Is it not a prerequisite that a wrong begin to effect your conscience before you want to do something about it?
Why are so many rich celebrities obsessed with animal rights, the death penalty, and climate change?
Because those issues affect them personally in some way. They gnaw at their conscience in a way that the extreme suffering of hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens does not.
Rather, I would say rich celebrities are obsessed with animal rights, the death penalty, and climate change because those ideas are fashionable among rich celebrities, not because they're relevant to rich celebrities for any fundamental (i.e. would still apply if no one knew what the celebrity believed) reason.
One doesn't have to be affected by rape to oppose it.
I can reflect that there are others whose opinions I value. And thus throw support behind issues that, if left to my own opinion in a vacuum, would be of little concern.
Empathy springs, in part, from conscience.
My hope would be that people would consider their utility vs. the utility of all those who also want something. I've certainly supported modest tax increases because my neighbors were passionately in favor where my own view would be to oppose it.
Is it too much to hope that people will consider broader societal interests and not just their own narrow ones?
The agenda is:
1. End the death penalty.
2. Assume someone else will help innocent people, which they largely won't.
3. Go bad to enjoying blissful ignorance.
PG thinks the death penalty is bad, but PG isn't worried enough about other things you think are worse, therefore PG is wrong? (???)
I honestly don't see where you're going with this other than cheap sniping.
He's anti-death penalty in the same way. The orders of magnitude more suffering in our prison system can't get a tweet but the nearly disused California death penalty urgently bothers him...
It does seem to bother Paul Graham as he writes "The police often arrest the wrong person. Defendants' lawyers are often incompetent."
It's also clearly an argument intended for Other People who need pragmatic reasons for ending the death penalty. He is against it on purely ethical grounds, or in my opinion, because it makes him feel bad about himself.
I've noticed a strange pattern where wealthy elites like Paul Graham are obviously very disturbed by things like the death penalty, animal rights, and tragedies they see overseas but can hardly be bothered to care about the great suffering poor people face generally.
The only issues that they care about are ones that directly affect their own conscience and mental well-being.
"The death penalty is bad because it makes me feel bad"
Whereas people who don't live such privileged lives can see so many worse problems in everyday life, like being hungry, suffering from bad/no medical care, to being victimized by street crime.