Why don't you donate all your money to Malaria prevention programs in Africa?

[Carl-Richard]

I think my answer to this ethical altruism conundrum is that we don't just value the sheer quantity of human life or even alleviating human suffering, but we value things like music, art, and we need different people to do different things to make society go around. We need air traffic controllers, train station workers, nurses, physicians, academics, politicians, etc.

Even people who suffer, value music, art; they might go to those things to alleviate their suffering, and if you take that away from them but you assure their life through Malaria prevention, you might have made their life less worth living.

So what to do?: Do what you feel called to do. A person who feels called to do something, who feels motivated to do it, will do it better than somebody else who does not feel as motivated. And that way you will contribute greater to that part of the world you choose to contribute to. If you feel very called to donate money to Malaria prevention programs, do that. If you feel very called to find a cure for cancer, do that. Charity is a way of using your time on something you think is valueable. So use your time on something you think is valueable.

"But can't you donate like 5% of your savings to Malaria prevention and save a big chunk of lives that way and still do what you feel called to do?" Well, yes, but what about other programs like water sanitation, cancer prevention, other disease prevention? "Just choose one that has a high life-saving conversion rate". Well, why do you ought to use 5% of your savings on initiatives with high immediate life-saving conversion rates and not say finding a cure for cancer or just landing a recording contract?

[yetineti]

It seems, although you're suggesting curing somebody's malaria could actually lead them down a wrong path away from a creative future more worth living. 

If so, that's a fucked up argument. 

To the "why not this, why not that" question, you answered it yourself. People do what they're called for. 

[Carl-Richard]

47 minutes ago, yetineti said:

It seems, although you're suggesting curing somebody's malaria could actually lead them down a wrong path away from a creative future more worth living. 

If so, that's a fucked up argument.

What you wrote is grammatically incorrect and I don't understand it.

[Elliott]

You do what best helps shape the world into what you want it to be, which can include pestering others to donate to malaria charities.

 

On 8/19/2026 at 3:17 PM, Carl-Richard said:

What you wrote is grammatically incorrect and I don't understand it.

I'm caught between supporting the new asshole Carl I like, or being concerned.

[yetineti]

@Carl-Richard

It seems as though you’re suggesting that curing somebody’s malaria could actually lead them down a wrong path, away from a creative future more worth living.

If so, that’s a fucked up argument.*

—

It’s also not believable that you identified the grammatical errors in my sentence but couldn’t decipher the meaning.

It almost seems like you were high and posted this as ‘food for thought.’

 

 

[Carl-Richard]

@yetineti "It seems, although [...]" is a fucked up typo for "it seems as though", with the comma and everything; extremely specific and multi-step typo. Besides, your referent "them" is highly ambiguous (are you talking about the curer or the cured?). I would kindly request you to try again.

Edited Sunday at 04:44 PM by Carl-Richard

[yetineti]

@Carl-Richard

You’re being pedantic. The opening clause of my sentence was unnecessary; remove it, and the intended meaning remains completely obvious. I’d implore you to apply the same standard of clarity and rigor to your own writing. Framing a post around rhetorical questions does not, by itself, make the underlying argument clear.

If your point is that society would lose art, music, and other meaningful pursuits if everyone devoted everything to maximizing lives saved, then say that directly. But nobody needs to abandon their art, career, or calling to donate 5% of their income. Presenting those as competing alternatives is a false and misguided ultimatum.

 

[LordFall]

I think humans like ROI for their investments and thinking about children in Africa is not enough to make you feel good about spending your money. I think we should honor philanthropists a lot more and the rich people that help solve problems should get statues made.

We should do whatever it takes to solve all of humanity's biggest problems asap and not virtue signal about Christian piety and "you should feel good about helping others with no reward in return!" 

Speaking of, MrBeast has done phenomenal work with TeamWater and some of his other charity projects. People are still dumb and found ways to hate him for it lol because his mere existence makes them feel small and irrelevant.

This is why I think acquiring power is very important and demonizing this quest is a huge blindspot for stage green. Without power you will not accomplish much in life. At best you will try to band together and achieve collective power but that can be misdirected in all kinds of ways. 

Edited yesterday at 02:57 AM by LordFall

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, yetineti said:

@Carl-Richard

You’re being pedantic. The opening clause of my sentence was unnecessary; remove it, and the intended meaning remains completely obvious. I’d implore you to apply the same standard of clarity and rigor to your own writing. Framing a post around rhetorical questions does not, by itself, make the underlying argument clear.

I know you just used Puke GPT to write that because that was absolutely a load of horseshit. Imagine copypasting my post into AI and copypasting back its answer to me when I asked you to merely clarify your answer, instead of merely clarifying your answer. That explains the absolutely horseshitted AI response you just got. You get out of it what you put into it. The fact of the matter is you made a ridiculous typo and you also bombed the "them" referent and you can't just accept it and clarify so everything is clear.

 

1 hour ago, yetineti said:

If your point is that society would lose art, music, and other meaningful pursuits if everyone devoted everything to maximizing lives saved, then say that directly. But nobody needs to abandon their art, career, or calling to donate 5% of their income. Presenting those as competing alternatives is a false and misguided ultimatum.

Tell your AI that I asked whether it's worth it to spend 5% of your income on malaria prevention OR that 5% on your art/career/calling, not that they should abandon their art/career/calling and then donate 5% of their income (uh, what?). Tell your AI that it sucks at reading comprehension and should be scrapped or 300x its token usage. And tell yourself that you're lazy and don't deserve to talk to other people in this thread if you can't even clearly state what you are saying when asked to do so.

Edited yesterday at 04:36 AM by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, LordFall said:

I think humans like ROI for their investments and thinking about children in Africa is not enough to make you feel good about spending your money. I think we should honor philanthropists a lot more and the rich people that help solve problems should get statues made.

We should do whatever it takes to solve all of humanity's biggest problems asap and not virtue signal about Christian piety and "you should feel good about helping others with no reward in return!" 

Speaking of, MrBeast has done phenomenal work with TeamWater and some of his other charity projects. People are still dumb and found ways to hate him for it lol because his mere existence makes them feel small and irrelevant.

This is why I think acquiring power is very important and demonizing this quest is a huge blindspot for stage green. Without power you will not accomplish much in life. At best you will try to band together and achieve collective power but that can be misdirected in all kinds of ways. 

So you're saying if somebody wants to donate to malaria prevention, they should also post about it on youtube and monetize it so that they can get a ROI and so they want to do it more (unless they feel better to just donate without getting anything in return)? 😆

Edited yesterday at 05:06 AM by Carl-Richard

[Scholar]

On 15.8.2026 at 1:30 PM, Carl-Richard said:

I think my answer to this ethical altruism conundrum is that we don't just value the sheer quantity of human life or even alleviating human suffering, but we value things like music, art, and we need different people to do different things to make society go around. We need air traffic controllers, train station workers, nurses, physicians, academics, politicians, etc.

Even people who suffer, value music, art; they might go to those things to alleviate their suffering, and if you take that away from them but you assure their life through Malaria prevention, you might have made their life less worth living.

So what to do?: Do what you feel called to do. A person who feels called to do something, who feels motivated to do it, will do it better than somebody else who does not feel as motivated. And that way you will contribute greater to that part of the world you choose to contribute to. If you feel very called to donate money to Malaria prevention programs, do that. If you feel very called to find a cure for cancer, do that. Charity is a way of using your time on something you think is valueable. So use your time on something you think is valueable.

"But can't you donate like 5% of your savings to Malaria prevention and save a big chunk of lives that way and still do what you feel called to do?" Well, yes, but what about other programs like water sanitation, cancer prevention, other disease prevention? "Just choose one that has a high life-saving conversion rate". Well, why do you ought to use 5% of your savings on initiatives with high immediate life-saving conversion rates and not say finding a cure for cancer or just landing a recording contract?

It seems to me like there is rationalization going on here.

The obvious answer is that humans are selfish. 

The idea that we actually don't help starving people in another country with our money because otherwise the world wouldn't be worth living, or some other deeper philosophical reality about the nature of ethics, is I think kind of hilarious if you truly look at how absurd that actually sounds.

No, you just don't want to be bothered to spent the money. It takes time, effort, sacrifice. Humans are driven by emotion, not reason, or philosophy, or the consequences of moral systems and principles. They don't see the suffering, they don't act on it.

If you were sufficiently horrified by what is going on another country, you would be motivated to do something about it. Not because you realized the true nature of morality, but because for whatever reason your identity was tied to that thing and you were driven to act on it.

There is no "ought" here. 

 

What seems to be happening actually is this:

You have engaged in some moral thinking, and that lead you to the idea that there are people in deep suffering that you could help substantially with a fairly trivial sacrifice to your life. We live in a society where nobody will peer pressure you into actually donating that money, and you really don't feel like donating that money. But you also have enough ethical sensibility that you realize the choice that you are making: You are choosing to go to the cinema instead of saving another human beings life. And in your mind, a person who prioritizes their own, trivial pleasure (you could easily do something that doesn't cost money and have just as much fun as whatever you spent money on) over another human beings life and suffering, clearly cannot be a good person. Not only are they not a good person, they are a horrible person. 

But you are a good person, not a horrible person.

So now here we go, we have to explain why it actually is not horrible to make this choice.

In the end, no matter what you come up with, the reality will be: If it was your brother or sister who needed 100€ not to starve to death, or die by some horrible disease, you would immediately give them that money. There would be no question about it. You would never say "Well, who is to say I need to give my sister this money? Why ought I use 100€ to save her life? What would life be if nobody could enjoy art, music?".

Everyone would know this is bullshit. You can enjoy life and music and everything else while still giving your sister 100€.

 

You would help your sister because your identity is tied to your sister. Even if she lived on the other side of the planet you would still give her that 100€. You would be highly emotionally driven to do so.

When we talk people in africa, they are an abstraction to you. You could sit down, watch videos, maybe even contact a person and befriend them from that region via the internet. And maybe your identity would get tied to them, or that issue in general. And then, you would be motivated to act, because your emotions drive you to do so.

You are sensing an issue with the problem of identity in general. Expanding identity is burdensome. Even just loving your own family can be burdensome. When they suffer, you suffer. You feel obligated to help them if they are in need of it. "Feeling obligated", just means there is a strong emotion driving you towards that. Now, the more people you include into your identity, truly, the more burden you would have to carry. Everyone's suffering who is included into your identity becomes your suffering. Identity means self.

So that is the reason why your psychology resists this idea. This is why identity is highly selective.

 

Notice there is no morality here. Morality has a profoundly small role in actual human behavior.

[Carl-Richard]

@Scholar You tend to make this same argument in other threads, that humans are emotional, illogical and are only driven by an irrational and ultimately arbitrary attachment to an identity. That might certainly be true to some level for all people, and for some people more than others, and perhaps for yourself since you like to project it so much (your cognition seems very much Fi, so you will view things through values people have that they don't feel like grounding in anything but feeling itself and simply "identification"). However, it's still possible to have a discussion where we try to come to things through logic. Some people think that is a reasonable way to interact with the world.

Through logic (and simply thinking clearly and explictly about things), you can start to map out relationships between different things you purport to value (and your actions), and if there is a discrepancy between any of them, you can start to fix them so that it becomes more consistent. For example, it took me quite a lot of thinking and deliberate attention to find out why I was dissatisfied with researching the bulk of "mindfulness" as it is often conceived in academia and why I was more specifically aligned with what I found out is called the "3rd wave of meditation research". I could of course have gone purely by feeling and have said "I don't like this but I like this", but I wouldn't have known how to clearly point out the difference (and perhaps I would have gotten stuck in the former without knowing why I felt dissatisfied and whether there existed any alternatives).

In short, logic is good for explicating your values and helping you act consistently with your values (because there are many values and many actions that can be consistent or inconsistent, and logic can map out those relationships).

Edited 16 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[LordFall]

On 9/7/2026 at 1:06 AM, Carl-Richard said:

So you're saying if somebody wants to donate to malaria prevention, they should also post about it on youtube and monetize it so that they can get a ROI and so they want to do it more (unless they feel better to just donate without getting anything in return)? 😆

Absolutely. If you get a return on your donations, then you can afford to do it continuously. This is how people end up starting powerful non-profits that change the world.

If your donations are not sustainable then it usually ends up being a one off that makes you feel better but doesn't end up really impacting the causes you care about and solving the problem. 

An average worker quietly donating 5% of their paycheck saves a handful of lives over a decade. A creator like MrBeast monetizing the process generates millions of dollars in production leverage, sponsors, and AdSense, funding hundreds of wells. The moral purist focuses on personal virtue; the operator focuses on total capital deployed to the problem.

Edited 8 hours ago by LordFall

[Yimpa]

Quote

Why don't you donate all your money to Malaria prevention programs in Africa?

 

[AerisVahnEphelia]

Because I have a more sustainable plan for humanity, people should donate to me so I can carry out my plans to save humanity.

[Scholar]

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

@Scholar You tend to make this same argument in other threads, that humans are emotional, illogical and are only driven by an irrational and ultimately arbitrary attachment to an identity.

That's not really the argument.

 

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

However, it's still possible to have a discussion where we try to come to things through logic. Some people think that is a reasonable way to interact with the world.

Those who have an identity tied to being logical and ethically consistent, which to some degree most people do. However, see next point.

 

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Through logic (and simply thinking clearly and explictly about things), you can start to map out relationships between different things you purport to value (and your actions), and if there is a discrepancy between any of them, you can start to fix them so that it becomes more consistent. 

Rational thinking is a tool deployed by identity. In this case, I pointed out how identity engaged in rationalization of it's own behavior. We don't really start with a set or ethical premises and then work out from that all conclusions that follow from that, and then abide by those rulesets. We constantly adjust our own moral rationalizations to fit moral intuitions (which are tied to identity).

 

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

In short, logic is good for explicating your values and helping you act consistently with your values (because there are many values and many actions that can be consistent or inconsistent, and logic can map out those relationships).

Of course, logic can be a great tool. I used logic to elucidate the process that has taken place here.

[Schizophonia]

Because I absolutely don't give a f***; it's not my karma/way to love. 

Choosing between immediate aid and a project with longer-term results such as curing cancer is a matter of personal preference.

"Ethics" is fundamentally the name given to castration (disguised, because no one wants to feel castrated; that is its very nature) upon entering the symbolic order.
Everyone has a different family, culture, set of traumas, and biology; that is why the notion of ethics is so relative.