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This is: Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
Yesterday:
There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone...
If the lawyer needs to work an hour at the soup kitchen to keep himself motivated and remind himself why he's doing what he's doing, that's fine. But he should also be donating some of the hours he worked at the office, because that is the power of professional specialization and it is how grownups really get things done. One might consider the check as buying the right to volunteer at the soup kitchen, or validating the time spent at the soup kitchen.
I hold open doors for little old ladies. I can't actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I'm sure it has, sometime in the last year or so). But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car's interior. I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so. I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car. And finally I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell. And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.
Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify true concern for another's welfare, or fear of guilt for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable. I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn't deduct any penalty points for the others. Just so long as people get helped.
But in my own case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises as to whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others. That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?
The obvious defense—or perhaps, obvious rationalization—is that an act of altruism like this one acts as an willpower restorer, much more efficiently than, say, listening to music. I also mistrust my ability to be an altruist only in theory; I suspect that if I walk past problems, my altruism will start to fade. I've never pushed that far enough to test it; it doesn't seem worth the risk.
But if that's the defense, then my act can't be defended as a good deed, can it? For these are self-directed benefits that I list.
Well—who said that I was defending the act as a selfless good deed? It's a selfish good deed. If it restores my willpower, or if it keeps me altruistic, then there are indirect other-directed benefits from that (or so I believe). You could, of course, reply that you don't trust selfish acts that are supposed to be other-benefiting as an "ulterior motive"; but then I could just as easily respond that, by the same principle, you should just look directly at the original good deed rather than its supposed ulterior motive.
Can I get away with that? That is, can I really get away with calling it a "selfish good deed", and still derive willpower restoration therefrom, rather than feeling guilt about it being selfish? Apparently I can. I'm surprised it works out that way, but it does. So long as I knock to tell them about the open trunk, and so long as the one says "Thank you!", my brain feels like it's done its wonderful good deed for the day.
Your mileage may vary, of course. The problem with trying to work out an art of willpower restoration is that different things seem to work for different people. (That is: We're probing around on the level of surf...
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