I can understand where the author is coming from, but this is the cruel reality of the world. > "I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person" I would compare this to situations where you are choosing a person with high IQ vs low IQ, or to choosing someone very attractive vs very…
I don’t find these hypothetical choice situations very illuminating, because (a) they tend to involve spherical cows rather than real humans, and (b) it’s possible to come up with arbitrarily morally tricky scenarios. Better to spend energy on the actual decisions people face.
for example only today in learned that 200sqm feed a human while the global mean agricultural land is 2000sqm per human. now what are the remaining 1800sqm used for, today? and back to ethics: why do humans still starve? who benefits from people starving or living in absolute peverty? which priorities do we need, as a species to change that? or what are the dsm.diagnostic criteria for people shrugging absolute pverty or starvation off as "such is the world?" that is an ethical questions to solve, imnsho.