Magical Healing Powers

This post is too low on interesting or useful new content, relative to reiteration of a standard ideological view about altruism. It would be different if the post described an interesting new argument, or a new more efficient means of helping people.

How could you justify a pleasant dinner with your family or a relaxing weekend at the beach when that meant more people living in pain?

Really, this is just a particular form of "what if you had super-high productivity, orders of magnitude higher than almost anyone else on Earth." If I had these powers, and knew they couldn't be duplicated through research and study, I would sell them at high prices. To extract as much of the surplus as possible, I would use the "financial aid" price-discrimination system employed by elite universities, demanding tax returns and other information to determine ability to pay, and then extracting a large portion of that potential in exchange for healing.

If one has to "lay on hands" only briefly, the expected annual revenue (provided one didn't get kidnapped or imprisoned) would be in the trillions of dollars. Even if a healing took a couple of hours, revenue would be in the tens of billions (driven primarily by the super-rich).

In this situation I would probably work 70-100 hour work weeks, and use a budget of billions of dollars to make quality of life while working as high as feasible, e.g. healing on the beach while getting massages, eating gourmet meals, hearing reports of scientific research projects I had commissioned, and so forth. And then a majority of the revenues would go towards improving global prospects.

I am reminded of a particular SMBC involving Superman.

Somewhat more seriously, I can't help but think that this post starts with far-mode idealization: would it really be difficult to turn people away for personal reasons if you had magical healing powers? Or is it merely uncomfortable, and perhaps usually bad signalling, to admit you would?

I'm coming to think that "people are dying, every second you aren't stopping it you're murdering them" is a basilisk. And not too far removed from Roko's. Instead of fear of the future FAI torturing you, this basilisk does it by screaming at you inside your head.

If I had magic healing powers, I'm pretty sure that rather than healing people all the time, my time would be better spent marketing myself and using my powers to become rich and famous, at which point I could help more people with my money than I could with a hands-on approach.

In fact, this is the most effective use of most superpowers.

But the balance should probably be a lot further towards others' than it currently is.

Why? My should is different from your should. Who is to say that your should is better for me than mine?

And no, I don't accept your "idea that we have some obligation to try to help other people". I hate obligations. They piss me off. Whatever I do, I do because I want to, not because I owe it to others.