There is an old story that I had read in one of the Upanishads (I can't recall which one exactly), and it describes a situation that goes something like this:
A blind man is walking towards a deep well. There is a guy sitting on a bench nearby and watching him from a distance.
The blind man unaware of the upcoming well, eventually falls into it.
The Upanishad asks the reader: Whose fault is that?
Is it the blind's man fault or the man sitting the bench watching everything and yet doing nothing?
In a simplistic setup such as this one, it is easy to point out that the fault is the man sitting on the bench. His inaction led to a painful event that could have been easily avoided.
The scenario becomes interesting when we try to simulate the exercise in our day-to-day life.
Let me illustrate by taking a hypothetical instance:
There is a reasonably large pothole is in the road in front of your house. You have noticed the pothole and have taken a mental note to ask the concerned authorities to fix it when you have time.
Now, one day, you hear the sound of a bike crash.
Maybe the biker didn't see the pothole, or maybe he was riding irresponsibly, but the bike got into a crash due to the large pothole, and the biker got seriously injured.
Now, let me ask you the question: Whose fault is that?
- Is it the the biker?
- Is it the concerned government official responsible for the maintenance of the road?
- Or is it yours? You, who in the pursuit to maximize your time for saving 10k children in Bangladesh, couldn't find an hour of your time to call up and perform basic civic duties.
It's a fun exercise to take any parable with its simplistic setup and apply it to our complex world setting. Isn't it?
One of the standard maxims of effective altruism is working on the world's most pressing issues that not many people are working on.
And sometimes, that just happens to be right in front of your doorstep.