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Comment by SamoyedFurFluff | Hacker News Reader

This assumes that having empathy for one person means actively working against benefiting other people— that is to say, funding someone’s wheelchair individually somehow also causes one to maliciously go against benefiting starving children in an exploited country. I don’t think this is the case; you can both give to someone with a wheelchair and also support a program that distributes medicine or food or something else.

I am heavily against this notion that giving to someone is bad because it isn’t the most efficient giving. Giving to someone, anyone, in need is good.

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> you can both give to someone with a wheelchair and also support a program that distributes medicine or food or something else.

You can only spend so much money on charity before you can't buy groceries anymore. Giving to one necessarily takes from the other.

There is a choice to be made, and one of the options is to give all your money marked for charity to one goal, and another is to split it. I don't think it's wrong to split between multiple causes, even if we know some causes are much more bang for your buck than others, it's a personal choice that you have to make for yourself. But it is a choice.

No it doesn't.

Giving to one means you gave and it is good period.

Speculation on whether giving to another is artificial value and loss.

If giving were required, it would work like taxes do and one getting more or anything at all does take from another.

Not everyone will give, and or give multiple times.

Whether money is even marked for gifts is itself a question.

It also misses the point of local tribe mentality deeply rooted in all of our brains.

We care about our closer relations far more than some other far away ones.

Therefore we are far more empathetic towards family and friends, than neighbours, than neighbouring nation, than country on the other side of the world you didn't know was there.

Me giving $100 to neighbour is different to $100 to malaria fighting foundation.

> It also misses the point of local tribe mentality deeply rooted in all of our brains.

Singer fully acknowledges the instinct you reference. But he points out there are other circumstances where we override our brute instincts based on social strictures and an intellectual understanding of the bigger picture.

For instance, most of us have a far stronger instinctive urge to violence than we actually practice. If someone steals my car I may be tempted to beat him grievously, but I don't even if it might feel powerfully right at the moment.

“The End of Empathy” is an Invisibilia (NPR) episode arguing empathy for a person harms others. I find the episode to be an interesting window into how some folk think. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/712280114/the-end-o...

Yeah, overwhelming majority of people don't do either. And people are way more likely to be in position to act on empathy then to do elaborate study then cause systematic changes of something.

Time and money are zero-sum.

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