Many careers guides and agencies suggest that ethically minded folks go into the nonprofit sector. And some use the phrase ‘ethical careers’ as a near-synonym for charity work. Of course, some charity workers do a lot of good. But there seem to be many career options that do at least as much good as charity workers. Why, then, do people love charity workers?
In this post, I discuss one possible explanation for the conventional wisdom about ethical careers: I suspect that many people implicitly view the extent of self-sacrifice required by our choices as a proxy for the moral value of our choices. Some of my altruistically minded friends are initially puzzled by the idea that (say) secretarial work can be more choice-worthy than charity work because the former can help important people do vastly more good.
While they don’t make this idea explicit, I think their tendency is to assume that jobs demanding greater self-sacrifice must be morally better. People may be disposed to hold this kind of view, in part, because our positive reactions to friend-favoring altruism might not be sensitive to effectiveness, and because doing the right thing often involves sacrificing one’s own interests. But morality and self-sacrifice do not always coincide.
In the context of career choice, morality and self-sacrifice come apart. Aid workers have an extremely demanding job, with low salaries, cruel realities, and (in extreme cases) high rates of mental problems. But many individual aid workers typically don’t make much of a difference, since their jobs are often replaceable. If it’s morally important to make a difference, then self-sacrifice here is a poor guide to moral choice.
Morality and self-sacrifice may come apart in other contexts as well. Donating 10 percent of your income to one of the most cost-effective charities may do more good than donating all of your money to one of the least cost-effective charities. Although the latter option is more self-sacrificial, it may be morally bankrupt.(1) And, to use an uncontroversial example, you needn’t throw yourself onto a grenade if no one else is near enough to be in danger.
Self-sacrifice is not sufficient for morality, because some selfless acts don’t do enough good. And it’s not always necessary, since the right thing to do is sometimes in our interest. While self-sacrifice is importantly related to altruism, the correlation is clearly imperfect. People who enjoy finance and find the business world fascinating should be glad to learn that they can make the world a much better place as a professional philanthropist, without giving up their self-interested motivation.
I think that conflating morality with self-sacrifice may explain, in part, why some altruistically minded people are initially puzzled by the idea that becoming a banker could be morally better than becoming an aid worker. In a forthcoming post, I will offer one possible explanation behind the intuition that self-sacrifice is morally important.
(1) Pun intended.
Comments
I want to suggest a challenge to the replaceability argument. When you take a job, say, as an aid worker, the person who otherwise would have been given that job doesn’t disappear from the job market. Let’s imagine a clean, oversimplified model where you’re chosen because your skills are more fitting for the job by some marginal amount than those of the next best person; they then drop down to the next best job for them, and displace someone else there who is slightly less capable than them. For the purposes of argument, let’s assume that they stay within the field of aid, or at least the non-profit sector. Whoever would have taken that job then takes their next best option, and displaces another person who would have been marginally worse than them… this conceivably will happen all the way down the line, a cascading effect for some significant number of jobs. At each point in the sequence, each organization gets someone more talented than they would have otherwise (or else they wouldn’t have hired them). By becoming an aid worker, you thus boost the human capital of all these organizations by some marginal amount.
While demonstrating the consequences of this empirically might be near impossible, you could argue that the expected value of this contribution to the non-profit sector is in the ballpark of the human capital you have to offer in the first place–which would support the more conventional intuition that we don’t necessarily need to consider the replaceability effect when choosing jobs.
A counter argument to this, even if you accept the assumptions of my model, is that you can’t choose where the human capital “boost” goes–presumably it’s distributed throughout a variety of organizations, many of whom may not be nearly as effective as ones you would otherwise donate to. This is definitely a valid argument, although if I’m right, we should still be wary of treating the replaceability argument as the final say in career ethics.
Hey Daniel - I think this is basically right. It’s certainly the case that it’s too simple just to look at the difference between you and the person who replaces you. In general, there’s an ‘iteration effect’ where a whole chain of people switch jobs. The difference you make to some field is probably closer to the difference you make directly and the difference made by the worst person in the field. There are also effects from sliding the higher ability people into other jobs. It’s too simple to say that replaceability means aid workers don’t make a difference. Though, it’s probably correct to say that many aid workers make much less than difference than they think. I’ll be writing a lot more about this in future posts.
Great point! I hope this is one of the things 80k writes about!
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