Strangers Drowning

by Larissa MacFarquhar

How far do you really go to “do unto others”? New Yorker journalist Larissa MacFarquhar reveals the individuals who devote themselves fully to bettering the lives of strangers, even when it comes at great personal cost

There are those of us who help and those who live to help. Larissa MacFarquhar digs deep into the psychological roots and existential dilemmas motivating those rare individuals practicing lives of extreme ethical commitment. The donor who offers up her kidney to a complete stranger; the activist who abandons possessions to devote himself to the cause; the foster parent who adopts dozens of children: such do-gooders inspire us but also force us to question deep-seated notions about what it means to be human. How could these do-gooders value strangers as much as their own loved ones? What does it really take to live a life of extreme virtue? Might it mean making choices as heartbreaking as the one in the old philosophy problem: abandoning a single family member to drown so that two strangers might live?

Strangers Drowning combines real-life stories of unimaginable selflessness along with deep meditations on the shocking implications of these ethical acts.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Book Club, Audiobook, Biography

336 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2015

About the author

Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her Profile subjects have included John Ashbery, Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, Derek Parfit, David Chang, and Aaron Swartz, among many others. She is the author of “Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help” (Penguin Press, 2015). Before joining the magazine, she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review, and wrote for Artforum, The Nation, The New Republic, the Times Book Review, Slate, and other publications. She has received two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and her writing has appeared in The Best American Political Writing (2007 and 2009) and The Best American Food Writing (2008).

(from http://www.newyorker.com/contributors...)

Reviews

[David Sasaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will likely turn out to be one of the ten books that have most shaped my worldview. I've struggled my whole life to find the right balance between duty, altruism and hedonism -- the responsibilities we have toward others, both near and far, and to our own pursuits of pleasure. Like so many others, I suffer from the nagging guilt that I should be more altruistic, but where does that guilt come from and why do I seem feel it more than most? Strangers Drowning by New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar helped me place that guilt into a much larger picture of what it means to be human and what motivates our moral behavior. Where do we draw the lines between what is expected of us and what goes beyond the call of duty? What do we owe ourselves as imperfect humans inspired by art, vanity, ambition and fellowship?

The book's title comes from two moral thought experiments. The first is from ethicist Peter Singer: if you're walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, do you muddy your clothes to save the child's life? Of course you do. Yet, we regularly spend our money on frivolous, unnecessary things when that same money could save the lives of children in far-off places. Singer's argument is compelling; just try reading The Most Good You Can Do without feeling more obligated to help others. MacFarquhar overhears the second thought experiment during a conversation between Jeff McMahan, a moral philosopher at Oxford, and one of his students: should you save the person you love the most from drowning or two strangers? What about three strangers? Three thousand? Three million? Where do we draw the line between whom we love and our responsibility to those we don't know?

MacFarquhar observes that the difference between the drowning child and the distant child is one of duty versus altruism:

To most people, the distance between themselves and another person—physical as well as emotional—is a deep moral fact: it makes a profound difference to their sense of duty. A person who is far away, whom you cannot see or hear, and with whom you have no memories or loyalties in common, cannot compel your help in the same way as a person who is right in front of you, or who is in some sense one of your own. Ignoring the cries of a drowning child is a violation of the most basic kind of compassion; anyone who did that would seem less than human. Cultivating sympathy for unseen and unknown people, on the other hand, seems an abstract, second-order, extra-credit sort of moral emotion—admirable enough, but more than can be required of an ordinary person.

The book is a series of episodic profiles of extremely altruistic individuals whose sense of moral duty inspires both admiration and unease. Why are they so hell-bent on sacrificing all pleasure and tranquility in their own lives out of a sense of moral duty to help others despite their frequent inability to actually do so?

The writing style is unique. Unlike her New Yorker profiles, which pull readers into every detail of the physical features of her subjects, in Strangers Drowning, we're not given even hints of the physical appearances of any of the altruists. Like a movie director, MacFarquhar does everything she can to remove herself from the connection between her subjects' inner mind and her readers' judgement. The effect is an alluring sense of intimacy, and also an unfair impression of objectivity -- as if the portraits of these do-gooders weren't filtered through MacFarquhar's own biases and interpretations.

After profiling three or four altruists, she offers readers a change of pace with a chapter that reflects on the philosophy, psychology, and literary history of altruism. She refuses to criticize or endorse any of her subjects directly. But, whether intentional or not, each reflective chapter is easily interpreted as a condemnation or defense of the individuals profiled before it. (You can read two of the profiles from the book -- about Ittetsu Nemoto, a Buddhist monk and online counselor for suicidal Japanese, and Sue and Hector Badeau, who adopted 20 foster kids in need of a home and help -- on the New Yorker website.)

On the philosophy of altruism

MacFarquhar dives deep into the philosophy of altruism with a focus on the critiques of utilitarianism. She writes:

The philosopher Susan Wolf has written that a morally perfect person would be an unappealing, alien creature, driven not by the loves and delights of ordinary people but by an unnatural devotion to duty. In a life devoted only to duty, there’s no room for art and little for enjoyment. “Morality itself,” she writes, “does not seem to be a suitable object of passion.”

In a world where we're all motivated to help as many others as much as we can, there would be no art, no gourmet food. Arguably, in a world where humans do so much damage to other species, there would be no more humanity.

However, MacFarquhar fails to address an appeal of utilitarianism for many non-religious, cerebral do-gooders. Utilitarianism, the idea that that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about moral right and wrong, offers us a clear moral code that isn't based on natural law or a higher power. She is right that it's a moral code -- like most moral codes -- that is impossible to adhere to. But without it, non-believers are left without any code at all.

On the psychology of altruism

This is the chapter that most disturbed and challenged me. It hit too close to home, and it continues to pester me. Here's MacFarquhar speaking with Lindsay Beyerstein about the role of suffering in altruists and some of the psychological research about altruists she came across in the course of writing the book:

It's the idea that a child who grows up with at least one parent who is non-functional either because he or she is an alcoholic or severely mentally ill, or for some other reason just does not function as a parent. And the idea is that this child may take on the burden of fixing his family. He wants desperately to make everything OK, and he feels it's up to him, and so he may try to become the perfect student, he may do the housework, try to cook the dinner, try to take care of his siblings, even his parents. And the idea is that this child may, when he grows up, feel an outsized sense of moral duty to fix the world in the way that he tried to fix his family when he was a child.

At first I resisted this idea as I had resisted many psychological ideas about altruists because it seems designed to suggest that extreme altruists were mentally unhealthy, that there was something wrong with them, that it was simply a matter of trauma. But then I thought about the people I wrote about in my book, and it certainly is striking that almost every single one of them falls into this category. Almost every single one has a parent who is alcoholic or is severely mentally ill. And, in that sense, I think that particular kind of suffering demonstrably can lead to a true moral commitment.

Most of the chapter surveys decades of psychological theory and research suspecting that the true motivations of altruists is a need to control others.

Selflessness was, in Freud’s view, usually suspect. The devoted, self-sacrificing mother, for instance, he found to be part masochist, part tyrant, enslaving her child with chains of guilt ... Excessive altruism tended to preclude real intimacy with another person, because intimacy was a business of giving and receiving, but the overly moral person could not receive, only give ... The moral narcissist’s extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not.

Others, like science fiction writer David Brin, have suggested that altruists suffer from a "relentless addiction to indignation" -- and, indeed, that seems true of a couple of the subjects of Strangers Drowning. These are the kinds of altruists that we can all agree are the most annoying -- each act of do-gooding is intended as a slap-in-the-face to everyone else. But MacFarquhar concludes the chapter citing more recent studies that have discovered "people for whom helping others was a source of genuine and unconflicted pleasure."

Intentions do matter, we realize. We're left trying to guess the intentions of each of the book's subjects. And our own.

On the literature of altruism

For me, the most interesting and unexpected chapter of the book surveys the treatment of altruists in English literature. "In novels," MacFarquhar writes, "moral extremity and a devotion to abstract ideals are nearly always regarded with suspicion ... it's as if there is something about do-gooders that is repellent to fiction."

There aren't many do-gooders in fiction, which is odd, because many fiction writers, like do-gooders, are driven by moral rage. But most such writers would rather show the thing that enrages them than show a character trying to fix it. You could say that do-gooders are rare in life, so their rarity in realistic fiction is not surprising -- though they are rarer in novels than in real life.

Novelists love to dig into the irrational idiosyncrasies of human behavior driven by lust, desire, fear and ambition. If they were to include highly rational do-gooders, it would only be to deride them for their lack of humanity. Ironically, MacFarquhar's character portraits show that extreme do-gooders, in fact, make for complex characters with compelling stories.

The ego of individualism

After presenting readers with all the critiques and suspicions of do-gooders from the fields of philosophy, psychology and literature, MacFarquhar finally puts her cards on the table and expresses enthusiastic admiration for do-gooders:

What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.

MacFarquhar's writing is so understated, so subtle, that its nuance and complexity are easily glossed over. I know it's a book that will offer more the second time that I read it. In an interview, MacFarquhar said: "I hoped that someone reading the book would have experienced enough uncertainty and bewilderment in the course of reading these lives that they would reflect on something of what they were feeling."

That it certainly does. Mission accomplished.

I only have one critique of the book. MacFarquhar's treatment of altruism and the individuals she chose to profile present a very individualized notion of what it means to do good. This is a critique that has been leveled against a certain breed of altruists by Amia Srinivasan, Lisa Herzog, Martha Nussbaum, and others. Sure, I could sacrifice 80% of my annual salary, live on peanut butter, and send all my money to purchase malaria bed nets, as GiveWell instructs me to. I could then quantify the estimated number of lives that I personally saved based on research by GiveWell and others. But sending over bed nets (or food or medicine or money) is not necessarily the most effective way to "help others." We live in a world of complex problems -- tax justice, climate change, aging populations, automation of employment -- that can only be addressed through institutions, collective action and good old fashioned politics.

We know this to be true, and yet as our economies and societies evolve we retreat from social movements into highly individualized forms of participation, where we seek attribution and recognition for each of our actions. There is a more humble, and arguably more effective, form of altruism, which is to be one of many organizing and advocating for social justice.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

What's the difference between a starving child standing right in front of you and a starving child millions of miles away? What is your duty to other people, to alleviate the world's suffering? How much is fair to ask of yourself and the people who love you when it comes to doing good?

These are some of the big questions that Larissa MacFarquhar's book contemplates, though there are no easy answers. The "do-gooders" in her book are all wildly different in how they approach the question of alleviating suffering, but each of them has one thing in common: They all do WAY more than the average person would even think of doing. They give up more money, more time and more emotional labor, because they feel like they must.

MacFarquhar presents these stories without judgment, and also presents the philosophical arguments for and against do-gooders throughout time. These were almost as fascinating as the personal profiles. I was amazed by the author's ability to write this book so gracefully, weaving arguments and individual stories together without ever taking a strong side. This book made me examine my own feelings and prejudices when it comes to altruism, and though I just finished the book today, I expect to be thinking about the questions the book asks for a long time.

[Philip Yancey]

Most of us live with the haunting sense that we should do more to help the problems of the world. Larissa MacFarquhar profiles ultra-altruists, such as a couple who adopts twenty children, some with special needs; a family that moves into a leprosy colony; a missionary in Latin America; a woman who gives away almost all of her income. Some are motivated by faith, some by humanism. Each story poses important questions that have stayed with me.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an deeply interesting, oddly gripping book, Larissa MacFarquhar's portraits of extreme do-gooders, and ruminations on the meaning, ethical and moral limits, and our response to extreme altruism in many guises. The book's title come from a thought experiment: if you saw a boy drowning in front of you, you'd save him of course, even if he were a stranger to you, it would be morally repugnant if you just walked on by and let him die. But what if you could save a boy in a distant country from drowning (or death from disease, say) by giving some of your money... and you could save a lot MORE boys if you gave almost all of your money? Why is that action so much less expected of us? And, in fact, if you were to do such a thing, to give all or most of your time and/or money to save lots of boys from drowning, why are seen as kind of freakish, and your altruism makes everyone uncomfortable?

So there's all of that to think about, and MacFarquhar is an excellent discussion leader, taking us through the history, philosophy, sociology, other-"y"-words, of the topic. Except for the chapter on why fictional characters are almost NEVER overly altruistic; that part read a little too academic for my tastes.

But the bulk of the book are the amazing real-life stories of people who in fact DO give up everything to help others, often strangers, living lives of what most of us would call extreme deprivation out of deeply ingrained and unquestioned sense of duty, sometimes of a religious nature, sometimes not. The portraits are all very entertaining, vividly told with an admirably neutral (but never dull) tone. MacFarquhar is neither overly, voyeuristically sensational--there's no "holy shot this family adopted 20 KIDS!!!" or "OMG LEPERS AND MAGGOTS"--nor does she ever descend into hagiography. Because it IS weird when we meet someone compelled to hand over everything she earns other than the barest minimum to survive or she feels guilty. It IS strange that a couple would deny themselves even the most rudimentary comforts and work 16-hour days every day for decades to build and maintain a leper colony in the jungle. It DOES seem unfair to the kids already in the family, already struggling, if the parents keep bringing more adoptive kids home. Et cetera.

Anyway, a great book.

[Graeme Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I learned so much. This book is like cracking open the secret diary of the world’s most intense do-gooders. It's about people who take giving and self-sacrifice to extreme levels. They give kidneys to strangers, adopt dozens of children, give away so much money that they live in poverty.

What really got me about this book is how MacFarquhar manages to be whip smart and a great storyteller at the same time. You know how sometimes you pick up a nonfiction book and it’s like, okay, this person knows their stuff but can’t write for peanuts? Or they can write, but they’re kinda clueless? Well, Larissa’s got the whole package. Reading her book felt like she was right there, chatting with me over coffee about these fascinating people she’s met.

She's got this knack for storytelling that brings you right into the thick of things. The book is packed with stories of people who are all in on helping others, sometimes so much that it makes your own good deeds look like child’s play. And Larissa doesn’t just tell you what’s up; she makes you feel it. She gets into the nitty-gritty of these folks’ lives, showing how they wrestle with their choices.

Any extravagance is often accompanied by self flagellation "if I hadn't bought that pizza, I could've donated that money and saved a life." So often, each and every penny spent is done with guilt and remorse. The suffering of others isn't just some abstract concept, it's like it's happening to them. It's personal and deeply disturbing on a level that few of us can understand. This book got me seeing the whole giving thing in a new light. It's complex, messy, and downright gut-wrenching.

MacFarquhar is so good at slyly making the stats and data sing without putting you to sleep. She doesn't just dump numbers and history on you; she weaves them through the tales of these hardcore altruists in a way that's totally seamless. Kind of like she’s mixing spices into a dish - just the right amount to make it delicious without overpowering the main ingredients.

For every character story in the book, she drops in statistics and trends like they’re part of the narrative, not an afterthought. It’s super clever because you're learning all this heavy-duty stuff about global poverty, ethical dilemmas, and psychological theories, but it feels like you're just getting to know these people and their world.

For example, when she talks about someone who’s obsessed with saving lives to the point of living super frugally, she backs it up with stats about global need and aid effectiveness. It’s not just numbers; it’s the reality that fuels these people’s choices. And the backstory stuff is gold - it’s like peering into their past to see the dots connecting, leading them to where they are now.

This book kinda shakes you up and makes you ponder about the big stuff, like what we’re all here for and how much we should be doing for others. It’s not preachy, but man, does it make you think.

In short, "Strangers Drowning" is a real-deal look into the lives of people who are super into saving the world, one sacrifice at a time. Larissa MacFarquhar nails it with her storytelling, making you feel all the highs and lows. It’s like getting a backstage pass to the minds of the most dedicated do-gooders out there.

[Frances · Rating 1 out of 5]

So. This was a terrible book, you guys. Everything about it was irritating.

- Bad writing.
- Bad outline.
- Honestly, a bad idea.

I had a professor in college who studied altruism, and she herself thought it was absurd to look at things on the individual level - that the whole idea of where altruism gets interesting is when it comes to group cooperation. Even then, at a Darwinian level the genes of the immediate relatives are not sacrificed for the genes of the larger whole.

In every one of these anecdotes, the author cannot contain admiration for people who almost certainly were ENORMOUS ASSHOLES. The sheer hypocrisy was mind blowing. I'm giving an additional star because I can respect someone being super curious about something and diving into an internet worm hole, but this read like someone's rejected New Yorker long form non-fiction. My coworker made the excellent point that this is extremely lacking in philosophical rigor.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them... The moral virtues, present... to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the non-moral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy,
well-rounded, richly developed character... there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand. – Susan Wolf

...the moral narcissist’s extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not. To [André] Green this moral straining was sinister, for the moral narcissist would do anything to preserve his purity, even when doing so carried a terrible price... new qualifiers appeared: there was "pseudo-altruism", a defensive cloak for sadomasochism; and there was "psychotic altruism", bizarre care-taking behaviour based in delusion... the analyst surmised that the masking of their own hostility and greed from themselves might be one of altruism's functions for people of this type.
– Larissa MacFarquhar

...we cannot and should not become impartial, [Bernard Williams] argued, because doing so would mean abandoning what gives human life meaning. Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your wife and your children, your friends, to work that you love and that is particularly yours, to beauty, to place — we are nothing. We are creatures of intimacy and kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.
– Larissa MacFarquhar

Twelve profiles of recent radical altruists, and the backlash they receive from the rest of us. (^) Besides, MacFarquhar has some deep reflections on the good life and human nature to work through. So: There are people who shape their lives around the need of the world – in particular around strangers who are constantly, in some sense, drowning. This category of person does more than just work a caring job and be dead nice to those around them: instead, their entire lives are dominated by the attempt to do the most good.
The profiled altruists are:

- A fairly fearless nurse who organised the Fast for Life and trained generations of Nicaraguan nurses, continuing for thirty years despite specific threats to her life by Contras.
- A pseudonymous animal rights activist who has rescued or won improved conditions for millions of chickens.
- Two early effective altruists, Julia and Jeff, who live frugally and donate more than half of their salaries to the most effective NGOs in the world. They plausibly save 100 lives a year, far more than a doctor or firefighter (even before considering replaceability).
- A real Christian, who opened her church to the homeless (over the hostility of her flock) and donated a kidney anonymously.
- A charismatic, outcaste social worker and jungle statesman, who created a self-sustaining leper ashram, 5000-strong, out of nothing. Also his equally hardcore descendents.
- A Buddhist monk who created the largest suicide counselling site in Japan, stressing himself into heart disease.
- The omni-parents of Vermont, who adopted 24 of the least cute and easy children on the lists.
- A taciturn altruistic kidney donor.
- A burned-out idealist.

(I've compiled data on their nature here.*)

MacFarquhar appears suspicious about these people, whose lives are taken over by their morals. She calls them "do-gooders" while admitting the term is dismissive.** Even the most humble and quiet do-gooder is, she thinks, making an extremely arrogant claim: that the moral intuitions of the whole species - i.e. family favouritism, supererogation, the right to ignore the suffering of strangers - are totally wrong. She leaves no-one unsuspected.

an extreme morality as Singer's or Godwin's can seem not just oppressively demanding but actually evil, because it violates your duty to yourself. To require a person to think of himself as a tool for the general good could be seen as equivalent of kidnapping a person off the street and harvesting his organs to save three or four lives... even to ask this of yourself seems wrong, even perverted. Impartial, universal love seems the antithesis of what we value about deep human attachment.

But these lives are victory laps: the victory of broad reason over narrow animality. MacFarquhar is more nuanced, less willing to dismiss particularism, nepotism and speciesism – which are together known as common sense. (Though I have only a mild case of the radicals: for instance, I am mostly immune to misery about the state of the world, and I help my loved ones without much guilt. I'm giving 10% now and 50% eventually, but I am such a bookish scruff that the absence of luxuries does not really cramp my life at all.)

One part of Williams' humanist case against radical altruism has dissolved in the last decade: the idea that single-minded ethical focus must erode your connection to your community. Well, the effective altruists are growing in number and maturity; they offer a deep, global community of at least partially serious people to support and be supported by: and all with the stamp of moral consistency.

MacFarquhar doesn't much like utilitarianism, but she is too moved and impressed with her subjects to take the standard, safe, quietist line (which her reviewers have tended to). Throughout, she presents contradictory philosophical propositions, and makes it difficult to know which she believes; she constantly uses indirect speech and deictic discussion, blurring her voice with the debate at hand. This is, I think, an impressive rhetorical strategy – an "esoteric" one. The book is addressed to common sense readers, but also to our uncertainty and faint guilt; it's dedicated to her parents, but explicitly constructed to bring us closer to the altruists:

I took out all the physical descriptions because if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside. Similarly quotations, which seem as though they should be the most intimate form, because they come directly from the person’s mouth. Again, in fact, the only way you hear someone speaking is if you’re outside them. So if you translate quotation into interior thought, which simply means taking away the quotation marks and saying ‘he thought’ rather than ‘he said’ – that’s a more intimate way of encountering someone.***

So Strangers Drowning covertly brings us closer to radical altruism. Her task is not to establish their ethical premises, nor to win over new obsessives: instead, she simply shows us their sincerity and incredible effects on the world – and, better, shows the lack of evidence and interpretive charity behind their opponents' aspersions. (This goes for the Freudians, the Objectivists, and the anti "codependency" crowd.) It humanises the threatening side of ultimate goodness. She mostly avoids editorialising about the radicals. But one of her clear conclusions is that these people are not deficient, instead having something most people lack:

What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility...

The need of the world was like death, [Julia] thought — everyone knew about it, but the thought was so annihilating that they had to push it out of consciousness or it would crush them. She understood, and yet did not understand, why other people didn't give more than they did. How did they allow themselves such permission? How could they not help?

while also noting that, in general

If there is a struggle between morality and life, life will win... Not always, not in every case, but life will win in the end. Sometimes a person will die for a cause; sometimes a person will give up for duty's sake the things that are to him most precious. But most of the time, the urge to live, to give to your family, to seek beauty, to act spontaneously... or to do any number of things other than helping people, is too strong to be overridden... It may be true that not everyone should be a do-gooder. But it is also true that these strange, hopeful, tough, idealistic, demanding, life-threatening, and relentless people, by their extravagant example, help keep those life-sustaining qualities alive.

An amazing book, anyway: charged, critical, structurally ingenious, and filled with humanity – or, with this other, better thing.

"Sedia hujan sebelum payung" (c) Zaky Arifin (2015)

† Note the absent quotation marks around MacFarquhar's report of the psychoanalysts' and Williams' positions.

The chapter on the blitheness and cruelty of the psychoanalysts enraged me - all the more because MacFarquhar leaves their unscientific bullshit unchallenged, instead letting it mock and degrade itself. (One hopes.) So much glibness and spite:

ANNA FREUD:
Altruists are bossy, because the urge that is usually behind the fulfillment of one's own wishes is now placed behind the fulfillment of the wishes of another person. The wishes have to be fulfilled in a certain way, in the way the altruist would like to fulfill them for himself or herself. After all, the bossiness of do-gooders is proverbial...

(My, what rigorous science.) So, here's yet another way I am fortunate to live when I do: these people have by now been mostly sidelined in polite discourse. The harm they are able to do is much reduced, and I need not spend my whole life convincing people that they are just making things up.


* Philosophy - e.g. Peter Singer, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Mark Lee, Geoff Anders, Stephanie Wykstra - looms large here, in this little corner of the race; larger than organised religion. Since all of the philosophers are from Analytic departments, this gives the lie to the generalised standard criticism of academic philosophy (: that they are fatally detached from the concerns of society, dehumanised, etc).


** "Do-gooder" is still much better than Susan Wolf's term, "moral saint", because, as MacFarquhar notes, to call someone a saint is to nullify the challenge of their difficult actions: saints are not just 'people who do really good things'; they are (thought to be) a different sort of being. Any movement (like EA) which seeks to make radical altruism mainstream has to resist this demarcation and get people to see such a life as, first, good; then, possible for them; and then reasonable - the sort of thing that people would do if they thought about it more.

*** MacFarquhar's account of Stephanie is misleading: she makes it seem like she has opted for ordinary amoral innocence, where the real Stephanie has taken on an incredibly high-impact job, activism for oversight of pharmaceutical clinical trial data.


[Data #2, Values #2]

"Optikaa" (c) Zaky Arifin (2015)

[juch · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book explores similar themes to sally rooney lol
what one should do for other ppl, how to square that duty off w other things ppl want/need in their lives, like family and love and art
but more in depth by focusing on extreme real life cases rather than relatable self flagellating millennials
also i really appreciated that from the outset, macfarquhar was like, of course it's weird to dedicate your life to morality, to helping strangers, bc caring about ppl close to you more than strangers is what makes us human (and is the subject of novels)—what rooney took a whole book to articulate haha
it makes the self flagellating of rooney + the mood today seem absurd/basic—of course you're not doing enough, of course everything you're consuming is somehow immoral, of course you don't actually want to be 100% moral all the time
and if you really wanted to, you would donate a kidney HA*
i sound very critical of rooney + mood today right now but i'm a part of it! which is why this is so refreshing

the arc of the book was very good, alternating profiles of extreme do-gooders with chapters on backlash against them (a chronological genealogy, titled "the undermining of do-gooders, part x"). it covers a pretty broad range of do-gooders—religious, secular, effective altruists—and the back and forth makes the book feel balanced. its ultimately position is pretty ambivalent: something like, not everyone should or will be like this, but it's kinda cool that some ppl are. it does seem to suggest that a lot of the backlash to them is excessive. the genealogy of this backlash is so interesting, suggesting that ppl came up w reasons to distrust do-gooders once the transition from religious saintliness to secular do-gooding began implicating them (begging the question, why aren't you as good?). that said the reasons ppl came up w are interesting and not wrong too. i want to stop paying for psychoanalysis myself but i like reading short summaries of psychoanalytic theory, which are just good stories, which hit a nerve but are kinda dramatic. giving is a way of asserting power over someone (as we do in our everyday lives all the time). it's crazy that back in the day it was considered crazy to donate a kidney to a loved one

one thought i have is that the book was mostly about ppl helping from a position of power. i mean i kinda think that's what most helping is, even if you're an organizer or something. that said i think i'm ready to admit that idk really what organizing is, and also idk really what critiques of "fetishizing organizing" mean either!

*i read this book bc of that viral nyt kidney story. it made me really scared of writers and wanting to be a writer for like 3 days. i'm back to applying for mfas but i really think writing is useless and fun and that's fine. i think it sucks to pretend it's moral, and to pretend that cloaking your individual pettiness and moral insecurity in identitarian righteousness is anywhere near as metal (an aesthetic judgement), let alone good, as donating a kidney! i probably won't donate a kidney. i wish my overall thoughts on this book were as developed as my thoughts on this kidney story, but maybe that will happen w time

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This nonfiction look at do-gooders in society is certainly filled with food for thought, and is especially poignant now when so many Syrian refugees are trying desperately to gain basic human rights while fleeing their violent country. And at a time when I, after reading the book and on a trivial level, am feeling guilty about buying a better refrigerator than I needed when my old one died.

The author discusses philosophy and the way society has looked at altruism, and especially at extreme “do-gooders,” those who help strangers at the expense of their own families. But alongside the theoretical, the author includes the stories of people who have trod this path. While all the stories were interesting, and some quite compelling, the first one or two felt too “she did this and then she did that” to me, more a recitation of facts than a story. However, I didn't get that feeling from some of the later stories.

I did feel that the story about the family who carried adoption to an extreme was a little too long, a little too detailed.

The author presents moral dilemmas, and sometimes there are no good answers, no right and wrong answers. I felt the author had strong opinions, but she didn't really go into her point of view.

And, to an extent, that was a problem for me. It was hard for me to tell when the author switched from explaining another's viewpoint to speaking for herself. I had an advance ebook copy, not a finished copy, and perhaps the formatting in the published edition makes that less confusing.

Altruism is, depending on society's bent at the time, accepted with open arms, open hearts, and open wallets. At other times, it is viewed as a mental illness. And truly, some of the people in this book wanted so much to do the right thing that their work does seem more like martyrdom, if not mental illness, than wanting to help.

And then there is the huge question of whether help is really helping, in the grand scheme of things, or making things worse. Sometimes, the argument can be made with quite a bit of validation that altruism can make things worse.

As someone who spent more than 20 years doing volunteer charitable work, but on a much, much smaller, much less self-sacrificing level than the people in this book, I found the book fascinating and great food for thought. The writing was perhaps not quite the level I would have. There was a section addressing works of fiction that didn't quite seem to fit into the book for me. Nevertheless, this book is very good reading for anyone who ever wonders if they are doing enough, if they should be doing more. Or less commonly, if they should be doing less.

I was given an advance reader's copy of this book in ebook format for review.

[Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the one hand, I read through this very quickly, so in that sense it was not something in which I was struggling to keep my interest.

On the other hand, it felt so disjoint. The first few chapters were a bunch of sort of random anecdotes with all the subjects seemingly influenced by the same group of thinkers (Singer's _Famine, Affluence, and Morality_, Gray's "World Equity Budget", etc.)

The remaining examples seemed to have a slightly different tack but ultimately it still seemed a loose jumble of anecdotes. The periodic historical context chapters were informative, though quite dry, and still didn't really help me view the text as a coherent whole.

In spite of this all it did provide a lot of interesting food for thought and has already been the subject of some friendly conversations among my friends. I'm not aware of other texts on this subject and their relative accessibility. I imagine for the determined student there is a wealth of philosophical discourse but for those of us less committed to this particular category of cause it seems like a nice step up from occasionally seeing some pop-science article in a magazine.

[Roshni Sahoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is about "do-gooders", people who push themselves to moral extremity. while reading this book, i felt uneasy and amazed in alternating turns and found it thought-provoking the whole way through.

i would recommend reading it if you're ready to think critically about your privilege, what you owe to yourself, and what you owe to other people (from family and friends to complete strangers). i wasn't super ready, which is why i think some parts made me feel guilty and uncomfortable.

this book is HEAVY. i didn't know what i was getting into and picked it up on a whim. i'm happy i read this though because upon graduating from college, i've been thinking a decent amount about topics that align with this book (how can i best help other people? there are many Big Problems in world right now, what should I be doing about them?) .

the author raises some really interesting questions to wrestle with and provides many possible answers, but she doesn't give super definitive answers to any of them. other goodreads reviewers are more critical of this but tbh i didn't expect a book to tell me how to live my life.

would be interested in talking about this book w people!

[Chunyang Ding · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stunning. Whatever expectations I held for this book initially - as another dry, moral philosophy book, as a collection of biographies, as a preachy book about altruism - were blown away by this masterpiece by MacFarquhar. Each of the individual portraits of these "do-gooders" has that particular feel and style of a masterful New Yorker article, which is little surprise considering that MacFarquhar's day job is as a New Yorker staff writer. Stylistically, it does bring forward memories of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, although there is significantly more distance between the author and the reader in this book.

From the very beginning, MacFarquhar does not make any claims about the goodness of these "do-gooders". They are not presented as saints, or even as people that we should aspire to be like. Instead, it is a portrait of complex humans who feel in their souls that there is a right way to live their lives. Most of us, even we contemplate morality and goodness, might reach similar intellectual conclusions, but few of us would live out the extremity of these people. Their stories are haunting: some fully embrace effective altruism, dumpster diving to give away their entire salary to charity, some live in dense jungle or war-zones to provide medical assistance. Yet reading about their lives, with all the messy complexity within, does not make me feel like I must strive to achieve their same kind of selflessness. Instead, it's like witnessing a pure form of emotion, and being able to reevaluate myself in that light.

These profiles are sandwiched with more standard non-fiction moral philosophy analysis, especially focusing on the work of Peter Singer. Those chapters are exhaustively researched and presented in a brilliant light, bringing in both examples from the previous profiles as well as intriguing thought experiments. It is difficult to read this book quickly because it simply raises so many questions as you go along.

A friend had recently sent me a sermon given by C. S. Lewis during World War II, where Lewis preached on the how people can still pursue higher learning even during war. One passage in particular stood out:

Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man, and perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn life-saving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving in the sense of giving it his total attention -- so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim -- he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for.

This book is an exploration of people who have fully embraced living for this duty. While such lives will feel very uncomfortable, this is absolutely wroth the read.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larissa MacFarquhar's Strangers Drowning is mostly a series of profiles about do-gooders, though I often thought of them as extreme altruists. These do-gooders care about many things, including protesting, working in impoverished communities, donating to charity, alleviating or ending animal suffering, saving children—and more. Many books about altruism now focus on effective altruism, which often leads to cerebral, abstract numerical discussion and a sort of percentage-of-one's-pay-charitable-donation (approved by Give Well, naturally). Some of the people in MacFarquhar's profiles do care about the logic of effective altruists and in fact Toby Ord appears in one discussion group (Singer is also mentioned), but these are stories about real people often working everyday jobs. They are outliers, but these altruists can be distinguished from the "pure innocents" one sometimes sees literature. And yet they do seem odd, so much so that Strangers Drowning would maybe not effectively convert many people into this lifestyle. I in fact encountered many strong critiques of altruistic arguments and lifestyles. Ultimately, I was most impressed to find myself thinking “these people are crazy” roughly as often as I wondered “am I crazy not to think like these people?" Strangers Drowning is almost certainly the best book I've read in the last twelve months and it's one of the most interesting books I've read in the past ten years.

Update: I was able to find an interview with MacFarquhar on Tyler Cowen's "Conversations with Tyler" podcast. Recommended.

***

Notes for future reference:

Dorothy the Nurse.
"I was out there doing civil disobedience and all that good stuff. It was all sacrifice, all for the cause, personal happiness was not important. We were confronting the powers and principalities, we were going to jail. And then I thought, We're so serious, all us peace-and-justice people. These people, they can't have fun, they have to be out on the firing line all the time. Those people did wonderful work, but they were really not nice people. They were people you did not want to be around. They were so sharp. Everything was a matter of life and death: we've got to do this action because the world depends on it." Dorothy Granada, qtd. Pg. 15.

"Dorothy loved living on the [World Equity Budget]; it was a challenge and an adventure. [...] Charles taught her how to Dumpster-dive for food, and where the best Dumpsters were, and she was an immediate convert; she never felt ashamed, as he had at first. She was astonished at the things you could find. [...] She tried not to patronize the Safeway Dumpsters, because she disapproved of Safeway: they sold products sprayed with insecticide, harvested by ill-treated farmworkers. She was aware that this was a ridiculous position—as if Safeway would care that she declined to sort through their garbage—but she stuck to it nevertheless." Pg. 31.

Aaron and Jen the Animals Rights Activists:
"Aaron and Jen moved in together, and then the trouble started. For one thing, Aaron was messy. Not just untidy—dirty. Laundry would pile up in his room, dishes in the sink. He would make huge batches of food to save money—pounds and pounds of lentil stew or hummus—and leave crusted pans and bowls all over the kitchen. When she complained, he told her that time spent washing dishes could be time spent working for animal rights, which were more important. She couldn't think of a good counterargument to that—in fact, she thought he was right, from a moral point of view. [...] She had always thought of herself as an extremely ethical person, and now she felt like the selfish one, the bourgeois one. Dishes? When animals were being tortured and people were starving? Dishes?" Pg. 48-9.

"How strange are the standards of do-gooders? Suppose you don't aspire to be a do-gooder; how much can morality demand of you? Is your life your own, to spend as you like, or do you owe some of it to other people? And if you do owe something, then how much? The moral question here is less one of quality—What should I do—than of quantity. When can I stop?" Pg. 61.

Julia, who gives money. Closest effective altruism example.
"Despite her extreme frugality, Julia is not an ascetic. [...] She loves fireworks and ice cream, she loves to cook. She loves to sew clothes and to make elaborate old-fashioned hats out of scraps. She gets pleasure out of many things like that. She doesn't get pleasure out of giving money. To her, giving is simply a duty, like not stealing, so it doesn't beget a feeling of virtue. If all were well with the world, she would like to live on a farm somewhere, and keep animals, and grow pumpkins and runner beans and sunflowers in the garden. She would sew curtains and read and bake pies and have children. But all is not well with the world." Pg. 73.

Julia "was not one of those blithe souls who didn't judge others—she judged. She held her fellow humans to account. But she didn't judge because she believed herself superior—quite the opposite. She didn't believe there was anything special about herself that she should be held to these duties while other people were let off the hook. Anyone could do what she did if they wanted to, she thought. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby said, 'Reserving judgement is a matter of infinite hope,' but the opposite is also true: to judge is to believe that a person is capable of doing better; it's to know that people can change their behavior, even quite radically, in response to what is expected of them. To judge is to hope that people are selfish in part because they believe it's the human condition." Pg. 86-7.

"Once Julia opened herself up to the thought that children might not be necessary—once she moved them, as it were, to a different column in her moral spreadsheet, from essential to discretionary—she realised just how enormous a line item a child would be. Children would be the most expensive nonessential thing she could possibly possess, so by having children of her own she would be in effect killing other people's children. Besides this, adding a new person to the population of a First World country was a terrible thing to do from fan environmental point of view." Pg. 98-9.

"By the 1990s, the codependency critique had become so widespread in America that it was taken up by some Evangelical Christians connected with the Campus Crusade for Christ activist Pat Springle. Codependency was a particular risk for Christians, Springle pointed out, because it looked so much like good Christian behavior—helping others and forgiving their misbehavior; striving to be morally perfect; denying oneself; fearing sin. Springle urged his followers to avoid developing a savior complex." Pg. 161.

Kimberly the Preacher/ Missionary:
"Not everyone who became a Christian gave up traditional beliefs. But Richard and Kimberly, like many other missionaries at the time, had come to feel that missionaries of the past had been too severe about that: it was better to welcome people into the church and muddle through with a mixture of beliefs than to accept as converts only those who were prepared to reject everything they had ever known. There were always ways to make the beliefs fit. A belief that ancestors watched over you, for instance—that fit well with a belief in saints. Of course, some customs presented more fo a problem. Polygamy, for instance, was awkward. But what could you do if the marriages had already taken place? You accepted it and hoped for the best." Pg. 184.

Sue and Hector, who take in over 20 children, often physically or mentally handicapped. These children go on to nearly always get pregnant in their teens. Some wind up in prison. Hector starts drinking at one point. The project seems to backfire, but the chapter concludes:
"Every year there were birthday parties and weddings and graduations; there were grandchildren and great-grandchildren, most of them still living in the same neighborhood, within a few blocks of each other and their parents, in and out of each other's homes all the time, minding each other's children. [...] Though some were missing—three dead, one in jail—still, most were there year after year, and for everything that had happened, they were a family." Pg. 268.

From the concluding chapter:
"The goodness that Satan revolted against was an angel's goodness, consisting of obedience to God. But the do-gooder's goodness is not usually obedience—it is often, on the contrary, a revolt against the rules and customs he grew up with. Part of the reason do-gooders seem so strange is that they're acting on their own. They are following rules that they laid down for themselves, driven by a sense of duty they have felt since they were too small to know what duty was, much less how anybody else thought about it." Pg. 296.

"When people heard that I was writing about do-gooders, many of them said, But aren't they mentally ill? [...] Some do-gooders are happy, some are not. The happy ones are happy for the same reasons anyone is happy—love, work, purpose. It's do-gooders' unhappiness that is different—a reaction not only to humiliation and lack of love and the other usual stuff, but also to knowing that the world is filled with misery, and that most people don't really notice or care, and that, try as they might, they cannot do much about either of those things. What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility. Of course, any do-gooder who is not dead or irredeemably jaundiced by the age of thirty has learned to acquire a degree of blindness in order to get by." Pg. 298-9.

"Do-gooders are different from ordinary people because they are willing to weigh their lives and their families in balance with the needs of strangers. They are willing to risk the one for the sake of the other. They, like anyone else, believe that they have duties to their families, but they draw the line between family and strangers in a different place. It's not that they value strangers more: it's that they remember that strangers have lives and families, too." Pg. 299-300.

"If everyone thought like a do-gooder, the world would not be our world any longer, and the new world that would take its place would be so utterly different as to be nearly unimaginable. People talk about changing the world, but that's not usually what they mean. They mean securing enough help so there is less avoidable suffering and people can get on with living decent lives; they don't mean a world in which helping is the only life there is. If there were no do-gooders, on the other hand, the world would be similar to ours, but worse." Pg. 300-1.

[Alisi ☆ wants to read too many books ☆ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to make of this book. I was really hoping that there would be more to this book. That there'd be analysis and all that. Like, present the good and the bad. Present how this helps and/or give another view point.

That really wasn't this book. Perhaps the subtitle didn't convey what the book really is. It is, basically, just story after story of people who have 'extreme ethical commitment'. There's very little discussion on these people. It's just dry narratives.

It honestly didn't truly make me wish to follow these people's lifestyle choices. If that was the point, I think it failed. Some of the anecdotes were just so bizarre to me. Like the one woman who cried for hours and hours when she realized it was basically her money that bought a $3 apple treat. That $3 could've gone to help people overseas and how selfish it was for her to get that and how she probably killed someone, etc. etc. etc. I was like 'really? >.> a little overly dramatic, aren't we?'

I didn't like the notion that ignoring the suffering closer to home in favor of foreign aid a good one. Perhaps some of these people don't realize that world charities such as Doctors without Borders actually comes to the US. To just ignore the suffering of those closer by because you perceive that people in other countries are worse off is a bit hypocritical.

And then there was that whole 'this much money was spent on a kid for cancer treatment? why did they do that? why waste that money? does that kid deserve to be saved over all the multitudes of people who would be saved for that amount?' This notion (and Stalin might be proud) just is so blind and bizarre to me. Who knows what that kid'll be when he grows up. For all they know, the experience of getting saved could profoundly change his course in life so that he dedicates himself to saving other people. Who knows?

[Katarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read (maybe the quickest i’ve ever read a non-fiction book), however, I genuinely disagree with the thesis of this book. One of the central themes that the author brings up frequently is the idea that do-gooders (as defined by the author, people who dedicate their lives to helping strangers, usually at the expense of themselves and their families) are vilified by society. I think there is limited evidence of this, especially in the anecdotes the author offers of do-gooders around the world. Half of the anecdotes focus on the Effective Altruism movement which has become a relatively mainstream idea, practiced by tech bros and altruistic billionaires alike.

I found it interesting that most of the people talked about as do-gooders had very chaotic and unhappy personal lives, often histories of alcoholism, spousal abuse, and, usually, divorce. Not a strong advertisement for this lifestyle.

An interesting take on philanthropy and humanitarian service, especially in the age of self-care. However, I am left thinking - what’s the lesson of this book?

[missy jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best non-fiction book I've read in a long time! It grapples with all the questions I'm most interested in: How do people try to live ethical lives in a profoundly unjust world? What do their lives look like, and what are the tradeofffs for this kind of life? Why does unyielding commitment to morality look so extreme to the majority, and why are "do-gooders" so often dismissed and derided? What does it mean to believe or not believe in altruism? And even: What role can do-gooders play in fiction? I super-duper recommend this book to anyone who is interested in these kinds of questions.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completely changed the way I think about myself and my life--I highly recommend it!

[Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a confronting and challenging read, especially if you’re prone to philosophical debates in your own mind. It’s important to allow time to read Strangers Drowning gradually, and take breaks to think over what you’ve read before continuing. Fans of The Good Place, and anyone ever crippled by indecision when faced with a ‘please donate now’ email or door-knock, should definitely give this one a read.

My full review of Strangers Drowning can be found on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first learned of Larissa MacFarquhar from her excellent New Yorker piece, "The Kindest Cut," on altruistic kidney donation. It's sixteen years old now and much of the stigma and suspicion around non-directed donation has softened with time, but I still found the article thoughtful and fascinating.

See, in a month I'm due to donate my own kidney to a stranger. I read everything I could about the process as I went through it—accounts from living donors, medical articles documenting complications and success rates, even surgery videos. And, when I saw that MacFarquhar had written a book about extreme altruists, I read that too, since it promised to answer a question that came up when I told my family and a few close friends about my intention to donate: Why did people react as though this was such an extreme act, when, to me, it seemed both simple and natural?

I'm not an extreme altruist, not by a long shot. The people profiled in Strangers Drowning reside in the furthest reaches of generosity, often veering into the pathological (at least in my opinion). It's fascinating to read about their chosen causes—from chickens to children to the suicidally depressed—and the way they see this flawed world of ours. I had a gut reaction to something practically every time I picked up this book, whether that was the ethics of endangering one's children during charity work or fasting to try to stop nuclear bombs or the morality of adopting twenty-two children you can barely afford to care for. And I think that's a great thing, to have a book that's able to provoke me to that extent, so I could reassess my own values and beliefs. I also realized that other people must feel about my kidney donation what I felt about some of the do-gooders in this book: that they were going too far, that they were acting out of guilt or fear and justifying it post-hoc with moral superiority.

MacFarquhar is exceptionally measured in her descriptions of her subjects, never once appearing in the narrative itself, lingering instead like an omniscient ghost above them and their lives. This authorial absence and her unconventional way of quoting—framing them directly as a subject's thoughts or placing dialogue exchanges into the text like sections of a play—is controversial. And it's occasionally ill-advised, as in this quote, randomly dropped between paragraphs:

FISHER: When I was born my brother tried to stab me with a fork. I was my dad's favorite; he favored me over my brothers and sisters. I died in the hospital when I was little and came back to life. And then a gypsy lady told me I would take on the troubles of the family.

...What? And MacFarquhar never revisits or explains this. She's so averse to judgment or any sort of editorializing that she tends to take her subjects at their word without contextualizing, and that can leave the reader wanting for explanation.

Which leads into my two other main critiques of this book. First, the balance of content is off: there are just too many profiles, which are straight reportage, in comparison to the scant criticism. Second, the format is wonky. There are occasional shorter chapters titled "The Undermining of Do-Gooders," which give context to the actions and beliefs of the altruists profiled in the rest of the book, as well as the larger societal beliefs to which they stand in contrast. But I wish this stuff was incorporated into the profiles themselves, rather than being relegated to these short, weird chapters that feel random and out-of-place ("The Kindest Cut" is retooled into one of these).

Overall, this is a worthy and immensely thought-provoking book. I'm glad I read it and I certainly hope Larissa MacFarquhar writes more; her articles are wonderful and she pulls off long-form writing just as well.

[Jafar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating accounts of extreme do-gooders. We go about our lives knowing fully well that we can save strangers from death and agony if we give up some of our indulgences. It doesn't matter if we already give money to charity or volunteer for charity work. We go on vacations. We buy expensive coffee and meals. We buy that dress or pair of shoes that we don't really need. Why not spend the money instead to save a starving or sick child from pain and death? The extreme do-gooders of this book can't stop thinking in these terms.

The book also contains some analysis and philosophical discussion. The main argument goes like: if you're willing to forego your five-dollar latte and instead feed a child who's starving in front of you eyes, why not do the same for children who are far away? This argument can be only be made by, and can only make a strong impression on people in wealthy societies. If you think you're not capable of walking with complete indifference past starving children, it's because you haven't lived your whole life in a place with countless starving children around you.

[jasmine sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

really unique book about altruism, bundling together stories of extremely altruistic individuals with sections on the history and theory of altruism.

macfarquhar is a gorgeous writer, which made the moral philosophy bits especially engrossing (request: entire ethics textbook by her). the individual portraits were like mini-biographies, and while some were more interesting than others, i appreciated that they were a geographically diverse group with vastly different rationales for giving.

the book focuses on altruistic intentions and their origins instead altruism's consequences: whether these people's impacts are good (not as obvious as you think - consider missionaries), or whether our society ought to be more altruistic. i think that's the point, but it felt like crucial context was missing.

[Charlie Quimby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked MacFarquhar's introductory chapter, which conducted a brief tour of the thinking about ethical choices and offered (to me, at least) some compelling insights of her own.

I was less taken by the chapters profiling individuals and couples who have made what seem to be extreme choices for how to commit their lives. The portraits are engaging in the way of those New Yorker pieces of reportage you start reading and after two pages realize you've been sucked into a much longer article than you expected. In this sense, the book feels more like a collection than an trip toward a few towering insights that the introduction seemed to suggest.

[Trey Hunner]

I'm not sure what my takeaway is from this book. I assumed this would be a critique of the effective altruist movement. It mostly wasn't. But I'm not entirely sure what it was.

A lot of these stories are about people whose lives seem like a mess, but who (hopefully?) left a positive impact on the world, obsessively.

I don't want to be any of these people. But I do want to help enrich the lives of humanity (plus more?), both alive and dead as much as I can. Maybe this is simply a series of cautionary tales.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I've read this year, and there's been plenty of strong competition. Beautifully written, moving, and thought-provoking. I couldn't put it down.

This came out a few years early to catch the tidal wave of Effective Altruism, but if you're intrigued by the idea that people ought to be doing more to make the world a better place, and if you wonder what a life devoted to such a goal might actually look like, then this is the book for you. A profound reflection on suffering, altruism, and what it means to be human.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck this was good.


Rethink your life good

It feels hopeless sometimes when you really dig into what it means to make an impact in the world, one’s life doesn’t seem to mean much. Unless it does.

I’ve looked for good answers, and this book doesn’t have any, but it does paint beautiful portrait of people searching and failing and still trying.

One of my other favorite books attempts to wrestle with the nonsensical nature of it all. “When We Cease to Understand the World” starts with the development of the color blue, reminding us of the beauty created with paint. The development of new colors over time and the increasingly complex chemical nature in the creation of paint. hydrogen cyanide was used in Prussian Blue, a deep, rich color. It became popular and was used widely, increasing the availability of cyanide and Access to it for experiments and other testing. Cyanide would later be used by the Nazis to kill millions of people. So when you look at the blue of a painting from certain eras and feel moved, there’s a pretty dark legacy.

And the Haber Bosch process used to create nitrogen, a process that props up modern agriculture system, supporting billions of lives, was created by a man who help create that same gas and used his knowledge to create bombs for the Germans during World War II.

How do we live in this world and not go mad?

[Eyes Of · Rating 4 out of 5]

I doubt there are few human beings that have not contemplated their personal morality, the decay of the world around them, and the suffering of others. Such things are plastered wherever there is the written word, a pulpit, or a media outlet selling time slots. Even without such things, people have likely asked themselves Am I enough? Did I do enough? Am I doing enough? Larissa MacFarquhar takes the troublesome problem of do-gooders and dives into such personal questions by presenting stories from the battlefront for those struggling with those same questions. Slightly shaky in the intro, Strangers Drowning picks up well by the first telling and gains steam until the end. Each account paints a different hue of the do-gooder type, highlighting different backgrounds and evolution of thought that give these people their foundations. Some are staunch and unwavering in their morals and ideals, some are ghastly in how they quantify the human experience and the good they do solely by the numbers of lives they have helped. Peppered with philosophical notations from well known authors and commentators on the subject, the book holds together fantastically to its conclusion, leaving the reader in contemplation, perhaps even a little changed. The do-gooder has their place, a needed place, in this world, and so do we.

[Sarah Galvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a really interesting read. However, the author hinges the work on the premise that the anecdotes chosen are about people who do not suffer any pathology, then goes on to describe individuals who not only seem to indicate pathology, but then fully describes why psychoanalysis of the individuals motives could be rooted in something much deeper and complex then a simple desire to the most good one can. She argues that our suspicions of do gooders are entrenched in culture but then presents many people whom I think it would be foolish not to have some reservation or misgivings about - even if the. Work they are doing is amazing and good. I like that she coupled this with a story about a woman who came to the conclusion that we are human beings, not doings- but it seemed tacked on- I think it is interesting that the author in her writing seems uncertain in her thesis- in that certainty can be illusive in the very question itself. Altogether, though very interesting read- very thoughtful histories and cultural examination- though the book could be even better if the author had included more of these chapters with the anecdotes

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating book takes comparison out of the doing of good deeds and gives a broader understanding to why we feel the need to help others. Filled with examples of extreme do-gooders, the purpose leans more towards finding a balance in our lives where helping others doesn't need to be all consuming. We learn about ambition versus charity, helping family versus helping strangers, doing work near home versus far away, and finding peace in doing what we can instead of believing we can never do enough. Each chapter focuses on the experiences of different extreme do-gooders which made it easy to fit reading time into a busy day. The conclusion was not as insightful as I expected but there were plenty of opportunities along the way to learn from the different examples.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strangely, I found myself unmoved by these tales of extreme altruism and by McFarquarhar’s attempt to situate them in their philosophical context. The lives of these so-called do-gooders are so filled with urgency and compulsion, but the book somehow conveys none of that. It’s a funny little book, one whose motivations and aims I can’t quite make out. Is it a philosophical inquiry? A celebration of idealism? A call to action? All of these things, or none?

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The profiles of the do-gooders in this book were engrossing. Overall I found the subject and the philosophies fascinating and want to reread this again already.