I have a confession to make. I own a grand piano that originally cost enough to, according to GiveWell, save three lives by instead donating that money to the Against Malaria Foundation. In a sense, I was responsible for the deaths of three people in that way.

It wasn’t even something that I could argue was necessary, like a car to drive to work with. A grand piano is pure unnecessary luxury. And one that depreciates in value, so selling it and donating now wouldn’t save all those lives.

It’s kinda like a Trolley Problem, except on one track it’s three human beings I’ll never meet, and on the other side it’s an old out of tune grand piano that I rarely even play and that mostly gets played by my wife.

Anyways, from the perspective of the saints and angels and probably Peter Singer, I’m actually pretty evil. But then, by that judgment, the overwhelming, vast majority of human beings are no better.

And who am I to judge? Utilitarianism is super demanding like this. It also leads to bizarre conclusions like the Hedonium Shockwave where the greatest good thing to do is to convert all matter in the universe into happybots or pulsating pleasure blobs as quickly as possible, tiling the universe with them, ignoring the concerns of everyone else.

Taking things to their logical conclusion can, intuitively, feel wrong. It’s very easy to focus on particular axioms and prove from first principles that something absolute is true. But… reality is more complicated than that?

From a certain perspective, I am well and truly evil. I am a murderer of innocent lives by virtue of not saving them when I very easily could. But that logic condemns nearly everyone. What use is there in that? Do people stop deserving happiness because they are so far from perfection?

Judgments like this are, in a way, cruel and cold moral calculus, lacking in compassion towards those who, like us, are inherently flawed creatures.

So, what do I do about the piano? I could still sell it and maybe save a life. I could try to play it more, make the most of it. Does it even matter that much? Powerful people toy with the lives of others quite casually these days. My sin seems orders of magnitude less evil. But, in a way, it is still an evil, and I am definitely no saint.