A short defense of foreign aid.

USAID is one of the best federal initiatives ever established, being able to save 92 million lives in just 2 decades through HIV/AIDs treatment, malaria prevention, and humanitarian relief—all while taking less than 1% of the federal budget; PEPFAR alone has prevented 26 million unnecessary deaths across 50 countries. If 1% of the federal budget can effectively save the population of Japan from dying every 30 years or the populations of countries like South Korea, Spain, or Argentina from dying every decade, it seems like we have a very strong moral imperative to spend the federal budget on such initiatives.

There are, however, dissidents who attempt to refute the efficacy of “taking other people’s money” for foreign aid in 2 ways:

1. Arguing that not donating to charity is a state of neutrality—harming people is a negative, helping people is a positive, and doing nothing is completely neutral.

2. Arguing against the efficacy of taxing people to send their money towards foreign aid.

Most of the anti-foreign aid camp is made up of rightoids who complain about virtue-signalling and ‘telescopic altruism’ from the other side of the political spectrum, and most of their anti-aid talking points come from relying on haphazard philosophical intuitions or the act-omission distinction. We’ll go over both of these responses in 2 separate sections.

​Most political discourse on the right when it comes to the ethics of saving lives revolves around “killing bad, saving good, so doing nothing neutral”, even though inaction being neutral is completely conditional on bad or good chains of events happening, some of which you have a responsibility and ability to influence (whereas doing something bad is always bad and doing something good is always good, doing nothing is not an action in the first place).

​This is not just within conservative circles—ordinary, politically active people find it appealing to buy into the view that failing to prevent deaths is a state of moral neutrality and not something that people should be held culpable for. If everybody is held to the standard of a murderer for not donating their money to charity, society would be completely soulless and devoid of pleasure, full of people who consume the bare minimum needed to survive. Who would want to live in a world like that?

This response is extremely misguided, and stems from a naive understanding of utilitarianism as a theory that mandates “extreme sacrifice”. If the amount of pleasurable things you have to give up makes you not want to be a utilitarian in the first place, then that hurts the amount you give to effective charities in the long run, which is worse from a utilitarian standpoint! Living on the streets and off of instant noodles is not a life that entices most people to act like good utilitarians.​

A better understanding of utilitarian spending would be a curve—helping very little is morally bad, and you should be giving more, while spending too much forces you to live a life of extreme deprivation, which is going to prevent you from wanting to live this “utilitarian” lifestyle anymore. That’s not the only effect; even if you can tolerate a life of deprivation, others around you can’t and will be discouraged from acting like utilitarians due to how miserable they think your life must be.

Being a good utilitarian simply mandates dedicating some of your resources to improving the welfare of others while keeping enough to maintain a lifestyle where you and others around you are encouraged to act in utilitarian ways and produce the largest impact.

There’s also an omnipresent bias against helping people more effectively when it entails spending money because it erases the human connection within the positive interaction. This is explained away by our moral intuitions being tribalist and skewed towards impartial, selfish judgements—the person receiving your help is getting the same positive and happy emotional reaction from being assisted; it’s just that you don’t get the pleasure of watching positive emotional responses to your actions.

The main philosophical argument levied against the act-omission distinction is that failing to stop an existing chain of actions is fundamentally different from starting a chain of actions yourself—you shouldn’t be killing 1 person to save 5 because it forces that 1 person into an existing chain of events that they have a right to be kept out of; shouldn’t such a right precede calculating the interests of people in a moral decision if some of its constituents shouldn’t be in that decision in the first place?​

Responses like this fail because of their inability to separate intervening factors that alter moral culpability from the discernment of actions and omissions. Deontologists tend to use medical practitioners as an example of acting being different from omitting—I shouldn’t be held responsible for the life of a random patient, but medical personnel are because they have a certain societal contract that designates the responsibility of saving lives to them.

Why does this special obligation exist in the first place?

Because specific people are much better at saving lives than others, which presupposes that people are obligated to go around saving lives—some people are just better at it than others due to how we structure society, so we prioritize letting them do the saving because it produces the best outcomes. If a person was dying in your car, you still have an obligation to save them by driving them to the hospital, so it’s a matter of your ability to access the desired outcome. This response pretty decisively takes out the contractual response.

Sure, if I saw a baby drowning in the Atlantic Ocean, I’m not committing a grave moral offense when refusing to jump in and save him, but that’s because the low epistemic access to saving the baby and my inability to swim in the ocean place this moral scenario outside my range of culpability.

Indicting me in this case would be analogous to holding me guilty of not singlehandedly stopping a genocide. If we modified the scenario to have the baby simply drowning in an ordinary bathtub in the middle of the street, all of a sudden I obviously should be morally accountable for not pulling the baby out, despite the mechanism of simply choosing to omit remaining constant.​

That’s because saving a baby drowning in a bathtub takes trivial amounts of effort and is basically guaranteed to induce the desired moral outcome. Effective foreign aid programs are basically that! Malaria nets treated with insecticide are only $5, measles vaccines are only $10, and many quality-of-life improvements can save millions of lives for only a few bucks each (whether or not a medication ends up being a life-saving one due to your specific contribution is up to chance). On average, it costs $3,000-5,500 to save a life, and you can do this with basically complete epistemic access.

You could argue that these numbers are statistical aggregations that don’t accurately reflect the amount of intervening factors caused by local health, logistics, and tons of intermediaries, resulting in a completely inconsistent amount of lives saved, but this response also fails to withstand any scrutiny. Once you accept that you have a moral obligation to prevent easily preventable deaths, you can imagine the following scenarios:

1. 10 people each donate an equal sum to a machine. The machine takes $1,000 from each person and uses it to directly save 1 life, such that each person saves a life for $1,000.

2. 10 people each donate an equal sum to a different machine. The machine takes $1,000 from each person, shuffles the sum into a budget of $10,000, and uses that budget to save 10 different people at various costs.

If you have an obligation to donate to machine A, you should have an obligation to donate to machine B, regardless of whether or not your specific amount produces a guaranteed, scalar outcome.

​Another objection to spending funds from taxes on charity is that it’s inappropriate to unconsensually force other people to donate their money to charity. A person who wants to give to charity can simply give to charity themselves without pestering the people who choose not to spend their money that way. Maybe it’s just not the purpose of a government to proactively intervene in foreign areas with the hope of saving lives.

​If all of California experienced a catastrophic famine where the only way to stop all 42 million people from dying was to spend 1% of the federal budget per year for 9 years on assisting the inhabitants of California, refusing to spend that 1% for just shy of a decade would qualify as a failure of the government and a grave moral sin. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because we have an unconditional reason to save and improve lives, especially when doing so incurs little personal cost—wait, no, it has to be the fact that nation-states have a moral obligation only to their constituents who are socially bound to them that provides the sole, conditional moral reason for why failing to treat domestic crises is bad!

​This response about governmental contracts and selective obligations also doesn’t hold water; imagine if Mexico was ravaged by a famine that threatened to wipe out 9 million of its inhabitants closest to the U.S.-Mexico border if the U.S didn’t make a one-time payment of 1/50th the yearly federal budget to rectify the famine. Obviously, it seems completely wrong to levy the fact that the U.S. government only has a social contract with people living inside of the U.S. as an excuse not to give aid.

​Arbitrary changes in regulations and nation-states shouldn’t change such a moral obligation, since such a discernment can be made in the Mexico scenario. It seems more intuitive when the people who need assistance are in closer proximity to us because of our inability to empathize with other humans who are spatially remote, as the only thing that changes between giving aid to a different nation right across the border and a different nation half the world away is the distance from us.