Follow-up to: So you say you're an altruist

The responses to So you say you're an altruist indicate that people have split their values into two categories:

1. values they use to decide what they want
2. values that are admissible for moral reasoning

(where 2 is probably a subset of 1 for atheists, and probably nearly disjoint from 1 for Presbyterians).

You're reading Less Wrong.  You're a rationalist.  You've put a lot of effort into education, and learning the truth about the world.  You value knowledge and rationality and truth a lot.

Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives.

What happened to the value you placed on knowledge and rationality?

There is little chance that any of the people you save in Africa will get a good post-graduate education and then follow that up by rejecting religion, embracing rationality, and writing Less Wrong posts.

Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong.  If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access.  If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally.  If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation.  Not doing so is immoral.  You can't use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning.

Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable.  Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable.  You can't have it both ways.  If all lives have equal value, we shouldn't criticize someone who decides to become a drug addict on welfare.  Value is value, regardless of which equation it's in at the moment.