> You’re comparing someone not caring about others getting into Harvard to someone not caring about people getting lead poisoning from their water.
No, I'm giving an example of not caring about something that does not affect you personally, yet you acknowledge it affects others.
> Can we at least agree that not envying others’ higher status is not the same moral ground as not caring about suffering?
This was never contended.
> On that note, you can’t force everyone to care about every bad thing that happens in the world. It’s not reasonable to care about each such thing because, since you can’t control or change all of them, that mindset will simply wear you down and consume all of your time and energy, yet produce no results. It’s a matter of focus.
This was never contended either. But different folks have different energy, and are fine reading the news everyday for example. Some don't read the news (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews). There is no one right way. No one's forcing anyone though.
> I did consider your example, but I don’t have enough information to make a determination one way or the other, and since you provided none, I dismissed the speculation out of hand.
I posed that hypothetical because OP implied they do not care about Harvard (or presumably other elite universities), but they do care about "more important" things like racism. However, elite universities like Harvard have complicated histories with institutional racism, segregated dorms, and admission scandals.
