If you don’t sympathize with Amanda enough that helping her would give you a fuzzy feeling, then obviously it’s not a good use of your money (from your perspective).
Rather, if my sympathy for her is not at least two orders of magnitude greater than it is for unknown Africans. I don’t mean that to sound moralistic—my sympathy for my cats really is greater, awful as that sounds.
If you don’t sympathize with Amanda enough that helping her would give you a fuzzy feeling, then obviously it’s not a good use of your money (from your perspective).
Rather, if my sympathy for her is not at least two orders of magnitude greater than it is for unknown Africans. I don’t mean that to sound moralistic—my sympathy for my cats really is greater, awful as that sounds.
For me, helping unknown Africans generally comes out of the utility budget, rather than the fuzzy budget. You may be different.
In any case, yes, it’s a question of amount-of-fuzziness per unit-of-money donated.