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anigbrowl • yesterday at 7:53 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

There's a bunch of influencers who go help struggling people. I'm certain the majority of them aren't doing it out of principle, but at the end of the day people still get helped.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's like a lot of other things on the internet, with a bimodal distribution between people who get helped a lot ('Sir Hype surprises homeless former billionaire with a MILLION DOLLARS!') with many other similarly deserving people getting nothing. I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.

Besides the fact that these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor (and the near certainty that some of these professional philanthropists will later turn out to devils LARPing as angels), it also makes the determination of moral worthiness turn on the public's fickle opinion about whether the recipient is sufficiently beautiful/ ugly/ unlucky/ desperate/ degraded enough to qualify. Charitable undertakings involving cameras are always a bit suspect.

Replies

godelski • today at 1:15 AM

  > I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.
Same. I hope you didn't interpret my comment as anything different. My point was that a suboptimal result is better than a negative result. I was *not** saying that a suboptimal result is better than an optimal *result* (that would be quite silly). Let's make a concrete example so there's no ambiguity.

  Scenario:
  There are 100 people starving

  Rankings of preferred situations:
  1) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone AND everyone gets fed
  2) Morals aside, everyone gets fed
  3) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone AND __N__ people get fed (N<100)
  4) Morals aside, N people get fed (N<100)
  5) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone BUT nobody gets fed
  6) Fuck the poor
Obviously we want #1. #2 is suboptimal but at least everyone gets fed. #3 is the realistic optimal situation because we're often resource constrained. #4 is, well... better than nothing. #5 is indistinguishable from moral cosplaying. #6 is messed up.

We can rank these, right? We can even get more nuanced about the ranking (we can define N!) and argue about the weight of intent vs outcome, but I'm just proposing one ranking for the sake of making my point clear, not proposing one ranking as if it is the absolute objective ranking system and everyone that disagrees is dumb. The rankings are clearly subjective. But what's not subjective is that nuance exists. What is subjective is how we handle that nuance.

  > these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor
So to go back to our example, even though I'd prefer we just feed everybody, I'd prefer somebody getting rich feeding the hungry over not feeding the hungry. I would prefer someone LARPing as an angle conditioned on actually doing "angelic actions" than somebody LARPing as an angle and doing nothing. Of course, I'd prefer a real angle, who wouldn't?!

So I'm quite confused by your comment because it doesn't seem we disagree. Unless if you're saying that #2 in my list is equivalent to #6 (or anything that isn't #1 is equivalent). But I don't think that's what you're saying.