This appears to be misunderstanding. The causality is reversed. The way bike-a-thons work, it’s after they biked, pledgers (supposedly) say “Wow, they cared so much about this cause they biked so far, and I pledged to donate X per mile, so here’s my larger donation.” The idea is that people (pledgers) appreciate the proof of commitment from the other person (the biker) and that social proof that others care matters.
In practice, bike-a-thons and similar that started with this premise were poorly understood by people who didn’t even bother to think about them. So, we see wrongly-done bike-a-thons where the bikers announce in advance exactly how far they will bike, and the pledgers can effectively set a fixed donation. This almost completely undermines the whole concept.
I’m not saying even the initial bike-a-thon concept makes sense. It would be far better for the activity to itself actually help the cause directly and certainly not to be a fun thing someone wants to do anyway. And there’s lots of other problems. But it’s just an example of the ways that people care about social reinforcement.
To clarify again: that’s not in conflict with my morals, there’s nothing wrong with that idea. But it just doesn’t make any sense even in a moral perspective when talking about a situation that isn’t adequate.
Pick a similar metaphor to the snowdrift: say there’s a flood and a few people are desperately trying to pile up sandbags to protect a neighborhood, but they’re going really slowly and it’s not enough. You can’t come up and say, “oh, let me help, then you can relax and do less”. The neighborhood is about to be ruined, and the few people working are struggling and burning out and losing hope. You need to come along and say, “we can do this! I’m going to help and work hard, and if you all keep going, push your hardest and don’t give up, we’ll save the day!” You can’t even think about saying, “you can relax some” until enough people show up that we’re confident the neighborhood really will be safe. Then, seeing everything going well, you can and should certainly say, “hey, you’ve been working hard, take a break, I’ve got the last few bags, thanks for all you did.”
We’re not in things-are-okay-spread-the-workload. We’re in “long emergency”, slow-scale-crisis facing down a world where a few consolidated, wealthy interests control massive AI-backed infrastructure with bread-and-circuses spectacles to keep the people from rising up with dystopian predictions looking ever more prescient. We need to get everyone we can on board and push each other to do the most just to have a shot at retaining the semblance of a free society. That may seem exaggerated, but I’m trying to clarify the perspective.
The short of it is: you don’t have different morals here, we have the same values. We want to lighten the load for everyone. But to have that be at all possible, we have to get the load to be carried in the first place.
One last attempt to clarify: I go around my neighborhood pulling invasive weeds. I do not feel better about the idea of pulling less weeds because one or two more people start helping. I want the invasive weeds eliminated / kept fully controlled. I want as many others as it will take to get there. And yes, I want enough people helping that I can do less. But to do less before we have the weeds actually under control would feel worse than doing more weeding alongside other new volunteers.
Also, I don’t want to just refuse to pick invasive weeds as I walk by until some arbitrary threshold of commitment from neighbors. Rather, the more others who help, the less hopeless it seems and the more motivated I’ll feel to work even harder myself. And I want to tell all the others who could do more that I’ll be extra motivated they more they’ll help. And that extra motivation doesn’t suddenly kick in at some arbitrary threshold. Every extra bit from others is encouraging to me.
But of course if we actually have all the invasives under control fully, my ideal is that everyone is doing their part, so I don’t have to barely do anything beyond the minimum as part of everyone chipping in. It’s just that this dream only happens when we actually have the situation under control, and we’re nowhere near that now.
My point is that this is all about the scenario, and that we share morals and should agree about what should happen in each scenario.