Counting Costless Beneficence

The linked post is #6 in my series of excerpts from Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good. In it, I respond to one of Jason Brennan’s essays, which asks whether we can exercise beneficence through business. My response explores two main ideas: (i) we should expect to be able to do more good through deliberate altruistic efforts than through self-interested consumer spending, and (ii) while we may do a lot of good through careers that we choose for self-interested reasons, such convenient impact doesn't excuse us from further efforts to do even better.

Here, I'll just copy over the latter discussion, which I expect to be of most interest to this audience.

Counting Costless Beneficence

Finally, I want to consider the significance of Brennan’s observation that “While earning to give can be noble, most of us already give by earning.” I’m very open to the suggestion that “regular work does far more good for others than it gets credit for.” But how far that goes towards discharging our duties of beneficence depends on how much better we could do.

I’ve elsewhere defended the view that we ought to do (at least) the most good we can without suffering undue burden. I formulate the relevant sense of “burden” in terms of an individualized effort ceiling (how much effort it would take you to be a decent person, roughly speaking), but you could stick to traditional welfare costs if you prefer.

This moral principle allows us to secure two plausible thoughts about unintentional beneficence:

(1) It’s better to do more good unintentionally rather than less good intentionally. You should never deliberately choose or prefer to do less good, merely to make it more intentional.

(2) Good side-effects from doing what you self-interestedly prefer doesn’t get you off the hook for doing more good when the opportunity arises.

We secure the first thought, because between the options described, the greater good can be achieved at no cost to yourself. So it is the most good you can do (between those options) without undue burden.

We secure the second thought because you haven’t yet taken on any moral burden at all. So you can hardly complain if morality asks you to do a bit more. “Look how much good I already did while simply pursuing my self-interest!” is not a compelling excuse to refrain from trying a little in order to do even better. It’s excusable to do less than the best when the best would be an undue burden. But having previously done good inadvertently is not the mark of suffering under an undue burden. Quite the opposite.

So yes, a wide range of (even ordinary) actions can have beneficent effects, and be well worth doing. But benevolent motives may still be relevant by helping to determine how much beneficence may be demanded of us, since it’s hardly unreasonable to ask for some minimal moral effort (to secure even better results) on top of whatever you can achieve with no moral effort at all. The low-hanging fruit of convenient beneficence is good as far as it goes. But however far it goes, this gives us no reason, and no excuse, not to do even better when the opportunity arises.