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> But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat? It's not, but unless you are working on something that is dir
by danans 8y ago
> But why is my own intellectual curiosity more important than whether someone else gets to eat?
It's not, but unless you are working on something that is directly impoverishing someone to this point, then the economic or social system that allows people to go hungry and without basics is more to blame than your particular role.
People don't go hungry anymore due to lack of societal resources. It's due to either a lack of sufficient collective concern, or even a belief that it is largely acceptable that this occurs.
That the effect of your inequality inducing job is hunger for someone can only be countered with policy and incentives that work at societal, not with individual choices to disengage from jobs that optimize productivity.
It's similar to the fallacy of asking Warren Buffet to cut an additional check to the IRS vs raising tax rates, or the fallacy of thinking that an individual's choice not to eat meat has any meaningful effect on climate change.
> I don't want to just donate to charities, I want to end systemic problems that lead to charities needing to exist in the first place.
This is actually a great way to think about it, and if you have the personal means to pursue the systemic issues without having to worry about your own survival, then go for it. But know that this will almost certainly involve spurring on the collective human will to act towards that goal, not inventing a technology as an individual that will fix the problem.
- shrimp_emoji 8y agoAnd get downvoted when asking how it's ethical to allow a small fraction of people to own unlimited wealth when 25% of Americans don't have clean tap water. :3
- rak00n 8y agoIt's actually 63 million people, roughly 20%. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-americans-exposed-unsafe-drinking-water/564278001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-am...
- xyzzyz 8y agoAs many as 63 million people — nearly a fifth of the United States — from rural central California to the boroughs of New York City, were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade, according to a News21 investigation of 680,000 water quality and monitoring violations from the Environmental Protection Agency. I'd say that "exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade" is pretty far from "20% of Americans don't have clean tap water". If anything, I'd rather say it's impressive that 80% of Americans haven't been exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once in a decade!
- thwiv 8y agoWhere did you get that statistic?
- pawelmurias 8y agoDiscussion about ethics are kind of pointless as different people have different ethical systems.
- aabeshou 8y agoI dont think unnecessary inequality of food and water are very controversial in humane ethical systems, unless you want to include fascism in your debate
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoNo individual snowflake thinks it is responsible for the avalanche. Being aware of your own contribution to the state of the world and being willing to change that are important, even if you account for only a minuscule part of the problem.
- danans 8y agoIndividual awareness is different than individual actions. Awareness can actually scale through individual change due to the non linear way that information spreads, and that can in turn influence policy, which then operates over the whole domain. That's sort of the whole political process in a nutshell. But individual acts of sacrifice for the common good are not scalable in the same way, due to our inherent aversion to loss. Usually large scale acts of sacrifice are the result of worse alternative consequences, like imprisonment or penalties for cheating on taxes.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago> But individual acts of sacrifice for the common good are not scalable in the same way, due to our inherent aversion to loss. I submit that this is a convenient excuse. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. It is easy to say "yeah, I'm making things worse, but its ok because so is everyone else", and thus nothing changes.
- danans 8y ago> I submit that this is a convenient excuse. More of an observation that people will tend toward their local maximum utility even while global utility is compromised. Sometimes you might discover a way to increase both, but for most ongoing concerns the way to balance the two is via laws and regulation.
- nabnob 8y agoI agree with you, what I was trying to say is that I've had an internal dilemma about pursuing my career or making it a priority to tackle those systemic issues. I know that my individual contribution to capitalism by working for a major corporation is a drop in the bucket, and simply refusing to work for a corporation has no real impact on poverty worldwide. But I could definitely put more energy into radical action than I do right now.