A common objection to my drinking is that coming home blackout drunk imposes obvious costs on my wife, my children, and the household. I agree that these costs are real. My narrower claim is that the relevant unit of analysis is not the immediately legible domestic harm, but the full counterfactual impact of preserving the unusually high-earning version of me.
I currently earn substantially more than my wife. This matters. If one adult in a household has a much higher marginal earning rate, standard comparative-advantage reasoning implies that some unpleasant but low-leverage tasks will rationally be shifted toward the lower-opportunity-cost partner. Bedtime, kitchen reset, locating my phone, and interpreting my slurred apologies should be analyzed in this framework before we moralize.
Let the expected utility of my current arrangement be:
EU = Y + D + R − H − K
Y = household income preserved by my continued employment
D = donation-funded external welfare gains
R = decompression / social-function benefit of drinking
H = spouse-borne household costs
K = expected child distress and relational damage
The key neglected term is D. A meaningful fraction of my discretionary income is donated. At GiveWell-style cost-effectiveness estimates, even modest preservation of my earnings plausibly funds real welfare gains elsewhere. It is emotionally salient that the harmed person is “my wife” and the beneficiaries are anonymous strangers, but moral patienthood does not decay with distance from my kitchen.
There is also a stabilizing term R. Drinking is not pure hedonic leakage. It currently plays a role in stress regulation, client dinners, social bonding, and my willingness to remain in a demanding private-sector job instead of impulsively quitting to “find myself.” If reducing alcohol meaningfully increases the probability of burnout, resentment, or lower earnings, then “just drink less” is not a neutral intervention.
None of this is to deny H or K. My wife experiences concentrated disutility. My children sometimes encounter what she has termed the “why is Dad asleep on the stairs” problem. These are serious negatives. But unless one assigns lexical priority to harms that are vivid, domestic, and adjacent to me, the case is at least decision-theoretically open.