An interesting followup to your example of an oiled bird deserving 3 minutes of care that came to mind:
Let’s assume that there are 150 million suffering people right now, which is a completely wrong random number but a somewhat reasonable order-of-magnitude assumption. A quick calculation estimates that if I dedicate every single waking moment of my remaining life to caring about them and fixing the situation, then I’ve got a total of about 15 million care-minutes.
According to even the best possible care-o-meter that I could have, all the problems in the world cannot be totally worth more than 15 million care-minutes—simply because there aren’t any more of them to allocate. And in a fair allocation, the average suffering person ‘deserves’ 0.1 care-minutes of my time, assuming that I don’t leave anything at all for the oiled birds. This is a very different meaning of ‘deserve’ than the one used in the post—but I’m afraid that this is the more meaningful one.
An interesting followup to your example of an oiled bird deserving 3 minutes of care that came to mind:
Let’s assume that there are 150 million suffering people right now, which is a completely wrong random number but a somewhat reasonable order-of-magnitude assumption. A quick calculation estimates that if I dedicate every single waking moment of my remaining life to caring about them and fixing the situation, then I’ve got a total of about 15 million care-minutes.
According to even the best possible care-o-meter that I could have, all the problems in the world cannot be totally worth more than 15 million care-minutes—simply because there aren’t any more of them to allocate. And in a fair allocation, the average suffering person ‘deserves’ 0.1 care-minutes of my time, assuming that I don’t leave anything at all for the oiled birds. This is a very different meaning of ‘deserve’ than the one used in the post—but I’m afraid that this is the more meaningful one.