= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jiro comments on What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (72)
Most people don't analyze things much at all. It's possible to ask a random person and be told he values everyone equally, and that's in some literal sense not saying what he believes. But if you just rephrased the question as "do you care more about yourself than someone else--would you pay my mortgage as readily as your own", he would answer "oh, if that's what you mean, then of course I care about myself more". Technically he's inconsistent, but it's a very shallow sort of inconsistency based mostly on the fact that he doesn't analyze things much; it isn't some kind of hypocrisy or denial.
Maybe I am amoral, but I don't value myself the same as a random person even in a theoretical sense. What I do is I recognize that in some sense I am no more valuable to humanity than any other person. But I am way more valuable to me - if I die, that brings utility to 0, and while it can be negative in some circumstances (aka Life is not worth living), some random person's death clearly cannot do so, people are constantly dying in huge numbers all the time, and the cost of each death is non-zero to me, but must be relatively small, else I would easily be in the negative territory, and I am not.