Having a limited supply of empathy is one way to think about this, but another (less immediately appealing) way is as fast moving moral fashions. In your example it seems like the empathy got ‘used up’, because of the order of those two events, but I think that sort of thing often happens the other way round too, in which cases it’s harder to tell ourselves stories about why. Maybe the best explanation is it’s mostly arbitrary. That’s the problem with relying on public charity and the feel-good factor as a mechanism for helping the worst off. Moral fashions are like weather – somewhat predictable, but not definitely not reliable or consistent.
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