Taboo Tradeoffs and Protected Values:
I think this is a framework that could use more emphasis. It’s one I am cueing into more after Caviola et al. (2021) included it in their review, “the psychology of (in)effective giving.”
People have a strong aversion to prioritizing some lives over others (see Tetlock et al., 2003, "Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions"). With limited resources, we of course do this all the time. But CBA makes it uncomfortably explicit. To prioritize some recipients as a result of CBA means to deprioritize others, which feels unfair. This is one explanation for why people prefer “distributed helping” when there are multiple possible recipients, even at the expense of helping more, since then at least no one is fully deprioritized (Caviola et al. 2020a, obstacle 5; Sharps & Schroder, 2019, “The Preference for Distributed Helping”). This could also be an explanation for Berman et al., 2018 finding that people prefer to prioritize investments rather than charities, since deprioritizing an investment isn’t nearly as aversive.
A moral aversion to (de)prioritization may also explain social judgments of people who donate effectively seeming “cold” (section 7.1). This is evidenced by the differences in instinctive judgments of “coldness” based on what is deprioritized. For example, deprioritizing investing in textbooks because it isn’t an effective intervention feels much different than deprioritizing investment in childhood cancer treatment because one could help more kids dying of malaria. People would likely make harsher judgments about someone doing the latter even though the reasoning is the same – it’s what is deprioritized that is different.
There might also be something else at play related to ‘CBA’ discomfort: choosing whom to help makes it clear to individuals that they can’t help everyone. It reminds people of all the suffering in the world that they can’t alleviate, whereas just choosing a neat charity only introduces one cause of suffering and then gives the donor the satisfaction that they have done something to alleviate it. I can imagine that CBAs role in revealing the reality of triage (1) makes people less inclined to engage in CBA and (2) less likely to donate a lot in accordance with CBA because there is less warm glow/ that one cause just isn’t as sexy anymore. (2) is related to the idea of Pseudoineffecay developed in (Slovic, 2007; Västfjäll et al., 2015). People are less inclined to help when they learn about others they can’t help.
A key idea that I think is relevant here is the “affect heuristic,” the importance of instinctive emotional cues of “goodness” or “badness” informing decisions (LINK). Deprioritization of emotional cause → instinctively violates moral value → aversion → less likely to engage with, worse social . Similarly, reminder of all the suffering in the world → feeling of sadness + helplessness → avoidant behavior. These oversimplified decision pathways can be overruled by rational, deliberate processing (see Tetlock, 2003 for discussion specific to sacred values) , but charitable giving is largely a system 1/emotional arena.