I guess I’m not fully sure I understand why you are thinking that. Is it possible that you are feeling confused about your feelings because it is a dog and so it is easier to think of its welfare in terms of which number is smaller rather than engaging with the question emotionally?
Imagine it was a human child. Wouldn’t it be “very good” to give one human child a caring family and a home? Why does the fact that it would be arguably more good to prevent ten human children from premature malaria deaths take away from that it’s good to help one child?
If everybody with the capability would give serious support to even one other person then almost all these problems would be solved several times over
Or lets imagine a more down to earth scenario. Your friend wants you to help them move. So you help them move. But you instead could have worked extra and made more money, hired movers for your friend, and also on top of that paid for a week of your friend’s meals. Haven’t you still done a good turn by helping your friend, even if an even more efficient way to help them exists? (Especially when in reality you were never going to put in all those extra work hours and you would burn out if you lived like that)\
A small good deserves a small reward, not a punishment, but it sounds like you are punishing yourself. The purpose of guilt and shame emotions are not intended to punish yourself for not doing enough.Those emotions are intended to stop you from doing bad things, not punish you for being insufficiently efficient about good. If you emotionally punish yourself for doing good in smaller than maximally efficient ways then you’ll only train yourself to flinch away from doing good things, don’t do that to yourself.
We want you to work hard at doing good for others for many years, We don’t want you to feel guilt and shame about not doing enough until your motivation fizzles out. Small good things count.
It’s not about catering to your emotions at the expense of rationality or anything. When you find a $1 dollar on the street, you are happy to have gotten a little money, not sad that the bill was not $100, right? It doesn’t do to not appreciate the small things just because larger things exist. You talked about emotions vs yourf riends being “more calculating” than you earlier, but what your friends said was actually not rational, it is not calculating correctly to not count small good things as good just because an even bigger good is placed next to them.
If you want to change your behavior to do even more good that’s great but there’s no sense in which doing a small good should count against you.
I guess I’m thinking that if A is 20k times as good as B, it’s really not very good to do B even if B is a little bit good in itself :-)
I guess I’m not fully sure I understand why you are thinking that. Is it possible that you are feeling confused about your feelings because it is a dog and so it is easier to think of its welfare in terms of which number is smaller rather than engaging with the question emotionally?
Imagine it was a human child. Wouldn’t it be “very good” to give one human child a caring family and a home? Why does the fact that it would be arguably more good to prevent ten human children from premature malaria deaths take away from that it’s good to help one child?
If everybody with the capability would give serious support to even one other person then almost all these problems would be solved several times over
Or lets imagine a more down to earth scenario. Your friend wants you to help them move. So you help them move. But you instead could have worked extra and made more money, hired movers for your friend, and also on top of that paid for a week of your friend’s meals. Haven’t you still done a good turn by helping your friend, even if an even more efficient way to help them exists? (Especially when in reality you were never going to put in all those extra work hours and you would burn out if you lived like that)\
A small good deserves a small reward, not a punishment, but it sounds like you are punishing yourself. The purpose of guilt and shame emotions are not intended to punish yourself for not doing enough.Those emotions are intended to stop you from doing bad things, not punish you for being insufficiently efficient about good. If you emotionally punish yourself for doing good in smaller than maximally efficient ways then you’ll only train yourself to flinch away from doing good things, don’t do that to yourself.
We want you to work hard at doing good for others for many years, We don’t want you to feel guilt and shame about not doing enough until your motivation fizzles out. Small good things count.
It’s not about catering to your emotions at the expense of rationality or anything. When you find a $1 dollar on the street, you are happy to have gotten a little money, not sad that the bill was not $100, right? It doesn’t do to not appreciate the small things just because larger things exist. You talked about emotions vs yourf riends being “more calculating” than you earlier, but what your friends said was actually not rational, it is not calculating correctly to not count small good things as good just because an even bigger good is placed next to them.
If you want to change your behavior to do even more good that’s great but there’s no sense in which doing a small good should count against you.