There have been a couple moments in my life when I’ve been pierced by someone else’s suffering, before the “fat relentless ego”[1] can catch up and mire everything in the soup of self-conscious self-reflective rationalisations. There is something true in those moments, and regular donation is a way to spread that truth out across time.
I.e. I donate because suffering seems bad, and I make it a habit/ commitment because I’m not always thinking about the suffering of others.
Fantastic Iris Murdoch quote from The Sovereignty of Good. Great trio of essays, strongly recommended. The content is mostly orthogonal to EA commitments (Murdoch’s version of doing good is quite blind to consequences), apart from the clearly serious striving to be good present across the essays.
There have been a couple moments in my life when I’ve been pierced by someone else’s suffering, before the “fat relentless ego”[1] can catch up and mire everything in the soup of self-conscious self-reflective rationalisations. There is something true in those moments, and regular donation is a way to spread that truth out across time.
I.e. I donate because suffering seems bad, and I make it a habit/ commitment because I’m not always thinking about the suffering of others.
Fantastic Iris Murdoch quote from The Sovereignty of Good. Great trio of essays, strongly recommended. The content is mostly orthogonal to EA commitments (Murdoch’s version of doing good is quite blind to consequences), apart from the clearly serious striving to be good present across the essays.