If there’s any part of that you should feel guilty about, it’s having the goal in the first place, not what you do to achieve it. Feeling guilty about buying poison or sharpening a knife doesn’t make much difference if you keep thinking that the murder itself is a good idea.
My point was that it is not any more wrong to spend money on public radio than to spend money on cable tv or a new iPod. Yes, in theory all my money not spent on food and shelter could go to saving children, but you are not going to do that, I am not going to do that, and no one either of us knows is going to do that.
Well if you get right down to it, feeling guilty only makes it worse. You should just not have the goal in the first place.
Hence the ‘if’ at the beginning of my comment, though in practice I do see how guilt can be useful at that stage: Most people don’t have complete control over their emotions or what they want, and given the choice between someone wanting to murder someone, feeling guilty about wanting that, and not doing it because they feel guilty about even considering it, and someone wanting to murder someone, deciding that that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and actually going through with it, the former is pretty clearly preferable. Not wanting to murder someone at all is preferable to either of those, but humans are pretty lousy at wanting what we want to want.
If there’s any part of that you should feel guilty about, it’s having the goal in the first place, not what you do to achieve it. Feeling guilty about buying poison or sharpening a knife doesn’t make much difference if you keep thinking that the murder itself is a good idea.
Well if you get right down to it, feeling guilty only makes it worse. You should just not have the goal in the first place.
The point is that listening to a radio station should be significantly below saving lives on your list of goals.
My point was that it is not any more wrong to spend money on public radio than to spend money on cable tv or a new iPod. Yes, in theory all my money not spent on food and shelter could go to saving children, but you are not going to do that, I am not going to do that, and no one either of us knows is going to do that.
Hence the ‘if’ at the beginning of my comment, though in practice I do see how guilt can be useful at that stage: Most people don’t have complete control over their emotions or what they want, and given the choice between someone wanting to murder someone, feeling guilty about wanting that, and not doing it because they feel guilty about even considering it, and someone wanting to murder someone, deciding that that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and actually going through with it, the former is pretty clearly preferable. Not wanting to murder someone at all is preferable to either of those, but humans are pretty lousy at wanting what we want to want.