Charities and the most good
Instead of the effective altruist model, then, I prefer to place more value on proximity and immediacy, as I believe that they are fundamental in the human conception of the value of good. Counterintuitively, perhaps as an effect of our evolution favouring a strong sense of community, humans inherently value the prevention of harm that they can see. For example, as the thought experiment goes, if you see a small child drowning in a pond, you are much more likely to go save them, than if you saw many small children drowning on the news in floods halfway around the world. Because of this, although it may not be the most efficient way of creating good in the world, donating to causes with proximity to you in time and place is preferable, as not only will it provide you with more tangible evidence of your effect on the world, motivating you to donate again, but you also will be more likely to find a personal impact that I find inherently more valuable as it also strengthens your connection to community. Overall, I believe that you should attempt to donate money based on what can do the most good in the world, if you balance this with a dose of acknowledged personal bias; this will help to counteract the tendency to discriminate by acknowledging it, but will also allow you to balance out the ability to never create change because you have a miniscule chance of creating massive good. Furthermore, choosing to donate based on creating the most good holds high value as it uniquely motivates you to address the historic injustices of capitalism and discrimination.
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