people you love. You feel a connection with everyone you see. Everyone’s mind is on the same thing.
This is serious, as true adventures always are. People die during adventures. There is loss. There is true misery.
But there is beauty, if you can find it, in the unexpectedness. In the new ways of living we have to adopt. In the feeling of solidarity with everyone else on the planet who is dealing with this in one way or another.
I never used to understand when people valorized war as a great vehicle for heroism and purpose and unity. But I’m starting to.
This is a continuation of last week’s post about the moral arguments contained in the recently concluded NBC sitcom, The Good Place.
This is kind of a complicated argument to articulate. In The Good Place the reason the afterlife points system is flawed is because a person’s score is overwhelmed by negative points due to the unintended consequences of their actions. The world is so interconnected that the simple act of me buying an apple means I’m implicitly supporting the exploitation of farm laborers, and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions because of the fuel that was required to transport the apple, and giving profits to the co-owner of the apple company who hates orphans. There are a bunch of negative externalities to my actions, so I get a bunch of negative points.
We might not initially have a problem with this (especially if we’re utilitarians) because there are also lots of positive externalities to my act of buying an apple. And these positive externalities are just as hard to predict as the negative ones. Maybe the trucker who transported this apple was having trouble holding down a job, but now has steady apple-trucking work. And maybe I’m also giving profits to the other co-owner of the apple company who loves orphans way more than the first co-owner hates orphans. So we might say “Sure, there are a lot of unintended side effects of any action we decide to take. Some of these actions will be good, and some will be bad, but on average they will cancel each other out. So what’s important to focus on is just the outcomes of your actions that you can reasonably predict.”
But we don’t see this “canceling-out” effect in the afterlife points system. If we did, we should still see some people making it into the Good Place. Maybe they would be people who just got lucky, because the apple they purchased happened to be the one apple that saved the company from going out of business and saved all the apple farmers in some community from losing their livelihood. But we don’t see anyone making it into the Good Place. The fact that we don’t means that in the afterlife points system, negative externalities are given more weight than positive externalities. And the characters reject this points system as unjust as a system of morality.
This can be seen as a kind of argument against the idea that the most important moral command is to do no harm. If you believe that in the trolley problem, it’s wrong to divert the train so that it kills one person instead of three people, then you probably believe that it is more important to avoid hurting people than to help people. You don’t want to divert the train because then you would have killed a person who would not have otherwise have been killed, which is bad. The fact that you saved 3 other people is good, but not good enough to make up for the bad thing that you did. You can’t just sum up all the harms and goods that you’ve done in order to decide what the right thing to do is, because somehow the moral need to avoid doing harm is more important than the moral need to do good.
You would need to believe in something like this in order to design the afterlife points system that is in place at the start of The Good Place You would have to believe that because people are doing accidental harms with their actions, then those harms will almost always outweigh the accidental goods they are doing. By rejecting this points system, the show can be understood as saying that we shouldn’t necessarily give these harms any kind of special weight, and that the accidental good and bad we do by our actions really do end up cancelling each other out.
This is probably the most straightforward argument the show is making: We all ought to try to be a little better every day. Michael argues over and over again throughout the show that people have the capacity to improve. Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason all become better people throughout the course of the show, and are meant to serve as an inspiration to those of us watching the show.
Under this reading, The Good Place can be seen as a source of practical advice for how to live rather than a rigorous logical argument for what ought to be done and what ought not to be done. It is more like Confucius (offering different advice to his pupils based on their personalities and the context) than Kant (making a structured rigorous argument for a system of morality with defined rules). The show tells us it’s important to take morality seriously, but not so seriously that you have decision paralysis like Chidi. It’s important to think about the outcomes of your actions, but you can’t always predict all the harms your actions might do. Don’t be too self-centered. Forgive those who have hurt you.
None of these are not hard and fast rules for how to live, but they are moral guidelines that most people know at some level. The purpose of the show might just be to bring these ideas to the forefront of our minds, so that we are a little better tomorrow than we were today.
This is the final argument I’ll explore here, and I think it’s The Good Place’s biggest and boldest claim. This is the claim that my relationships with the people around me are what is most important from a moral standpoint. If we are to be good people, we should above all focus on caring for those around us as opposed to trying to maximize the good we do in the world or follow abstract moral or religious codes.
The show is far more concerned with how the main characters behave to the people around them than to how they follow abstract moral rules. At its core, the show is not as much about saving humanity as it is about 6 friends learning to care for, rely on, help, and forgive each other. The reasons each of them were bad in their first shot at life was because they had terrible relationships with the people directly around them — Eleanor because of her unwillingness to form connections, Chidi because of his indecisiveness, Tahani because of her envy, and Jason because of his petty crimes.
To the extent to which the show focuses on the ways we influence people far away from us (because of the interconnectedness of the global world), it actually argues that the way we affect these distant people is so hard to determine that it can’t be a basis for morality (see Argument #4). It’s significant that when Eleanor walks through the doorway at the very end of the show, the magical dust she turns into encourages someone to be good in a way that helps Michael. She doesn’t turn into an abstract force of morality that helps everybody in the world indiscriminately (or if she does, we don’t see that). The abstract force of morality she turns into helps a person she loves.
Of course, this is a very natural moral claim for an NBC sitcom to make. A sitcom is naturally about interpersonal relationships, because relationships are dramatic. And a relationship-focused morality is not going to offend anyone. It’s a comfortable kind of morality that a lot of people would like to believe in anyways. It feels nice to care for the people around me, doesn’t require too demanding of sacrifices or too much thinking about the externalities of my actions, and having loving relationships in my life will actually make me happier anyways. But I still say this is a big claim, because the idea that direct personal relationships are of primary moral importance is not what is taught by most major religions, or by most philosophers.
Throughout these two posts, I’ve tried to articulate 6 ways you can read what The Good Place says about morality. I’m not sure what exactly the creators of the show wished to say by making the show they did, but to some extent that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effect the show has on the viewers, and what lessons each of us draws from watching it. I think all of the above are reasonable lessons to draw from the show. But there are countless other lessons that you could just as reasonably draw, because the show is not didactic. It is an exploration in what it means to be a good person. And hopefully all of us who have watched it are now better people than we were before we watched it.
“A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in a story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” – Flannery O’Connor
“Oh dip” – Jason Mendoza
“What does it mean for art to mean something? How should we try to understand art? What makes a piece of art good? What is even the point of art? These are all big thorny questions that 1. Are not directly addressed in but are at the core of today’s blog post 2. I think I have the answers to, and 3. May be the subject of future blog posts” - Luke Eure
Trying to understand what arguments a work of art is an exercise I find very fun and insightful (“work of art” is a phrase which here means “basically any creative endeavor, ranging from NBC sitcoms, to haikus you wrote while bored in freshman bio, to philosophical sci-fi novels”). Some works of art make very clear arguments (Atlas Shrugged has a character give a 50+ page monologue where he tells you what the books is about). Some can be interpreted as making any number of arguments, many in direct contradiction to each other (talk to anybody about Parasite or try to untangle what Kanye’s message is in Gold Digger). And some works of art are more interested in raising questions or exploring emotions than in articulating specific arguments about those questions (e.g., Whiplash: Is the self-destructive pursuit of excellence worth it?).
So it’s not always the case that a work of art clearly makes a certain moral argument (i.e. a piece of art isn’t always telling you to act or feel a certain way). And even if it is making an argument, it’s not likely that you can exactly reproduce the argument with all its subtlety in words, because if you could then the piece of art would just be a philosophical argument and wouldn’t be interesting at all as a work of art. But trying to articulate all the different moral arguments a piece of art could be making is one fun and useful way to approach interpreting art, and one that can lead to understanding.
In this week and next week’s blog posts I’d like start to try to analyze what kind of arguments are made in NBC’s The Good Place. Take as a whole, what do the four seasons of the show tell us about how we ought to live our lives?
Disclaimer: I’m not an art critic or a serious philosopher, and don’t know that much about TV or art criticism or the nuanced history of philosophy. Lots of very smart critics and philosophers have written about this show I’m sure, but I don’t know who any of them are and haven’t read any of their work. But I like to think critically about things, and have read a good number of New Yorker articles in my time. And I have a blog which you’re inexplicably reading, so here we go.
There are 3 big moral arguments that The Good Place makes that I’d like to explore in this post. I will tackle a few more arguments in next week’s post, because the length of this post is already getting out of hand and I haven’t even started on the arguments.
1. A meta-argument: Morality is important and worth talking about
2. An argument for existentialism: Morality is what you make of it
3. An argument for moral realism: “Justice” as a concept really exists
Any work of art can be said to be making at least one argument about its subject matter, and that is “this thing is important! Important enough that I’m making art about it!” In Little Women when Jo March writes a book about domestic matters, she’s implicitly saying that these domestic matters are important enough to write and be read about. The fact that the world is full of love songs can be interpreted as an argument that love is really important and ought to occupy roughly half of our singing time.
Similarly, when Michael Schur makes a TV show about moral philosophy, he’s saying that moral philosophy is important. And when that show is on NBC during primetime, and stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, and is designed to be broadly appealing, then that show’s existence is an argument that moral philosophy is important for everybody. Everybody, not just academics and pretentious teenagers, should be thinking about what it means to be a good person.
My one-sentence summary of the plot of The Good Place is: “Some people and their demon friend discover that the universe’s system of morality is broken, and design their own system to replace it.” When confronted with a system of morality (the points system) that doesn’t reward and punish people the way our main characters think it ought to (because it sends everyone to the Bad Place), they take it upon themselves to reject this system of morality and replace it with their own (people are allowed to try and try again to improve themselves until they are good). The idea that morality is not fixed and each person must seek for themselves what is good and meaningful is a core idea in existentialism.
The Good Place rewards our main character for replacing the established moral system with their own version of morality. During the course of the show, we see that our main characters question the real metaphysical rules that govern the Good Place and the Bad Place – rules that have been in place for as long as humans have been giving rocks to each other and killing each other with those rocks. Our heroes come up with a version of morality that makes more sense to them than the established system, and then are rewarded for following their intuition about how morality should work over the established rules. If someone like Chidi comes along with an idea of what the rules of morality should be, then it’s fine for the whole universe’s system of morality to change in response. Morality is not a given, but can be molded to fix the preferences of those it affects.
If I’m to follow Chidi’s example, I should live my life searching for the version of morality that gives my life meaning and that makes sense to me and that will make me and the people I love happy. And then I should use that as my moral code. Moral codes are arbitrary and can be changed if they don’t work anymore – what’s important is my own interpretation of how the universe ought to work in this time and place.
“But wait”, you might say. “The self-improvement-simulation system of morality that we end up with in Season 4 of The Good Place isn’t depicted as being an improvement on the points system just because our main characters like it better than the old system. It’s really a more just system. The whole reason Michael convinces the Judge to replace the old system is because everyone can see that the existing points system is not a good system.” But this doesn’t make sense if we think that morality at its base really consists of the points system as enforced by the Judge. Because how can the ultimate moral system of the universe be “not good”? The “good” thing to do is defined as “the moral” thing to do. So in order for the points system to be a bad system, it must not be the true underlying morality that governs the universe.
The show can reasonably be interpreted under the view that there exists a fundamental moral law that exists at a higher level than the points system. This law escapes all of the main characters. None of the supernatural beings -- not the basic Judge, the petty Demons nor the ineffectual Good Place Committee -- really have a full grasp on what the rules of this fundamental morality are. But they can tell that something is going wrong when their point system is sending everyone to the Bad Place, really truly wrong and unjust. So they create a new system with the help of some humans. It’s clear that the self-improvement-simulation system that they create is more just than the points system, and the fact that everyone agrees that it’s more just is an indication that there exists some external sense of “justice” that they are measuring against.
If interpreted as arguing for moral realism in this way, then the message The Good Place to us is that we ought not to accept rules of morality or societal structures that are handed to us if they are unjust. We should search for what is truly good, and pursue that.
These are just three of the moral arguments that you can interpret The Good Place as making. Since I’m already way longer than any of my blog posts have been so far, I’m going to stop here for this week, and pick up next week with a few more moral arguments made by the show.
Terminology alert: I will use “utilitarian” in this post to mean “someone who thinks that their moral duty is to maximize the happiness of sentient creatures”. My understanding is that there are many different versions of utilitarianism that prescribe moral duties that are different than this, but I think my definition is a decent baseline, and that anyways the points I make will apply to other versions of utilitarianism.
Here are two ways of thinking about moral rules:
Type I Rules: There are certain moral laws that govern what we ought and ought not to do. These can be rules like “don’t kill” and “recycle all your recyclables” and “strive for a society where people have freedom of speech”. If you believe these rules have value as Type I Rules, then it is because you believe there is some intrinsic moral value to about life, recycling, and freedom of speech, and you would follow these rules even if they lead to misery and ruin because they are the right things to do.
Type II Rules: These are rules that are not morally binding in themselves, but are useful as means to help you achieve some moral objective. If you’re a utilitarian who thinks that it is your moral obligation is to maximize human happiness, then you might think that a rule like “don’t steal” is a good way to maximize human happiness. People aren’t happy when they’re stolen from, and theft breaks down trust in society. But it’s possible that stealing would be justified in certain circumstances, e.g. if you’re Jean Valjean and need some bread to feed your family. Type II rules are more like guidelines that point you towards the best moral action.
If you are a utilitarian, you don’t really believe in Type I Rules (except the foundational rule that you should maximize happiness), and all of the moral rules you follow on a day-to-day basis are Type II Rules. But even people who believe that their life is governed by Type I Rules (e.g. Christians, who believe in things like the Ten Commandments) still have Type II rules, because no moral code gives you rules that will help you make decisions in every situation you will encounter in your life.
I’ve found it useful to distinguish between the Type I and Type II rules that I follow in my life. Identifying as Type II rules that I previously thought were Type I has opened me up to new ways of thinking about the best way to accomplish the moral objectives I care about. That last sentence was incredibly general, so here are some specific examples.
Example 1 -- Recycling: I used to think it was my moral obligation to recycle. A sense of shame at throwing an empty bottle into a trash can had been drilled into my head as long as I can remember, mostly by my mom and articles in National Geographic Kids. It was black and white: It’s good for me to recycle, and bad for me not to recycle. But I’ve since realized it’s not inherently evil to throw away recyclable material, but it is better for the world if more things are recycled. So what really matters is the total amount of material recycled, and it’s better for me to spend 1 minute going through the trash at work and moving 5 bottles from the garbage to the recycling than for me to carry around an empty bottle for 2 hours because there are no recycling bins around.
Example 2 – Free Speech: As a proud American, I used to think that the idea that society should have freedom of the press and free speech was a Type I rule, and that free speech was valuable in its own right. It’s nice that having free speech and freedom of the press contribute to the open flow of ideas in society, and that citizens are happier when they have these freedoms, and these freedoms allow for mechanisms (like the press) that hold powerful organizations (like the government) in check. But these benefits of free speech weren’t the fundamental reasons I thought free speech was valuable. I thought the ability for citizens to speak their mind was valuable, even if that didn’t make the citizens any happier and didn’t contribute to the flourishing of society. But now I believe that free speech is a means to an end, and is only valuable insofar as it contributes to the flourishing of society and the happiness of citizens.
Note that I think that a prescription of free speech is so conducive to human flourishing, that for all practical purposes I think of it like a Type I rule. I think every society should have free speech (with similar exceptions as are made in the US, e.g. shouting “fire” in a crowded theater). So while there aren’t any fundamental moral laws that require freedom of speech, it should still be sought in every society. What is fundamentally a Type II rule is elevated to a pseudo-Type I rule by its near-universal applicability.
Another reason to act as though your Type II Rules are Type I Rules is to send a stronger signal about the morality of certain actions. I fully admit that this is why I started being vegetarian. Two years ago I became very concerned about the treatment of animals on factory farms, as well as the effects of animal agriculture on climate change, so I adopted a practice of “not contributing to meat production”. What this meant to me was that I would not buy meat, but if there was leftover meat from a meal (which there was every day at my fraternity), I would eat it, with the idea that on the margin this wasn’t contributing to meat production.
But I send a much stronger signal about how I feel about the ethics of eating factory farmed animals if I say “I’m vegetarian” than I do if I say “I don’t buy meat but will eat it if it’s leftover”. So even though I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with eating meat, I believe that being vegetarian is one of the best ways I can help reduce the suffering of animals and carbon emissions. The important thing isn’t that I don’t consume meat myself – it’s important that the total amount of meat being consumed decreases. But the best way to do that is to not consume meat myself (for full transparency: I don’t treat my vegetarianism as entirely a Type I Rule – I still occasionally eat meat if it’s leftover from an event and was going to be thrown out anyways. But this happens infrequently enough that I am still comfortable calling myself vegetarian).
So here are the takeaways: Find out whether the moral rules you follow get their value from the underlying importance of the rules themselves, or if they get their value from the predicted outcomes of following the rules. If they get their value from the predicted outcome, then it’s possible that you should still follow those rules in all circumstances. But understanding why you think it’s important to do or not do a certain action will help you to be more certain of and more committed to your actions.
The existence of apps like Venmo make it very easy to pay your friends when they buy you something small. This means the likelihood of me and a friend reciprocally buying things for each other is much lower. If I buy you a coffee, you can just Venmo me the exact amount the coffee cost instead of just buying me coffee the next time. If we split a Lyft when going somewhere, you can pay me for half of it — to the penny — instead of just letting me cover it, and then you paying for the Uber on the way back.
The kind of reciprocal spending that Venmo has made less commonplace is usually done in a pretty approximate way. We wouldn't worry that each of us was spending the exact same amount on the other. I just do you a favor when I get you coffee, you do me a favor when you call the Lyft, and things generally even out in the end. (Note that you can have a lesser version of this reciprocity with Venmo if you just pay each other approximately what things cost — e.g. you paid for my $2.99 dinner, and instead of calculating tax and tip I just send you $4. But if you are a to-the-penny Venmoer, you don’t even have this).
I think the decrease in this kind of reciprocity is not necessarily a good thing. There’s a nice feeling I get when I do you a favor, and know that we have a relationship in which I can expect you to do me a favor in the future, without us needing to tally up exactly who owes each other up. But because Venmo makes money transfers so easy that it feels a little like you’re showing off your deep pockets if you tell people they don’t need to Venmo you for something.
So we have here a situation where Venmo makes something more convenient, but the fact that this thing was inconvenient before actually brought people together in a certain way. This is a general pattern that you can see in other places areas affected by technological advancement:
Instead of needing to visit your friends when they are sick to make sure they’re alive, you can just call them. And if they’re locked up at home, there’s no need to bring them groceries or hot soup, because they could just use DoorDash
It’s so convenient to navigate on Google Maps that there’s no need to ask people on the street for directions
Facebook alerts you to people’s birthdays automatically, which means that if someone wishes you happy birthday, you can’t be certain that they remembered it themselves, which might make it a little less meaningful
Because so many facts are so easily Googled, there can be a sense of purposelessness around having an idle debate about something random (“is the climate in France colder or warmer than in the US?”) because if you really wanted to know the answer, you could just Google it
The existence of sturdy, waterproof rain boots means that there are far fewer men spreading their jackets across the mud so that ladies can walk without dirtying the bottoms of their dresses (okay, maybe there are other reasons contributing to the decline of this habit)
Basically, many advancements make it easier for us to be independent. On balance I think this is a positive thing. But there is great spiritual and emotional value in having to rely on other people for things — in being interdependent. So maybe it’s worth looking out for situations where you can do small favors or ask for small favors from people, even when it’s relatively easy to avoid the need for favors. It’s nice to help and it’s also nice to be helped.
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Thanks to Connor for suggesting this topic! And sorry I don’t have many insights beyond what we talked about
In the spirit of the BBC, I have nothing remotely interesting to say this week. But here are a couple interesting facts about square dancing: