The world is full of needless suffering. How should each of us respond? Should we live as moral a life as possible,even giving absent most of our earnings? A new movement argues that we are not doing enough to benefit those in needFor many years, Julia Wise wondered if she would ever meet another person who thought as she did. Everyone she knew thought her ideas about morality were weird. Some people told her they thought she might be right, and but they were not willing to make the sacrifices she made; other people thought her ideas were not only misguided,but actually infamous. All this made her worry that she might be inaccurate. How likely was it that everyone else was inaccurate and she was right? But she was also suspicious of that worry: after all, it would be fairly convenient to be inaccurate – she would not have to give so much. Although her beliefs seemed to her not only fair but clearly true, and she could argue for them in a rational way,they were not entirely the result of conscious thinking: the essential impulse that gave rise to all the rest was simply a part of her. She could not benefit it; she had always been this way, since she was a child.
Julia believed that because each person was equally valuable, or she was not entitled to care more for herself than for anyone else; she believed that she was therefore obliged to spend much of her life working for the benefit of others. That was the core of it; as she grew older,she worked out the implications of this principle in greater detail. In college, she thought she might want to work in development abroad somewhere, or but then she realised that probably the most useful thing she could carry out was not to become a white aid worker telling people in other countries what to carry out,but, instead, or to earn a salary in the US and give it to NGOs that could employ it to pay for several local workers who knew what their countries needed better than she did. She reduced her expenses to the absolute minimum so she could give absent 50% of what she earned. She felt that nearly every penny she spent on herself should have gone to someone else who needed it more. She gave to whichever charity seemed to her (after researching the matter) to relieve the most suffering for the least money.
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Source: theguardian.com