Personal Ties to Causes Don't Matter
We should just do what helps the most.
When people hear about Effective Altruism’s ideas for the first time, you often hear the same sort of objection. EA endorses sending away malaria nets, helping animals, and giving out vitamin A pills - but what if I don’t really care about those causes? I have a cause that’s dear to my heart, and I want to help that instead.
This sounds pretty reasonable, if you have lost a loved one to some specific disease, it’s easy to see why you would want to have a hand in preventing that harm from befalling others. However, it is evil, and you should be burned at the stake for even considering it.
“Saw you’re doing a fun run. You know the rules.”
I jest of course, it’s admirable whenever anyone tries to do anything good for others - but I do still think it isn’t a good reason to abandon the malaria net approach. You might think “Well, that’s easy for you to say, you don’t know what it’s like to lose someone like that.” to which I say “Ahah! You activated my trap card! My dad is dead!”.
You idiot. You imbecile. You nincompoop of the highest order.
My dad died from a preventable heart condition, and there are charities such as the British Heart foundation that help people in those situations. Despite this, I still send no money to them. This is because the fact that it was a heart condition that happened to take my Dad out isn’t really all that important.
What matters are all the negative outcomes of that condition. Things like, y’know, him dying at 57. To illustrate, imagine that he had the same heart condition but with no negative health outcomes. He had an enlarged heart, but it didn’t impact his life expectancy at all, or his health in the interim. Would this be bad? Not really. It’d certainly be weird, but hey, if he had a big heart but carried on as he was, it’d make no difference to us.
Compare this to a scenario where the condition is removed but all the negative outcomes stay. His heart is in perfect health, but as it happened, he still died. Would this be bad? Yes! It would be exactly as bad as what actually happened. So the negative value of his death is clearly being determined by the death itself and not whatever the cause happened to be.
If this is true, though, then we shouldn’t try to help causes that we have personal ties to, but instead the ones that actually help others the most. Donating to the British Heart Foundation probably does some good, but it will save a lot fewer lives than giving to the Against Malaria Foundation.
Imagine I’m placed in a room with two buttons. One prevents one death from a heart condition, and another prevents two deaths from malaria (The effectiveness ratio is probably even more in malaria’s favour but let’s just say 2). What should I do in this situation? Clearly the answer is save two lives, and it would be a bit weird if I said “Yeah, but my dad died from a heart thing so I’m going to go for that”. I’d clearly just be allowing my emotions to get in the way of doing the right thing - yet that’s exactly what we do when we just pursue causes close to us without assessing their effectiveness.
I try not to think of it in terms of my dad dying from bad heart health. I instead think that he died of death. That pesky terminal disease. As it happens, I’m in a position to help prevent as much death as possible. I can help prevent more families from going through what mine did. So what if they were going to lose their loved ones from malaria or vitamin A deficiency? I just want as many of them to make it as possible.
I like this point, and I think it is true. This is a great video that makes the same point, which I recommend: https://youtu.be/48VAQtGmfWY?si=2wGafd_tNXQz2LJS.
Quick devils advocate:
Similar to this argument, one can argue that this same type of argument for not caring about causes and instead caring about essentially maximizing utility can be made for not caring more about one’s own family. This can be used as a reductio because I don’t think anyone is willing to accept that they shouldn’t cure their mom who is sick with $6,000 instead of saving a kid far away — not that this is just subject to biases and they would be more rational if they were to give to people abroad, but that it would actually just be immoral.
I think there are two "don't care" conflated:
1. I do not feel personal connection to this. However, the results are of the same kind: prevented death of humans. (E.g. heart disease vs. malaria.)
2. I do not feel personal connection to this. Moreover, the results are also dissimilar. (E.g. heart disease vs. animal welfare.)
Your argument is argument against 1, but not against 2. It is quite consistent to actually not care about animal welfare much (I think I'm on record saying that if your moral theory requires sacrificing one sapient for any reasonable - i.e. not in the ballpark of 9^(9^9) - number of non-sapients, then your theory is wrong).