Why cutting life-saving foreign aid could look bad even to people who don't care much about foreigners

 The full list of cuts in the rescission is not yet clear. The money for AIDS prevention seems to be spared. But it is clear that some of the cuts will be for programs that directly or indirectly save lives and reduce serious illness (including severe malnutrition).

In the following paper, I report an asymmetry for domestic/foreign and act/omission. People are not very concerned about failing to help foreigners. But they are much more upset by direct harm to foreigners through action. This was, of course, in a specific experimental context that was not the same as real life.

However, if this finding is general, the rescission bill must be seen as an action. It stopped the flow of money that would have continued if nothing was done. It is not the same as failing to provide sufficient aid when it is needed. That is often tolerated, if only because it is easy to think that there are so many such needs relative to our capacity to help. (Here "our" means the U.S., but it could apply more generally to the rich world.) But cutting off life-saving aid is like pulling the plug on a respirator, that is keeping someone alive. It is actively killing some and harming others. The fact that we don't know just who our victims are does not seem to be something that would count as an excuse in people's minds.

• Baron, J. (2012). Parochialism as a result of cognitive biases. In R. Goodman, D. Jinks, & A. K. Woods (Eds.), Understanding social action, promoting human rights, pp. 203–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

If I am correct, then, politically, those who want to point out the callousness of the Trump administration might do well to focus on this issue, despite the fact that, otherwise, foreign aid is not a political winner.