Other people’s suffering affects us in a strange way. We can know that thousands of children die every day from preventable causes and continue with our lives without it having much effect on our emotional state. The number is enormous, but it remains abstract. On the other hand, we can see a woman selling juice in forty degree heat, watch her struggle for a few seconds, and feel that something inside us breaks. It is not necessarily because her suffering is greater. It is because she is right in front of us. Human empathy seems to work better with what is concrete than with statistics, with a person we can look at rather than thousands of people who exist only as a number.

This has an uncomfortable consequence: our morality does not necessarily respond to the scale of suffering, but to our proximity to it. We become outraged by what we see and remain indifferent to much greater tragedies happening far away, outside our field of vision. We do not do this because we are necessarily cruel, but because our brains do not seem designed to feel the suffering of millions of strangers with the same intensity. The problem begins when we confuse that emotional reaction with an objective measure of what matters. What is in front of us moves us more, but that does not mean it matters more.