Discover more from Overcoming Bias
Let a person’s benefit ratio be the amount of benefit they give to others, divided by their cost to others. Then consider two classes of people:
Burdens – Those for whom the ratio is less than one. Such folks are a net burden on the rest of the world.
Saints – Those for whom the ratio is far greater than one, such as a thousand or a million. Such folks are fantastic altruists.
While these would seem to be opposite types of people, I think I see a correlation in the world: those who talk the most about trying to be saints also tend to have an unusually large chance of actually being burdens. Why this correlation?
One story is that variance is a good way to increase your chance of very good outcomes, but high variance altruism strategies tend to have more risk of both altruism extremes. So people who try hard to increase the thickness of their high tail of altruism must typically also accept a thicker low tail of being a burden.
A very different story is that people who feel guilty about their high risk of being a net burden compensate by talking more about wanting to be saints. They don’t have much of a chance of actually being saints, but by deluding themselves they can avoid guilt about being a burden.
What evidence would distinguish these theories?
Saints And Burdens
This is wrong (there are some related notions you can equate in this way, but you have to change the underlying quantities being measured at the same time as you change the comparison method).
For instance, consider adding one unit of value to both the the benefit and costs a person provides. This won't change the additive version, but will change the ratio (unless the person were net zero before). Indeed particularly if it's the same person who benefits and loses from the change, it's not always obvious whether to count such items for both sides or not, so I agree with suntzuanime that the version where this is absorbed by the system is the more natural one to use here.
It is very difficult to address this question. And it depends on whether you believe there is an afterlife with punishment and reward. That is, are we playing a finite ethical game or an infinite ethical game?
A bad man may have utility as an example of what not to do, and may serve as a good negative example. A disabled individual may allow others to show their moral side by providing a good target for ethical behaviour. A ruthless businessman may nevertheless provide work for his less ruthless employees.
I suspect there are few, if any, easy answers to this kind of question.