Rational Giving

A few days ago I donated what was, for me, a hefty sum of money to three different charities. 70% of my donation went to the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides insecticide-treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. 20% went to GiveDirectly, which distributes cash straight to needy individuals in Kenya. 10% went to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which treats children in sub-Saharan Africa for parasite infections.

And the entire sum was donated via GiveWell, an organization that researches charities to determine which are the most efficient at saving and improving lives.

Here's why I chose this particular donation strategy—and why you should, too.

As it turns out, a lot of charities suck. Maybe even most. They're either inefficient, ineffective, lack transparency or have unintended consequences like damaging the local economy. (See examples here and here.) Some are actually worse than doing nothing at all. For instance, the "Scared Straight" program, which takes kids on tours of prisons to discourage criminal behavior, was found to increase delinquency compared to doing nothing. Even the practices of big-name charities like Kiva, Smile Train and UNICEF have raised concerns.

Furthermore, many charities (intentionally or not) post misleading information about their own effectiveness. For instance, since malaria nets from Nothing But Nets cost $10 each to make and deliver, they claim an astounding rate of one child's life saved for every $10 given. But roughly 95% of kids would have survived even without nets, and it's not known what proportion of delivered nets are actually used. It's all too common for charities to exaggerate their impact and ignore hidden costs like this. And since most have never been independently evaluated, so we have no real way of knowing how effective they are.

But for most people, none of that's really on the radar. They pick a charity based purely on how it resonates with them emotionally. They may see an ad featuring a starving child with sad puppy-dog eyes, skim a few anecdotal endorsements and start reaching for their pocketbook. All without doing any research. Sure, their hearts are in the right place, but isn't it more important to ensure that we're actually helping people? It's okay to let our emotions drive our generosity, but we need to let reason steer us toward options that will do the most good.

That's where GiveWell comes in. This group looks for charities that:

• Offer strong evidence of positive impact
• Are extremely cost-effective
• Will use added funding productively, without diminishing returns
• Are highly transparent and accountable

So why trust GiveWell? Well, they've been endorsed both by major media outlets and by experts in the field. They're fully transparent: their research is publicly available, they record their board meetings for donor scrutiny, and much more. They've subjected themselves to intense external evaluation. And their three top-recommended charities have been thoroughly vetted, and are monitored via written reports as well as photo and video evidence.

GiveWell's top-rated charities have the most positive impact of any they've evaluated thus far. Through AMF, it costs about $1.36 per year to protect someone with a malaria net. Through SCI, it costs about $0.51 to treat someone for parasites. And through GiveDirectly, it costs about $4.50 per year to keep a metal roof over someone's head. There are still some unknowns, as there would be for any charity. But right now, these three have the most powerful balance of efficiency and credibility.

Lastly, why did I choose to give via GiveWell rather than to the charities directly? Because it helps GiveWell. Not because they take any of the money—they don't—but for other important reasons. First, giving through GiveWell means they'll have more sway among charities. If their recommendations are shown to substantially impact people's giving habits, charities are more likely to cooperate with their investigations. And second, it gives more publicity both to GiveWell and to the effective altruism movement as a whole, thereby influencing even more people to give effectively. You help the charities, and you help the meta-charity. It's essentially like making your donation count twice.

You don't have to take my word for all this. I encourage you to do your own research. On the other hand, it's easy to get so overwhelmed with ideas and options that you succumb to analysis paralysis and end up doing nothing. So if I've convinced you that this approach to giving is worthwhile, please consider making a donation here. Thank you.

My Evolution on Gay Marriage

Now that the Supreme Court has heard arguments on two gay marriage cases, that the number of senators publicly supporting it has jumped to more than half, and that public opinion has now shifted decisively in its favor, I thought it might be a good time to chronicle how my own views of gay marriage have changed.

For most of my life as a Christian, homosexuality wasn't even really on my radar. The concept was largely foreign to me. When it did finally trickle into my consciousness, I felt no animosity toward gay people; I just considered it a strange and sinful way of thinking and behaving.

I never held very strong opinions on gay marriage, but the issue came to a head in 2008 with the introduction of Prop 8 in my home state of California. I remember that it was something I went back and forth on, but sadly I ultimately voted in favor. My rationale at the time was that gay people could still have civil unions and get the same benefits without taking on the title of marriage.

At the time, I thought that was enough. My vote on this issue was probably the last truly harmful action I took as a result of my religious beliefs. Though I no longer think that civil rights issues should be put to a majority vote, a small part of me wishes this one would be, just so I and others like me could redeem ourselves.

I didn't think much about the issue again until what was probably late 2010—after I had started questioning my faith, but before I became an atheist. I came across this video by prominent atheist and LGBT blogger Zinnia Jones.

In the first half of the video she rattles off a number of potential disadvantages associated with civil unions, but the second half (starting at 1:30) was what really struck me. If civil unions are identical to marriage in every way but in name, why is there a need to make a distinction at all? What does marriage offer straight couples that they need and gay couples can't have?

My views on gay marriage were already tenuously held, but that video was what solidified them decisively in its favor. At this point, I think it's clear that there are no decent arguments against gay marriage, and that most secular arguments have been propped up in order to disguise religiously-motivated concerns. I'm glad to see public opinion changing so rapidly, and look forward to seeing how each sect and denomination will respond to gay marriage's inevitable acceptance.

The Purpose of Hell

Everyone agrees that criminals should be punished, but what many people don't realize is that there are several different theories about why punishing criminals is a good idea. Here I'll examine whether any of these penal theories apply to an eternal punishment in hell. I'll assume in this post, purely for the sake of argument, that unbelief is in some way a bad thing. But even granting this, what we find is that these five rationales either don't apply in the case of the Christian God punishing us in hell, or imply that some other punishment would be more just.

The first reason that one might be justified in punishing a wrongdoer is rehabilitation—punishment for the purpose of morally improving the criminal. But since people stay in hell forever, anything they might learn to better themselves could never be put to use. At most it would result in morally upright people suffering forever, which is clearly even worse than if hell was only filled with the unrepentant.

There's also restoration—punishment for the sake of repairing the damage resulting from the crime. But there's no reason to think that suffering endlessly in outer darkness would benefit God or any other possible victims in the slightest—unless we label God a sadist, who takes pleasure in our boundless pain. In fact, if we take at face value the apologist's claim that God is quite upset about having to punish us, hell seems to work against restorative justice.

The third is deterrence, which is intended to prevent crimes from being committed in the first place. Perhaps hell is a way to bully people into obedience. But there are two problems with this: First, given that 70% of people on earth are non-Christians, the threat of the Christian hell has been largely ineffective at the global scale. Second, by attempting to threaten people into genuine belief when in fact belief is not generally a choice, this form of justice would fall into the same trap as Pascal's Wager.

The fourth is incapacitation, or punishment for the sake of protecting potential victims from further harm. If believers are the victims here, hell would keep the evil heathens from corrupting them—but there are other ways to do this that don't involve excess suffering. If God is supposed to be the victim, it's unclear how hell is "protecting" him from unbelievers. Presumably he isn't so fragile that unbelief or even rebellion would cause him the slightest amount of harm. Perhaps rebellion harms God in some emotional sense. But in that case, hell is once again totally counterproductive: it's the perfect way to stir up even more resentment against him.

Finally, the crudest and most basic reason for punishing wrongdoers is retribution: the idea that evil deeds inherently deserve to be punished, apart from any tangible benefits that will result from such punishment. This may feel like an appropriate reaction, but it's really nothing more than barbaric, institutionalized revenge. What some perceive as punishment for the sake of some idealized "pure justice" is actually a combination of the other rationales listed above. Even if we accepted retribution as a legitimate penal theory, though, it still wouldn't justify hell. Retributive justice carries with it a sense of proportion: the punishment must fit the crime, and eternal punishment for even the tiniest sin certainly doesn't qualify in that sense.

There really is no justification at all for hell as a punishment. This is true because many sins are essentially victimless crimes, and because eternal punishment for sin results in no benefit to any party. However, apologists sometimes sneak around this by saying that hell is a choice: if we willfully reject God, he grants our wish by taking us to a place where we can be completely separate from him. Nonsense. He could accomplish the same thing by simply snuffing out our existence altogether, and avoid all the unnecessary suffering. This would serve as a perfect form of incapacitation (it's impossible to cause any further harm) as well as a more reasonable form of retribution (more proportionate with the perceived crime).

One last defense apologists occasionally give is to claim both that retributive justice is valid and that hell is a proportionate punishment, because our crime has somehow caused infinite offense against God's infinite dignity. Ridiculous. The relevant factor is not dignity, but actual harm. A crime against a king would deserve no more punishment than the same crime against a peasant. If the king threw a fit, demanding the culprit's execution due to some abstract violation of dignity, we would rightly label him a tyrant. If anything, the more power this king has and the more severe his demanded punishment, the more petty and unjust he becomes.

Hell is not only useless as a punishment according to most penal theories, but also highly unjust and even counterproductive. The onus is on Christians to show that this unending punishment can somehow be justified, and they certainly have their work cut out for them.

Where Morality Comes From

Theists tell us that morality comes from God, and some even go so far as to say that atheists can't explain why humans are moral. If we are solely the product of evolutionary processes, why is it that we often care deeply about those around us? Shouldn't we be selfish, concerned only with passing on our genes as efficiently as possible? As it turns out, no. Below I'll cover several intriguing phenomena that, when taken together, explain surprisingly well why we act the way we do.

The easiest concept to understand from an evolutionary perspective is parental investment. Fitness is defined as the ability to produce viable offspring, but this entails more than just surviving long enough to procreate. Once the offspring are born, they must in most cases be protected by one or both parents: for example, a father may go off to hunt while the mother protects her young. If the parents fail to do this, their offspring will die and their genes won't be passed on. Thus, natural selection molds the behavior of many species to form a powerful parent-child bond.

What about cases where the genetic relationship is less pronounced? For example, why would a worker bee care about building the hive if it doesn't get to procreate? Why would a prairie dog sound an alarm to warn its siblings of an approaching predator if this could cause it to be eaten? Kin selection provides the answer. Suppose animal A has a gene that causes it to help related animal B, even if doing so reduces A's reproductive fitness. Because B's genes are similar to A's, B is also likely to have the gene that caused A to do this. Since A has made B more likely to survive and reproduce, A's gene is more likely to be passed on indirectly through B.

Awww.

The first two concepts I've mentioned depend on the genetic relatedness of individuals, but many others do not. For example, there's reciprocal altruism, which is perhaps best summarized by the phrase "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine." When animal C does a favor for unrelated animal D, then D is expected to do a favor for C. If D does not oblige, then he is punished by C and the other members of the community. In this way, the two are motivated to help one another because their pact is mutually beneficial. In more advanced species, this idea works even with long time intervals and a wide range of "social currencies." For example, if C grooms D, then D might look out for predators on C's behalf several weeks down the line.

Among those species capable of complex cognition, a wide range of cooperative group behaviors are possible. For example, social predators hunt in packs: bottlenose dolphins will surround a school of fish, force it toward the surface, and take turns eating from it. Some dolphin groups off the coast of Africa even form alliances with fishermen, driving fish into the nets onshore in exchange for part of the catch. Sperm whales will defend themselves by creating a flower formation: vulnerable juveniles are protected in the center, surrounded by a circle of adults who face inward to create a barrier of powerful tails along the perimeter. And perhaps most touchingly, when one odontocete is near death, the others in its group will lift it to the surface to breathe.

We're already well on our way to explaining the moral sense we all share today. One additional idea to consider is that sufficiently advanced social creatures eventually form a culture. Individuals in such societies—and humans especially—are taught to hold certain values and beliefs. We learn them from our parents, from our friends, from our government and media, and even from complete strangers. These cultural values are so heavily reinforced that they become a part of us; this is known as enculturation. This idea may sound a little ominous, but in itself it's neither good nor bad: enculturation simply is.

Along with other values, cultures have a strong tendency to promote moral systems, because they help maintain order and are generally beneficial to society as a whole. These moral systems build upon our hard-wired altruistic and cooperative tendencies. Religion is one common source of moral values, but morality need not be so formal and ritualized. For example, the people of Scandinavia are largely nonreligious, but they seem by any measure to be just as moral as people in religious countries.

These phenomena give us a reasonably detailed understanding of the origin of morality in humans and other animals. However, it's important to realize that by explaining the evolutionary and cultural origins of morality, I'm not trying to derive an ought from an is. While these concepts tell us why we are moral, they say nothing in themselves about why we should be moral, or what moral truth is from an objective standpoint (if such a thing exists). These questions are better suited to philosophers, and I hope to examine them in depth—but that's for another day.

(Aside: I learned much of this information from a course I took on animal cognition. Book learnin' really can come in handy!)

The 10 Commandments, Version 1.5

The Ten Commandments are undoubtedly the best-known moral instructions in the entire Bible. Some Christians exalt them as the basis from which we get our laws, and even insist that we have statues of the two ancient tablets in front of our nation's secular courthouses. Yet in terms of their actual usefulness in regulating human morality, they're really a mixed bag. Here's a summary:

1. You shall not have any other gods than Yahweh.
2. You shall not make any carved images (i.e. idols).
3. You shall not take Yahweh's name in vain.
4. Keep the Sabbath day holy by refraining from work.
5. Honor your father and mother.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not lie.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or possessions.

Some are great commandments, others not so much. Ebon Musings has an essay in response to them entitled "The New Ten Commandments" that lays out ten completely new commands for the modern world. All of them are great, but they got me thinking: we don't even have to totally rewrite the Ten Commandments in order to massively improve them. A little tweaking could go a long way. This is what I might expect to find if the Bible was really an inspired book:

1. Respect Yahweh and have no other gods than him.
2. You shall not persecute those who do not follow Yahweh.
3. You shall not own other humans as slaves.
4. You shall not kill or mistreat animals unnecessarily, or sacrifice them.
5. Honor your parents except in cases of abuse.
6. You shall not kill humans except in self-defense.
7. You shall not commit rape or adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not lie with the intent of causing harm.
10. You shall not treat others as inferior due to race, gender or sexual orientation.

Now let's take a look at what I changed. First I condensed the four God-related commands into one. Even if Yahweh actually existed, things like not taking his name in vain and honoring the Sabbath shouldn't be anywhere near that high on the list of important commands. Of course Yahweh still shouldn't be respected if he goes on killing sprees. But I wanted to keep the new set of commandments plausibly religious, and it's still an improvement overall. To balance this out, I made the next one a command against religious persecution. The two after that are meant to explicitly forbid two of the worst elements of the Old Testament: slavery and animal sacrifice.

I only needed to make relatively minor changes to the next bunch. Honoring one's parents is a good sentiment, but it could be misused to apply even to extreme cases. I made the "kill" commandment less vague by forbidding all cases except self-defense (which could apply to defensive wars as well). Adultery, while certainly immoral, pales in comparison to the evil of rape. I couldn't think of any obvious scenarios where it would unambiguously acceptable to steal, so that's the only commandment I left untouched.

I added "with the intent of causing harm" to the ninth commandment to allow for "white lies" that avoid offending people, and for scenarios such as lying to Nazis to hide Jews. And finally, as others have pointed out in the past, coveting isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, it's an extremely useful trait in a capitalist society. I replaced it with a broad commandment against racism, sexism and homophobia—wiping out centuries of intolerance against countless groups with just one sentence.

Are my revised Ten Commandments perfect? Certainly not—nor are they meant to be. But as with my reworked version of Genesis 1, I would expect an omniscient and all-good God to come up with something even better than a lowly human could. The fact that I could improve upon the holy commandments of the Almighty so easily suggests that they are not, in fact, what they claim to be.

The Euthyphro Dilemma

Before I begin writing about how and why unbelievers are moral, I want to show why a Christian-style God cannot serve as an acceptable objective moral standard. The simplest way to do this is by using the Euthyphro dilemma. It was first posed about 2,400 years ago in Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, and to this day there is no well-accepted solution to the problem. Here it is:

"Why are God's commandments morally good? Does He command them because they are good, or are they good because He commands them?"

Let's start by considering the first option. If God commands things because they are good, then God is no longer the objective standard by which goodness is measured. It would mean that morality exists completely apart from and above God, and that God obediently follows whatever it says just as believers follow what God says. It would also mean that unbelievers could in principle bypass God and derive their moral system directly from the source.

The first option is unacceptable to most Christians because it robs God of his moral authority and makes him subservient to an external standard. However, in my opinion the second option (known as divine command theory) is worse. If God's commands are good only because they are commanded by God, then they are completely arbitrary. (At this point the theist may object: "They're not arbitrary! God has good reasons for commanding the things that he does!" But if this is the case, then those "good reasons" are the true moral standard, not God, which leads us back to the first option.)

The implication is that if God happened to make some other commands, they would be equally as good as the current ones. For example, if he commanded us to run around raping and torturing innocent people on the street, then to do so would be not only acceptable, but required as a moral good—and to prevent such acts would be morally evil. To put it another way, suppose that God happened to command whatever it is that Satan would most want God to command. This version of God would essentially be Satan in a God costume—the very embodiment of what Christians consider to be evil—and yet each command that he made would just as righteous and good as God's current commands. Furthermore, if goodness is defined as "whatever God commands," then the claim "God is good" no longer has any real meaning.

What's remarkable is that some people actually accept this abhorrent option. On his blog, Christian apologist Vox Day received the following question:

If your god revealed to you in a set of flawless communications you could not dispute that you should kill every child you see under the age of 2, would you?

He responded:

"I don't see what the problem is ... The answer is yes, and how would you possibly take issue with that position regardless of whether you believe in my god or don't believe in any god?

"If I am correct that my God is the Creator God, that we are all his creations, then killing every child under two on the planet is no more inherently significant than a programmer unilaterally wiping out his AI-bots in a game universe. He alone has the right to define right and wrong, and as the Biblical example of King Saul and the Amalekites demonstrates, He has occasionally deemed it a moral duty to wipe out a people.

"And as we are informed in Revelation, He will wipe out many peoples through the acts of (presumably) His angels. Jefferson [the questioner] can complain that this makes God unworthy of worship all he likes, but that's as irrelevant as complaining that Stalin wasn't properly elected according to the Soviet Constitution. Although in this case it isn't might makes right, it is a much simpler case of might = right. Obey or perish."

Wiping out babies like AIs in a video game. Might equals right. Obey or perish. This is the reasoning that divine command morality leads to. It should go without saying that this moral system is unacceptable. The very fact that some people can condone this is a testament to how terrifying and destructive religious morality can be.

Some theists have tried to concoct another solution to the problem: they say the things God commands are morally good because goodness is inherent not in God's commandments but in his nature. But this is no solution at all, for we can simply ask: Is the goodness of God's nature based on an external standard, or would God's nature be good no matter what that nature happened to be? These two options have exactly the same implications as they do in the original dilemma.

As a last resort, theists may say, "Well, it's a moot question, since God's nature won't change anyway." With that, they breathe a sigh of relief and consider the issue settled. But refusing to accept hypothetical questions doesn't make them go away. And even if we blindly accept the claim that God will never change, I must ask: Why do the theists seem so relieved about this? It's almost as though they place importance upon their morals quite apart from their supposed foundation in God's nature. Could it be that they, like unbelievers, in fact operate primarily according to non-religious ethics?

Some theists say unbelievers are "moral parasites" who co-opt religious ethics for their own ends. But I think it's quite the opposite: instead, it is theists who have taken our innate capacity for empathy and tacked on some heavily flawed laws and rituals, then claimed the entire system originated from an unfalsifiable almighty being.