I am mentioned in bleedingheartlibertaria… but can’t comment in it, so I will comment here and hope it reaches someone.

The author thinks he’s disagreeing with me, but I think he’s agreeing with the point I was trying to make. He says:

The fact that we owe more to friends and family than we do to strangers doesn’t imply that we owe nothing to strangers. It doesn’t imply, contra Scott Alexander, that we should simply let them die. X > Y does not imply that Y = 0.”

This was exactly my point. Whether or not we owe more to family than to strangers, we shouldn’t let the child in the pond drown.

The tweet was trying (I guess ineffectively) to push back at people who were saying that, because of ordo amoris, we should cancel PEPFAR and let foreigners die of AIDS - because we owe more to our family than foreigners. But our family members are not dying of AIDS, canceling PEPFAR will not help them anywhere near as much as it hurts the AIDS victims, and one’s opinion on ordo amoris isn’t very relevant to this question.

I admit there is a sense where all budgetary priorities funge against all other budgetary priorities and another such priority might benefit your family, but I think this doesn’t really work in practice, see