Thanks to Jacob G-W, Sophia Lloyd George, Ariana Azarbal, and Jo Jiao for reading through / commenting on a draft. All opinions, and any errors, are my own.

‘On Caring’ by Nate Soares is a great piece. It’s a moving appeal to do good in the world. I respect Nate’s articulation of his personal philosophy, and I empathize with his motivations for writing the same. At the same time, I don’t share many of the intuitions behind it. I don’t intend for this to be ‘a rebuttal’. That seems unkind. A rebuttal would also be unproductive – deep-seated values seem hard to change. Yet, I want to articulate why these intuitions don’t ring true for me.

‘Caring’ is a funny word. I don’t have a crisp, intensional definition for it. In this essay, it’s associated with ‘feeling for another's pain’. This framing, however, ignores the happiness felt by others. There is a lot of weight in the world, but there is also much lightness. It seems unfaithful to focus on one, without acknowledging the other. I’m moved by both the highs and the lows of the world – and I’m uncomfortable with the (seemingly) primary focus on suffering.

I also don’t think that mountains weigh as heavily on me, as they do on some others. Why? For one, it seems like mountains are inevitable. We perceive mountains because of how they jut out relative to our experiences; if there’s any inequality in the world, we will always have mountains. But regardless of our perception of them, the absolute size of the mountains does seem to be shrinking.^[1] Currently, an average person in the USA lives a life far-removed from the challenges faced by billions – eg. reliable access to food, water, and shelter. Yet, it seems plausible that in a future world, folks might look back upon the life of an American today with similar sorrow. Eg. the overwhelming rates of obesity, navigating a broken healthcare system, and living with the fear of school shootings.^[2] I’m not taking a fatalist stance here. One of our biggest skills is recognizing the mountains around us – that’s how progress gets made. Nonetheless, this is a task with no clear resolution criteria. Sure, we can work on reducing the mountains. But since I’m skeptical of ever being able to ‘solve suffering’, they weigh a little less heavy on me.

Another reason for this, is the average baseline happiness of people. All things considered, most people are generally happy.^[3] From an external perspective, it seems abhorrent that so many have so little. However, in another sense, if we’re all having similar feelings about our experiences, it feels a bit silly to imagine them as “suffering”. Relatedly, it also seems like much of happiness is under one’s control. Ie. it’s as much about how one reacts to the world, as being determined by one’s circumstances. This is also why I don’t resonate with ‘helping those who're suffering’, and prefer something closer to ‘enabling people to realize their potential’.

I also disagree with some of what we’re labelling mountains. The “loss of a human life [...] is tragic no matter what the cause.” Framing it like that blurs the difference in how lives are lost. The loss of a child from a preventable disease is, for me, far more tragic than an 80 year old passing peacefully in their sleep. I feel far more compelled to intervene in the former case, than the latter.^[4] And even though there’s a part of me that sees sorrow in death, there is another that doesn’t feel too put out. Y’know, so it goes.

Similarly, I don’t feel strongly for ‘potential people’. Nor do I feel strongly about all the art and beauty of future civilizations. I believe in a good life for people living today. All else being equal, I’m indifferent to living in a world with 800 million people, or a world with 80 billion people. Sure, in an abstract sense, it would be ‘nice’ to have more art and beauty and rich experiences. But it’s also alright otherwise. No single person can capture even a fraction of it all – everyone’s subjective life experience would be similar. And anyways, folks would be equally happy in both societies.^[5]

Neither do I share the intuition of ‘devoting one's life to moving mountains’. Certainly, reducing suffering is a worthwhile endeavour. Yet, there are many things I could do with my life, and it feels odd to put this one goal above all else. I could spend a life dedicated to learning math, and it would not be enough. Or I could spend a life dedicated to writing novels, or making music, or traveling the world. And in none of those cases would it be enough. There’s too many things to do, and not enough time to do them. And since moving mountains isn’t my sole purpose, it’s alright to behave like Alice / Bob / Christine, and only give sporadically. It might be inconsistent, but prioritization is always hard with multiple terminal-seeming goals.

So, why do I care about doing good in the world? For me, it’s the appeal of a good hack. So we have all these big, important problems going around – and you’re telling me we haven’t solved them yet? That’s messed up. In fact, I wouldn’t quite say I ‘care about doing good’. Rather, I care about making systems work better, and ‘doing good’ is simply downstream of that.

These two different motivations seem compatible. In fact, having people with both these views is probably better than the alternative. It seems useful to avoid insular, echo chamber-ey dynamics. After all, at the end of the day, we’re all trying to realize a better tomorrow.

1. ^{^}

    Alternate viewpoint: material progress doesn’t help, and the mountains are as high as they’ve always been.

   I also don’t think it’s clear that inequality is bad by itself (since we could all be equal and poor). But I’m open to changing my mind about the same.

2. ^{^}

    I don’t hold this claim strongly. I’m happy to reconsider, especially if we see mountains growing over time. Eg. evidence for, say, hunter gatherers having a better quality of life than millions today.

3. ^{^}

    Caveat – there was hardly any data for countries in sub-saharan Africa.
   Also, I spent ~5 minutes looking up this data. I didn’t investigate methodology / contrary evidence strongly (because this jived with my priors on eg. the hedonic treadmill). If there’s contradictory evidence, I’d love to see it!

4. ^{^}

    I have read the arguments for transhumanism, and I’m not convinced. While I might change my views in the future, I still have these intuitions today.

5. ^{^}

    To put it another way – I care less about how our civilization is faring, and more about how the people in our civilization are doing. Having a thriving 10,000 person society seems much more appealing than a dysfunctional society of a million people (which might still, by virtue of numbers, produce more high-quality art, music, etc).