The Levite – Practicing Affective Altruism

The fourth lecture will consider another significant objection to the love ethic, namely that in its focus on attention and emotional vulnerability, it causes agents to abnegate responsibility for the consequences of their decisions. The love ethic requires us to be “interruptible” in our tasks and to pay attention to the needs of others in noncompetitive ways. There is a significant worry that such an approach to ethics renders us wasteful and inefficient. The two denarii that the Samaritan spent on the night at the inn represented roughly a week’s worth of wages for a middle class person in that period. For that amount, the Samaritan could have funded projects to make the road safer for many other travelers.

We’ll develop the objections to the love ethic from rationalism, using the character of the Levite as a stand-in for one who approaches the ethics of philanthropy from this rationalist framework. I’ll argue that the Samaritan love ethic challenges the assumptions about control and attention that are central to rationalist arguments. And I’ll defend the role of vulnerability and proximity in philanthropy while rejecting defenses of partiality that are common in modern virtue ethics. I’ll develop an alternative to Effective Altruism, inspired by the Samaritan love ethic, which I call Affective Altruism.

All are welcome to attend the lectures, but please register at: https://tinyurl.com/wildelectures4