I did the "which would I shoot in the head" test.

If you handed me a pistol and made me shoot either a polar bear or a five year old, I'd shoot the polar bear 100% of the time.

The funniest part is that this article is trying to make an economic argument without even pausing to consider that since aid programs are underfunded, they are obviously serving the most easily saved children first.

Each child doesn't cost exactly the same amount of money to save, and the current estimates presumably are based on trying to save the most easily saved children.

I bet you that number doubles or triples or quadruples real fast, once you actually start seriously spending money on it.

Of course, absolutely - that's the point of arguments like this. They all, ultimately, boil down to well paid stooges trying to convince you that you have an equal share of culpability and blame for the horrors of the world.

The goal of this article isn't to convince you to buy one less coffee. It's not to convince you to go on less cruises. The goal of this article is to make it so the next time you read an article about how Apple is forging iPhones directly out of the bones of orphans and kittens or whatever, you just go "meh but I can't complain or I'd be a hypocrite", as if your morning cup of coffee has made you morally equal to a board of directors who have done the math and figured out that if they throw literal babies into a literal wood chipper, they'll sell 2% more iPhones next year.

Ironically, you actually make a better argument than the entire article linked - no offense intended.

We do spend absolutely bonkers amounts of money keeping individual people alive, and it is probably true that this is very inefficient on a global scale. But of course, it's much easier to poke at "luxuries" like coffee or vacations than it is to point out that the quality of medical care that some of us are lucky to have access to is so much better than the rest of the world that we might as well live on different planets.

You seem to be trying to argue that if an appeal to emotion is effective, it isn't a fallacy.

This is incorrect.

Fallacies are actually quite effective as far as rhetorical techniques go. The entire premise of "we should price coffees in fractions of a childs life" is blatantly an appeal to emotion, so much so that even in your attempt to defend it, you gave up on finding a way to word what it is other than calling it an appeal to emotion.

I suppose you could attempt to argue that the author is merely claiming that OTHER PEOPLE should employ the fallacy FOR THEM, but that's pretty absurd. If the author convinces some other person to actually do the appeal to emotion, they still were advocating for the use of the fallacy.

Okay so take the second example they provide. "Saving polar bears would cost X children's lives".

It is absolutely amazing to me that anyone could write this article, include this example, and then continue on to publish it.

They literally rebut themselves, with their own example.

Measuring every good act as a cost in children's lives does not "properly capture the externalities" or whatever hoohah term you want to use. It's literally a weaponized guilt trip to force shortsightedness.

You can follow the logic. Saving a polar bear is obviously worse than saving a child. So is saving an acre of rainforest. So is saving any individual hive of bees. So is preventing any one small impact of global warming.

But writ large, those impacts add up to a world where saving children is more and more and more expensive. Children's lives being worth 4k is not a fixed fact of the universe. It's literally market price. When the world is burning and the only place you can grow corn is northern Siberia, it won't cost us $4k to save a child any more.

Though conveniently for us of course, there will be many fewer children left to save.

Your cruise ship is not powered by the souls of screaming children. Your coffee was not heated with 100% organic child suffering.

Pushing back on individual consumers as though their morning latte is murdering children in Africa is every bit as sick and stupid as blaming individual commuters for global warming. The systems that are ruining the world are not vulnerable to individual action - by design!

No amount of you ordering less coffee will make manipulating impovershed countries less appealing to governments and corporations.

This article is just another in a long list of attempts to pass the buck - to argue that you may not have ruined the world but by golly if you are drinking a coffee right now, you can't complain about a major corporation making children sew t-shirts for pennies!