Unless you’re an autistic savant, you probably can’t do it without counting each one individually. This is because the brain has limited capacity to represent quantity concretely. We can hold only about seven objects in working memory at a time. Now try the equivalent math problem where the dots are represented abstractly as Arabic numerals:
100 + 100
Easy.
Just as symbolic representations of quantity allow us to do math with numbers greater than 7, learning to represent suffering and happiness symbolically will allow us to better care about people who live beyond our borders and beyond our lifetimes. We are probably all familiar with the received wisdom that people ought to be treated as individuals, not statistics. I think this ‘wisdom’ is fundamentally wrong. Our brains simply lack the capacity to empathize with every individual in the world. If we are to properly care about everyone, we need to think of human well-being as a statistical measure of happiness and suffering.
We don’t need to be able to intuitively conceptualize large quantities of things in order to do math, and we don’t need to be able to empathize with the suffering of large quantities of people in order to care about them. Instead of understanding the pain of individuals, we should make an effort to understand abstractly the pain of the masses. This is the key to discovering and overcoming our moral biases. We need to recognize the immense amount of suffering in the world today, as well as the vast potential for happiness in the future, and take it as our mission to make the world as happy a place as it can possibly be.
No comments:
Post a Comment