The more impactful a thing is, the more you should care about it.
This applies in the context of work. Effective organizations of people think together about what projects would have the biggest impact on the business, and allocate resources on those projects.
It also applies in the context of charity. Giving What We Can does research into what charities have the highest impact per dollar. There’s a meaningful difference between spending $15 to donate one toy to one child, versus spending $15 to provide clean water for a year for ten children.
It’s generally viewed poorly when there is an injustice and yet people do not care about fixing it.
However, we can generalize this: If someone cares more about fixing something less bad, but cares less about fixing something more bad, that is also not great. It is better than not caring at all, but still not optimal.
One difficulty is that it’s not clear what is “more impactful”. Different things are impactful to different people.
- You would probably care more if you lost your own job than if an arbitrary guy lost their job.
- If you were sick, you’d probably focus first on getting treatment for yourself before thinking about getting treatment for some sick guy you don’t know.
- When an airplane loses cabin pressure, we’re told to put on our own mask before helping others.
This all makes sense and seems appropriate.
However, when you start to consider zero-sum games, where everyone is competing for finite resources, things get harder. And since our lives and our world is finite, this comes up often.
It seems okay to care about and advocate for your community’s well-being. But is it okay to care more about your own community’s well-being than other communities? Is it appropriate to advocate for funding and attention for your community, when, because funding and attention are finite resources, to do so could arguably deprive those other communities of those resources?
The core idea of conservatism, which I tend to reject, is that existing hierarchies of power should not be changed. Another way of framing this is given by one Frank Wilhoit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
I claim that another way of framing the core idea of conservatism is that it is to care disproportionally to impact.
If we’re caring more about thing A, even though that thing A is less important than thing B, we’re creating or maintaining an unnatural power hierarchy where A is favored over B, where A is the in-group and B is the out-group.