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Except it isn't. That's the whole problem--people have natural ingroup/outgroup biases where the suffering and death of people in groups they identify with is given more weight. Wars are criticized, not on the basis of the hundreds or thousands of foreign civilian casualties, but on the basis of thousands of military casualties suffered by our own side. National law is reevaluated on the basis of American children dying in a shooting, but Middle Eastern children dying in a drone strike go ignored. People would rather donate money to save an American from financial hardship than to save a Haitian from death or lifelong crippling, implicitly leaving the Haitian to suffer and die.

To some extent this is just human nature. But it's a problem that people think this way, and I would prefer to solve this problem than exacerbate it.



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