Altruists can always ask, "What can I do that would do the most good?" and it would be surprising if the answer (for someone of above-average wealth) was ever "spend 100% of my resources on personal consumption for myself."
But I wouldn't personally be terribly bothered by the fact that some people are *slightly* less well-off than I am, …
Altruists can always ask, "What can I do that would do the most good?" and it would be surprising if the answer (for someone of above-average wealth) was ever "spend 100% of my resources on personal consumption for myself."
But I wouldn't personally be terribly bothered by the fact that some people are *slightly* less well-off than I am, such that I could expect to do a couple of percentage points more good by reallocating my resources to them. I think the situation we're currently in, where others get *orders of magnitude* more benefit from marginal resources than I do, is much more troubling. And it's that massive gulf, and the associated "low hanging fruit" for *massively* improving the world, that I was suggesting should be fixable.
(Ultimately it's a spectrum rather than a binary, but current global inequality is so extreme that it's pretty clear we're not currently in the "grey zone" where the urgency of altruism could reasonably be questioned.)
Altruists can always ask, "What can I do that would do the most good?" and it would be surprising if the answer (for someone of above-average wealth) was ever "spend 100% of my resources on personal consumption for myself."
But I wouldn't personally be terribly bothered by the fact that some people are *slightly* less well-off than I am, such that I could expect to do a couple of percentage points more good by reallocating my resources to them. I think the situation we're currently in, where others get *orders of magnitude* more benefit from marginal resources than I do, is much more troubling. And it's that massive gulf, and the associated "low hanging fruit" for *massively* improving the world, that I was suggesting should be fixable.
(Ultimately it's a spectrum rather than a binary, but current global inequality is so extreme that it's pretty clear we're not currently in the "grey zone" where the urgency of altruism could reasonably be questioned.)