- Scott H Young - https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog -

Ten Books on Doing Good

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This is the last month in my year-long Foundations [1] project. The focus of this month was service. In this post, I’d like to share some takeaways from the ten books I read this month. Next week I’ll share my reflections on trying to improve this foundation in my own life.

Those interested can also check out my reading lists from the previous foundations: fitness [2], productivity [3], money [4], food [5], reading [6], outreach [7], sleep [8], reflection [9], connection [10], focus [11] and organization [12]. (102 books in total!)

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

The facts are striking:

In brief, it seems like we not only fail to be sufficiently generous for others’ sake, but even for our own sake. Altruism is undersupplied.

The 3-Minute Summary of What I’m Still Confused About

While the facts are clear, the philosophy is not. This month’s reading raised more questions than it answered.

Fortunately, at a practical level, I don’t think it matters much. The typical person (myself included) can do so much straightforward good that getting the philosophy right isn’t the most pressing issue. However, since what it means to help others is, in part, a question about what makes life good and meaningful itself, the questions are not mere academic pedantry.

Some questions I don’t have a great deal of certainty about:

One possibility is that these questions simply don’t have an objective answer. Philosophy is a conversation we’ve been having for over two millennia, and perhaps we’ll keep having it without arriving at any answers that have ultimate justifications.


Another possibility is that, as hard as it may be, these questions may be answerable, but we simply lack some of the knowledge or intelligence to answer them today. Perhaps morality is waiting for its Newton to unite the theories both in Heaven and on Earth.

Quick Reviews of the 10 Books

1. Doing Good Better [21] by William MacAskill

MacAskill opens with the story of an engineer who watches a poor woman working vigorously at a hand pump to get water from a well. He gets the idea to turn the hand pump into a play set. The kids will get to play, and the townspeople will get water without laborious effort. The idea is lauded and raises millions, including prominent celebrity donations.

Except the idea sucks. The women prefer the hand pump and the kids don’t want to play on the set. It breaks frequently and can’t be repaired except by technicians from the charity.

In contrast, deworming kids [22]—something that can be done for only a few cents—creates enormous gains to health and education.

When we spend money for ourselves, we tend to be fairly rational. Yes, we sometimes waste money on junk or fail to learn about products that might benefit us. But, on the whole, we are strongly motivated to get the most for our money. However, when we spend money on behalf of others, we often fall victim to the play-pump problem—we hear good-sounding stories and open our wallets without asking if it actually helps anyone.

MacAskill, one of the founders of effective altruism [23], thinks we can be much better at helping. By evaluating the impact of altruistic causes, we can identify charitable efforts that do much more good.

2. A Year of Living Generously [24] by Lawrence Scanlan

Scanlan spent a year volunteering, Each month, he worked for a different charitable cause, ranging from helping the homeless, to teaching First Nations youth, to rehabilitating criminals, to helping in a nursing home.

This book’s first-person storytelling was a good contrast to MacAskill’s detached economic analysis. It’s clear that even if volunteering is less “efficient” in terms of cost-benefits, directly helping others is probably good for forming one’s character and cultivating bonds that bridge groups and circumstances. For that, I applaud Scanlan.

At the same time, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of Scanlan’s arguments. He frequently disparages those who give financially, either because they have a lot (and therefore ought to have been taxed heavily instead) or because they feel proud of their generosity (which condescends those who are needier). At the same time, Scanlan shrugs off predatory behavior among those who ask for help, such as one person who lies to the operator of a food bank about needing money for an emergency, but then simply pockets the money instead.

I think the heart of our disagreement comes down to whether you believe the system we live in our society is a net positive (as I do), and we need to make incremental reforms to help the people who miss out; or whether you believe our current system is fundamentally corrupt, and thus one’s successful participation in it is a sign of one’s sins.

Despite our differing worldviews, I still found Scanlan’s survey of volunteerism to be a useful guide to understanding how we might cultivate a more service-oriented personality.

3. Give and Take [25] by Adam Grant

Measure performance among a group of people: students, salespeople or professionals. Then give them a personality inventory that probes their reciprocity style: are they generous givers, competitive takers, or tit-for-tat matchers?

What you’ll find is that the givers tend to be on both the bottom and the top of such rankings. Despite their reputation for being doormats, generous givers actually do quite well in the cutthroat world of business and professional life.

Generosity is a strategy that pays of in the long-term. In the short-term, helping can undermine your own work. But, over time, it cultivates friends and allies that end up being worth far more than the effort required to generate them.

A highly-competitive “taker” strategy tends to be short-sighted. But so, too, are the cautious “matchers” who seek to help when they can clearly perceive your ability to reciprocate. This approach is too cautious, akin to the start-up investor who is only willing to give money to companies that are already turning a profit. By giving generously when a reciprocated favor is not on the horizon, givers manage to cultivate deeper networks that win out in the long run.

4. What We Owe the Future [26] by William MacAskill

We live in a hinge point in history. It’s not implausible to imagine that, perhaps centuries from now, our descendants will colonize the stars, and we may number in the trillions. At the same time, catastrophic climate change, rogue AI, bioengineered pandemics and nuclear war all threaten to bring our species’ story to an abrupt end.

While such speculations may seem like the stuff of science fiction, MacAskill makes the case that, to the extent that we have some control over the direction the future takes, those actions may have, in moral terms, far, far greater impact than anything that helps a person alive today.

In addition to existential risk, MacAskill also discusses the potential contingency of moral attitudes. He gives the example of slavery, arguing that, had it not been from the early advocacy of Quaker abolitionists like Benjamin Lay [27], the world’s oldest institution might have legally continued up until the present day. While Lay was hated and ridiculed in his own time, if his actions nudged the moral arc of the universe, it may have been one of the more beneficent actions any human has ever taken.

I enjoyed this book, but it was certainly more speculative than Doing Good Better. In the end, the reason to care less about the future may not be that it matters less, but simply that there is too much uncertainty in our ability to reliably cause a better future.

5. Stubborn Attachments [28] by Tyler Cowen

Cowen makes a similar case to MacAskill that we ought to value the far future much more than we do presently. However, unlike MacAskill’s science fiction hypotheticals, this mostly boils down to Cowen’s commitment to the idea that we ought to maximize sustainable economic growth, constrained by some minimal set of human rights.

Economic growth, not international aid, after all, is probably the only thing that has ever sustainably lifted people out of poverty.

I don’t think that’s an argument against giving strategically. Deworming, for instance, doesn’t just make children healthier, it also raises educational attainment which is conducive to a more economically productive society.

 However, it is, perhaps, an argument against actions that might help people today at the expense of future growth, such as discouraging foreign direct investment or boycotting factories abroad on account of their working conditions.1 [29]

6. The Theory of Moral Sentiments [30] by Adam Smith

While Smith is best known for launching the field of economics with his book The Wealth of Nations, his first major work was about the origin of our moral intuitions.

Smith argues that our moral sentiments come primarily from “sympathy” (what we today would call empathy). By putting ourselves in the other persons’ situation, we respond to it as they do and judge their behavior accordingly. Through socialization, we not only learn to empathize with others, but to reflexively empathize with a hypothetical, impartial bystander who might witness our case and, in doing so, moderate our instinctive tendencies to exaggerate our own self-importance.

Some philosophers, owing to their analytical natures, read almost like Martians—observing humanity with near-alien detachment. Smith, despite his bookish personality (scholars debate whether he died a virgin), was the complete opposite: an incredibly keen observer of human nature, picking up on subtleties in our feelings and conduct. He wryly observes the incredible egotism baked into human nature:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment.

…

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but provided he never saw them, he would ignore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.

7. Against Empathy [31] by Paul Bloom

Bloom thinks empathy is a morally corrosive force, and we’d be better if we stopped using it.


Bloom argues that empathy distorts, biases, neglects scope and discourages reflection. Compassion and reason are better guides to altruistic behavior.

My first impression, especially as I read this book immediately after Smith’s Sentiments, was that Bloom was deeply wrong and mistaken. Empathy is the grounding for our moral intuitions, and while it may be imperfect, being coldly rational seems like a straight path to becoming a cruel psychopath.

But Bloom largely won me over. He makes a good case that empathy is not, in fact, what underpins much of our moral behaviors. We frequently do good things where there is no victim to empathize with. Feeling a suffering person’s pain is not necessary to cure it, and can frequently get in the way.

8. Reasons and Persons [32] by Derek Parfit

Parfit is considered one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, and Reasons and Persons is perhaps his greatest book.2 [33]

Parfit carefully works through arguments to arrive at the following conclusions:

  1. We should reject self-interest. The theory of self-interest, namely, that it is rational to do whatever is best for one’s life, is collectively self-defeating (because of game theory) and indirectly, individually self-defeating (because we might live better if our motivations weren’t so self-interested). It is also difficult to defend the notion that it is irrational to do what would harm one’s future self, but rational to do what would harm another person.
  2. Personal identity is less than it seems. There is no Cartesian ego [34]. What it means to be a person, extended over time, is the continuation of many psychological factors over time. This means we shouldn’t fear Star Trek-style teleportation (should it one day be invented). But it also means we’re less than 100% identical with our future selves, and more than 0% overlapping with other people, and should fear death less than we do today.
  3. Deciding what’s best over the long-haul is hard. Every action causes not just benefits and harms to the future, but also creates completely different sets of people who would be born in the world. It is difficult (perhaps impossible) to construct a theory of what we should do that deals with this fact, and also avoids the repugnant conclusion [35] that a sufficiently large world of people whose lives are barely worth living is better than a world with the same population as ours that lives in utopia.

9. Ethics in the Real World [36] by Peter Singer

This is a collection of essays by Singer. It covers a range of controversial issues in ethics:


Thought-provoking, even if I don’t always agree with Singer’s conclusions.

10. Man’s Search for Meaning [37] by Viktor Frankl

As a young psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl and his entire family (including his pregnant wife) were deported to concentration camps. Only Frankl survived.

Man’s Search for Meaning is half an analysis of the psychology of camp life, from the almost unimaginable brutality of the guards, to the even more despicable behavior of prisoners who collaborated. The other half is Frankl’s theory of psychology, which posits that human beings ultimately seek a meaning for their actions, not merely pleasure (pace Freud [38]) or power (pace Adler [39]).

Despite the horrors, Frankl decides that there is a potential meaning in every experience, and it is our task in life to find it. The concentration camps, then, serve as an extreme test case for this theory of life—of our ability to find meaning that will allow us to transcend our circumstances.

Frankl writes:

“We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.

…

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus, it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete.”

_ _ _

Next week, I’ll share some personal reflections on my own month of service, and how I tried to apply some of these ideas, however imperfectly, in my own life.

Footnotes

  1. The argument here is that even if “sweat shop” working conditions are appalling by developed-country standards, they are usually better than the alternative of subsistence agriculture (as evidenced by the demand for such jobs). Additionally, these jobs form an early rung on the ladder of economic development that can allow a country to climb up the economic ladder to self-sufficiency.
  2. On What Matters being his other magnum opus. [40]