Orbinski And The Medical Profession By Macaskill

“If it were not for that cold, calculating, yet utterly necessary allocation of 1s, 2s, and 3s, how many more lives would have been lost?” The author uses this descriptive sentence to underline the central theme of the book; when we want to make the world a better place, we must make choices concerning what the best use of our resources, time and money are. The story about Orbinski and his days in the medical profession set up a great visualization and bring a great parallel to the main questions of the book. However, the harsh reality that is brought forward within these questions and the points that MacAskill brings up are almost heartbreaking. For example, MacAskill points out that “as a result of your choices, someone is made better off
MacAskill however, doesn’t believe this figure to be representative of how effective we are actually being. He says that in reality, a small amount of aid has been spent, but has brought about big changes to the world’s poorest people. He then asks us to look at the best aid programs before we judge how beneficial aid can actually be. Using the eradication of smallpox, MacAskill identifies this cause as a good cause to contribute to. “Fortunately, in 1977, we eradicated it.” I wrote a note next to this paragraph asking myself if MacAskill only calls it a good cause because it’s now eradicated and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. It seems to be a common theme in this book that MacAskill is very approving of charities and causes that are either solved in the U.S. or are close to being solved. He wants to put his faith in sure charities, because if he doesn’t, and a charity fails or takes a long time to develop even the smallest solution, everything he writes about in this book would be contradicted. Maybe he is not worried about his theories and ideas being disproven, but the breadth of what he believes to be good only involves surefire
Personally, when big topics come up on Facebook or celebrities are involved in scandal, I tend not to contribute anything to any conversations or even like posts about it. Essentially, MacAskill provides the same idea, but applies it to natural disaster relief programs. If you consider the amount of people that contribute to the programs, your donation does not have much of a marginal return. But what if everyone thought like this? What if, for instance, this book or theory reached hundreds of thousands of people? That would result a loss of that much money, or even more, for disaster relief programs. That money could have been used to provide water, first-aid and more advanced medicine that costs a large amount of money. While the idea of diminishing returns is accurate, and most of the theories MacAskill presents as to why you shouldn’t donate to popular or publicized charities are sound, this mindset will only work for a short amount of time until we eventually lose a large amount of money and charities no longer has the means necessary to provide even the smallest amount of help to those who need