Demanding Moral Theories Aren't Too Demanding

Would you give up your life to save 100 people? Probably most wouldn’t, some would (or at least say they would). But now imagine that you could save 100 lives at unclear net cost, so that it isn’t even clear if doing so would make your life worse. It might make it better. Surely you’d do that? I solemnly swear that we are currently living in thought experiment land, and so nothing you say here will have any implications for how you act in the real world.

In fact, I lied (we utilitarians get to do that). The real world is a place where you can save a bunch of lives at unclear personal cost, such that doing so might make your life better. The way to do that is to give a sizeable chunk of your wealth to effective charities. Being charitable makes people happier, in general, so it isn’t even so clear that this would be a cost.

A common complain raised against effective altruists, vegans, and utilitarians is that our moral theory is much too demanding. It demands that you give away all your excess wealth in order to help foreigners or sometimes eat tofu instead of steak. This, it is claimed, is very counterintuitive. Can morality really demand so much of us?

But overlooked in this analysis is the moral theories praised for being non-demanding really are demanding. They simply place demands on other people. It is demanding to require us to give some of our money to effective charities. But it is also demanding if morality requires the beneficiaries of those charities to die at a young age so we don’t have to give away money. It requires they make the ultimate sacrifice, instead of us make a small sacrifice.

This becomes easier to grok if you imagine yourself as the beneficiary of the charities, rather than the person giving to the charities. Imagine that you were going to get tortured unless some distant alien spend a few minutes filling out a form. Would it seem justified for them not to do it, on grounds it was too demanding? No! It’s too demanding for you to have to be tortured, not for them to have to do something about it! Toby Ord put this point extremely well:

Suppose we did take the overdemandingness objection at face value and thereby reject the

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