Here's the link. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-new-years-resolution-fo_b_802480.html
I find myself agreeing with his every word until he suggests local targets for charity. Why focus on the relatively poor, when he could focus on the globally, absolutely poor?

Thank you for the link, Ryan.

I agree when you ask: "Why focus on the relatively poor, when he could focus on the globally, absolutely poor?". But we can expand on that line of reasoning: why focus on the absolutely poor (and meat-eater), when we could focus on the daily tortured billions of farm animals? Since we can, moreover, help a lot of more animals than humans with the same money.

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, said Voltaire. ("The better is the enemy of the good")

How do you figure?

I've actually seen that quote in context like this before. My response was that the expected utility depends as much on how good a charity you find as how likely you are to actually donate to it, so if you do it right, there should be a significant chance that you give up before you settle on a good enough charity.

Say you have a bottle of wine, that gets better every day. Say you will live forever. Say the better the wine is, the more pleasure you will get from it (your taste buds don't age). Utilitarianism tells you each day to refrain from opening the bottle, because you will have more pleasure if you put it off to the next day. So you will never open the bottle.

It doesn't tell you never to open the bottle. That gives zero utility. It just doesn't give you an ideal answer. This can only come up if there are an infinite number of possible choices, and people aren't psychologically capable of handling that many anyway.

If you're a 1-megabit deterministic turing machine, for example, you'd have 2^1,048,576 choices. One of those would be the optimum. Theoretically, waiting one more day would be better, but there's no possible program that results in that.

I don't really see where the program issue comes in. The fact is that on any particular day, between opening the bottle today and opening it tomorrow, I should choose the latter. It never is the case that I am right to drink the wine today. The paradox is of course that, as you say, that leads to never drinking it at all, which is the worse possible solution.

I see this situation as a real problem for utilitarianism, but here I only wanted to mention it as a jestful illustration of Voltaire's saying. Which in turn I only mentioned because I don't have time now to say (or even think) anything more serious about the subject of this thread!

Why would it be a problem for utilitarianism in particular, rather than a general paradox? Eg some deontological principle which says "drink the bottle after precisely x days" wouldn't be an obvious solution (it would still be clearly better to drink it 10 days later, for instance).

Hi David, I'm interested in "the better is the enemy of the good" and ways that it could apply to the Sam Harris piece, but I'd argue strongly against the idea that it causes problems to a mathematically-inclined utilitarian.

At the very least, you'd have to concede that at some point in his life, the owner of a wine bottle is likely to be unwell so that they're not assured that they'll live another month. When this happens, they'd be put in the following sort of position:
1. In a month, my wine will be 1% better
2. I'm only 95% confident of living another month.
In that scenario, you'd clearly favour drinking the wine today. I'm not sure that's a scenario that many people, especially non utilitarians would find acceptable, but I do think it demonstrates my point.

RyanCarey wrote:At the very least, you'd have to concede that at some point in his life, the owner of a wine bottle is likely to be unwell so that they're not assured that they'll live another month.

No! Not at all! I flatly denied it!

David Olivier wrote:Say you will live forever.

I might, in my immense generosity, concede that there can be some lack of plausibility here. But you must stick to the problem as it was stated!

But I'm sorry, I didn't want to side-track this thread. The initial question was interesting in itself. Maybe we should open another thread about the the "better enemy of good" issue. But I don't have much time this week.

Reasons to give locally:

Descriptively, people give to local charities because they are most aware of local needs, they forget about people in far-away places, they think people in far-away places are inferior and deserve to starve to death, giving locally allows people to better see the results of their actions so the donors can feel good about themselves, giving locally can help a rich person to gain status among others in high society, local charities might be deemed worthy because they have helped friends or relatives or might help them in the future, some foreign operations are thought to misdirect resource through corruption, and probably many other "reasons" that have varying degrees of validity.

Prescriptively, there might be a basis for giving locally while letting people in far-away lands starve to death because supporting some types of charity might help to maintain the social systems that allow your luxurious life to continue. In other words, without a system of local charity, there might be class wars or other such things that lead to bad conditions locally. If taken to the extreme, denying local charities could quickly result in some local people experiencing the same extreme threats that people in far-away lands face. There is also the possible perception that helping people in far-away lands is counterproductive if that help does nothing more than allow the current population to expand so that an even larger number of people will face even greater suffering due to the inability to sustain that population.

There is also a question about what is "local"--is it my town, or anybody in the U.S., where I live. There are people in the U.S. that live in areas where there is little help from people in their immediate area, so I give them priority. An example would be Indian reservations in South Dakota. I am familiar with this organization: http://www.changingwinds.org/
Their web site is not fancy, and other things are imperfect, but I know specifically what they do and how it helps, so I support them. I also support organizations that operate in developing countries.

I don't think there are any simple solutions to giving locally versus in developing countries. As for giving to animal causes, some of the same conditions apply, but the main basis for choosing animal rights or environmental rights organizations stems from a person's belief in the intrinsic value of animals, nature, and the like. It might be interesting to ask yourself about the degree to which you (or humans in general) discount the value of non-human life forms. Long ago, I had not asked myself this until I encountered somebody who dedicated his life to shrimp (and their habitat in mangrove forests: coastal areas usually in mixed salt and fresh water where many aquatic life forms begin life): http://www.mangroveactionproject.org

p.s.: The 95% confidence in living another month versus the increasing value of wine seems like a useful approach

There are variations of the problem where lifespan isn't a problem. For example, if someone offers you n of something, for any finite n of your choice, and you always prefer more to less. Or if they offer to extend your life by n years, but only for finite n.

rehoot wrote:As for giving to animal causes, some of the same conditions apply, but the main basis for choosing animal rights or environmental rights organizations stems from a person's belief in the intrinsic value of animals, nature, and the like. It might be interesting to ask yourself about the degree to which you (or humans in general) discount the value of non-human life forms. Long ago, I had not asked myself this until I encountered somebody who dedicated his life to shrimp (and their habitat in mangrove forests: coastal areas usually in mixed salt and fresh water where many aquatic life forms begin life): http://www.mangroveactionproject.org

I think than an utilitarian must give value to animal pleasure or preferences. An utilitarian can give value to pleasure or to the preferences, but humans are not the only beings with pleasure or preferences -- animals are too. So this is not a belief (or it's a belief in the same sense that to give value to human pleasure or preferences). Plants don't have a nervous system, so they don't have intrinsec value.

Some utilitarians give less value to animal pleasure than to human pleasure. And they conclude: "go for human charities!" But this isn't necessary the right conclusion, because:

1. Most of farm animals suffer more than most of poor humans.
2. There are a lot of more farms animals than poor humans.
3. We can help a lot of more farm animals than poor humans.
4. Trillions of animals suffer in Nature.

If we have this issues into account, I just cannot understand why most of utilitarians absolutely ignore animal charities, even if they are giving less value to animal pleasure or preferences. If I may engage in armchair psychologizing, I'd say this steams from a bias against sentient beings who aren't humans.

About the conservationist charity you mention (Mangrove Action Project), its efforts can reduce value if there is a disvalue in nature, as Yew-Kwang Ng ("Towards Welfare Biology: Evolutionary Economics of Animal Consciousness and Suffering") and Alan Dawrst ("The Predominance of Wild-Animal Suffering over Happiness: An Open Problem") argue.