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Notes -
Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.
Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)
So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.
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