I think your comment is thoughtful and well-intentioned, but I find myself wondering about the seemingly egalitarian nature of it.

May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?

In other words, if an organization only has the resources to do a little bit of good in the world, unless they can treat everyone as equals, they shouldn't be allowed to act at all?

> May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?

In your scenario, you only have fixed set of resources and wanted to do as much good as you can.

I would imagine in that situation, to make things "fair" you would have some set of criteria in which a poor person could qualify for assistance.

As long as those criteria were objective (geographic, income based, etc) I would support your organization.

If you only wanted to help poor whites, or poor men, or otherwise discriminated against protected classes, then I wouldn't be okay with that.

To put this back to MIT and Harvard: They made learning accessible to everyone except for people who are deaf and those without internet access. The law protects the first group, and not the second.

Thank you – I genuinely appreciate the clarification.

Yes, I'm assuming an individual who has finite (but possibly significant) resources. Let's assume s/he wants to do as much good as s/he can.

Who determines whether some proposed action is sufficiently good, so as to allow them to take that action?

In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?

For example, if Bill & Melinda Gates wanted to donate a great deal of money to help the poor, would you say that someone other than Bill and Melinda had a right to say how their resources may be distributed?

> In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?

As a private citizen, wishing to donate their money-or other resources, I believe it should be left up to the individual to decide. There are edge cases, such as donating money to support illegal activity--such as "terrorism", or if the donation will be counted towards tax benefits.

If you can only do a little bit of good, you should do it for the underprivileged position and not for people who are already privileged.

With that attitude, MIT would never exist in the first place!!!

Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace.

MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have to learn at a much faster pace than is the norm, a lot of material in a fairly compressed schedule of 13 weeks of instruction if I remember correctly as of the '80s. That's not believed to be good for most STEM students, but we at least believe there's a place in the world for institutions like MIT and CalTech. One meme is that a fair amount of what you learn will be obsolete before your career is over, but there's merit in learning how to learn difficult stuff quickly.

If MIT is all about giving more privilege to the privileged, why did they start the OCW project in the first place? I submit that MIT actually wants these videos to be as accessible as possible, including captions. This is supported by the fast the many of the videos already have captions.

Indeed, and one of its initial and still strong missions is to bring the benefits of rapidly developing science and engineering to the world. As far as I know, the single biggest boost to health and material well being in the US occurred in the post-Civil War period, not much later when we got "modern medicine" as in antibiotics (although what they could often pull off with antiseptics and infection control was amazing, read a history of the Mayo brothers if you're interested).

But we're talking about gross ingratitude here. That OCW is not perfect in this is a crime (literally, unless you think they can get away with ignoring a civil legal settlement or judgement), with a punishment requiring either removing the videos or spending a lot of money it and MIT doesn't have to perfect them under an inflexible legal mandate.

I again repeat, this is not going to end well. Especially for the truly deaf people this is ostensibly being done for.

So, do good, but only to those whom I approve, or else don't do it?

Just writing this comment to approve (and follow discussion). I also would like to know parent's point of view.

What about the right to free speech? Do I have the right to write a book that might be hard or impossible to read in braille or not? Do I have a right to make a video without captions or not?

I can't see how the right to individual free speech could be compatible with your view.

By the way, equality before the law means that the same law applies to everyone equally, regardless of social standing, race, etc. It does not make anyone equal in any other sense. Equality before the law does not mean that the law should make everyone equally good at hearing, doing math, playing basketball, dating, or anything else. Human beings are inherently unequal in every other sense but the law, and this is a fundamental fact of existence that can never be eliminated! Examples: none of us will ever have the exact same genetic makeup as any other (and it is monstrous to attempt to force people to attempt to do this). Nor will any of us have the exact same opportunities as any other (a man that lives in Kansas can't also live in Idaho at the same time; the people he meets and interacts with are determined in part by geography!)