Its interesting to try to think about how to accomplish being benevolent to the degree you want to in a world that you are included in. One way you might start to come up with a map that’s a little less biased than where you might think to start is—after working to overcome your prejudices and the social and geographical and perceptual distortions that make other people’s problems harder to empathize with, turning that lens on yourself and thinking about how you are biased against or for yourself and how you fit into this map as well, remembering that you’re also deciding how to allocate the resources and energy of that one person on the map you are including, and that various people are variably selfish and helpful to others, and finding a balance that makes sense among all that. And that that one person has not only material and emotional needs but meaning needs. You may want to pencil in time to write the great american novel, or something. There are other meaningful things to spend resources on besides charity, and its arguable that its good to facilitate those things too—that there may be some good to having those self-actualization bits, where we figure out what anything means or what we’re doing with ourselves, or we do things like make art or whatever, that is actually comparable to and can be measured against the good of having more people survive and so on. Come to think of it—this can work both ways. It might be that the best use of your resources might be to do things so that your group actually suffered more or some of you died, so that some /other/ group can go off and actualize or better itself in some way… weird to think about. One way you might very roughly point the whole thing out would be to assign values to each tier of maslow’s hierarchy—maybe a ‘4’ for physiological, a 5 for safety, 6 belonging 7 esteem 8 for self-actualization.. so one person figuring out the meaning of life is a state of affairs that’s maybe worth the lives of two people. So, obviously not a ‘perfect’ point system. But from there you can say, if i take action X—who moves up or down the pyramid (or off the bottom of it) and what’s the gain? There are probably better descriptions of ‘the good’ for an individual than maslow’s hierarchy which is from the forties, but, I’m working with what I know off the top of my head and am looking forward to better ideas / corrections / etc. I’m sure there’s way more elaborate / nuanced utility systems that people are into. And then compare X to other actions on that basis—based on where they move people on the pyramid. So for instance adding too many people will eventually lower the quality of life for everyone because it takes a certain amount of resources to give everyone the best quality of life and there’s a finite set of resources available at any given time… only so much carbon, so much sunlight etc—we can also take steps to increase that energy and that changes the game, too...
Its interesting to try to think about how to accomplish being benevolent to the degree you want to in a world that you are included in.
One way you might start to come up with a map that’s a little less biased than where you might think to start is—after working to overcome your prejudices and the social and geographical and perceptual distortions that make other people’s problems harder to empathize with, turning that lens on yourself and thinking about how you are biased against or for yourself and how you fit into this map as well, remembering that you’re also deciding how to allocate the resources and energy of that one person on the map you are including, and that various people are variably selfish and helpful to others, and finding a balance that makes sense among all that. And that that one person has not only material and emotional needs but meaning needs. You may want to pencil in time to write the great american novel, or something. There are other meaningful things to spend resources on besides charity, and its arguable that its good to facilitate those things too—that there may be some good to having those self-actualization bits, where we figure out what anything means or what we’re doing with ourselves, or we do things like make art or whatever, that is actually comparable to and can be measured against the good of having more people survive and so on. Come to think of it—this can work both ways. It might be that the best use of your resources might be to do things so that your group actually suffered more or some of you died, so that some /other/ group can go off and actualize or better itself in some way… weird to think about. One way you might very roughly point the whole thing out would be to assign values to each tier of maslow’s hierarchy—maybe a ‘4’ for physiological, a 5 for safety, 6 belonging 7 esteem 8 for self-actualization.. so one person figuring out the meaning of life is a state of affairs that’s maybe worth the lives of two people. So, obviously not a ‘perfect’ point system. But from there you can say, if i take action X—who moves up or down the pyramid (or off the bottom of it) and what’s the gain? There are probably better descriptions of ‘the good’ for an individual than maslow’s hierarchy which is from the forties, but, I’m working with what I know off the top of my head and am looking forward to better ideas / corrections / etc. I’m sure there’s way more elaborate / nuanced utility systems that people are into. And then compare X to other actions on that basis—based on where they move people on the pyramid. So for instance adding too many people will eventually lower the quality of life for everyone because it takes a certain amount of resources to give everyone the best quality of life and there’s a finite set of resources available at any given time… only so much carbon, so much sunlight etc—we can also take steps to increase that energy and that changes the game, too...