Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar
I.
Peter Singer famously argued in Famine, Affluence and Morality that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He illustrates this idea with the drowning child thought experiment: if we see a child drowning, and it is in our power to save them at an insignificant cost to us, then it is our moral duty to do so. It seems most people agree in the case of the drowning child, even when the monetary cost of the damage is explicitly mentioned. When it is pointed out that the situation of the drowning child is similar to that of children at risk of dying from malaria however, people recoil, although they don’t necessarily claim to be able to express why those situations would be different.
It seems clear that this difference comes from emotional biases: our moral intuitions are difficult to scale up, we care more about an identifiable victim than about a large group of anonymous people, the bystander effect lets us think that somebody is going to intervene (although the fact the people are still dying from malaria makes it clear that our help would be far from useless), thus we care more about people physically close to us than people far away. We are also programmed to care more about people emotionally close to us than strangers; we could discuss whether this is a good thing or not, but until we have the means to change our biology, this is a fact of life, and we have to take it into account. But the fact that we care more about friends than strangers doesn’t tell us where we should draw the line between friends or strangers, or how much we should help people depending on their emotional distance to us. Some people are able to keep in mind the death and suffering that their lack of action would represent, and keep acting accordingly to help those in need. In Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help, Larissa MacFarquhar writes about such people.
The first chapter explains what a do-gooder is. Simply put, they’re “people who try, more than anything else, to do good.” This implies that they organise their lives around moral principles, to live as ethical a life as possible: a do-gooder is “someone who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable.” This commitment comes from a strong sense of duty: several of the do-gooders in that book say they have no choice, and see their actions as something they are duty-bound to do. They see everything wrong in the world as their problem: knowing is enough to make action a moral necessity. They may have personal dreams and desires, but those come second to fulfilling their duty, or at least coming close enough to having done so. But for many of them, helping is already an end in itself, and they argue that we should be Giving Gladly, as one of the characters named her blog. Some of the do-gooders find a real joy in having a useful purpose. But conversely, being happy makes you do better work. The do-gooders certainly are on a continuum with the average person. MacFarquhar gives the example of war:
“In wartime—or in a crisis so devastating that it resembles war, such as an earthquake or a hurricane—duty expands far beyond its peacetime boundaries. In wartime, it’s thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family for the sake of a cause. In wartime, the line between family and strangers grows faint, as the duty to one’s own enlarges to encompass all the people who are on the same side […] This is the difference between do-gooders and ordinary people: for do-gooders, it is always wartime. They always feel themselves responsible for strangers —they always feel that strangers, like compatriots in war, are their own people. They know that there are always those as urgently in need as the victims of battle, and they consider themselves conscripted by duty.”
Most of the chapters of the book discuss the life of one of those “do-gooders” (although they often attract and follow other people with similar commitments). Their similarities are as interesting as their differences (although we’re relying on MacFarquhar’s narrative here; it’s possible that she decided to insist upon certain aspects to give them more importance than the characters would grant themselves). The most obvious difference is the diversity of causes: humanitarian aid for Dorothy Granada, Kimberly Brown-Whales and Baba Amte and his family; Effective Altruism for Julia Wise, Jeff Kauffman, Stephanie Wykstra and Geoff Anders; animal welfare for Aaron Pitkin (not his real name); suicide prevention for Nemoto Ittetsu; international adoption for the Badeau family. The choice of a cause is an important decision, as it is not possible for one person to right every wrong in the world (except for Geoff Anders, who has decided to do precisely that. Good luck to him!). MacFarquhar quotes E. M. Forster here:
“And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley’s mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.”
The sheer size of the mission do-gooders take up would be a recipe for immediate burnout if they were to throw themselves at it impulsively. Many of the do-gooders presented in the book start somewhat haphazardly following their impulse to do good, then come to realise there’s more to do and they need to find better methods, so they meet other activists and read about the topic (Aaron’s approach is particularly interesting: early in his activism, he is regularly reading anti-animal rights literature to find any compelling argument that could show his quest to be misguided; after a few years of not finding anything, he decides he’s clearly right in wanting to improve chicken welfare). Many of them also read moral philosophy: Peter Singer is mentioned as a direct inspiration in several cases for instance. But even for utilitarians, rules remain an important part of their framework, even to such extremes that they stop producing results. One example is how Julia sees any purchase as a waste of money that could have bought anti-malaria bed nets instead; but this reasoning fails to take into account how the stress this places on her can decrease her effectiveness in her activism. The solution also comes from rules:
“Jeff decided he would give away 50 percent of his salary and keep the rest for spending and saving; Julia would give away 100 percent of hers. Out of the remainder of Jeff’s salary, he allotted an allowance to each of them of thirty-eight dollars a week, which they would use to pay for everything other than rent and food—things such as clothes, shoes, transportation, and treats like candy apples. Jeff decreed that this allowance had to be spent on these things: it could not be given away, and it could not be saved, or he would donate a matching amount to the Republican Party. That way, if Julia wanted to spend money on something, she would not be taking that money away from someone who was dying. (Julia realized, of course, that this wall they had set up between his money and hers existed only in their heads, but since its only function was to preserve her sanity, that didn’t matter.)”
Aaron’s commitment to his principles can be quite myopic: he claims for instance that any time spent on doing the dishes would be time spent not working on saving animals; considering his devotion to his work, this may be true, but is he taking into account how the stress the mess places on his girlfriend impacts the productivity of them both? He refuses to lend his girlfriend the money to cancel her credit card debt, because most of the money he has comes from his grandfather making fur coats, and thus should only be spent on the worst sort of suffering; this ignores the fact that any money paid as interest payments to credit card companies is not sent to charities. He also rejects marriage because it was still illegal for same sex couples in Massachusetts: I fail to see the impact on his individual decision on this legal question. Later one of his girlfriends, who is similarly extreme, breaks down in tears when he offers her a second-hand DVD player, because it might have been made by exploited children; but since it’s secondhand, I really don’t see what possible impact their purchase could have. Even someone who sees their action as completely rational can have reactions that only make sense from an emotional perspective; this emotionality becomes a hindrance when it comes to effectiveness, and do-gooders have to learn to become more detached to fulfill their mission. Aaron finally learned to put caveats in his principles when it really matters, such as eating meat when meeting with cattlemen, as being approachable can do more for his cause than refusing that one steak.
The clearest example of a do-gooder failing to see the consequences of his actions is Charles Gray. We’re introduced to Charles in the chapter on Dorothy (he was her husband). Charles’ big idea is the “World Equity Budget”: wealth inequality is a big problem, and everybody should live on their fair share of the world’s wealth (or even less than that, to take future generations into account). Although he keeps reevaluating the amount, the numbers we’re given are $62 a month at one point, and $1,200 a year at another, to live in the USA. Charles is a bit of a running joke in the book, as each of the do-gooders who has heard of him seems to think he’s crazy. Even Aaron finds the WEB a bit extreme, and Julia is saddened that such a strong moral impulse gets wasted on something so pointless: why would it be more important that he be poor than that other people be less so? Even Dorothy, who joined him in all of his insane projects:
“I told Charles Gray, ‘Okay, I’m in love with you. I love the project. I’ll join the World Equity Budget. But I must have my glass of wine before dinner, and my coffee. I will not do without that.’ We used to fight—he was always adding up every penny, he kept a notebook. Once, he told me that I was thirty-eight cents over budget. I said, ‘Would you repeat what you just said?’ And then I told him what he could do with his World Equity Budget.”
Apart from Charles Gray, each of the do-gooders seems to agree that rules are useful tools, but are less important than the goal they serve.
Another set of rules is heavily discussed in the book: religion. In some cases, the reason is obvious: Baba, Kimberly and Ittetsu have all been clergypeople of their respective religions. The Badeaus prayed on it every time they had to decide whether to adopt a given child (or siblings). Stephanie’s story is mostly focused on her crises of faith. But in the case of Julia and Dorothy, their progressive loss of faith does not seem as central to the story. In the case of Aaron, a nonpracticing Jew, MacFarquhar judges it useful to point out that he disliked religion. One possible reason for this insistence on religion could be the historical ties in many cultures between religion and charitable giving. Typically, it used to be considered normal to give 10% of one’s income to the church; that’s one of the reasons Toby Ord chose to recommend this threshold for Giving What We Can. Another reason of MacFarquhar’s focus on religion could be to highlight the religiosity of doing good: throughout the book, the do-gooders are compared to saints (and in the case of Baba, MacFarquhar claims he “read the life of Christ not as an account of perfection but as a practical template”), and they themselves feel a connection to the divine through their charity: Dorothy’s fast against nuclear weapons is a political act, but feels like a kind of prayer and a communion with God; the act of giving a kidney to a stranger is described as “a transcendent experience, akin to a religious one;” Ittetsu’s counselling of suicidal people is informed by the training in Zen listening he received as a monk; Stephanie’s faith in utilitarianism is a replacement for a broken faith in Christianity. MacFarquhar isn’t denying the obstacles that religion can pose to doing good though: one of the rare mentions of religion in Aaron’s chapter is the description of kosher beef-slaughtering, which is presented as one of the worst abuses that we inflict on animals; both Dorothy and Kimberly are opposed in their attempts to help women on the basis of Christian morality; Baba and his family become outcasts for daring to help the lower class “Dalits” (also known as untouchables).
Other similarities frequently highlighted in the backgrounds of the do-gooders are, on the one hand their caring and generosity, and on the other hand, the hardship and abuse they had to go through. The first part is made up of cute stories about do-gooders bringing home stray animals and giving away their allowances, as well as heroic ones about rushing toward disaster areas or fighting soldiers harassing a woman (I need to find a Bollywood flick about the life of Baba Amte, there’s incredible potential in there!). Including these stories makes sense when we’re trying to understand an extreme impulse to do good. The second part includes abuse, depression, growing up in an unsafe and unstable environment, alcoholic parents, sick relatives, suicide… Here, I’m not sure whether these elements are mentioned because of how they would impact someone, or if MacFarquhar is making a statement about how suffering could be a key to understanding do-gooders, either because enduring this suffering prepares them for the horrors to come, or because suffering can be the mirror through which they learn to see the cracks in the world and the reason they decide to make it their life's work to close some of those cracks.
Indeed, the best way to do good is not necessarily in the field, and a strong sense of empathy is essential to maintain one’s commitment when the people (or chickens) being helped are not even stories but numbers. Some people are better than others at seeing the forest for the trees, and when Aaron needs to feel that “warm glow” of directly helping others, it’s enough for him to be carrying boxes and cooking the meals and let other volunteers serve them and get the direct thanks. It’s for a similar reason that he chose to focus on chickens rather than cats and dogs, who already had people caring enough to protect them: the more neglected the cause, the better the return on investment. This ethos is at the heart of the effective altruism movement. Julia and Jeff share this utilitarian perspective, and once their rules for giving were set up, they could simply enjoy knowing what their money was doing, without having to see it directly, except through GiveWell’s evaluations. Still, that joy can never become the main purpose of giving, and it’s more important to think about what people need, rather than what it feels good to give: “What was important was that people were helped, not that it was she who was doing the helping.” Julia comes to the realisation that she should be earning to give: the goal being to maximise one’s impact rather than to give as much as possible of her money away, it would be more efficient to earn a higher income. She doesn’t have to go for the absolute maximum income accessible if that would mean being so miserable it would end up with a breakdown, but surely there must be a better position? She considered psychiatry for a moment, and the combined effect of the high income and her blog encouraging people to give more would certainly have resulted in a high impact (although… a psychiatrist with a blog? That would never work). In the end, she decided to remain a social worker.
After all, there are other ways to maximise one’s impact. One is to encourage others to give. But there’s a fine line between not doing enough and being so preachy you put people off. Kimberly mentions having to restrain herself when encouraging her parishioners to give, for fear of receiving nothing. For an example of this done well, we have the example of Toby Ord, who came to the conclusion that starting Giving What We Can had been the most effective thing he could ever have done, far beyond the impact of his personal donations. MacFarquhar also mentions two students of Peter Singer whom his teaching convinced to give in their first year out of college more money than Singer probably ever made from writing or teaching. Knowing how to maximise one’s impact is a hard question: donating one’s money to a GiveWell recommended charity certainly is a good thing, but that’s the safe option: when thinking about her options for a career, Stephanie considers life extension and AI alignment (MIRI is directly mentioned). And although Julia relates an EA dinner where people with more traditional approaches to charity were dismissed, people are still needed on the ground, and this is not an easy job.
Being a do-gooder means being constantly aware of the suffering everywhere, and often witnessing it yourself. You will even have to share some of it. Helping people who live in unsanitary conditions means having to see a lot of death, always wondering what more you could have done (plus all the diseases that you will catch). Working in war zones means you could be kidnapped or raped. Building a village in the wilderness means that until it’s built, you’ll have to survive everything that’s trying to kill you. Helping others means being made painfully aware of how bad things can be.
Toward the end of the book, MacFarquhar insists that the only reason she’s writing about these people is that they were lucky enough not to die:
“Dorothy Granada did not fast to the death and was not shot by Contra soldiers. Aaron Pitkin did not remain homeless or alone. Julia Wise did not stay childless. Baba Amte did not contract leprosy, and his children were not eaten by panthers. Prakash Amte was not forced to cut his baby to pieces to save his wife, and was not killed by one of his animals. Kimberly Brown-Whale’s son did not die in Mozambique of his heart condition, and her daughter was not kidnapped. Ittetsu Nemoto did not die from overwork. Sue and Hector Badeau held their family together. But any of these stories might have turned out differently. One step over the brink and their commitment might have looked like craziness, or cruelty.”
And of course, helping means accepting all those facts and going on, despite the fear, when the do-gooder could simply walk away. This sense of injustice is very present when women in Baba’s family have to choose between giving birth in unsanitary conditions, or leaving the people who need their help because they don’t have that same luxury of leaving. And then later, is it fair to her child to come back with them, when they don’t have to be there and could enjoy a safe and comfortable life? But why would she enjoy this privilege when all the women around her are likely to lose some of their children? (after failing to deliver a baby, Prakash Amte is told that “many babies died in their first year of life from malnutrition or illness or snake bites; if a mother died in childbirth, the father usually didn’t take care of the infant—it was left to die. This death was just a little earlier, that was all.”)
Whether doing good through donations or in the field, the decision of organising one’s whole life around one’s moral principles is going to have an impact on those who share that life. There is self-selection at work however: since do-gooders’ social circles tend to be mostly charity workers, activists and generous people, the partner of a do-gooder is more likely to share their values to some extent. It’s hard to guess how much beforehand though: Aaron’s girlfriend Jen saw herself as committed to their shared values, but ended up leaving him, being dissatisfied with the relationship. What hurt her was that she had to admit that she was leaving him because she felt she was not as ethical a person as he was: “she was not just leaving Aaron; she was choosing selfishness. She was choosing her own happiness over the survival of other creatures. She could not justify it, she thought it was the wrong thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself; she wasn’t him.” The same thing happened with Charles’ first wife, who despite giving half of her money already, refused to follow him with his WEB project. Dorothy accepted the WEB, but even she had a similar problem: “We’re so serious, all us peace-and-justice people. These people, they can’t have fun, they have to be out on the firing line all the time.” “Those people did wonderful work, but they were really not nice people,” “They were people you did not want to be around. They were so sharp. Everything was a matter of life and death: we’ve got to do this action because the world depends on it.”
In other cases, the partner fully buys into the project, like Jeff with EA, or Hector with his wife's project of adopting children (after the fourth child, it was Hector who was pushing Sue to adopt more, up until their 22nd child). An interesting case is Baba’s wife Indu, who married him when he was a rich Brahmin. Because she was taught to obey her husband in all matters, she follows him when he decides to work with Dalits, accepting her own reputation to be tainted too. She remains by his side when both of their families reject them, and when he renounces his wealth, and even when he starts working at a leprosy clinic, and again when he starts his own ashram of Anandwan (a shelter for lepers made of wooden sticks and grass, to live among rats, tigers, leopards, under 115 degrees with no water. The name means “Forest of Joy”). Indu stays and takes up a large amount of the workload. She takes the name Tai, sister to the lepers. She takes care of everyone there, making little distinction between the patients and her family. She only seriously complains to Baba after he’s left Anandwan to join the anti-dam movement on the Narmada river. Tai feels useless there, and is miserable; after ten years, Baba accepts to return with her to Anandwan. Similarly, their children and grandchildren join the family mission, with one son improving the ashram, and the other creating another clinic nearby to take care of the native Madia Gonds, as well as an orphanage for injured wild animals. By contrast, the Badeaus children didn’t always understand why their parents were adopting so many children (after a bike accident, one of their daughters complained: “If you didn’t adopt so many children, I could have had a new bike, and this wouldn’t have happened to me!”). In the end, none of the 22 children decided to adopt themselves.
Ittetsu is one rare case for whom his partner does not seem to have been involved in his charity in any way (or at least that’s the way she appears in MacFarquhar’s book; the documentary on his life seems to show her as very supportive of her husband’s work). He’s also the one who suffered the most severe burnout. There are several reasons for that. The first one is the extreme empathy he shows to suicidal people, which takes a toll: while he was maintaining his blog (“For Those Who Do Not Want to Die”), he was making the effort of replying immediately to everyone in need of counselling, day or night (the messages mostly arrived at night), just a bottomless chasm of anxiety threatening to engulf him. This is a common problem for do-gooders: “any do-gooder who is not dead or irredeemably jaundiced by the age of thirty has learned to acquire a degree of blindness in order to get by.”
The second reason is the apparent lack of progress, sometimes for years: there simply wasn’t much he could do beside listening. He develops coping strategies, but they aren’t enough. Five years within his practice, he develops an unstable angina and had heart surgery four times over the next two years. He has to stop counselling for a few weeks, and explains his situation on his blog while in the hospital. Of course he receives messages of support… and other kinds too: “They didn’t care that he was sick: they were sick, too, they said; they were in pain, and he had to take care of them.”
Other do-gooders reported similar reactions: Dorothy and Charles made other activists angry when they gave up on their fast against nuclear weapons, saying that you can’t abandon a fast to the death. When they leave the movement, they are criticised again for abandoning the higher calling for peace to selfishly treat injured people in a war zone (in fact three weeks later, the world came close to its end. Coincidence? yes). On the other hand, protesting nuclear weapons got Dorothy this reaction from her black friends: “What are you doing with that white movement? Let them blow themselves up! To hell with it! Who cares?”. Because nuclear winter can only affect white neighbourhoods of course. Basically, if you decide to start working for a cause and switch to a different one, you’re a traitor, as Baba can attest following his decision to leave Anandwan to prevent the building of the Narmada dam. But if you keep fighting for that cause, you need to be able to pass whatever purity test the other activists have decided for you. One of the reasons “Aaron” uses a pseudonym in his chapter is that he’s afraid of what could happen to him if other activists were to learn he sometimes eat meat to achieve better results:
“He thinks about the example of a famous animal-rights activist who he’d heard was an awful person with a coke habit, given to sexual harassment and waving guns about, but the thing that really scandalized his followers was the rumor that he’d been spotted eating M&M’s. True, the people who raised hell about the M&M’s were a bit crazy, but they were Aaron’s base; he needed them to do his work.”
If you’re working intensely to achieve next to zero result, and all you get as a reward is a deteriorating health and abuse, is this really worth it?
II.
Strangers Drowning aims to answer two questions: the first, why people go through such lengths to help strangers is answered through the biographical chapters. The second is why the rest of the world doesn’t help more. The non-biographical chapters deal with various topics, but the general theme is the world’s reaction to do-gooders.
So why don’t people do more to help strangers? Regarding giving, loss aversion is one explanation: who knows what crisis looms in the future, that might require just the amount of money we’ve saved so far? What would happen then if we have given away a large part of our finances? But we’re not just saving the money, we’re also spending it on things that are objectively less important than the lives we could save instead. And here, it all comes down to our lives, and those of our relatives, being more important to us. Another important factor is the identifiable victim effect: writing checks is “a dull way of giving”, without glamour; it would be more motivating to see direct results of our charity, and contributing mere drops to extinguishing the inferno of misery is too daunting a task (and our intuitions are bad at scaling far above human scales). As a result, it’s easier to simply avoid the cognitive dissonance by not giving at all (or just enough to avoid the opprobrium of not giving). Even when people give, Toby Ord laments that it’s hard to get them to give more effectively, because of change aversion. Still, McFarquhar admits that “Should most of us do more for others than we do now?” is not a hard question. But for people who are giving a decent enough portion of their wealth and/or time to see themselves as good people, and are aware of the warm glow we feel when helping others, why can’t we be do-gooders too?
Here, it comes down to the sacrifices that come from being a do-gooder. Some of the sacrifices are small, so small in fact that the individual impact is hard to measure without seeing it as part of a large population doing the same sacrifice. Even someone as principled as Aaron realized that “it was silly to despair because people weren’t becoming vegans; most people were never going to become vegans, or even vegetarians, but if they ate less and less meat, then little by little things for animals were going to get better”. As such, the compounded impact matters more than the size of the individual sacrifice, whose value comes more from the inspiration it can provide as an example. Yet there is a fundamental difference between choosing what rules to follow (deontological framework), and how far to pursue a value (utilitarian framework):
“But it’s not only in its embrace of impartiality between family and strangers that utilitarianism is radical: it’s even more radical in how much it demands. In some rules-based moral systems, after all, there is the possibility that as long as you follow the rules, once you have done your duty, you are free to use the rest of your time and resources as you like. You haven’t stolen anything or murdered anyone, you have honored your parents, you have helped old ladies across the road, and now you can go about your business assured that you are a decent human being. But utilitarianism claims that you should act so as to bring about the most well-being possible in the world. Taken literally, this means that every single thing you do, at every moment of your life, should be motivated by that goal. Which is to say that there is no point at which you can say, I have done my duty, I have followed the rules, and I am now free to do what I want.”
There is no good solution to the trade-off between personal gratification and duty. The result is that this choice is arbitrary, and for a do-gooder, wherever the limit is set, any second spent not working is more chickens being tortured, every candy apple bought is the preventable death of a child somewhere.
Then there are the big sacrifices: “once you push moral commitment beyond its usual borders, more difficult conflicts arise: morality begins to push against other things that we value deeply, such as certain kinds of beauty, and certain kinds of freedom, and humility, and openness, and family, and love. To confront these conflicts is to ask what matters most in life.” The real sacrifices presented in the book are usually about family: most do-gooders seem to be beyond fearing for their personal safety, but asking a loved one to risk their life is a different matter. When his father gets sick, Aaron wrestles with whether his commitment to his family should come before his commitment to animals; but he knows that if it were his mother instead, whom he actually loves, he wouldn’t even think about the choice. Peter Singer himself decided to spend a lot of money to care for his mother when she developed Alzheimer’s disease. Which leads to the question of whether it’s ethical to have children when you are a do-gooder. First, there is the question of spending a lot of money on someone who doesn’t exist yet, instead of on suffering that exists right now. Both Aaron and Jen, and Jeff and Julia decide that there is no moral justification for having children; the first couple sticks to their principles, and the second chooses to do the human thing.
Then there’s the question of whether you can impose that way of life on someone who didn’t ask for it. But this is a strange question, considering that the children who are living in the misery you’re trying to reduce never asked to be born there either. The Badeau family is a useful concrete example. Every child who is added to the family becomes a strain on those who are already a part of it. And every time the parents want to make a new addition to the family, the children are asked about it. Welcoming the new child very likely means improving the life of their new sibling, no matter how thin the family’s finances are stretched. Rejecting them means denying vital help to a stranger, one who is very much like them (the Badeaus almost exclusively adopt children who are unlikely to be adopted otherwise, either because they’re a group of many siblings, or they have some disease or handicap). And yet they can’t adopt every child in the world.
(Fortunately there are also easy decisions, cases where the do-gooders’ values are aligned: of course nuclear weapons are an existential danger, but to Dorothy, they are mostly a waste of money that could be used to feed starving people. Animal cruelty is wrong, but eating meat is also less healthy, and the factory workers are some of the most ill-treated and miserable. Giving lepers their dignity is a worthy goal, but they also provide a valuable workforce)
It seems that avoiding those ethical dilemmas is a major reason for the undermining of do-gooders. Some of the criticism is about the effectiveness of the effort; not necessarily in the sense of EA, but just having an effect at all, or not inadvertently causing worse problems. This idea comes from disciples of Adam Smith, who considered that in a capitalist society, virtue was an anachronism, and capital could be better shared by letting the market decide. If anything was virtuous, it was to follow one’s instinct to buy “stupid, extravagant, frivolous things”: pride and greed were the new virtue. Although centuries of capitalism have shown the limits of the system, it is true that misguided attempts to help can easily fail, particularly if they’re focused on the feelings of the giver rather than on the effects of the charity.
One common flaw in charity is ignoring the political dimensions of a problem. Sometimes the individual solution is cheap enough to be scalable, as with the case of deworming medicine (and even then, problems of coordination can ruin your efforts. An example of this on a smaller scale happened to Kimberly, who, with the help of some of her parishioners prepared a big meal for a family shelter, and ended up with lots of uneaten food because the shelter had forgotten to put it on the schedule). Other necessary reforms can only come from a top-down action from the government, or more ambitiously from institutional change.
Acting upon the object level without considering the factors that affect the situation is another mistake. Typically, food sent to countries facing famine can be exchanged for weapons on the black market, thus prolonging conflicts. MacFarquhar mentions Michael Maren’s book The Road to Hell, which shows how food aid can destroy local markets, as well as Alex de Waal’s Famine Crimes, that denounces the lack of accountability of NGOs and how aid removes incentives for governments to prevent famines. In general, aid should empower the locals and give them the tools to develop their own solutions to the challenges they face, rather than make them dependent on neocolonialist programs. But all of this is more support for EA rather than an indictment of aid in general.
The problem that do-gooders pose is that they show that facing those hard dilemmas in a way that is courageous, thoughtful and constructive is possible: we “know, as the do-gooder knows, that there is always, somewhere, a need for help”. Do-gooders are a constant reminder of our own selfishness, an implicit criticism of how we should live our lives. The only way we can continue to see ourselves as good people under these circumstances is to discredit them.
One way to do so is to question their altruism: people are selfish, do-gooders are people, so they must be gaining something from their charity. Are they trying to feel like they are better than others? Do they want to feel powerful as they change the world? Are they secretly benefiting from the charity in some manner? Are they trying to assert their power on others by making them feel indebted and in no way to repay their debt? Of course with the rise of psychotherapy, such ideas took shape as a theory of altruism as a mental disease: “Selflessness was, in Freud’s view, usually suspect. The devoted, self-sacrificing mother, for instance, he found to be part masochist, part tyrant, enslaving her child with chains of guilt. But the devoted, self-sacrificing child was equally dubious.” This kind of reasoning led surgeons to be suspicious of kidney donations even in the case of a mother wanting to save her child: “Billy Watson (a pseudonym), a ten-year-old boy, needed a kidney transplant in order to live, and his mother wanted to donate. But was Mrs. Watson’s motivation acceptable or pathological? the doctors wondered. Mrs. Watson had nine other children—was she showing an unhealthy favoritism toward Billy by wanting to keep him alive, since the surgery would leave her temporarily unable to care properly for the others? And was this a normal family, psychologically? How stable was the Watson marriage?”. Or in another caricature of Freudianism: “after a sister donated to her brother, the sister “felt absolute control over her brother, as if she had castrated him.” Basically, any desire to do something for someone else can be framed as pathological: “narcissism turns morality into an autoerotic pleasure in which the pleasure itself will be suppressed.”
All this converges to the notion of codependency. The concept is developed in a chapter on alcohol. The relevance of this chapter is that according to MacFarquhar, “the recent history of do-gooders, at least in the West, is inseparable from the history of alcohol”. This probably explains why along the relationship of every character to religion, she made sure to also mention their relationship to alcohol, whether it is becoming an alcoholic, having grown around alcoholics, or categorically refusing to touch alcohol, like Jeff, Aaron and Baba’s family (nothing culturally forbids them, except for Baba’s edict on the matter). She writes that when you drink, “you feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help.” I can’t decide whether it is her position or if she’s trying to express the perspective of an imaginary do-gooder, but in that case, all we have is Jeff and Aaron’s perspective on the topic, who never drink for fear of the loss of control and the alteration of their mind; while I understand how that makes sense as an argument against being drunk, I’m not sure why they couldn’t have one drink. But then again, do-gooders rarely compromise unless they have to.
More precisely, this chapter is about Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In 1934, Bill Wilson had a religious vision that prompted him to stop drinking and start AA. Throughout his alcoholic phase, his wife Lois endured everything and tried to make him stop, in vain. After he overcame his disease on his own and remained sober through the support of other drunks and recovering alcoholics rather than through the power of her love, she starts thinking she might actually have been the problem. When Bill was drunk, he was dependent on her, now, she had lost her purpose. She made this codependency model the centre of her own organisation, Al-Anon, a support group for the families of alcoholics. Al-Anon teaches its members that the actual problem is their self-righteousness, they are “co-alcoholics”; they need to acknowledge their problem and follow their own twelve step program.
Here MacFarquhar bizarrely jumps from this individual model of codependency from Al-Anon to making it the template for the criticism against do-gooders, regardless of the problem they’re trying to solve. Is she saying that people think those who fund MIRI are codependent with the AI alignment problem? That Aaron is trying to gain power over chickens? The examples presented in the rest of the chapter are not this extreme, and it is conceivable that some of the people who do disaster relief abroad might have some savior complex for instance, but as a general theory of the hate against do-gooders, this chapter falls short.
One last reproach against do-gooders is that if we are to take them at face value, without supposing hidden or unconscious gain from their endeavours, this makes them truly inhuman beings. For instance the chapter on voluntary kidney donation mentions how “bizarre, even repellent” the idea appears to the surgeons: doesn’t it go against the Hippocratic oath? A study on the phenomenon concludes that “the most puzzling aspect of our investigation has been the striking contrast between the naturalness, relative calm and equanimity of the volunteer donor, and the uncomfortableness of the transplant team.”
When belief in God and Heaven was a fact of life, someone with the mentality of a do-gooder could be seen as a hero, someone to emulate: if doing good is the path to heaven, then giving up a bit of comfort to avoid hell was only sensible, and we can only wish we were strong enough to do the same. But in our more secular societies, doing good to such extent, just for the sake of living a moral life, without expecting any reward, even in the afterlife… it’s strange. Reviewing Gandhi’s memoir, George Orwell wrote that “the ordinary man only rejects [saintliness] because it is too difficult [...] Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints.”
Normal humans are morally imperfect. Although Singer’s drowning child thought experiment is easy to understand, we cannot follow it through our actions. “Surely, a person who declined to reduce himself and his family to penury could not be as bad as a serial murderer”, yet it’s difficult to express the theoretical difference. Except that accepting that fact when we are incapable of moral perfection would mean renouncing the concept of morality altogether: “to demand too much can be as corrupting as demanding too little. And to demand too much crushes aspiration. If every good act is required, then none is praiseworthy. There is no more virtue—only duty and vice.” Then the only moral path is to devote our life to an “impartial, universal love” (with little in terms of transcendent joy), which “seems the antithesis of what we value about deep human attachment.” There is thus no moral life for a human being. We don’t need to adopt such an extreme view: simply seeing the example of the imperfect do-gooder (who still loves their family more than the stranger) and then choosing not to follow it means that we have chosen not to be as ethical as we could be.
And even if the do-gooder still values their family more than the stranger, the cold rationality the makes it possible for them to even compare the two is already repellent to some:
“Suppose a man could save either his wife or two strangers from drowning, [philosopher Bernard Williams] proposed. A utilitarian might ask: is it permissible for the man to save his wife? But even to ask that question in such a situation was to have, as Williams dryly put it, “one thought too many.” A loving husband would save his wife spontaneously, without consulting moral rules at all. To grant morality the power to adjudicate impartially in situations like that would be to abandon what gives human life its meaning. Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your family and friends, to place—we are nothing. We are creatures of kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.”
Even without introducing family into the equation, the fact that there could be an equation involving human lives makes people uncomfortable, even when it’s trading money for human lives rather than the opposite. MacFarquhar postulates that after the French Terror and the Russian Communist Revolution, the idea of a small group of people convinced that they know the path to a better world and willing to sacrifice themselves for it can only make us think of death, and of whether we would even have a place in such a world.
III.
One important thing to realise about the do-gooders presented in the book is that their sacrifices were not empty. Large sums were sent to such charities as the Against Malaria Foundation, corresponding to hundreds of lives saved by the people mentioned in the book. Many more survived and regained some of their dignity in Nicaragua, India or Senegal through direct interventions. Some suicidal people regained some will to live. Legislative and corporate regulations were decided to improve the well-being of chickens. And although the story of the Badeaus is not presented as the same unmitigated success, with three of the children predictably dying of their respective diseases and two ending up in jail, all of them had a better life than they would likely have had they not been adopted. Even Charles Gray might have come close to partly achieving his goals, as the fast he and his friends conducted in Paris, Bonn and Oakland attracted political attention in France and Germany. Had the Cold War not reheated just at that time, some small progress toward nuclear disarmament might have been achieved.
In the last chapter, MacFarquhar reminds us that there were always limits to the sacrifices the do-gooders were willing to make, and that despite how unwavering they appear in their commitment, they still doubted themselves (which she sees as “a measure of their seriousness”). And although they may appear to us as extraordinary, it’s only because we see them through our own norms. These norms certainly made their actions more difficult: it would be easier to be generous if such behaviour generated praise rather than confusion, suspicion and hostility. Luckily, such norms do evolve: the chapter on kidney donations points out that this act that used to be the clearest possible sign of a diseased mind has now become, if not normal, at least acceptable enough to have processes in place to accept those donations (still, making it an opt-out process rather than opt-in would be such a simple way to save lives, it’s really frustrating that all countries don’t do so). Similarly, as EA becomes more prominent, we can imagine a world in which nobody would take the Giving What We Can pledge because there wouldn’t be anything special to giving 10% of one’s income past a certain level of wealth.
But what is normal is relative. Kimberly’s chapter is a good example of that: she was an aid worker in dangerous countries? How is that different from what Dorothy and Baba did? She adopted two children, one of whom was handicapped? That’s only a tenth of what the Badeaus did! She gave a kidney to a stranger? Thousands of people have done that! Have I achieved anything close to any of that? Not at all. But simply the fact of being presented near the rest shifted my expectations of how a moral person should behave. Similarly, if you agree that you should give more but find it difficult to commit to that decision, I recommend spending time among EA circles and reading EA blogs and books, until peer pressure pushes you to do the right thing. Then keep looking up to more extreme examples until you reach the point where you’re no longer comfortable giving more. Or you might become like Aaron who apparently ended up finding it hard to meet more inspiring people:
“He still needed to accumulate a certain number of utility points each day to feel okay with himself—to feel that he’d done his duty—but since his work was going so well, those points were easier to come by. It had never occurred to him when he was younger that there might be a time in his life when he might feel he was doing enough. Mostly this was a good feeling, but he was also suspicious of it.”
But can anyone be a do-gooder? Or is it essential to be a religious teetotaller from a hard background, as MacFarquhar seems to suggest? The last bio in the book is that of Stephanie, who after working for GiveWell, ends up rejecting effective altruism, as she couldn’t stand the constant guilt of not doing more, or the fact that more personal but less optimal ways to do good were discouraged by the movement. She ends up finding peace through self-acceptance. She decides that the fact that logically she should be trying to save every drowning child, doesn’t mean she has to: she can also find her own ways to do good. Although do-gooders tend to live by some rules, these are self-imposed, and it’s OK to change them if you can’t find happiness through them: getting embittered would help no one.
Similarly, even though Julia used to think that other things than her own happiness mattered, she ended up deciding to have a child and keep her job; it doesn’t have the highest impact, but it does good and makes her feel good about herself. She relays Eliezer Yudkowsky’s advice to purchase fuzzies and utilons separately: that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t purchase fuzzies at all! Even from a utilitarian perspective, being a happy altruist is more likely to convince other people to give than being an effective but miserable one. The people you can encourage to give are part of your impact, and it is thus useful for the EA movement to be as inviting as possible, typically by being welcoming of other people and encouraging people to be generous, rather than judging them for not being the most effective. The goal of charity is to improve the world, and this is more easily achieved by having more people contributing: we wouldn’t have to witness all these strangers drowning if more people were helping. As Julia says:
“One thing I almost never talk about is anger. When I’m happy with my life I don’t have any reason to feel angry, but when I’m feeling deprived I sometimes do. I feel like I’m pulling at something heavy that I can’t possibly lift by myself, maybe pulling a car out of a mud pit. And everyone is standing around saying, “Boy, it’s too bad that car is in that mud pit,” or “That looks like hard work you’re doing,” or, more often, “Did you hear the Italian team just lost out to Slovakia?” I really think there’s enough material stuff and human ingenuity that nobody needs to be horribly poor. If everyone who could, pulled a little more weight, I wouldn’t need to pull so much.”
So thank you for doing good, in whatever way feels right to you!