Here’s the thing: suffering is bad.
In a perfect world, I would not have to diminish my happiness to increase yours. In a perfect world, everyone would flourish. It’s easy to get cynical, to think all happiness comes at a price of someone’s else’s, but that’s not true. When I tell my friend a joke, when Alicorn writes a short story, when roommates work together to clean the house, when I feel happy because someone I love is in a better life situation… things are better.
I think there’s a reason a lot of the people who have this intuition are libertarians. Trade often goes bad. It has limits in how much it can elevate people: while “work a degrading retail job and I will give you enough money so you don’t starve” is better than “starve”, it’s still a terrible fucking situation. People make decisions that are bad for them or don’t totally understand what they’re buying. And it’s all too easy for a trade to help both people making the trade and hurt a bystander. (“Hey, wait, why are you giving him ten thousand dollars to kill me?”)
But at its best trade is an interaction that leaves everyone happier than they were. When I give the owner of this coffee shop two dollars for a cup of tea and a quiet work space, it’s better for me (tea! good working environment!) and for him (seriously, this man has so many teabags it’s easily a year’s supply for me. No one needs that many teabags). When I give you fifty dollars for the air conditioner you weren’t really using anyway, we can both walk home thinking “I got the better end of this deal.”
In a good world, everything would be like that. I would make myself happy, and through that I would make you happy, and through that you would make a dozen others happy, and…
In a good world, it would be.
But we don’t live in a good world.
We live in a world where sometimes my life has to be worse than it would otherwise be in order to make things better for other people. We live in a world where I am going to give up that vacation or that restaurant meal, so that people in developing countries do not die of malaria. And… in the grand scheme of things, of course I have to make that sacrifice. How could I not? How could I live with myself if I said “well, you know, I know your children are dying of treatable diseases… but those jeans were really super cute“?
But the only reason I have to is because the world is bad.
And the problem is… no one has to tell you “make jokes to your friends!” You do that of your own accord. But no one naturally wants to cause themselves harm, even to leave other people better off. So moral encouragement tends to concentrate on “it is important, when hurting yourself would make someone else happier, to do that.”
But it is easy to lose sight of the goal. It is so easy to slip from “self-sacrifice is often a part of doing good” to “self-sacrifice is virtuous in its own right.”
And it’s important when you find yourself doing that to repeat to yourself: suffering is bad. Happiness is good. We don’t have to get all Deeply Wise about this. The actual truth is the same truth that is obvious to a child: it is bad when people are hurting. Even you.
Self-sacrifice is a virtue that immolates itself. The only reason to sacrifice yourself is to help create a world where no one will have to sacrifice themselves ever again.
Self-sacrifice is virtuous. It is necessary. But it is never good.
Thing of Things 
Um, maybe I’m dense, but I’m having trouble parsing you… what does “this intuition” refer to?
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>In a perfect world, I would not have to diminish my happiness to increase yours. […] It’s easy to get cynical, to think all happiness comes at a price of someone’s else’s, but that’s not true.
Libertarians tend to speak of “increasing wealth”, and to decry the idea that what’s important is how we *divide* wealth as (mistakenly) viewing life as a zero-sum game.
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The intuition that positive sum transactions are normally positive for both parties.
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Hear, hear. I’ve never liked the confusion assigning virtue to mere means- if I can achieve better ends for others by *not* sacrificing, even better! (See: blood donation, where I lose nothing that I care about in the “trade” to help others)
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I don’t really grok virtue, but I guess virtue is “being able and willing to sacrifice if the need arises”, not the sacrificing itself.
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Nice essay!
0) Random observations that I should take time to organize, but am not going to self-sacrifice in this regard:
1) Some measure of self-sacrifice works as a signal or screen. If I see you self-sacrificing a lot, then there’s a good chance that you prioritize others’ well-being relatively highly, which might be something good to know about you.
2) On the other hand, if you’re self-sacrificing specifically in order to signal your goodness to the community, even subconsciously, then you might not be self-sacrificing at all. (I suspect Orwell has a relevant essay somewhere, but I am not looking it up because point 0).
3) On the gripping hand, maybe it’s better for *me* to have *you* believe in self-sacrifice as a moral virtue. That’s not necessarily even bad – I think everyone is better off if we collectively believe that breaking promises and taking bribes is morally wrong to some degree even when we can’t think of a reasoned argument not to break the promise or take the bribe.
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If it’s good to self-sacrifice for a greater good, why is it bad to sacrifice somebody else’s utility, to the same extent, for the same good (if it is bad, that is)?
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There are two lines of argument I see here, but both accept the assumption that it’s not actually good. One would be that the readership for this blog is likely to be in a position to give up a relatively small amount of utility in order to greatly increase overall utility–we’re people who can give up a vacation so other people can have mosquito nets.
The other is that it’s always going to be easier to convince yourself that someone else should give up their utility for the greater good, so it’s probably for the best to apply additional skepticism when you come up with solutions to problems (whatever they may be) that do too good a job shifting the costs onto people who aren’t you.
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Well, the libertarian answer is “because it’s not your utility to sacrifice”; if you’re taking from someone else to achieve it, without their consent, it’s not “sacrifice”, it’s “theft”.
(And via Kant, “that would justify everyone else sacrificing your utility for their preferred ends”.
That doesn’t lead to nice places.
The Categorical Imperative should be taken seriously, even if most of the rest of Kant shouldn’t be.)
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Well, the libertarian answer is “because it’s not your utility to sacrifice”; if you’re taking from someone else to achieve it, without their consent, it’s not “sacrifice”, it’s “theft”.
Be that as it may, it’s not clear to me that libertarianism and utilitarianism overlap enough for this to be dispositive. You would need a fair amount of additional analysis to get there. “Theft is not bad if it increases overall utility,” seems like a perfectly self-consistent position to take at first gloss. There may be (indeed, are, IMO) perfectly good practical reasons for utilitarians to support some forms of property rights, but even those are likely to fall short of what libertarians want.
The Categorical Imperative seems even less relevant, since my understanding is that the basic premise here is that everyone should act in a way that maximizes overall utility. If that means that they do so in a way that reduces your utility specifically, so be it.
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To some extent this already happens. We force people to sacrifice utility for the sake of others whether they want to or not all the time. Taxing people to build hospitals is the simplest example. On average it increases utility. If you win the lottery you’ll lose more to tax but if you don’t you can still get a broken leg fixed up. (at least in civilized countries)
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Yes, taxation is the most common example, and libertarians sometimes conflate taxes with theft. The utilitarian approach justifies further refinements that are actually reflected in the real world, like progressive taxation (since the incremental utility of the your millionth dollar is usually going to be considerably smaller than the incremental utility of your thousandth dollar).
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It’s strange to call this “against selflessness” when it’s really only against the most egregiously pathological altruism. At the most fundamental level, if you have to make yourself worse off in net to make others better off, that’s selflessness, and objectionable for the same reason that the other instances of selflessness are. You never have to make a sacrifice, it’s only something you’re imposing upon yourself. Of course, it’s possible for there to be someone for whom the choice between going to a restaurant vs donating to charity weighs in favor of the charity because they like helping people so much that it’d feel good for them, rather than burdensome. But for such a person, going to the restaurant would be selflessness, and donating to charity would be selfishness. But most people aren’t like that, and they really get more of a benefit from the restaurant, so that’s what they should do. We aren’t each others’ slaves.
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I think that you’re equivocating between “self-benefit” and “fulfillment of values”. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter that we’re interested in maximizing for questions of “should”.
To put it another way: If we have to consider a charitably-natured person to be more selfless when they burn money in a fire than when they give that money to charity, then I think something is really wrong with our definitions.
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It is, after all, your own values you would seek to maximize, to the benefit of yourself.
Consider the ethical antithesis of yourself, who has opposing values. Would you want this counterfactual person to sacrifice what you call self-benefit, in order to fulfill their values? (Should they live a slightly-worse live to try to spread malaria?)
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I don’t think that shows that something is wrong with our definitions, I think it makes sense – selflessness is simply bad for oneself (as the word suggests), regardless of whether it’s good for others. Something similar goes for selfishness.
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What do you, o smug glibertarian, know of slavery and sacrifice?
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That sentence does not compile under the usual definitions of selflessness/selfishness.
1. These terms are only applicable to situations when there’s a trade-off between your interests and the interests of others — at least on the most primitive, short-term level. Choosing an option that is suboptimal for everyone involved, like your hypothetical altruist going to a restaurant, is neither selfish nor selfless, just stupid.
2. Additionally, they are relative to the normal inclinations of a “typical” person — we call someone selfish only if they prioritize their own welfare more than we expect them to. E.g., failing to risk your own life to save someone else’s is not selfish, but failing to save someone’s life because you’re busy playing Angry Birds would be.
3. Here’s an analogy: we say that someone has a “low time preference” if their choices seem to privilege long-term results over short-term results more than the average person’s choices do. We often praise this trait as a virtue, even if the person in question genuinely enjoys making such “virtuous” choices, without suffering any short-term distress. “Selflessness” is the same idea, only applied to other people instead of future versions of yourself.
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I agree with most of this, but the end is a bit utopian. Scarcity isn’t going away. I think we have to accept that most of the benefits of our sacrifices will be exactly as fleeting as the sacrifice induced hardship itself.
I’ve been watching a lot of relatives deal with end of life issues recently. These have included some very hard questions on exactly how much we can ask of each other, or be expected to offer. The truly ill can be effectively bottomless pits of need, in the sense that trying to make them happy is like trying to reach an asymptote. And in that if the amount the person needs outstrips what you have (perhaps monetarily, or even just in terms of your own personal physical capacity- my 91 year old grandmother could only do so much for my grandfather).
And the long term effect of the sacrifices everyone made and continue to make… is ephemeral. One relative has died. Another will likely die soon. Then there will likely be a gap in time, but the next generation will, also, die. Need will arise, and people will struggle with how far it’s fair to burn themselves out satisfying it, and how much it’s fair to expect that of others. And for all our sacrifice this will never change.
But I think it still matters.
I dunno. Maybe I’m reading too much into a throwaway line or something. But it reminded me a bit of religious debates about Ultimate Purpose. I don’t see the need for it. I am no more less ephemeral, in the long term, than a terminally ill relative. I’m just at a different point in the cycle. And so I have to accept that the cycle continues, and try to do my best with what I have.
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“Scarcity isn’t going away”
You say this like it is an undeniable reality. I disagree. Most “scarcity” we have today is actually because of greed; people starve while food is allowed to decay because they can’t pay for it rather than growers choosing to feed the hungry before their unsold food rots.
Certainly it is *possible* that we will be in a situation of genuine scarcity, as we overpopulate, use up non-renewable resources on this planet, and fail to find other resources elsewhere in the universe, but that time is not now, not yet, and it is just as possible that it can be avoided if we, as a species, work together.
There may be scarcity in places, but, in a global world, we have ways to fix that, if we choose to. But in order to do that, we must stop competing and start cooperating on a grand scale. I’m not saying that’s going to happen; humans are very good at screwing ourselves over, but it COULD happen and it SHOULD happen and failing to try is even worse than trying and failing.
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Scarcity is an undeniable reality, and this will almost certainly never change, at least in the technical sense that we can’t accomplish everything we could want to accomplish.
You say we have enough food, if only the farmer worked for free and the investor invested for free. Perhaps we have a scarcity of motivation and incentives, then?
Also consider that maybe the farmer suffers from his work, when he could spend extra hours doing something more enjoyable instead. Is that not also scarcity?
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We do sacrifice others’ utility for the perceived greater good all the time: property and regulatory takings, the draft, the decision to only spend X on criminal trials when X+Y would lower the error rates, etc.
But in general, what Pillsy said. I don’t trust people either to measure other people’s lost utility or to measure the greater good when they are spending someone else’s utility to achieve it. (This does come up with regard to the draft fairly often – that policy makers are allegedly insulated from its effects and therefore unreliable.)
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Isn’t the perfect world one where it’s impossible to improve someone’s happiness without decreasing another’s? Pareto-optimal, that is?
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Pareto optimality means that there are no changes (or exchanges) left that would leave someone better off without making someone worse off. It’s still possible that there are changes left that raise total utility at someone’s expense.
For example, let’s say we can cure a serious disease by forcibly harvesting your stem cells, but you categorically refuse. There might be no exchange that would make you agree, so forcing the transaction leaves you worse off by improves others’ lives by more. Otherwise, you’d expect on paper that if an exchange really creates more utility than it destroys, there should be a way to compensate the loser enough to make her better off, but transaction costs often get in the way – it can be hard to identify the losers, or to quantify their personal loss.
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How could I live with myself if I said “well, you know, I know your children are dying of treatable diseases… but those jeans were really super cute“?
Well, you’re not actually talking to these parents, are you? And if you were, maybe there should be some addressing of the awkward fact that they made children suffer and die.
What would this sound like if we re-phrased it appropriately?
“well, you know, I know you want to have more babies than you can afford to keep safe from suffering… but those jeans were really super cute, and unlike your reproductive choices, my purchases don’t make any children suffer.”
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Excuse the blockquote fail.
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By the way, if we take wild-animal suffering seriously, it’s rather easy to cause win-win situations: Any economic activity that allocates more of earth’s primary production from nature to useful things that don’t suffer is a net-reduction of total suffering.
At least on the surface of earth, and in a strictly suffering-focused view, humanity can do good by enriching itself.
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