How Risky Is It, Really?

I care about others feelings, if they are in pain. That is what hurts me, because I empathize with them and feel their pain as my own. If someone dies how do I empathize with a dead person?

I never have felt bad about just people dying. Unless it was a family member in a close family, then I feel bad for the family members.

Like a million people could die right now and I wouldn't really think much of it. If I knew that a million people were being tortured right now... That would be saddening and painful

The overall idea behind this post is a very interesting one, but I think using donation studies as illustrations was distracting. I actually found the second paragraph more disturbing than the first, but I would be more willing to donate to the first. The reason: I feel like donating to "feeding the children in Africa" is a black hole for my money to fall into. That is a cause that has generated a lot of money over the years and we have seen almost no improvement in the situation. You know what is happening with your donation when it goes directly to one child.

We relate to the person, not the statistic.

One thing that this study does not take into account is the fact that most people know that when they give to a cause like this most money they give winds up in some bureaucrat or corrupt foreign government official's pocket. Or the aid goods show up on the black market profiting only the gangs that stole them and furthering harm to the intended recipients of the aid. There have been several recent news stories about that happening. But when there is a specific individual, people feel like most of what they give will go directly to that person rather than get lost in a big aid system and wind up supporting the corruption that caused the problem in the first place.

I'm not taking this down a racist line but hear me out. I think that part of why the donations for famine are low is because
(a) famine is seen as a sort of never-ending situation; the donations do not go into 'hittin a reset-button' by getting the folks back on their feet like in the case of the Tsunami. I've heard people comment about african famine in terms such as 'why don't they just move?'
(b) the majority of people in developing countries simply cannot identify/empathize with folks in developing countries. Just listen to people talk about fighting in the middle-eastern countries 'they've accustomed to that hard life' ...'why don't they just move?' Its a geo-political phenomenon that the developing world has raised for many years, it has been the backdrop of hundreds of hollywood movies. The concept of the 'Us' and the 'Them.' Its not a bashing statement but another sad fact about human nature I think.

"Save Child One $3.25

Save Child Two $3.25

Save Both $3.00"

"You are a person, not a number. You don't see digits in the mirror, you see a face. And you don't see a crowd. You see an individual. So you and I relate more powerfully to the reality of a single person than to the numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction of numbers."

But in this experiment the people had two faces each with their own story - shouldn't that mean "Save Both $6.00" - because the two faces weren't a statistic but two people.

I do think it's the emotional drive behind it all. You can relate and feel for one person and aid him/her in their suffering, but when you get to millions how can you relate to such a mass? Only if you go one by one but then you get to a whole new set of problems.

Going along what AT said, its hard for people in the developed world to empathise with starving Africans because the decisions they make are so baffling and devoid of common sense that a lot of us are just too dumbfounded to feel sorry for them.

Why have 7 children if you can't feed them? The K-reproductive is causing the problem. We in the West are raised to only have 2 children and invest all our resources in them to allow them to succeed. But when African women have 6-7 kids on average, they only hope 2 will survive. That's how natural selection worked before the west came in to intervene.

Sending money and food only make the problem worse. Those 7 children each have 7 children of their own and so on and so on. So a population of 20 million becomes 70 million after a few generations. What Africa really needs is immediate birth control and sterilisation. Get the population down to where its manageable. Then you won't have famines every few years. And then we won't look at them as a statistic.

A related exploration from a philosophical perspective is this paper by the Norwegian philosopher and 'deep ecologist' Arne Naess:

Arne Naess (1999) The Principle of Intensity
The Journal of Value Inquiry Volume 33, Number 1, 5-9.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1004374106015

Unfortunately the media and fundraisers keep putting death, destruction and misery in our faces constantly (partly for ratings in the case of the media and preservation of jobs for fundraisers). The result of this even if it is focused on a single person is "so what?". And given the reports of the amounts of graft when you do give (especially in East Africa), what is the point?

I don't think it is only the eyes of the child vs. some abstract number. Let's take a look at the donor in the experiment, his responsibilties and his perceived accomplishement.

In the first scenarion, a fundraiser ask him to support a single child. In some context, he asks the donor to take responsibility for that child. The donor accepts that responsibility, since he guesses it is feasible to help a single child. After he donated, he walks away with the feeling that he saved a child. He fulfilled the responsibility he took.

In the second scenario, the donor is asked to accept responsibility for all the hungry in the world (or so it seems). There is no way he can help them all. All he can do is only an insignificant contribution. So, either he denies this responsibility - and only donates some amount to get away from the fund raiser.
Or he accepts a responsibility that he cannot fulfill. After his donation, he still feels guilty for those he could not help.

A friend posted a picture with Steve Jobs on half and a starving child on the other with the caption "One dies, millions cry; Millions die, no one cares." It was an unfortunate poster for several reasons but one of the most unfortunate things was a comment by a 'friend' "The world are filled over low potential lives anyway; the millions didn't invent my macbook pro" All I could muster was "Hmmmmm"

A friend posted a picture with Steve Jobs on half and a starving child on the other with the caption "One dies, millions cry; Millions die, no one cares." It was an unfortunate poster for several reasons but one of the most unfortunate things was a comment by a 'friend' "The world are filled over low potential lives anyway; the millions didn't invent my macbook pro" All I could muster was "Hmmmmm"

We don’t care because we are immune to what is relevant. We confuse opinion with directive, directive with criticism, criticism with insult, insult with authority, authority with expertise, expertise with amateurism, amateurism with creativity, creativity with intelligence, intelligence with arrogance, arrogance with violence, violence with frustration, frustration with inability, inability with handicap, handicap with illness, illness with randomness, randomness with freewill, freewill with self-awareness, self-awareness with reason, reason with opinion. We don’t care because we are confused.
Read full article here: http://bunea.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-we-dont-care.html