This is a good point, and I’ve pondered on this for a while.
Following your logic: we can observe that I’m not spending all my waking time caring about A (people dying somewhere for some reason). Therefore we can conclude that the death of those people is comparable to mundane things I choose to do instead—i.e. the mundane things are not infinitely less important than someone’s death.
But this only holds if my decision to do the mundane things in preference to saving someone’s life is rational.
I’m still wondering whether I do the mundane things by rationally deciding that they are more important than my contribution to saving someone’s life could be, or by simply being irrational.
I am leaning towards the latter—which means that someone’s death could still be infinitely worse to me than something mundane, except that this fact is not accounted for in my decision making because I am not fully rational no matter how hard I try.
This is a good point, and I’ve pondered on this for a while.
Following your logic: we can observe that I’m not spending all my waking time caring about A (people dying somewhere for some reason). Therefore we can conclude that the death of those people is comparable to mundane things I choose to do instead—i.e. the mundane things are not infinitely less important than someone’s death.
But this only holds if my decision to do the mundane things in preference to saving someone’s life is rational.
I’m still wondering whether I do the mundane things by rationally deciding that they are more important than my contribution to saving someone’s life could be, or by simply being irrational.
I am leaning towards the latter—which means that someone’s death could still be infinitely worse to me than something mundane, except that this fact is not accounted for in my decision making because I am not fully rational no matter how hard I try.