The standards to which he holds himself and the emotions he cultivates – care for strangers, a degree of detachment from family in order to care for those strangers, indifference to low pleasures – can seem inhumanly lofty, and separate him from other people. Because of this, there is a certain rigidity and a focused narrowness to the way he lives: his life makes ordinary existence seem flabby and haphazard. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy.Ī do-gooder has a sense of duty that is very strong – so strong that he is able to repress most of his baser impulses in order to do what he believes to be right. I mean someone who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean a person who is drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean a person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible. By “do-gooder” here I do not mean a part-time, normal do-gooder – someone who has a worthy job, or volunteers at a charity, and returns to an ordinary family life in the evenings. J ulia is a do-gooder – which is to say, a human character who arouses conflicting emotions. She would sew curtains and read and bake pies and have children. If all were well with the world, she would like to live on a farm somewhere, and keep animals, and grow pumpkins and runner beans and sunflowers in the garden. To her, giving is simply a duty, like not stealing, so it does not beget a feeling of virtue. She gets pleasure out of things like that she does not get pleasure out of giving money. She loves to sew clothes and to make elaborate, old-fashioned hats out of scraps. She loves fireworks and ice cream, and she loves to cook. She loves material things as much as anyone. She is young – 30 – but not so young that her youth accounts for any of her beliefs she is long past the age when most people forget or distort or reject the terrible simplicity of the rules they learned as children.ĭespite her extreme frugality, she is not an ascetic. Her depression has made her viscerally conscious of suffering in others in a way that most naturally happy people are not. You can imagine the doors of her self closing very tightly, to the point where no light at all can enter. Julia has experienced depression in the past, and even now that she has been happy for several years, and is often funny, the dregs of her sadness still cling to her. She gave to whichever charity seemed to her (after researching the matter) to relieve the most suffering for the least money. She felt that nearly every penny she spent on herself should have gone to someone else who needed it more. She reduced her expenses to the absolute minimum so she could give away 50% of what she earned. In college, she thought she might want to work in development abroad somewhere, but then she realised that probably the most useful thing she could do was not to become a white aid worker telling people in other countries what to do, but, instead, to earn a salary in the US and give it to NGOs that could use it to pay for several local workers who knew what their countries needed better than she did. That was the core of it as she grew older, she worked out the implications of this principle in greater detail. Julia believed that because each person was equally valuable, she was not entitled to care more for herself than for anyone else she believed that she was therefore obliged to spend much of her life working for the benefit of others.
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