This delves into the same territory as Peter Singer's short book, "The Life You Can Save" (available free online as PDF and audiobook).
You may see some person in your community in need and your empathy prompts you to contribute to a fundraiser or whatever. Singer points out that while that empathetic instinct is natural, an intellectual approach (or what Bloom is calling compassionate) results in a better overall outcome, often wildly so.
Say you read in the local paper there is a fundraiser for $50K to buy a custom vehicle for someone recently paralyzed from the waist down. Sounds great, I want to contribute! But that same $50K could literally save 20 lives in a developing country, or it could prevent thousands of cases of blindness in children. Most of us (me included) don't have nearly as strong an empathetic response to people suffering 10,000 miles away as we do for someone nearby, someone more like "us." The suffering of people living 10,000 miles way (and will likely never meet) is just as real as the suffering as someone living five miles away. Allocating limited resources based on our emotional instincts lead to more net suffering.
That is the core idea of Singer's book. Much of the rest of the book goes about step by step debunking the usual objections which get raised ("I already pay a lot in taxes for those 3rd world people", and "Why donate to a charity in Africa? It will just end up in the pocket of a corrupt politician", and "There have always been poor people and there always will be", etc)
That argument relies on the utilitarian assumption that maximizing the global well-being is the goal.
For most people, that is not the case, and understandably so. We care about our neighbors, but we don't care about alien lifeforms on other planets, because we have no contact with them and no way to help them. Same can be applied to poor people living on the other side of the world. Where exactly do we draw the line?
The simple answer is that helping is inherently selfish - we help people because we expect to be helped when we are in need (for those who disagree - imagine being in a community where everyone asks for help, but nobody gives it to you when you need it). So the obvious answer is we need to help people in our proximity.
Of course, like many other human affairs, there's no simple algorithm to decide what do to in a general situation. It all comes down to an individual's will.
Recommend reading a book called "The Elephant in the Brain".
For almost all human behaviour there are 2 reasons. The good reason (acceptable to others) and the real reason (selfish).
And we have evolved for self-deception on this because we need to deceive ourselves in order to deceive others.
As an example the primary motivating force for Peter Singer might be status and academic prestige, not concern for others. Would he do the things he does if he got no attention for it on a personal scale?
Looks interesting. Apparently, written by a software engineer and an economist, and it's about a topic I'm very passionate about - human behavior. I will definitely check that out, thanks.
This assumes that having empathy for one person means actively working against benefiting other people— that is to say, funding someone’s wheelchair individually somehow also causes one to maliciously go against benefiting starving children in an exploited country. I don’t think this is the case; you can both give to someone with a wheelchair and also support a program that distributes medicine or food or something else.
I am heavily against this notion that giving to someone is bad because it isn’t the most efficient giving. Giving to someone, anyone, in need is good.
> you can both give to someone with a wheelchair and also support a program that distributes medicine or food or something else.
You can only spend so much money on charity before you can't buy groceries anymore. Giving to one necessarily takes from the other.
There is a choice to be made, and one of the options is to give all your money marked for charity to one goal, and another is to split it. I don't think it's wrong to split between multiple causes, even if we know some causes are much more bang for your buck than others, it's a personal choice that you have to make for yourself. But it is a choice.
It also misses the point of local tribe mentality deeply rooted in all of our brains.
We care about our closer relations far more than some other far away ones.
Therefore we are far more empathetic towards family and friends, than neighbours, than neighbouring nation, than country on the other side of the world you didn't know was there.
Me giving $100 to neighbour is different to $100 to malaria fighting foundation.
> It also misses the point of local tribe mentality deeply rooted in all of our brains.
Singer fully acknowledges the instinct you reference. But he points out there are other circumstances where we override our brute instincts based on social strictures and an intellectual understanding of the bigger picture.
For instance, most of us have a far stronger instinctive urge to violence than we actually practice. If someone steals my car I may be tempted to beat him grievously, but I don't even if it might feel powerfully right at the moment.
Yeah, overwhelming majority of people don't do either. And people are way more likely to be in position to act on empathy then to do elaborate study then cause systematic changes of something.
I would encourage everyone to read "When Helping Hurts". It lays out why it is bad for Americans' first response to throw money at an international problem.
Some of the reasons why we should be slow to give money:
We should encourage self-empowerment. If there are local laborers who can clean up after a natural disaster, we should empower them to help their community
We should avoid short term solutions. Instead of donating a super expensive tractor to a farming community that can't maintain it, donate a tractor that they can maintain
We should strengthen the community. Instead of sending a Dr to heal people across the world, send a Dr to train local Dr's who heal the locals
And, to be clear, the model of being thoughtful of where and how to give is much harder than giving money. This is not a cop out
I agree with everything you said, and so does Singer.
But I want to point out that a large part of Singer's book is about "effective altruism", giving in a way that helps. He talks about how the shallow analysis of Charity Navigator focuses mainly on operational overhead, while a few charity evaluation sites have boots on the ground to study how the charity is using its spending and measuring results. See the "Best Charities" link on the site below:
>We should encourage self-empowerment. If there are local laborers who can clean up after a natural disaster, we should empower them to help their community
Usually, though, this empowerment is just giving them money.
>Instead of sending a Dr to heal people across the world, send a Dr to train local Dr's who heal the locals
Similarly, subsidizing study-abroad programs could have a similar effect.
I agree that stupidly giving out money is exactly that, stupid. But let's not let the pendulum swing too far the other way - the solution, much of the time, is giving out money, wisely.
EDIT:
I say the solution is to give out money much of the time because money offers freedom in ways that a good tractor doesn't; moreover, we might not know the comparative need of tractors vs doctors at as high a resolution or in as nuanced a way as the locals do, considering that we haven't lived where they have for X amount of years. Money lets them allocate according to their needs in real time and as specifically as they want. Of course this assumes the people that the money is going to is in the best interests of the people in general, and that's where wisdom and discretion come into play.
I've heard a similar idea with giving free food to an area. Influx of free food puts local farmers out of work - they can't compete with free. When the charity dwindles the former farmers can't spin up their production in time and famine reoccurs.
It is selfish, and I would say that is ok. Yes, it might be more altruistic to help someone you have literally no connection to, but perhaps it is more rewarding to help someone near you, who has suffered unfortunate loss or difficulty, achieve a life that is closer to being as fortunate as your own. It's a real understandable difference from helping someone in a different country and a different culture who you can't identify with and will never see.
And yes, it's a little selfish, and I think that's ok.
Its just indulgence letters all over again. People paid a lot of money to the church to try to clean their conscience when they could instead have used the money to lift a ton of people out of poverty. So the actual cause doesn't matter, what matters is what those around you think is important, and to them burning money by sending it to the church was more important than actually doing as Jesus preached.
Meh. It's a bit cold-hearted, but if I help a person that I never actually meet, I think you can also argue that this is a simple indulgence letter, instead of making a tangible change that you can see with your own eyes.
I don't think you're wrong, I just don't think your statement is any more (or less) valid than its inverse.
It is a matter of culture, we shouldn't praise those who throw away money on mostly useless things since then we encourage more people to throw away money instead of using it well.
So even though you say "it helps a little bit, that is praiseworthy!", that is the problem! If they are to throw away money then we can at least try to incentivise better use of it. I agree that giving away money is a good thing, but praising those who give away money to mostly useless things that is a bad thing. The bad person here isn't the one who gave money to a guys car, it is the people who praise that person for giving away money for the car that are the problem, we should praise those who actually helps rather than those who just makes sacrifices.
I submit that any attempt to reduce your humanity to a math problem is ultimately going to give perverse results. Why give money to children in foreign countries and save 10,000 lives when I can contribute to the creation of technology that could save the lives of countless future human beings? Instead of that, why not give my money to Elon to help ensure we eventually develop an extraterrestrial and (possibly even extrasolar) colonization capability which will help ensure the survival of humanity as a whole? Oh, I know, I'll build a company that exploits its workers and consumers in order to amass a fortune that I can ultimately use to further that goal!
The part of your mind that does this kind of logic or math based reasoning is very useful, but there's a reason our minds aren't entirely rational. Rationality is a tool we use, it is not us and it is not the end-all be-all way of understanding and interacting with our reality.
One aspect of the intellectual approach that I struggle with is decision paralysis. That is, second-guessing any expenditure of resources I'm considering as possibly better spent on something else. And there are innumerable options. Empathy or (perhaps more usefully?) a sense of duty to specific people or organizations helps break that indecision, at least for me.
It’s not really intellectual, it’s a sort of bike shed accounting process where we argue about what is more virtuous.
Most of us have a sense of family, community, humanity or other identity. Your personal feeling on these matters ultimately drive charity. Personally, my family does alot of charity and volunteering, and we generally do so for local organizations in our city that help those less fortunate. In my mind, it’s important to build up the community that we live in.
A “human charity accountant” will point out that our labor and treasure would better benefit a child in Bolivia or a sick person in the Congo. Those are fine causes and we all find our path to what matters most to us.
As an Australian this neatly explains the problem I see looking at US policy as an outsider. Everyone will chip in for a gofundme for basic surgery, but at the same time freak out when democrats propose govt services that help everyone that are pretty standard everywhere else. What the hell is going on there?
Please tell me if you figure it out. As near as I can tell, there's a profound distrust in any mandatory collective action (aka government) especially the closer to the federal level you get. Voluntary collective action is praiseworthy.
"Freedom" is overblown in American discourse. Americans can't even agree on stuff like "freedom to require people coming into my store to wear a mask during a pandemic" versus "freedom to go about my business without restrictions," so it's often just spin, even without getting into the real fun ones like abortion, birth control, guns...
This is because the word has been redefined in the US. As outsiders we struggle to understand american brand freedom because its a weird concept centred on "my rights" where in most of the rest of the world includes responsibilities.
Believe me, a decent chunk of Americans don’t even understand the concept of freedom.
We have an expression, “it’s a free country”. But if you go to Mexico, the pharmacy will just sell you anything short of controlled substances—antibiotics, heart medication, whatever. In the US you need a prescription from a doctor. We’re not a free country by a long shot.
I don’t know how you could believe in freedom and not have that opinion about the US federal government. But I’m not sure why you brought that up in this context.
The us has over ten times the population of Australia. The concentration of power is much greater and the distrust of that power isn’t completely irrational.
What I can’t figure out is why one state out of the fifty can’t do healthcare. That’s how it stayed in Canada, in one province.
Many already do to some extent, they're just incremental, narrow changes designed to solve the most pressing issues rather than full "free, universal healthcare". For example, Massachusetts's mandatory health insurance, or Washington State's public option.
I've lived in both countries. While Americans are very strong believers in democracy, Americans trust their government much less than than people in smaller countries. It may be directly related to the problem of empathy at a distance. There are things that I would trust the Australian Government to do that I would not trust the US Government to do, not because I think the Australian politicians are more competent or trustworthy, but because the United States population is 13 times greater, making a human connection between politicians and and constituents, keeping trust and accountability is an order of magnitude easier with a population that's an order of magnitude smaller.
We don't trust the government because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and history repeats itself.
That's what a constitution is for, it's an agreement between the people and government on how they wish to be governed. Ours sets out our God given rights that no government should be able to take away.
The Australian government hasn't been too kind to its people recently during covid, carrying people off for facebook posts, not a great example.
Someone in our prime ministers own government just described him as a man with no moral compass who uses 'his so-called faith as a marketing advantage' But the Australian population is much smaller, which means the public have a much smaller task keeping the government in line. You can't keep brazen narcissist kleptomaniacs entirely in line of course, but you can keep it to the level where they're not buying superyachts. I think this different context leads Australians to have some very different ideas about Government to Americans. We know power corrupts, but we don't see the Australian government as an arena where it is possible to attain absolute power, we don't see it as a vehicle someone can ride to outright despotism. There are people in the government in Australia would love to be despots, would love to rule the nation with an iron fist. The clown who renamed the 'Customs and Border Protection Service' to 'Border Force' and made all the uniforms black (ok really really dark blue) would love to be proclaimed eternal wise father of the nation, but we don't believe he's got a hope of getting that past us. We are more trusting of government not because we are naive, but because a nation of 330 million is a very different beast to a nation of 25 million
Like Australia, the US has a significant portion of its territory dominated by reactionary types who earn a living extracting resources. Their primary mission in life is to maximize return on assets and allow for dynastic inheritance.
Because of the peculiar configuration of the US Senate, these interests hold an outsized sway on the public, and they’ve managed to maintain an extended campaign to create a strange coalition of people against abortion, for guns, against taxes (especially inheritance taxes), and pro subsidy of agriculture, petroleum and real estate and traditional
values.
That combo attracts a bunch of unrelated cohorts of voters passionate about a wedge issue, many of whom join together in a cause that is often not in their personal interest or normal mode of thought.
The gofundme is a short term solution to a short term problem. The assumption that the person is going to transition from "I need help right now" to "I'm in a little bit of trouble" to "I can contribute to society"
The stigma with government services is that "these people need help and they will always need help, they will never contribute to society"
I'm not saying the stigma is correct - but that is likely a common rational behind the emotions
Id call that stigma constructed by Conservative Right Wing ideaology! They call them bludgers in my country and parade them around in everyones face and use it to justify tax cuts, subsidies, or grants, for their mates.
Because universal programs are slush funds. If you want to fix healthcare, make pricing transparent and competitive. Don't just let hospital administrators and insurance companies price fix and charge whatever. Same thing as free tuition. Fix tuition costs, don't just make the taxpayers foot the college administrators rolls royce.
What does "make pricing transparent and competitive" mean to you?
I hear this a lot but I don't see people explaining what exactly their desired outcome looks like, and to me, I can see lots of ways it potentially changes things without actually improving them.
Are you picturing a world where before you call an ambulance after injuring yourself you have to get on something like yelp to look at prices for 10 different ambulance services, and ten different local urgent care or ERs? Are you picturing a world where it's obvious that some surgeons and doctors are 10 times better than others, so the rich pay $$$$$$ for 10x better care, and the poor are left with the scraps? Or a world where it's hard to tell, so people compete on price alone, and the doctors who care most about outcomes vs bottom line are at a disadvantage?
When I take my cat to the vet I get upfront estimates.
When I take myself to the doctor no one can tell me how much anything costs.
Regardless of insurance status the vet gets paid the same amount.
My pets get better healthcare then I do and I pay less for it and they don’t have insurance. I’m relatively healthy, my cat has FIV. I have insurance my pets don’t.
In America, you spend a few hours in the hospital, and then for the next year you receive separate snailmail bills for each procedure, medication, machine, instrument, outsourced clinic, and every doctor who happened to pop in to greet you. All in unpredictable, exorbitant amounts. And any of these bills may be sent to you again even if you pay.
If you're well insured, you still get all the fun reading material, but they say "amount you owe: 0.00"
Nope. Here is a personal example that I love to use.
When my wife was first pregnant, we had health insurance amd we picked a hospital whose business was 50% baby delivery.
Not a single person could tell me how much it would cost to deliver the child. The OBG couldn't tell me. My health Insurance couldn't tell me. The hospital couldn't tell me. I know - for a fact - the hospital had delivered babies from other people with my insurance. They couldn't tell me the cost of a delivery.
Also, someone screwed something up and I was improperly charged for a hearing test. SMH.
While it's a step in the right direction, most people don't know about it, the accuracy is questionable, what insurance will cover isn't clear, and what random additional fees will be added are unknown.
Noone is enforcing it, it was enacted by the Trump administration in 2019, effective Jan 2021, but the Biden administration isn't enforcing it and hospitals are defying it.
No. Doctors make a show out of a professional indifference to filthy lucre, except when they cash the checks.
Because the federal government insures the poor and old, the law requires that they get the best pricing. So every other insurer pays a little more, until you get to an uninsured person, who pays some unfathomable rate.
"Are you picturing a world where it's obvious that some surgeons and doctors are 10 times better than others, so the rich pay $$$$$$ for 10x better care, and the poor are left with the scraps?"
Isn't this the case already?
I mean, it could probably be worse, but I doubt Bill Gates will go to the same clinic that I do.
Why do Americans freak out on proposed government services? In the USA, we self-select ourselves into two political camps.
The first camp claims our ethnicity/race/class/region/religion/gender/identity has historically been oppressed. The most effective means to redress this injustice is by Federal government action. We want the Federal government, Washington D.C., to resolve our issues. The more government is involved, the better.
The second camp is a reaction to the first. The second camp believes the past is the past. The USA is doing just fine if stop meddling with what the Founding Fathers created. "Government is not the answer to our problems but is the cause of our problems". The less government is involved, the better.
My thoughts as a regular American: Among other factors, floating around in a murky spot in US culture are disdainful notions that money for public services will go to "them" or the undeserving or the degenerate or that it will enable lazy people or devalue hard workers. This intersects with a lot of other longstanding American culture problems, including bigotry over race/ethnicity/religion, distrust of government, culture divides like rural/urban, American (mis)conceptions of meritocracy, etc. These beliefs are often espoused even by people who would benefit greatly (and deservingly) from those programs, but instead they see them as the source of their problems. I can't speak to the details of the hows and whys but those are the connections I see (at least from one angle).
EDIT: I want to add that the above is constantly aggravated by opportunistic politicians and toxic media (both traditional and social media)
To answer your question, not "everyone" but rather a tiny minority of people, will throw money at gofundme under whatever circumstances. By contrast, a majority of people, including about half of Republicans, support Medicare for all (ie, "Single payer" health care).
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As for the article, Empathy is what separates us from psychopaths, so it's not surprising that a Yale Psychologist would want to damage it to help his political slant. That said, I would say it's unfortunate that people can be fooled and conned easily due to their empathy, but I'm not sure there's fix besides destroying high-trust society altogether. The professor is not concerned with this downside of empathy, I don't think.
I'm curious as to where you gather the insight that Paul Bloom is pushing us politically towards psychopathy. Personally, I've gather the opposite from my interactions with him; he seems to be rather sociable and empathetic. Here is a quote from him (from the article) that nicely summarizes one of his beefs with using empathy rather than rational, compassionate thought:
>> The second problem is the innumeracy. Empathy zooms me in on one but it doesn’t attend to the difference between one and 100 or one and 1,000. It’s because of empathy we often care more about a single person than 100 people or 1,000 people, or we care more about an attractive white girl who went missing than we do a 1,000 starving children who don’t look we do or live where we don’t live.
Having read the article and briefly interacted with Paul Bloom, I can't say that I share your perspective as to his political agenda.
It is not the main point here, but psychopats are sociable and can have a very high form of cognitive empathy. They can also be very charizmatic.
Also, I dont think the parent was saying Paul Bloom himself is psychopath. It was saying that he is pushing others to think that way, because that is congruent with his political ideology. That is different claim.
Many years back I heard a radiolab podcast that touched on this very topic from a qualitative and scientific perspective. The podcast specifically addressed this issue:
What is it that happens in a person's mind at that pivotal moment, when they decide to Voluntarily leave a point of safety... And risk their life to extraordinary degree to save the life of another human?
Turns out the more empathetic you are the less likely you are to do acts of heroism like this. And it's interesting as to why this is the case. I recommend people listen the audio or read the transcript because this podcast changed forever the way I think of empathy and morality.
It's very much inline with the vox articles conclusion that empathy does not fully equate with morality. But that's not a big deal to me. What was the big deal to me was people who lack empathy and their place in the world and the moral hierarchy.
In a world full of faked empathy, thanks to thin-skinned morons who avoid any and all pain at all costs, I choose not to believe anyone - especially some bullshit mainstream site - who tells me that I shouldn't rely on Empathy.
Empathy is real. Morals are not. Anyone who struggles defining Empathy does not have any. It's not rocket science. If you need to learn, go slap someone and have him slap you back. You'll learn soon enough.
Compassion without Empathy doesn't exist.
If the western degenerates weren't so hell bent on avoiding any and all pain, both physically and emotionally, we'd all be in a better place and articles like this one would have never come up.
The sole reason bullshit like this comes up is because our world is borderline totalitarian already. We're not supposed to trust our own feelings, at all, so instead we're being told what to trust.
Worse: All these degenerates out there actually believe it.
Excessively high drug prices in the US are what helps get drugs into developing nations. That $500 bottle of insulin really is doing good for the people in lesser parts of the world. The strong implication being many of them would die otherwise.
Same goes for our expensive and generally poor performing health care system, the argument being the most advanced high quality is best developed this way.
What do these ideas mean for people in the US using GoFundMe to stay alive?
A similar line involves markets and the "invisible hand", often framed as a hard fact of our reality we simply must endure, like age, gravity and the like.
This line of reasoning transforms what a majority of people in the, US at least, consider priority problems that can and should, need to be solved by changing our priorities, into harsh necessities we must all endure for some distant greater good the people struggling find hard to understand matters more than they do.
I find it very difficult myself, and I reject this line of thinking with prejudice!
Roughly half the nation works hard only to receive less than it costs them to continue to exist and show up for work, despite their employer banking billions every year, while also enjoying a labor subsidy from the general public who pay taxes to fund assistance for those people.
People struggling to afford health care, using GoFundMe to get through and continue living makes about as much sense.
More people are struggling unnecessarily than not in the US, amd it is these lines of reasoning that set people who are in a position to do something about it free from caring enough to act.
This line of reasoning implies a lot of harm here must be OK in order to reduce harm there, somewhere. That is damn tough to accept when profit is so very clearly a priority over people.
The net good, if there is any, lies on a distant time and scale, all of which puts the idea of this all being somehow necessary in to the big bullshit bucket we should have emptied decades ago.
>If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping. But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better.
He puts his statement shortly after into perspective, but it's dangerous to state that empathy is exhausting in general. It is only exhausting if somebody doesn't have the means to help.
>If you and I are the only people on earth and you’re in pain and I can help you and make your pain go away, and I feel empathy toward you and so I make your life better, empathy has done something good. But the real world is nowhere near as simple
The cure for much of the ills of empathy here is MORE EMPATHY. The very problem in the Trump example is the lack of empathy for the group that just got labeled rapists and murderers. The cure for the sentencing example is having empathy for the sullen black man.
There is a cognitive side to empathy. You need to be able to get into someone else's shoes and think through how you would feel if you were them. It is another side of the coin from the emotional empathy that the author assumes is the sum total of empathy.
I reject his implicit framing of empathy. I believe empathy is the strongest tool we have for connecting with other human beings, and without it we wouldn't do much of anything for each other. Yes, it can be used incorrectly and insufficiently, but the cure is using it correctly and sufficiently.
Seems like miseducation in the name of clicks to me. But, having some empathy, I'll presume that the author just lacks a full understanding of empathy and thinks he has stumbled upon a brilliant insight.
You may see some person in your community in need and your empathy prompts you to contribute to a fundraiser or whatever. Singer points out that while that empathetic instinct is natural, an intellectual approach (or what Bloom is calling compassionate) results in a better overall outcome, often wildly so.
Say you read in the local paper there is a fundraiser for $50K to buy a custom vehicle for someone recently paralyzed from the waist down. Sounds great, I want to contribute! But that same $50K could literally save 20 lives in a developing country, or it could prevent thousands of cases of blindness in children. Most of us (me included) don't have nearly as strong an empathetic response to people suffering 10,000 miles away as we do for someone nearby, someone more like "us." The suffering of people living 10,000 miles way (and will likely never meet) is just as real as the suffering as someone living five miles away. Allocating limited resources based on our emotional instincts lead to more net suffering.
That is the core idea of Singer's book. Much of the rest of the book goes about step by step debunking the usual objections which get raised ("I already pay a lot in taxes for those 3rd world people", and "Why donate to a charity in Africa? It will just end up in the pocket of a corrupt politician", and "There have always been poor people and there always will be", etc)