Failing to say things is often blameworthyThere was a popular 2016-era slogan that went “silence is violence.” Normally, those who uttered the slogan would have some pet issue—probably having to do with race and gender—and suggest that if you didn’t talk about it at length, and share their exact views on the subject, you were behaving badly. It’s one of an endless cascade of proliferating left-wing slogans that mostly wasn’t very well-thought-out and was primarily deployed because it rhymed.Nonetheless, I think the slogan is basically right. Failing to discuss certain subjects is often morally culpable. In fact, I think most of us are morally culpable for failing to discuss important issues.We all recognize that in some cases, failing to speak is morally culpable. Suppose you see a child drowning and you can alert someone else who would then save the child’s life. However, you fail to do this because you don’t want to interrupt your dinner conversation (about anthropics, no less!). This is obviously immoral. In cases where discussing a subject is only minimally costly and brings about some large good, one should discuss that subject.Note that this applies pretty much whatever the speech act is. If a child was drowning, and the only way to save him was by peer pressuring the life-guard into saving him, you’d obviously be morally required to peer pressure the life-guard. From these cases, we should take away the following general principle: one is culpable for failing to say stuff if the expected consequence of one failing to say the stuff is very bad. This follows from the more general principle that if you can, you should prevent terrible things from happening at minimal cost. Seems obvious enough!
>>519372025Here is the bad news: from this is follows that nearly all of us engage in morally culpable speech omissions a lot of the time.Let’s begin with the most obvious case: writers! It turns out that if a person donates 5,000 dollars https://www.givewell.org/ to an effective charity, one fewer person will die. Most people are not aware of this fact and if they are, they mostly ignore it because it has inconvenient implications. By writing about this subject, one can direct lots of excess money to effective charities. Several people signed a pledge https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-just-took-the-giving-what-we to give away 10% of their incomes to amazingly effective charities after I wrote an article urging them to do so.So by writing a blog post, if you’re an influential writer, you can probably raise thousands of expected dollars for effective charities. This means that writing a blog post about this can save around a Whole Entire Human Life. If one is required to say things if doing so prevents something very bad, and a person dying is very bad, then it seems influential writers are morally required to write about effective giving with decent frequency. As an analogy, if you knew one of your readers was next to a pond where a child was drowning, and by sending out an email to all your readers you could alert him and save the child’s life, you’d be obligated to do that.Quite a few influential bloggers read this blog. To their credit, a lot of them write about effective charities. But of those who don’t, they almost certainly should. By writing an article urging effective donation, they can probably save several lives. And even if you already write about effective giving sometimes, you should probably write about it even more! The marginal article about effective giving prevents lots of terrible things from happening, so you should write it!
>>519372145This is only considering the impact of writing about charities that help humans. By writing about the charities helping animals, you can save staggeringly large numbers of animals. My shrimp article https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think convinced people to give enough money to spare about 600 million shrimp https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-all-helped-hundreds-of-millions?utm_source=publication-search from a painful death. Now, probably most articles at the margins won’t be that effective but by pretty conservative estimates, blog posts about shrimp welfare could spare millions of shrimp from a painful death. A 100 dollar donation saves about 1.5 million shrimp from a painful death—for reference, there are only around 500,000 people in Wyoming. Probably it would be morally obligatory to write a blog post if doing so saved 1.5 million shrimp from excruciating pain.But what if you’re not a big-shot blogger? Well, probably you are similarly culpable in your conversational omissions. By making the case for important causes to the people around you, you can often convince people to spend their money and careers on those important causes. By talking to your friends about shrimp welfare, it’s not that unlikely that you’ll convince some of them to donate. This spares tens of millions of shrimp, in expectation. You shouldn’t just do good things—you should try to convince others to do the same.
>>519372223So, are those annoying lefty academics right that silence is violence? Certainly they are right that being silent is sometimes morally culpable. Their error was normally that the causes they were trying to get people to talk about were causes on which individuals couldn’t make important differences—on which talking about the subject accomplished little more than signaling tribal affiliation. Failing to Tweet #blacklivesmatter doesn’t make the world worse. Failing to comment on the political issue of a day is not blameworthy. Nothing good would come out of such commentary.But if speaking on a subject really is important, then you should do it. Advocacy is a pretty low-cost way to improve the world. If failing to perform an act causes extra people to die, then it’s wrong. It just so happens that failing to advocate for effective donation causes extra deaths. We live in a morally counterintuitive world where failing to speak up has devastating consequences. In such a world, it is no surprise that silence is violence.
>>519372025what is the link between Chad and Armenia???
>>519372494that's a racist question to ask
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