Twice now, I’ve seen people pour themselves into “saving” a sociopath in front of them, to the neglect of themselves and everyone else in their life and in the world, precisely because that sociopath played on their belief that they had to save whichever person in their life was suffering most loudly.
You can’t save everyone. You shouldn’t try. Focus on finding the people who you can safely and sustainably help.
That course of action seems like it’s straightforwardly misapplying the spirit of the advice! (Although admittedly the letter says nothing about it.) If you try to save one person who keeps loudly suffering and this is interfering from doing more good for more people, you are not “trying to save everyone”, imo.
(And also: yeah.)
What I mean is that people who have an “I have to save everyone” internal belief are, in practice, extremely vulnerable to those who tell them “you have to save me first”.
etiragram’s interpretation seems (correctly) utilitarian to me.
“You have to try” seems to be directly attempting to shut off the kind of contact-with-reality that allows utilitarianism. If I have to try something that’s already known to be impossible, then clearly I’m being graded on effort or deontologically, not success, because we’ve already established that success is impossible.
I loved the Ron Moore Battlestar Galactica pilot specifically because after all that “the captain’s such a good guy, you can tell cause he’ll risk the mission and the whole ship to save a few crewmen” they specifically run against that three times – Tigh venting the fires to void while damage control is still fighting them, jumping away from the ships without FTL, firing on the transport that isn’t responding – to illustrate that in the actual Navy, the better part of valor is often pragmatically accepting losses
