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?
A Ph.D student in neuroscience shot at least 50 people at a showing of the new Batman movie. He also appears to have released some kind of gas from a canister. Because of his educational background this person almost certainly knows a lot about molecular biology. How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
Edit: I'm not claiming that this event should cause a fully informed person to update on anything. Rather I was hoping that readers of this blog with strong life-science backgrounds could provide information that would help me and other interested readers assess the probability of future risks. Since this blog often deals with catastrophic risks and the social harms of irrationality and given that the events I described will likely dominate the U.S. news media for a few days I thought my question worth asking. Given the post's Karma rating (currently -4), however, I will update my beliefs about what constitutes an appropriate discussion post.