system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it morally justifiable to prefer luxury over charity?

I have no professional or academic background in the field of philosophy or ethics, but this question bugs me a lot:

I am a 17 year old white male living in Germany. I enjoy pretty much any advantage a human can hope for, I am healthy and my parents make a decent middle class living. I spend my time in school, studying, dicking off on reddit, drinking, you know the type, just to give you a little context to the question.

I recently bought a 150$ pair of headphones, pointless luxury, just because I can. This money could've saved lives. A ton of rice apparently costs 400-500 dollars, enough to feed families for months. If I buy a smartphone for the same price instead of donating the money, am I responsible for starvation and subsequent death? To what extent am I morally bound to help strangers over spending spending money on myself?

We (rightfully) praise firefighters, policemen, soldiers for protecting and saving individual lives because the stories appeal to us - but the distance and anonymity of far-away suffering silences our biological sense of empathy. African lives apparently have less inherent value than the ones close to us, close to our communities. Does that make us bad people?


On a related note, to complicate the question further: We spend a huge amount of resources to save the "weak but wealthy", it is not uncommon for cancer patients to receive treatment that costs a few thousand dollars a month just so they can live a little longer. Is it selfish of us to do this instead of saving hundreds of poeple? Is there a utalitarian or humanist consensous on the matter? Does acknowledging my moral shortcomings change anything about their nature? I don't think of myself as a horrible person, but laying things out like this, I apparently am.

Any thoughts on the matter are warmely appreciated.
gpt
Just a small comment, then I'll let people who actually know something about normative ethics answer the rest. There are two interesting questions in here:

> Is it morally permissible to prefer X to Y? (The question in your title).    
> Is it morally permissible to do X rather than Y? (The question your post asks).  

These are both interesting questions, but they should be carefully distinguished.