So all good is worth equally? Holding a door open for someone is equivalent to donating a kidney? I'm sure you'll say no, in which case please provide me with an objective way to measure value of any individual good deed.
Which helps more people, holding a door for someone, or inventing automatic doors?
When someone is standing there in front of the door, you don't rush off and start designing a door-opening mechanism for them. In the same way, it is better to provide clean water and other aid to a community immediately than to put the same amount of money into local aid and waiting for it to "trickle down" to this distant village.
You don't fly halfway across the world to open a door, either.
And I never said helping people here would help people on the other side of the world. That's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. Helping the poorest people here will by extension help
everyone here, by increasing the skilled workforce, increasing the consumer market, and decreasing the number of individuals in such desperate straits as to turn to violent crime for money, in addition to the general benefit of improving the lot of people who deserve better then they have, and need only a little push to reach it. Go to the other side of the world and the same efforts are nothing more than pissing into the ocean. Educate some children, great, too bad there are no jobs there that require those skills, so they just end up farmers anyways. Give them clean drinking water, great, too bad their food's tainted too. Give them safe food, great, too bad those militants over there came and shot them all to take it for themselves...
Just one comment on the philanthropy discussion. I personally believe that our egocentric worldviews and selfish tendencies are a root source of many of the world's problems. Most of our problems come from people's treatment of one another based on the justification that they must look out for them and their own first, even at the cost of others. Thus we create a competitive rather than cooperative atmosphere, where doing harm becomes necessary for survival. I think that dedicating ourselves to the betterment of all people equally, beginning with those facing the largest scale and most desperate situations especially as caused by our competitive culture, is the deepest possible approach to uprooting this fundamental human problem.
In other words, most of our problems come from a widespread lack of compassion, thus actively cultivating compassion is the most pragmatic possible approach to solving the world's problems, even if the actions involved in that process of cultivation when studied individually are not pragmatically effective.
Note that we teach people to share, and help others, and to be all nice and benevolent, all through their childhoods. It doesn't take in enough of them, and in many of those it does it gets beaten out of them by those it doesn't take in. Eventually most people end up with a sort of jaded benevolence at best, when they're not the sort to actively seek to better only themselves. I step a hell of a lot further than most when I say it's a government's obligation to help
all of its people, not just the wealthy fucks bribing congressmen. One must pick one's battles, and helping those whose wellbeing has an impact on yours, however indirect, and who can be helped comes before trying to help people on the other side of the world. Ultimately, we should all be united under one flag, such that those people on the other side of the world
are our people too, and thus we become obligated to help them, but that is a very long way off.
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Topic: Egypt and the world and Libya - Now without Ukraine! (Read 373161 times)