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gwern comments on Mass-murdering neuroscience Ph.D. student - Less Wrong
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The easily followed ones.
What makes you think that any system is easily followed in all common circumstances?
What makes you think, then, that any discussion of donation rates or 'hypocrisy' is of any interest or relevance?
Because donating a kidney IS fairly easy to do. So easy, in fact, that when I realized that I really, really, don't want to, I had to come to terms with the fact that I needed to reevaluate either morality or my character.
We must have different standards of what easy is, if donating a kidney strikes you as an easy way to help people as compared to, say, donating a thousand bucks to GiveWell's top charity.
Which doesn't answer the point. If ease/low standards doesn't matter to evaluating a theory of ethics, then your questions about kidney are just irrelevant and rhetoric; if ease does matter in deciding whether a theory of ethics is correct or not, why do you implicitly seem to think that easiness is the default and high standards (like in utilitarianism) need to be justified?
I'm not measuring a standard of ethics by looking at the people who support it. I'm saying that if the people who claim to support a ethical principle violate it without considering themselves either immoral or hypocrites, then they believe something different from what they think they believe.
And donating to charity until I become a charity case is unreasonable- if donating to charity is a moral obligation, at what point does it stop being a moral obligation?
Is 'immoral' the best word to use in this context? If you asked them, 'do you think you are as moral as possible or are doing the very most optimal things to do?', I suspect most of them would answer 'no'. Problem solved, apparently, if that was what you really meant all along...
You already explained at what point donating stops. As for 'unreasonable', I think that's more rhetoric on your part since I'm not sure where exactly in reason we can find the one true ethics which tells us to eat, drink, be merry, and stop donating well before that point. If it's really unreasonable, you're going to be picking fights with an awful lot of religions, I'd also point out, who didn't seem to find it unreasonable behavior on the parts of ethical paragons like saints and monks.
"Are you currently violating the moral principles you believe in?" would be the best phrasing.
From one standpoint, it becomes unreasonable when there is something else that I would rather do with that money. Coincidentally, that happens to be exactly the principle I use to decide how much I donate to charity.