This is a small essay i’m mostly writing for myself to formally put my thoughts on paper on how I feel about obligatory altruism. I also think it’ll hopefully help others in seeing my thought process to avoid falling for the efficiency paradox explained below.

Altruism is a moral obligation

Michael Lewis’s Princeton talk was instrumental to my views on affluence. He explained how successful people mostly owe their success to the random external events out of their control which put them in their position, and the obligation lucky people have to those less fortunate. This ingrained a certain sense of moral obligation which i’ve had for several years now.

Over the last few months i’ve become particularly interested in philosophy and Peter Singer’s views on Famine, Affluence, and Morality where he expresses how “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” - which makes perfectly good sense.

The paradox of efficiency

I got trapped in the loop of constantly researching the most efficient thing I could be doing. This makes perfect sense as you would always want to make sure you were being as logical as possible. However the deeper I went, the less I valued my personal feelings, as it felt selfish to give them any weight at all.

Over time I found that the most effective ways I could be contributing didn’t align with the quality of life i’d still want to be living. Basic luxuries such as eating a meal at a restaurant seems unethical as you could have eaten at home and the money saved could have been spent helping to improve the lives of people suffering. Even when you attempt to do good by giving money to an education charity, you find that the money could have been better spent helping twice as many people alleviating suffering in another part of the world. Eventually this leads to a sense of hopelessness as whatever you do isn’t efficient enough.

Optimising on effectiveness makes logical sense. However, it seems as you increase efficiency there is a certain point where your emotional connection with the people you were helping quickly diminishes. I found that changing from helping people in my own country to more effectively helping those abroad didn’t have this effect. However, once I directed funds to social programs which didn’t have a clear way to qu...

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