What We Don't Do: Inaction in the Face of Suffering

By Forumite @ 2025-10-24T21:45 (+16)

I recently read a book called "What We Don't Do - Inaction in the Face of Suffering and the Drive to Do More." I thought it was great, and I highly recommend it.

The book suggests that when we look back on our lives, we can assess how good our life was, ethically, by breaking things up into four boxes:

 Things we didThings we didn’t do
Good things

e.g.

Times we were nice to people

 

Times we helped others 

 

 

 

 

 

 

e.g.

Donations that we could have made to help other people and animals, but that we didn’t

 

Hours that we could have worked to help other people and animals, but that we didn't

Bad things

e.g.

Times we lied

 

Times we were rude to people

 

 

 

 

 

e.g. 

Times we refrained from being nasty to someone 

 

Times we refrained from stealing from someone even though we could have 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book argues that, normally, when we think about how good someone's life was, we tend to think about the good and the bad things that they did. We pay less attention to the things that they didn't do, but could have done. And in particular, in general, we pay much less attention than we should to things in the "good things we didn't do" quadrant.

The book argues that we should think about those things much more, and that working on improving this quadrant is, by far, the biggest and best way to improve our impact on the world.

Personally, I found this quite an interesting and motivating way of thinking about things.

Has anyone else read this book? What did you think about it?

(Sorry for the weird formatting; can't get the table to display properly...)