I was thinking more on the anxious side of things:
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
“If the city spends any money on weird public art instead of more police, while there is still crime, that proves they don’t really care about crime.”
“I did a lot of good things today, but it’s bad that I didn’t do even more.”
“I shouldn’t bother protesting for my rights, when those other people are way more oppressed than me. We must liberate the maximally-oppressed person first.”
“Currency should be denominated in dead children; that is, in the number of lives you could save by donating that amount to an effective charity.”
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
I suspect that this is in practice also joined with the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, where saving zero children is morally neutral (i.e. totally not like killing ten).
So the only morally defensible options are zero and ten. Although if you choose ten, you might be blamed for not simultaneously solving global warming...
The version that I’m thinking of says that doing nothing would be killing ten. Everyone is supposed to be in a perpetual state of appall-ment at all the preventable suffering going on. Think scrupulosity and burnout, not “ooh, you touched it so it’s your fault now”.
I was thinking more on the anxious side of things:
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
“If the city spends any money on weird public art instead of more police, while there is still crime, that proves they don’t really care about crime.”
“I did a lot of good things today, but it’s bad that I didn’t do even more.”
“I shouldn’t bother protesting for my rights, when those other people are way more oppressed than me. We must liberate the maximally-oppressed person first.”
“Currency should be denominated in dead children; that is, in the number of lives you could save by donating that amount to an effective charity.”
“If you could have saved ten children, but you only saved seven, that’s like you killed three.”
I suspect that this is in practice also joined with the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, where saving zero children is morally neutral (i.e. totally not like killing ten).
So the only morally defensible options are zero and ten. Although if you choose ten, you might be blamed for not simultaneously solving global warming...
The version that I’m thinking of says that doing nothing would be killing ten. Everyone is supposed to be in a perpetual state of appall-ment at all the preventable suffering going on. Think scrupulosity and burnout, not “ooh, you touched it so it’s your fault now”.