In a recent bonus episode of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, Eneasz Brodski shared a thought experiment that caused no small amount of anguish. In the hypothetical, some eccentric but trustworthy entity is offering to give you an escalating amount of money for your fingers, starting at $10,000 for the first one and increasing 10x per finger up to $10 trillion for all of them.1 On encountering this thought experiment, Eneasz felt (not without justification) that he mostly valued his manual dexterity more than wealth. Then, two acquaintances pointed out that one could use the $10 trillion to do a lot of good, and Eneasz proceeded to feel terrible about his decision.
I had several responses to this episode, but today I’m going to focus on one of them: the difference between cost and sacrifice.
How Ayn Rand Made Me a Better Altruist
But first, a personal anecdote. I was raised Catholic, and like the good Catholic boy that I was, I once viewed altruism through the lens of personal sacrifice. For the uninitiated, Catholic doctrine places a strong emphasis on this notion of sacrifice – an act of self-abnegation which places The Good firmly above one’s own wants or needs. I felt obligated to help others because it was the Right Thing to Do, and I accepted that being a Good Person meant making personal sacrifices for the good of others, regardless of my own feelings. I divided my options into “selfish” and “selfless” categories, and felt guilty when choosing the former. Even as I grew older and my faith in Catholicism began to wane, this sense of moral duty persisted. It was a source of considerable burden and struggle, for me, made worse by the fact that the associated cultural baggage was so deeply ingrained as to be largely invisible to me.
Then, in a fittingly kabbalistic manner, Atlas Shrugged flipped my world upside down. 2
Ayn Rand, you see, did not believe in sacrifice. In her philosophy, the only real moral duty is the duty to oneself and one’s own principles. She happened to hold a great many other convictions about what those principles ought to be, some of which I now dispute; but in this, I believe, she was wholly correct.
My teenage self, at least, found this perspective incredibly freeing. (Perhaps a bit too freeing, as I’ve always been the sort of person who enjoys being smugly right about things, and taking the word “selfish” as a compliment for a couple years did not do my social life any favors.) But I emerged from this phase like the titular unburdened Titan himself, having thoroughly abandoned all thought of dutifully adhering to any principles besides my own.
Which of course led me to wonder, for perhaps the first time: What are my principles? If my morals are not to be guided by God nor by the expectations of others, but by my own reflectively endorsed desires, then what do I actually want?
It turns out that I want to help people. I want to ease suffering and promote wellbeing; I want to create things people value; I want to surround myself with a thriving civilization filled with flourishing people.
In abandoning the values that had been imposed on me, I discovered that my own values included a strong preference for the wellbeing of others. And that makes all the difference.
Cost vs Sacrifice
Let’s return to the ten-finger demon. We’ll set aside, for now, the argument that the money from selling fingers has lots of selfish benefits. That’s not what this post is about. Let’s focus specifically on the opportunity to Do Good, and what it means for us.
Here’s the thing about thought experiments. They’re not supposed to be traps for the unwary. In the best case, they are ways to notice problems in our thinking by making choices stark and binary. If a decision posed in a thought experiment makes you feel utterly miserable, that is a warning sign.
In the podcast, one person says something to the effect of: “[I don’t like it], but if you really pressed me, I would make the [painful] sacrifice so that I could use the money to help others.”
I applaud the sentiment, but this is the wrong way to think about the problem.
Buying something more valuable with something less valuable should never feel like a terrible deal. If it does, something is wrong.
If enough money to end world hunger, lift millions out of poverty, delay global warming, fund a bunch of medical research, outspend the lobbying efforts of multibillion-dollar companies, and do a half-dozen similar things seems more valuable to you then manual dexterity, then you may have discovered something interesting about your preferences.
If, however, your instinct is to keep your fingers and feel guilty about it, then perhaps you should ask: whence comes this guilt? Am I failing to live up to a standard I have set for myself? Or am I allowing the standards set by others to override my own preferences?
If you value $10 trillion worth of improvements to the world more than you value ten fingers, then this transaction is not a sacrifice. It is a cost you are paying to get more of what you want.
If, on reflection, you actually value your fingers more than the leverage $10 trillion buys you, then you shouldn’t pay that cost.
Own Your Values
It’s a mistake to do as I once did, and divide the outcomes you are capable of achieving into buckets of “selfish” and “selfless”, especially if doing so makes you inclined to always let one bucket win at the expense of the other. The universe does not distinguish between selfish goals and selfless ones.
When I was a Reliability Engineer, I donated some of my money to the Against Malaria Foundation. I did not donate everything and decide to live as a pauper. Setting aside how that would have made me worse at my actual job (and at making money to donate), I didn’t do that because I don’t want to live that way.
I’d take the $10 trillion, even if I couldn’t use it to buy prosthetics or live in luxury or whatever, because $10 trillion is a massive amount of leverage that I likely can’t match any other way. With it, I could steer the world in ways that according to my own values are better than having functional hands. It’s a slam dunk. But this is not, in my view, taking a “selfless” option over a “selfish” one. I just want the leverage more than I want my hands.
For the glowfic fans out there, Alicorn’s Bella characters embodied this philosophy with their Three Questions: What do I want? What do I have? How can I use what I have to get what I want?
Don’t ask, “Am I a bad person?” Instead, ask “What do I want to achieve?” and make it so. The Replacing Guilt series has more to say on this topic as well. 3
I implore all altruists, non-altruists, and aspiring altruists alike to make your choices and own them. Leave the hand-wringing to those with all their fingers.
- It was further stipulated that this would not cause inflation or have some other horrible monkey’s paw effect; it’s just $10 trillion worth of anything money can buy you. ↩︎
- I don’t claim it’s a perfect book, but it does contain messages that some people – like young Joe – badly need to hear, and that less emphatic sources often fail to convey. ↩︎
- For those wondering, I found these posts valuable well before I started working for the author. ↩︎