I am a Christian. I don't think ordo amoris is quite right. I do entertain the possibility that God has put people in my path in order for me to help them, so for example when a lady asks me for a ride home from Church, I don't think, "Oh, no, I should take the $0.35 this ride will cost me and send it to an effective charity instead" - although partly that's of course because I wouldn't do it. And I do donate some locally (and give to people who ask me) even though my money could do more good overseas.
Re: alcohol, I like the Chesterston story where a man on the street asked him for money and he gave it. When Chesterton's friend said, "You know he's just going to spend it on drink," Chesterton replied, "Well that's all I was going to do with it!"
Yes, being truly good is frightening. I also think it's required of me and will eventually be enforced, so that's fun. I make more than the medium income where I live, and I donate money, but not so much that I go down to even the median (much less into actual poverty). What's my excuse for that? Absolutely nothing. Surely my duty to care for myself doesn't require me to buy a lot of the things I want and go on vacations while children die of preventable malaria. One can't really imagine looking God in the face and saying, "I figured 10% was adequate and I could just enjoy the rest of this." And yet here we are. There's nothing to be done except to continue to try, or at least, to try to try, or to try to want to try.
Thanks for sharing that quote! Chesterton can be delightfully witty sometimes. And thank you for your thoughts on charity. I sympathise with trying to want to try! I like to trick myself by slowly increasing donations over time, with larger increases when my income has increased, in the hope that I'll just find it normal that the money goes out and not register it as unusual. "Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing," indeed...
I don't think this is as charitable as one might aspire to.
Just from what you posted in parts I and II, the "ordo amoris" argument was raised specifically relating to immigration, you pivoted that to the relatively unrelated PEPFAR argument, mostly I imagine because "ordo amoris" is easy to defend in immigration scenarios and difficult to defend in childhood AIDs cases.
From what I can see, Trump's team have granted a waiver for PEPFAR and intend to allow it to continue, the primary concern is all the chaos and disruption this caused. (1) That's unfortunate, sincerely, but we're not in a situation where good faith governance is possible by either party. They uncovered plenty of...uncomfortable stuff in USAID, certainly from their perspective. How would you have preferred them to do this?
Maybe I'm missing something. I certainly haven't studied this closely. But:
If this argument is made on immigration grounds, is it nearly as strong?
If this argument is made on PEPFAR grounds, what more can you reasonably ask for in an extremely low-trust political and governance situation other than the administration to grant a waiver and try to secure PEPFAR, which, as far as I can tell, they did?
As I said in the piece, what I would have had them do is whitelist the obviously good stuff, particularly where lives are at stake. Failing that, I would have them turn the funding back on, immediately, for everything they have granted a “waiver” to. Failing that, they could acknowledge the funding problem and give a timetable for when it will be solved. I do not trust them with this and I think continued pressure is probably necessary in order to save lives.
I wasn’t intending this piece to be about immigration, and I do in fact belong to the school of thought that concern for the welfare of the state as an entity can outweigh concern for prospective immigrants to some extent. I’m not a hard-line open borders advocate. The “ordo amoris” thing has rapidly cross-pollinated to USAID in the discourse that I’ve seen, so I wanted to emphasise that Vance is not responsible for its use relative to USAID while noting that he introduced the term.
By *signaling* and giving time for things to be changed or taking the program down. You even noted that people care about the chaos and disruption, this would negate that. Come up with a plan to wind down the programs and there would be far less room to complain. I get it, Trump/Musk/whoever has an ideological axe to grind with PEPFAR wants it dead today, not in 2 months, but they deserve the ire if they choose to make that tradeoff in favor of killing it immediately, not in X days or whatever.
There are many things that Trump and the insane people he surrounds himself with could do that I would genuinely applaud that aren't against their ideologies, but they could only do that if they took the time to understand the problems and went at them with scalpels and anesthesia, not sledgehammers to the skull.
> Personally, when I started giving to beggars, I did it out of spite.
I think this is more common than most think. I'm a kind of civil servant in government right now. As much as I've come to see my work as a craft worth devoting myself to for the betterment of the world, the thing that's really driven me to push myself to new heights of skill is anger that people at my office weren't doing their jobs as well as they could and the need to prove them wrong. Worse than that, I strove to outdo them because I believed I was better than them and wanted them to know it. I bought books, badgered my boss for training funds, and enrolled in masters degree courses with my own money just to learn the right way to do their job. My contributions to my local wildlife research institute have been mostly fueled by contempt.
Taken seriously, there are few things more worth fearing. You're right that it's a lot easier when you've got the built-in process to deal with it.
>If you think of all your moral obligations as being, on some level, voluntarily taken on, then perhaps it leaves more room for meta-cognitive reasoning
It is quite a heavy assumption that they *are* voluntarily taken on.
To the contrary, I think most secular universalists like Scott have extremely strong innate drives to universalist moral obligation. Some details may be voluntary, but I doubt he could say "I've done more than 99.9% of people, I can retire" any more than he could stop breathing.
Like the prize-winning mathematician saying anyone can learn what he does if they get comfortable being stuck, you might be underestimating the possibility that many people don't have that meta-reasoning skill.
I am a Christian. I don't think ordo amoris is quite right. I do entertain the possibility that God has put people in my path in order for me to help them, so for example when a lady asks me for a ride home from Church, I don't think, "Oh, no, I should take the $0.35 this ride will cost me and send it to an effective charity instead" - although partly that's of course because I wouldn't do it. And I do donate some locally (and give to people who ask me) even though my money could do more good overseas.
Re: alcohol, I like the Chesterston story where a man on the street asked him for money and he gave it. When Chesterton's friend said, "You know he's just going to spend it on drink," Chesterton replied, "Well that's all I was going to do with it!"
Yes, being truly good is frightening. I also think it's required of me and will eventually be enforced, so that's fun. I make more than the medium income where I live, and I donate money, but not so much that I go down to even the median (much less into actual poverty). What's my excuse for that? Absolutely nothing. Surely my duty to care for myself doesn't require me to buy a lot of the things I want and go on vacations while children die of preventable malaria. One can't really imagine looking God in the face and saying, "I figured 10% was adequate and I could just enjoy the rest of this." And yet here we are. There's nothing to be done except to continue to try, or at least, to try to try, or to try to want to try.
Thanks for sharing that quote! Chesterton can be delightfully witty sometimes. And thank you for your thoughts on charity. I sympathise with trying to want to try! I like to trick myself by slowly increasing donations over time, with larger increases when my income has increased, in the hope that I'll just find it normal that the money goes out and not register it as unusual. "Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing," indeed...
I don't think this is as charitable as one might aspire to.
Just from what you posted in parts I and II, the "ordo amoris" argument was raised specifically relating to immigration, you pivoted that to the relatively unrelated PEPFAR argument, mostly I imagine because "ordo amoris" is easy to defend in immigration scenarios and difficult to defend in childhood AIDs cases.
From what I can see, Trump's team have granted a waiver for PEPFAR and intend to allow it to continue, the primary concern is all the chaos and disruption this caused. (1) That's unfortunate, sincerely, but we're not in a situation where good faith governance is possible by either party. They uncovered plenty of...uncomfortable stuff in USAID, certainly from their perspective. How would you have preferred them to do this?
Maybe I'm missing something. I certainly haven't studied this closely. But:
If this argument is made on immigration grounds, is it nearly as strong?
If this argument is made on PEPFAR grounds, what more can you reasonably ask for in an extremely low-trust political and governance situation other than the administration to grant a waiver and try to secure PEPFAR, which, as far as I can tell, they did?
(1) https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/trump-administration-throws-u-s-aids-support-into-turmoil
As I said in the piece, what I would have had them do is whitelist the obviously good stuff, particularly where lives are at stake. Failing that, I would have them turn the funding back on, immediately, for everything they have granted a “waiver” to. Failing that, they could acknowledge the funding problem and give a timetable for when it will be solved. I do not trust them with this and I think continued pressure is probably necessary in order to save lives.
I wasn’t intending this piece to be about immigration, and I do in fact belong to the school of thought that concern for the welfare of the state as an entity can outweigh concern for prospective immigrants to some extent. I’m not a hard-line open borders advocate. The “ordo amoris” thing has rapidly cross-pollinated to USAID in the discourse that I’ve seen, so I wanted to emphasise that Vance is not responsible for its use relative to USAID while noting that he introduced the term.
By *signaling* and giving time for things to be changed or taking the program down. You even noted that people care about the chaos and disruption, this would negate that. Come up with a plan to wind down the programs and there would be far less room to complain. I get it, Trump/Musk/whoever has an ideological axe to grind with PEPFAR wants it dead today, not in 2 months, but they deserve the ire if they choose to make that tradeoff in favor of killing it immediately, not in X days or whatever.
There are many things that Trump and the insane people he surrounds himself with could do that I would genuinely applaud that aren't against their ideologies, but they could only do that if they took the time to understand the problems and went at them with scalpels and anesthesia, not sledgehammers to the skull.
> Personally, when I started giving to beggars, I did it out of spite.
I think this is more common than most think. I'm a kind of civil servant in government right now. As much as I've come to see my work as a craft worth devoting myself to for the betterment of the world, the thing that's really driven me to push myself to new heights of skill is anger that people at my office weren't doing their jobs as well as they could and the need to prove them wrong. Worse than that, I strove to outdo them because I believed I was better than them and wanted them to know it. I bought books, badgered my boss for training funds, and enrolled in masters degree courses with my own money just to learn the right way to do their job. My contributions to my local wildlife research institute have been mostly fueled by contempt.
Beautiful post, as ever.
>Are you scared of becoming a good person?
Taken seriously, there are few things more worth fearing. You're right that it's a lot easier when you've got the built-in process to deal with it.
>If you think of all your moral obligations as being, on some level, voluntarily taken on, then perhaps it leaves more room for meta-cognitive reasoning
It is quite a heavy assumption that they *are* voluntarily taken on.
To the contrary, I think most secular universalists like Scott have extremely strong innate drives to universalist moral obligation. Some details may be voluntary, but I doubt he could say "I've done more than 99.9% of people, I can retire" any more than he could stop breathing.
Like the prize-winning mathematician saying anyone can learn what he does if they get comfortable being stuck, you might be underestimating the possibility that many people don't have that meta-reasoning skill.