Karthik Tadepalli
Bio
I research a wide variety of issues relevant to global health and development. I'm always happy to chat - if you think we have similar interests and would like to talk, send me a calendar invite at karthikt@berkeley.edu!
Posts 12
Comments402
Maybe it was an exaggeration to say it should be retired. It was an important source of insight for me as well. But I think it is used in a browbeating way very often, and this post is a strong example of that. I think the drowning child argument is best used as a way to provoke people to introspect about the inconsistency in their values, not to tell them how immoral all of their actions are.
That's fair, if it's more of an expository exercise for OP's own sake, I can respect that. But
people understand the general meaning behind it even when only half-explained in 45 seconds by non-philsophers.
is exactly why I'm not a fan of using it to browbeat people. It is simple and makes its point clear without you needing to tell people how immoral they are.
I am not receptive to browbeating. I suspect most people in the world are not, either. I don't know what you intend to accomplish by telling people that every single one of their valued life choices is morally equivalent to letting a child die.
If your answer is "I think people will be receptive to this", I have completely different intuitions. If your answer is "I want to highlight true and important arguments even if nobody is receptive to them", you're welcome to do that, but that has basically no impact on the audience of this forum.
The drowning child motivated a lot of people to be more thoughtful about helping people far away from them. But the EA project has evolved much further beyond that. We have institutions to manage, careers to create, money to spend, regulatory agendas to advance, causes to explore. I think it's time to retire the drowning child, and send it the way of the paperclip maximizer.
Effective altruism in the garden of ends is a great reflection from someone who experienced this dilemma.
This essay is a reconciliation of moral commitment and the good life. Here is its essence in two paragraphs:
Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.
Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits. Particularly so for those working outside of organized religion on huge, consuming causes. I suggest such a community might practice something like “fractal altruism,” taking the good life at the scale of its individuals out of competition with impact at the scale of the world.
I'm agnostic on the right functional form for the VSLY, just as I'm agnostic on the right . My point was just that you cannot have it be independent of .
You need to impose some structure to get an exact identification of , but that should not be interpreted as meaning that we can be fully agnostic about how affects valuations, the way you describe. So I don't think that puts us at the point you stated. Specifically, I think the framework you describe where the VSLY relative to income doublings is constant while you shift is still inconsistent with utility maximization, and still not a valid way to interpret how affects the value of health vs income.
Can you say more about why the distinction between "Open Philanthropy" and "Open Philanthropy GCRCB team" matters? What subset of the community does this GCRCB team align with vs not? I've never heard this before