The things we owe each other

There's an ancient Chinese proverb (or at least, a line from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo about an ancient Chinese proverb) saying that, if you save a person's life, you're responsible for it forever. On the face of it, this makes no sense. Having made them a gift of their own life, you should, it seems, be able in good conscience to walk away. What they do with it afterwards is up to them.

But what strikes me about this proverb is rather how intuitively sensible it feels. No one in Vertigo demands to know why this is so, or dismisses it as nonsense, and I've never known anyone in real life to react that way either. Owing someone your life isn't like owing them 50 dollars. It means something.

And the reason why, it seems to me, is that this isn't a debt that's meant to be repaid. You don't ordinarily save a person's life in the expectation that they'll later be in a position to save yours, or to offer anything of comparable value. You expect that they'll be in your debt forever. There will always be this relationship between you-- and not at all a relationship of equality.

I come to be thinking about all this because of a mild surprise I had this morning. About two years ago I did (what I thought of as) a minor favor for a man I didn't really know. A small sum of money changed hands, a couple emails were sent, and after that I didn't think much of it. Just today, I got a message from him saying that he hasn't forgotten me, or what he promised me-- which is a bit embarrassing, seeing as I'd all but forgotten him, and had no recollection of his having promised me anything at all. I feel like I should have remembered. I feel like I owe him that much. But it hardly makes sense that I owe him something; I never even intended for him to owe me anything. Without meaning to, without even realizing it, I became someone he felt accountable to, and by whatever obscure human mechanism is operating in the Chinese proverb, that means I have an obligation to him as well.

It's not a tremendous obligation, I don't think. If anything, it's the same obligation I have to everyone else: the obligation to notice him as a person, and treat him how I'd like to be treated. But it feels much more weighty and serious, I suppose, because I've realized that, in a way, I have power over him. Power is supposed to come with responsibility, and it almost always does.

This made me think that, of all the unequal relationships in the world, debt is maybe the least humane in this respect: all the power is on one side, and all the responsibility on the other.

--

Obligation must be as old as people, but debt-- quantified debt, the kind that can be exactly measured and tracked over great distances in time and space, between any two people in the world-- is a modern innovation, something that needs currencies and accounting to work. If I owe you 50 dollars, and I pay you 50 dollars, the debt is annihilated, and indeed there is no longer any necessary connection between us at all. We don't have to care about each other for this to work; we don't even have to be introduced; we just have to agree on the concept of 50 dollars. This has some major upsides: it lets resources flow freely, and it allows people to be (at least nominally) free and equal, even-steven, owing nothing to anybody.

This is in contrast to the kind of obligation that subsists between family, or friends, or doctor and patient, or teacher and student, or maybe between the two people in the Chinese proverb. These obligations aren't precisely measured or ever fully discharged. There is no limit to what they can demand of us. But their big advantage is that they're generally understood to run both ways. When they're unequal, they acknowledge the inequality. They are thou-relationships between whole people.

I worry about the exercise of power without a thou-relationship. I don't say that it's inherently oppressive, but it's certainly risky. And so I worry about debt, and what it means for us that our society relies so much on it.

Showing vs Telling

So I just started watching Blue Planet on Netflix. It starts off with David Attenborough convincingly describing the size of a blue whale:

Dwarfed by the vast expanse of the open ocean, the biggest animal that has ever lived on our planet: A blue whale, 30 meters long and weighing over 200 tonnes. It’s far bigger than even the biggest dinosaur. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant; its heart is the size of a car; and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them. Its tail, alone, is the width of a small aircraft’s wings.

Whereas I would've been tempted to say something like:  

Blue whales are really fucking big, you guys. These are monstrous motherfuckers. So big, you just would not believe.

 Of course, that's because I'm not a very good writer. I've been struggling with this in my med school apps; I can tell my essays tend to be very abstract and thinky, without enough impact and incident. But thinking of specific examples is hard!

On Doing Good by Stealth

A book I've been rereading makes much of how its heroine "does good by stealth." It's a popular idea, of course, and one I'd accepted until recently, but I'm a bit skeptical of it these days. Since becoming involved with Giving What We Can, I've made my giving more public-- and I've also been giving a good bit more. Is doing good by stealth really so great? It feels more virtuous, I suppose because it is-- it requires more real altruism to help others without the reputation gains and warm fuzzies that come with social recognition. But is it, in the end, more helpful? It may or may not be, I think, depending on the situation.

One test is whether the beneficiary of your help would want you to keep quiet, or to tell others. If the person you’re helping is known to you and nearby, it may be convenient simply to ask them whether they want you to talk about helping them. Of course, a person you’ve helped might feel obligated to let you enjoy the social benefits of your kindness, even if it harms their own reputation by, for example, making them look weak.  You’ll have to ask very carefully-- or it might be better not to ask at all, and default to confidentiality, only asking if there are strong arguments in favor of telling others.

But if the person or persons you’re helping are far away and not easy to ask, you’ll probably have no choice but to infer their preferences. This is the situation I find myself in with respect to the charities I support: the people helped by donations to AMF and SCI are far away, many, unknown to me, often young children, and basically hard to ask in almost every possible way. I can infer some things-- they’re probably less concerned about their reputation with my friends (rich Americans they’ve never heard of) than a nearer, known person would be, and anyway, my friends probably already think of poor children in the developing world as objects of charity, when they think of them at all. So it seems to me I should feel less compunction about telling on that account.

Another issue to consider is the effect that talking about giving, or not talking about it, will have on the giver. If telling people that I just gave to charity gives me warm fuzzies, I’m prepared to accept that as an absolute good-- I’m broadly in favor of warm fuzzies. But more than that, will it make me more likely, or less likely, to give more in the future? It seems on the face of it that rewarding myself for giving will make me want to give more, which would be a win. I should also consider the effects on my self-image: trivial acts that change my self-image may have large, predictable effects on my future behavior. Cialdini says that to be most effective in changing self-image and behavior, these "commitments" should be "active, public and effortful," and force the actor to "take inner responsibility for their actions." Giving What We Can's pledge seems designed to take advantage of these effects to encourage future giving.

(On the other hand, if I think that doing good by stealth is more altruistic, maybe I should keep quiet, to prove to myself that I'm a genuinely good person? If I believe I'm doing good partly for social kudos, I may not take "inner responsibility" for my commitment to give.)

If I talk about giving regularly, I’ll begin to get a reputation as a charitable person, which seems as though it would also encourage more giving. But is this true? I’m reminded of psychology research that shows that the satisfaction of talking about a goal can substitute for the satisfaction of making progress toward the goal, so that we’re actually less likely to achieve goals we talk about. Maybe if I talk too much about giving, the talking will begin to substitute for the giving?

Once we begin to discuss giving publicly, we bring third parties into the transaction, so we have to consider our effects on them too. If I talk more about giving to charity, will others give more, or less? GWWC encourages members to pledge publicly, in part, to spread the word. This makes sense to me; many people probably just don't realize how much good effective philanthropy can do, and will give more once they understand that they can realistically save thousands of lives by doing so. They also talk about forming a "community of givers" who can encourage each other and share information about effective giving. I think there's a plausible argument to be made, too, that when I talk about giving, I contribute to a forming social expectation that people like me should give more.


That points to a potential negative effect, though: guilt. Often, when GWWC is mentioned in the media or on blogs, I see commenters saying things like "That's nice, but most people just can't afford to give that much." These comments feel defensive to me, as if by publicly declaring our intent to give, GWWC members are shaming others for not giving more. On a basic level, I don't like making people feel bad; more, I'm afraid it may be counterproductive. I suspect there's another blog post to be written about that problem.