by Richard Robb
The Rotten Kid Theorem presents, at best, an idealized version of reality. It relies on the assumption that every member of the household has perfect information about how much everyone else values each outcome. It also assumes that one benevolent family member feels strongly enough to transfer some positive amount to all others. Given these assumptions, it would appear that every member of the household was altruistic and dedicated to maximizing collective welfare. In fact, the mother’s behavior is care altruism and the rotten kid’s is a special kind of selfish altruism. But since both act in the other’s interest, bound by the mother’s desire to maximize a common objective, an outsider wouldn’t be able to detect the difference. Although the mother and the woman saving her drowning husband who we encountered in Chapter 1 both care deeply about their families, they are opposites for our purposes. The woman saving her husband is acting outside of a purposeful calculation, while the mother can be modeled in terms of her preferences.
The Rotten Kid Theorem involves observed care for a limited number of people. Another type of observed care, effective altruism, encompasses multitudes. It stems from concern over the well-being of everyone in the world, often including animals. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, a prominent advocate of effective altruism, abides by the principle that people who live in rich countries are morally obligated to support charities that aid the global poor. He equates spending on luxuries when some people are starving to letting a child drown because you don’t want to muddy your clothes.5
Effective altruists don’t give more to people geographically close to them than to those far away. Nor do they spread their philanthropy around; instead they concentrate on charities they believe will have the greatest impact. Rather than giving when they feel a personal connection—to the university they attended, research on the disease that killed a friend, or a fundraiser to buy a new fire truck for their town—they support the organizations that most efficiently improve the welfare of those most in need. They rarely volunteer for worthy causes, preferring to work long hours at the highest-paying job to maximize the amount they can donate.
You don’t have to give away all or most of your money to be an effective altruist. Using the standard purposeful choice calculation, you give until the marginal benefit you derive from helping others equals the marginal cost of reducing your consumption. Effective altruists don’t give enough to reduce suffering in the world by a material amount—that is, to the point where each marginal dollar they give becomes less effective.
But giving does increase the marginal benefit of their own consumption. To reduce spending on themselves, they first cut out the most superfluous expenses. For instance, they might break the habit of buying a four-dollar cup of coffee and instead spend fifty cents to make coffee at home. Once they’ve made all the easy sacrifices, subsequent cuts become increasingly painful. To save another fifty cents per day, they might have to cut out coffee altogether. Eventually, they reach the point where the satisfaction from the last dollar directed to their own consumption equals the marginal value they attribute to one more dollar donated to the poor. The largesse required for effective altruism of course depends on wealth and preferences. The test is whether a person gives enough to significantly affect her lifestyle and whether she gives to the causes she judges to be most beneficial to humankind.
Then there are extreme effective altruists. Like their plain vanilla counterparts, extreme effective altruists give where they believe they can do the most good. But extreme altruists feel extraordinarily deep bonds with everyone in the world and give until the extra cost in foregone satisfaction from a dollar spent on themselves equals its perceived benefit to a needy person. In contrast with ordinary effective altruists, they put themselves on equal footing with the rest of humanity, asking, “Do I need this more than a faraway stranger?” The significant income transfer required makes extreme effective altruism very rare. It’s an exceptional person whose well-being depends so intensely on the well-being of strangers.6
UNOBSERVED CARE
To become observable, care altruism must involve strongly felt bonds. But care can, and often does, exist at levels too low to catalyze action. Someone who cares but not enough to act exemplifies what I’ll call “unobserved care.” Care, too faint to be observed, is everywhere. In 1759, Adam Smith wrote that even “the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without … principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others.”7 The ruffian’s care for others is weak. It’s not a “concern,” just an “interest.” He doesn’t quite possess principles—rather, he’s “not altogether without” them. While his interest is real, he doesn’t act on it.
People who desire private jets or the well-being of refugees may not spend money in these areas because their desire is too low and the price too high. For instance, I am a fan of the New York Yankees baseball team, a bond I share with my fellow fans, most of whom I’ve never met. The Yankees’ standings enters into my preference rankings. But the impact of the Yankees’ standings on my satisfaction is far too low for me to send them any positive amount of money so they can afford better players. I care—I just don’t care enough. That doesn’t make me a hypocrite. Care can be genuine even when it doesn’t result in action.8
A thought experiment could be used to verify unobserved care: would you give up a small amount to provide a large benefit to others, assuming that no one would ever know that you were the source? If my donation could draw in millions so that the Yankees could acquire an All-Star pitcher, I might anonymously give one dollar. Thus the team’s welfare must be part of my utility.9
Altruism fits into purposeful choice in all the examples discussed so far. In the case of selfish altruism, the connection to others is so tenuous that they become part of an optimization strategy to gratify the altruist’s desires. Our motives to act in harmony with good manners, social norms, and ethical precepts can be evaluated relative to each other and to other desires. Care altruism can be observed when the altruist’s connection to others is so tight that their well-being factors into her routine optimization strategy. It is unobservable when care is sincere but of a lower magnitude—when it is optimal to refrain from acting because other options are preferable. None of these cases presents a problem within purposeful choice.
Mercy
Nearly five hundred years ago, Montaigne observed: “There is a certain satisfaction which tickles me when I do a just action and make others content.”10 Researchers have rediscovered this tickle, dubbed it the “warm glow effect” and attempted to fold it into purposeful choice.11 But because the pursuit of Montaigne’s tickle involves a free exercise of will and prioritizes the act of helping over ensuring the optimal outcome, it is for-itself.
An act of for-itself, out-of-character altruism, or mercy, occurs in the Buddhist parable of two monks walking along a river. When they see a young woman struggling to cross, the senior monk picks her up and carries her to the other side. Later, the still-astonished junior monk asks his colleague why he did it, since the monks are not allowed contact with women. The senior monk replies that he carried the woman only briefly and asks why the junior monk is still carrying her in his mind.
This act belongs to a single, unique moment in time, in which the senior monk makes a decision outside the dictates of any universal rule. He doesn’t set out to do a good deed—he responds to circumstances that arise in the natural course of his travels. Here, as in all for-itself acts, authenticity plays an important role. We might help a little old lady across the street when we encounter one, but we don’t actively seek little old ladies in order to reduce the stock of unassisted street-crossings. We only undertake altruistic acts of this kind from time to time. Since the decision to help is an act of will, this behavior is by its nature sporadic and unpredictable.
These altruistic gestures are about the act of helping, rather than about finding the most efficient way to make the recipient better off. Assume the l
ittle old lady derives twenty cents from my help, it takes one minute to walk her across the street, and my after-tax wage is a dollar per minute. Even with perfect information about all these inputs, I would not be tempted to say: “Lady, you take sixty cents. I’m going to walk across the street more quickly by myself, and we’ll both be forty cents better off.” Nor would I hire someone on the street corner to walk her across for fifteen cents, even though that would leave me eighty-five cents better off than if I walked her across myself. I am not directly concerned about the little old lady’s welfare—or at least, that’s not what is driving me to help her.
A staunch defender of purposeful choice might argue that this gesture is care altruism: a burst of care for the old lady that lasts a moment, then disappears. But ephemeral priorities have no place in an optimization problem. A textbook condition for rational choice is reasonably stable preferences. If desires come and go willy-nilly, rational choice can no longer help explain our actions. Attributing them to random desires renders rational choice theory useless.
The defender of purposeful choice could instead try to cast this act in terms of manners or ethics. Clearly, there is a continuum of cases. To take a more common example than the little old lady crossing the street, I, like many New Yorkers, volunteer every once in a while to assist tourists struggling with maps. I have no idea why I do this sometimes and not others. It defies any clear explanation and so is for-itself.
Love Altruism
Our taxonomy would be incomplete if it failed to encompass commitments that are greater than all preferences put together. This final for-itself category is embodied by the woman from Chapter 1 who jumps into the river to rescue her husband. The essential qualities of this act can’t be captured by care altruism (or any other sort of purposeful altruism), or even mercy. My example has to do with love between people, but this category may also encompass the intensely religious who perform extraordinary deeds of renunciation out of love for God.
Some Examples of Acting with Mercy
“Mercy” describes an unpredictable, unselfish altruistic act that cannot be characterized by a direct preference for the well-being of another person. It can be effective or not, generous or not, and can coexist with other types of altruism. Risking one’s own life in the spontaneous and heroic rescue of a stranger is clearly merciful. But even if helping the little old lady to cross the street is mundane and inefficient (it would be more efficient to give her sixty cents), it is still an act of spontaneous unselfishness since it delays my progress.
Unique acts of mercy for the good of a single individual and in defiance of cost-benefit calculations punctuate military campaigns. After U.S. Captain Roger Locher’s plane crashed in Vietnam in 1972, General John Vogt “shut down the war” by sending 119 aircraft to rescue Locher. Vogt wasn’t taking a page out of any strategy manual. As he later explained, it was a personal decision: “I took it on myself. I didn’t ask anybody for permission.”12
Merciful acts often fly in the face of the altruist’s self-interest, as in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. When God shared with Abraham his plan to destroy the two cities, Abraham protested. God agreed to spare all of Sodom and Gomorrah if fifty righteous people could be found there. But Abraham kept bargaining: how about forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty? Finally, God agreed to call off the destruction if just ten righteous people could be found. (Even that was too tall an order: the next day, God leveled the cities with fire and brimstone.)
Sodom and Gomorrah were selfish societies that despised charity. They so opposed hospitality that the entire populace tried to punish angels lodging in Lot’s house for relying on his hospitality rather than fending for themselves. Abraham’s mission in life, according to the Jewish interpretation, was to promote kindness and charity. Abraham was no pacifist (just before this incident, he and his servants slaughtered the Elamites to rescue Lot), and getting Sodom and Gomorrah out of the way would certainly have made the world kinder and more charitable, but apparently, he didn’t make that calculation. He didn’t ask that only the righteous be saved, or for something better, like an end to famine. Instead, Abraham protested God’s plan, squandering political capital out of mercy for all the cities’ inhabitants, righteous or not.
The deep roots of our impulse toward occasional acts of mercy are evident in not only ancient religious texts but also the evolutionary heritage of primates, as Frans de Waal and his coauthors demonstrated in an experiment with female capuchin monkeys. Two monkeys were placed in adjoining cages. The “subject monkey” was then offered a choice between two tokens: (1) a “selfish” token that would result in a reward of fruit to only the subject monkey, or (2) a “prosocial” token that would result in the same reward to the subject monkey and an equal reward to the “partner monkey.” The subject monkeys had the same role throughout the experiment, so there was no obvious potential for reciprocity.
The monkeys chose the prosocial token significantly more often than the selfish token, especially as the experiment progressed and they learned what the tokens meant. The monkeys were also more likely to choose the prosocial token if their partners were visible to them or belonged to the same social group.13 This fits with Montaigne’s tickle theory: it’s more pleasing when you can see your altruism in action and when you know the recipient. But the monkeys didn’t choose the prosocial token every time. Perhaps they wanted each act to be their idea, when the spirit moved them.
A variation on this experiment demonstrated that the monkeys did not care directly about the welfare of their partners. Rewards for the prosocial token were made unequal, so that the subject monkey received a piece of apple while the partner received a grape, which capuchin monkeys prefer. This should have made subject monkeys who cared directly about their partner’s welfare even more likely to choose the prosocial token, since the greater reward to the partner came at no cost to them. But when the prosocial token came with a larger reward for the partner, the subject monkeys ceased to prefer it. They enjoyed a good deed, but only up to a point.14
While such studies establish an ingrained tendency toward mercy, each act of mercy is unique. If we were merciful all the time, then we would no longer be acting out of mercy but adhering to rules.
Still, a scheduled charitable act could be merciful if it preserved an element of spontaneity. Suppose someone decided to donate money each week but left the implementation to whimsy. This week, give it all to a charity for seeing-eye dogs; next week, split it between the opera and the Red Cross; and so forth. This feels mostly purposeful—to the extent the acts are planned, they become expressions of ethical principles—but also retains a for-itself element.
Sometimes it’s hard to untangle the purposeful from the for-itself. The first time we watch Casablanca, we are moved when Rick sends Ilsa on the plane with her husband to freedom. Rick implies that he wrestled with it the night before, but the viewer gets the impression he’s making the final decision then and there. That would make it a for-itself gesture of mercy, but there must also be at least a little truth in his famous claim that Ilsa would eventually regret leaving her husband. That suggests a hint of care altruism and maybe selfish concern that her unhappiness would trickle down to him.
A One-Time Act of Mercy
We all engage in mundane acts of mercy from time to time. Around five years ago, I put aside a rule that organizes my life in favor of such an act. Even after all this time, my decision still puzzles me.
For my lecture classes, I have a no-nonsense approach to grading. Each student’s grade index is 45 percent her midterm exam score, 45 percent her final exam score, and 10 percent her homework scores. The exams are mostly multiple choice, and short answers are graded according to transparent rules. The grade indices are rigidly mapped onto letter grades around a mean of B+.
As soon as grades are posted, I receive a barrage of protest emails. After checking to make sure the disgruntled student’s final exam was properly marked, I send a standard response:
&n
bsp; Dear Mr./Ms. X,
The grades are determined according to a formula. Here are your inputs … The formula produces a numerical index that maps onto letter grades according to the following grid … It is the same for everyone. I do hope you learned useful things in the class that will serve you after grades have been forgotten.
If the student’s index comes just below a threshold, I add:
Your grade was nearly an A− but unfortunately did not make the cutoff. That’s bad luck. I hope that over the course of your life, good luck will eclipse the bad.
Usually they accept my response and that’s the end of it. Occasionally, a student who has apparently read a book about “Getting to Yes” asks: “What can I do to improve my grade?” My answer is always: “I can’t offer an option to you unless I also offer it to everyone else.” If the student still doesn’t give up, I write: “The only way is to invent a time machine, go back in the past, and study harder.”
Once, I received an email from a student who said she was in jeopardy of losing her Singaporean government sponsorship as a result of her B− grade. I didn’t know this student and barely recognized her name, meaning she wasn’t an active participant in class and hadn’t come by for help during office hours. Grades in my classes are a function of effort, so I felt confident that the B− was her fault.
