¶1Hello everyone. Welcome back to The Majesty of Reason. I'm Joe Schmid, your fearless host. And today I'm joined by No Mccay, my fearless compatriate. I guess you're both my compatriots.
¶2And the fear the fearful Matthew Ad. >> Why am I fearful? The Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost. We disagree on a lot of stuff, don't we?
¶3>> We do. >> Yes. >> What are some things you disagree about? >> Well, you guys are Catholic. >> We are indeed Catholic.
¶4>> No, I'm a utilitarian. >> Oh gosh, you are utilitarian. We're not utilary. >> I off the selfindication assumption. You guys are sort of wishy-washy fence sitters about the selfindication assumption.
¶5They say things like, "I don't know what I think about entropics. I have to do more reading on the subject. Lame, weak, low energy." Um, well, I got the right view. Yeah. Sneaky Joe, they're calling me.
¶6Um, uh, so >> but yeah. And you also think, you know, um, buck welfare and agreement matters more than human welfare. >> Yeah, I think a lot of you >> we both very much strongly disagree. We strongly disagree with utilitarianism. We strongly disagree with, um, yeah, the non- capitalism.
¶7But amidst our disagreements, we agree on some very important things. Don't go exist. >> We do agree that God exists. There's an afterlife and yeah, I mean, >> psychical harmony are is good despite all the manifold terrible criticisms that are out there. Um, but there's another big thing, Brian.
¶8What is that? You should give your money to effective charities. This much is true. I mean, why is that the case, Matthew? Well, so I mean it's almost like a trivialism that if you are have different options that do different amounts of good, you should pick the one that does more good rather than less.
¶9If you have the ability to save five lives or to save two lives, you should save five lives. Unless you're, you know, John Tar where he had this view that saving more lives wasn't better and like no one agrees with him, you know, assuming assuming there are no dectic constraints that would prevent you from saving the fire, >> right? You might have special obligations as we think like family members and whatnot. >> If you have multiple permissible options, you have a really good reason to do the one that's going to have the best consequences, >> right? And then it just turns out that there are lots of ways of doing very large amounts of good at comparatively minor personal costs.
¶10There are charities like the Yensmaria Foundation which save lives for just about $5,000. So if you give $5,000, if you give a a fraction of the median income of the average American, uh you will save someone's life every single year. And whatever we disagree about in the other domains, I think it's pretty uncontroversial that if you can save people's lives routinely without giving up anything of comparable value, that's a really really valuable thing to do and that's the kind of thing that you should consider doing. Speaking of our disagreements in other areas, I think it would be helpful to draw some distinctions. So the sort of view >> we need to distinguish between two different types of >> formal distinction real distinction >> disting so so take this minimal claim you should be generous with your money and when you're generous with your money you should be generous in ways that are more likely to do more good for more people.
¶11Okay, so that's as Matthew put it, almost trivial, right? It's like a moral platitude. Almost everyone's going to agree with that claim when they hear it. Now, that minimal claim sometimes goes by the name effective altruism. It's just the view that you should be altruistic and when you're altruistic, you should be effective, right?
¶12You should have higher impact if possible. Now the term effective altruism is also a name for a social movement full of people who are committed to that very minimal claim that moral platitude but who are going to cash it out in ways that are sometimes very controversial. So a lot of them are like Matthew utilitarians. So they think that basically um you should do whatever maximizes utility. So there are no dontic constraints.
¶13It's just it's all about doing the most good, right? Um, and then there are also people who think that the welfare of nonhuman creatures matters a lot more than intuitively it seems to. So, for instance, Matthew here uh has gotten in trouble lately for claiming that the welfare of insects in aggregate matters more than human welfare. Now, we're not here to debate that topic. And if you want to see my defense, go on my blog, Google uh insect welfare matters more than human welfare and the eye brigade or something.
¶14>> But but the point but the point right now is just to draw a distinction between those claims. Claims like utilitarianism is true. There are no absolute moral constraints and insects matter more than people in the aggregate. From this very minimal claim that you should be generous with your money and when you're generous with your money, you should be generous in ways that are more likely to do more good for more people. Right.
¶15So, um I think our disagreements that I just flagged, these are really disagreements about what constitutes an effective charity or maybe disagreements about like which charities are morally permissible to donate to in the first place. Uh, but we can agree that it's good to donate to the most effective of the permissible charities while still disagreeing about which charities are permissible to donate to and which of those charities are the most effective. That's just something that um that we want to that we want to flag, you know, effective abism has been in the news for a long time, but including recently. We just don't want people to be dissuaded from being generous in being generous in effective ways just because they're averse to these very controversial moral views like utilitarianism, insect welfare, and so forth. >> Yeah.
¶16I mean, it would be totally irrational to like not give your money to prevent children from dying malaria because some of the other people who do that have moral views that you disagree with. I mean, that would just be like crazy. um uh like you shouldn't refrain from doing something good because some other people who do the good thing have other views that you don't like. I will just say briefly with respect what you were saying. So it's true that lots of EAs have controversial moral views.
¶17I will say that while I think you would have disagreements with them about lots of issues, I think probably the stuff that people that EAS do in their capacity as EAs when they're trying to make the world a better place effectively. Well, one can disagree it's best thing or just some good thing. Generally, this stuff's pretty uncontroversial. So, some of it's preventing children from dying of disease. Some of it is very cheaply making it so that large numbers of animals aren't trapped in cages for their whole lives where they can't turn around or that they're not subject to painful deaths uh when we can stun them prior to slaughter and whole cost.
¶18Some of it's trying to work to prevent another pandemic from killing lots of people. So, we'll say I do think I I think that the things EAS do is actually a lot less controversial than just unrelated stuff like lots of EAS think. But I agree that whatever you think about the whole core package of things that that EAS do in the real world should be totally irrelevant to whether you end up doing good in the way that you after carefully considering think is most effective. I mean, one of the reasons why we wanted to do this video was because I mean this stuff has been in the news recently. I don't know if one of you guys wants to comment on the the news stuff about EA and what our our government spit out on Twitter.
¶19>> Yeah. So, not to make things political, but my understanding is that the Department of the Defense recently sent out a tweet saying that the United States will never be an effective altruist country. And and that's also in connection with some policies that they've been instituting. Right. >> That's right.
¶20So, this administration is very down on foreign aid. And I think right now um many people especially conservatives in the United States for whom you know I have much love and this is not supposed to be a bash on conservatives. Um but I think that uh right now conservatives are in danger of sort of confusing effective altruism modestly construed just with a package of policy priorities that they really don't like. So um you know uh let's say that there's somebody who really really wants to slow down AI progress. They want to heavily regulate AI.
¶21Now you can disagree with that sort of and I think that's the sort of policy that the Department of Defense is is explicitly like pushing against in these tweets. Now you can disagree with the people who want to heavily regulate AI without rejecting the spirit of effective altruism, right? because you might just have disagreements with those people about whether regulating AI is a good idea, right? Especially if you think it's very important that a you know a a country with a lot of respect for civil rights like the United States wins the AI race if you if the reason you think that is because you think that would make the world better. And that's not contrary to the spirit of effective altruism, right?
¶22That's just a disagreement about which policies are actually going to be uh best for the world, best for people. So again, I think it's good to take our our political disagreements and sort of just separate those from again this thing that's kind of just a moral platitude when you think about it, which is you should be generous and when you're generous, you should do it in a way that's most likely to do more good for more people. >> Yeah. One of the more tragic things I read is I read I was reading a list of poems that was written by parents who had lost a child. And when you read that, I think it becomes really really clear that like like a child dying is this like incomprehensible tragedy of unimaginable proportions if you can prevent this from happening routinely without giving up anything of remotely comparable value.
¶23It seems like that's the sort of thing that that you ought to do. And so whatever you think about like shrink or whatever should it be totally irrelevant to this yet? Um, so I can encourage people who are listening like actually just like think about this. Think about making a commitment to giving some of your money every year to affected charities to charities like the Against Maria Foundation so that children don't need to continue to die unnecessarily. >> Yeah.
¶24And I'm going to put the Augusta Foundation link to donate in the description and in the pin comment. So like please seriously consider giving. Yeah. And I guess another reason why I wanted to put this together is just to showcase that like yeah, you don't have to be uh like a non-atholic utilitarian shrimp lover in order to favor this this core thesis this core thesis of effective alphaism. And in fact, I think there are lots of things that are very convicting from within the Christian tradition from within the Catholic tradition um that I want to share with you guys.
¶25So um let me just like go on a montage to really try to convict you guys to really feel pretty passionate about this. So u Aquinus and theolog says whatever a man has in abundance is owed of natural right to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrose says the bread that you withhold belongs to the hungry. The clothing you shut away to the naked and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless. St.
¶26Nebro in uh the year 395 continues, "You are not giving to the poor man anything that is yours, but are rather restoring something that is his." And in similar fashion, Vatican 2 declared that men are obliged to come to the relief of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods. If a person is an extreme necessity, he has the right to take from the riches of others what he himself needs. Since there are so many people in this world afflicted with hunger, this sacred council urges all, both individuals and governments, to remember the saying of the fathers, feed the man dying of hunger, for if you've not fed him, you have killed him. But let's ratchet things up even further. John Chrysum said, "It is impossible.
¶27It's impossible though performed 10,000 other good deeds to enter the portals of the kingdom without almsgiving." Aquinus said that some are punished eternally for omitting to give alls. And our Lord clearly teaches that almsgiving is necessary for for salvation. Matthew 25. So I just want to read this for you guys. You probably heard it, but it's very convicting when you listen to it.
¶28When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him and he will separate the people one from another. As the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, he will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by my father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.
¶29I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me." Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink?
¶30When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or be clothed and clothe you? When did we see you sit her in prison and go to visit you? The king will reply, truly I tell you, whatever you did for whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. Then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you who are cursing, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat.
¶31I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and and you did not invite me in. I needed clothes and you did not clothe me. I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. They will answer, Lord, whenever we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or meeting clothes or sick or in prison and not help you.
¶32He will reply, truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. So this is a salvation issue. That's what grace is telling us. And notice something is very important.
¶33The goats here, the ones on the left, the ones that are being eternally condemned. They're not being described here as murderers, they're not people who like were mass murderers like, you know, Hitler, Stalin, etc. They're people who omitted to give arms, people who failed to help. That is a damnable sin according to our Lord. Now, can I just interject here?
¶34So, I agree that's the correct interpretation of the passage, but I just want to sort of like throw a bone to maybe the non-atholics in the audience, especially the Protestants who think there's something very problematic about saying that salvation is based on almsgiving. Um, here's something that I I still think you should gather from the passage, even if you're going to, you know, interpret it differently. Giving to the poor is very very important and failing to do so is a like a morally grave omission. It's like, you know, walking past Jesus who's like naked and starving in a ditch and not helping him. That's what's described in the passage.
¶35So, even if you even if you deny it's a salvation issue, it's still an issue. It's still a morally grave issue. Um, so I don't think like even if you think the sotiology that Joe just articulated is wrong, it should not affect your assessment of like whether this should be a priority. Yeah. >> Yeah.
¶36You can't serve God and mammon as it says, right? >> And I mean, just imagine that. Just imagine like you're walking by and there's Jesus and he's like dying of hunger and thirst and has no clothes and you just like keep walking. I mean that would be so awful. Um and like omitting omitting to give to the poor to help those who are in diar is equivalent to that.
¶37So if you can't imagine yourself doing that, then you should ask yourself, you know, how can I imagine God giving to effective charities? >> Yeah. And now, so one thing that people might be thinking at this point is, okay, maybe I should give some of my money to charities, but why should I care that much about effective charities? Isn't, you know, just doing some amount of good enough? I I don't think that this is the attitude that we should have.
¶38I mean, so imagine you're a doctor in a hospital and there are different patients and you can't treat them all and they have different levels of sickness. The thing that everyone thinks doctors should do in a predicament like this is that doctors should do triage. They should treat the people who they can help the most easily because if they care about each individual person, then they will care about saving the most lives. Um and so similarly if uh if we are in a position where there are huge numbers of people and they can't save them all we should be focused on trying to save people and trying to benefit people as effectively as we can try to do as much as we can in this department. There's a famous argument that Peter Singer gave the drowning child argument.
¶39I guess you heard some variant of this from Noah the drowning Jesus argument. Um, but imagine you come across a child drowning in a pond and you can pull them out, but pulling them out of the pond would require ruining your two your several thousand dollar suit. Of course, you should pull the child out of the pond. But then it turns out there are people who are drowning in the proverbial pond who we can save for just a few thousand. The fact that they're far away does not seem to make a difference.
¶40When if you're saving someone's life, how proximate they are to you in space doesn't seem to make any difference to how to the extent of your obligations to save them. It's not like if you had a button that you would press to save the child from the pond and you were on bullet train as it got farther away, your reasons to press the button would get weaker. Physical proximity is obviously not the sort of thing that's directly relevant to our obligations to save people's lives when we can. Now, I think that some of our viewers might think, well, it's not just that I'm spatially distant from them. Maybe I have weaker kinship ties to them.
¶41Or maybe we're not members of the same nation. And so, maybe I have a duty to prioritize the interests of the people to whom I'm related or with whom I share a nation over the interests of foreigners. Um, but I think that we can deal with that objection by just redescribing the case so that the child drowning in the pond is a foreignb born child. Maybe you're on vacation, you know, in I don't know, Nigeria and you're walking by and you see a child drowning in the pond. Still seems like very morally urgent in that case, right?
¶42Even if saving that child would require ruining your very expensive suit seems like you should still do it. So even if you do think that there's some relationship between your obligations to a person and your familial or national ties to that person, it like it doesn't follow that people with whom you don't share those ties don't matter or that you're not morally obligated to help them when you can do so at relatively low cost to yourself. >> Yeah. I one thing that I sometimes think about is like imagine like talking to the parents of the people who whose wives you can save and imagine trying to explain to them your omission where it's like the reason you didn't do something prevent their child from dying but you would have rather spent your money on other things. You know it just that seems like such a bad excuse and that seems like the sort of excuse that wouldn't fly for the person.
¶43uh and um so they wouldn't fly for the per if you were explaining to people affected by your actions then it seems like you it it's just not an adequate excuse for not doing for not doing it. Now, I guess so the best objection to the drowning child our age is people say, "Look, there are constantly children drowning." And so, if there was just one child drowning in a pond, maybe you'd be obligated to pull them out, but there are millions of children drowning. You're not obligated to spend every waking moment pulling children out of ponds. There are things to say about this, but maybe that's right. But here's what I think would be queer.
¶44You'd be obligated to pull some of the children out of ponds. Maybe you'll only be obligated to pull them all out. >> Walk by the millions another >> right. It's like you walk by and you see a child drowning in a pond and you're about to pull them out and then you notice there are more children drowning. So you're like, "Ah, screw it.
¶45I'm going to, you know, go on vacation." Like obviously that's unjustified. Obviously, if there are lots of children drowning in ponds, maybe you're not obligated to spend every making moment pulling children out of ponds, but that should be one of the main things that you do. So similarly, I would suggest that you in the audience who's listening to this should make saving lives effectively one of the major things you do in your life. Here's maybe a an elaboration on the argument you just made. Suppose that you come across a child drowning in the pond, but there's a curtain and there's a 50/50 chance that behind the curtain there are like 10,000 other children drowning in ponds, but you just don't know.
¶46It doesn't seem like that should in any way affect your decision about whether to save the child in the pond who's drowning right in front of you, right? Like you shouldn't be uncertain about what to do just because you're uncertain about whether there are more people in trouble behind the curtain, right? The fact that there are more people there might be more people in trouble shouldn't affect your judgment about whether to help this person who's in trouble. >> Yeah. And I guess I just want to say a few things to like the the Catholics in the audience as well.
¶47So I mean how much you should give of course depends on your state life, right? Like if you're struggling to even feed your family saying um then you know take care of your family first. Um, but I guess it's different if you have like a lot of spare income or if like you really can live in ways that are simpler than your means allow. Um, I think like you should really potentially consider that so that you can give more away um to charities. And I also just want to like clarify that like one thing that at least Noah and I aren't saying is that like you should give out of all the money that you give away, every single penny of it should be going to effective care because like Catholics are obliged to for instance help the church.
¶48um Catholics are and also I just think like we do have some kind of um greater obligations toward you know family members other kinship ties and whatnot but again as you said that doesn't mean that people who are like starving in foreign nations don't matter at all and as Matthew said I think it's important to include them as at least a significant or main part of your charitable giving um >> there's a reason that the there's a reason that the main character in the parable of the good Samaritan is a Samaritan right because what the parable is supposed to illustrate is that love for neighbor is supposed to cross ethnic boundaries. That that's not to say again that you don't have special obligations to your close family members, your close friends. It is to say that your generosity should extend should extend beyond those bounds. Right. So, well, do we have anything else to say before we close off?
¶49Um I guess one thing I'll just say briefly uh uh so if you're thinking of giving to affected charities so I think the charities in the global health space like against Muer Foundation are a good one to do. I also think animal charities are quite good that maybe maybe there's some disagreement about that year or I don't know but I mean the best animal charities spare animals from multiple years in a cage per dollar. If you could spend a dime to free a bird from a cage that would otherwise trap it for a year, you wouldn't have to be some like bleeding heart tofu eating vegan to think that would be a good use of a knife. Um, and we all are tofu eating vegans. >> That's right.
¶50But then I I I think you know consider giving giving your money to a farm kind to these other effective animal charities as well as well as the human charities. Uh so yeah, that that that would be basically my my two cents on it. I'm gonna maybe we should briefly comment about that. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that money should not go to animal charities. That should as a priority go to humans.
¶51And it also says that we shouldn't be showing to animals the affection that's due to human beings who are created in the image of God. Now, I'm no theologian, but my reading of that passage is that giving to animal charities is allowed as long as giving to human charities is the priority. Right? If it were supposed to be a blanket prohibition on giving to animal charities, I don't think it would have any qualification at all. But it is qualified.
¶52It says you shouldn't give money to animal charities that should as a priority go to humans. So I think what that means for Catholics and I think this goes for all Christians because I think the rationale for it right that human beings have a special kind of dignity because we're divine image bearsers um that that's something that's held in common by all Christians. I think what this implies is just that your first priority should be helping humans who are in need. But that doesn't preclude going above and beyond and also trying to help animals who are in need. >> Yeah.
¶53The way that I understand it is very similar. It's just like so long as you meet your obligations, your your oblations regarding um charity towards humans, then it's totally permissible and in fact good to have animal battles. Um and in fact, we have lots of saints who are just like overwhelmingly um generous and loving towards animals. So um taste >> Yeah. And I think the other reading would be kind of implausible where the other reading would be that like you can never get do spend any money helping animals if you could instead use a helping humans.
¶54So, like if there was a dog fighting arena where like a thousand dogs were like being bred and fighting and brutally dying every day and you could shut it down, but in order to shut it down, you'd have to drive and it would you'd have to spend a little bit of gas money to like tip off the sheriff that you shouldn't do that. And it's like, what? That's crazy. Or like you shouldn't free the bird the hundred birds from a cage for like one nickel. Like that would be ridiculous, I think.
¶55So I don't I don't think that plausible reading of the catechism at least if the false is true. >> Yeah. And again like just even the bare surface level reading of the of the catechism seems to support what we're saying. So anyway that that's at least our take. Again we're not moral theologians but um so anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
¶56Um thank you Matthew and Noah for joining me and again uh check the link in the description and the pin comment to the Against the Lair Foundation. I would very very strongly recommend you guys give some money to them. All right, peace out.