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Henrik_Jonsson comments on Shut Up and Divide? - Less Wrong
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A very, very large portion.
When I was a child, I read a tract published by Inter-Varsity Press called "The salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer". It's a story about a Christian who tries to actually live according to Christian virtues. Eventually, he concludes that he can't; in a world in which so many people are starving and suffering, he can't justify spending even the bare minimum food and money on himself that would be necessary to keep him alive.
It troubled me for years, even after I gave up religion. It's stressful living in America when you realize that every time you get your hair cut, or go to a movie, or drink a Starbucks latte, you're killing someone. (It's even more stressful now that I can actually afford to do these things regularly.)
You can rationalize that allowing yourself little luxuries will enable you to do enough more good to make up for the lives you could have saved. (Unlikely; the best you can do is buy yourself "offsets"; but you'd usually save more lives with more self-denial.) You can rationalize that saving lives today inevitably leads to losing more lives in the future. (This carried me for a long time.) But ultimately, the only way I find to cope is not caring.
Recently, Michael Vassar told me I was one of the nicest people he knows. And yet I know that every day, I make decisions that would horrify almost everyone in America with their callousness. Other people act the same way; they just avoid making the decisions, by not thinking about the consequences of their actions.
I'm not a nice person inside, by any stretch of the imagination. I just have less of a gap between how nice my morals tell me to be, and how nice I act. This gap, in most people, is so large, that although I have morals that are "worse" than everyone around me, I act "nicer" than most of them by trying to follow them.
Nick Tarleton said it well, but to try it another way: Depending on how you phrase things, both to yourself and others, the situation can appear to be as bleak as you describe it, or alternatively rather good indeed. If you were to phrase it as being stuck with a brain built for chasing deer across the savanna and caring about the few dozen members of your tribe, being able to try to gain money (because it's the most effective means to whatever your ends) and investing some appreciable fraction of it in the cause with highest expected future payoff, despite being abstract or far in the future, starts to sound fairly impressive -- especially given what most people spend their time and money on.
If Starbucks lattes (or more obviously living above the subsistence level) makes it more likely for me to maintain my strategy of earning money to try to protect the things I value, my indulgences are very plausibly worth keeping. Yes, if I had another psychology I could skip that and help much more, but I don't, so I likely can't. What I can do short-term is to see what seems to happen on the margin. Can I sustain donating 1% more? Can I get by without a fancy car? House? Phone? Conversely, does eating out regularly boost my motivations enough to be worth it? Aim for the best outcome, given the state of the board you're playing on.
That gives you an incentive to not try to change your psychology, or even see if it's possible to change. If seeing your psychology as immutable gives you a reason to get what you want, you'll be biased against seeing it any other way. It's perfectly fine to choose Starbucks lattes over strangers' lives, lest we end up like Zachary Baumkletterer, but let's at least be honest about our preferences.