Let's start by observing that, when someone does something that is easy or inexpensive for him, that creates a benefit way bigger to someone else, the overall welfare in the World increases.
We would like that most people would apply the above: do a little kind act when the benefit for the others is way greater than his effort. In theory, his reward from others that would do the same to him should be much higher than his loss in helping others.
For example, if you realize other people would lose a lot of time without some information, you can do the extra step to inform them, even if this was not your duty. Your time investment is small, but even one individual that is helped saves way more time. When you manage to help many people, the welfare return of investment can be orders of magnitude higher.
This idea is not new, some people are even practice it, but too few unfortunately. There are practical problems that prevented this practice to become more widely used. However, I think many of these problems are solvable. I don't aim to create yet another utopia that cannot work with the current human nature. I think we can address the issues without trying to create "the New Man" that many ideologies tried and failed to deliver.
The free rider problem
Whenever a social circle starts to practice "selfless" helping, there is always the temptation for some members to just benefit from the kindness of others without doing the same. Soon enough, people that tried to help without having something back immediately gets tired of "free riders" that are abusing their kind nature. This soon breaks the virtuous circle of helping and the social group gets back to mostly transactional interactions "quid pro quo" that is way more resilient to "free rider" individuals.
What is needed, I think, is a conscious social norm that rewards helping others and marginalize the free riders. While most people would intuitively appreciate the individuals that help other and resent the free riders, the current social norms is rather tolerant to selfish people - as long as they don't break laws. This makes the impact of free riders to be toxic enough to discourage the widely reciprocal helping.
No need to go extreme
We don't want to go into extremes where individuals are sacrificing their entire welfare to help other. This would even defeat the base assumption that the individual would make rather small efforts when the benefit for others is big. When the individual is close to suffering, the rule of helping others would not apply until he has some abundance that he is able to share without too much inconvenience.
I don't think we need to create laws that punishes the people that don't like to be "the good Samaritan". However, if we really want to build social "virtuous circles" that has high welfare return for each effort, we need to consciously excomunicate from that group the people who don't want to live by those values. We can still apply forgiveness and redemption multiple times. Just that we need to be very conscious about how each step is helping or damaging the desired social norm.
This can also be an individual decision to do small "selfless" acts with high welfare return for others. However, this is not sustainable for many normal people - unless they are receiving similar help from others. I thinks it works way better for the human nature to clearly state that such behavior is the expected social norm in that group and whoever don't want to take part should stay away. It is like politeness... on steroids.
Other difficulties
It is not always easy to evaluate what would be the perceived result of your help. Sometimes people don't want to be helped, and we should respect that. Sometimes what is useful for us is not wanted by the other. Similarly, we should develop kind ways to check and communicate misalignments.
We should be very cautions when desiring to do good with force. This should be reserved for irreversible actions when we suspect a temporary lack of judgement - think suicide. For most other things, I think we should respect the desire of the individual - while we can still try to softly convince to whatever we think it's better.
The bigger picture
Making the life of many people significantly better, without affecting the life of others too much seems like something that most people would find desirable.
Sometimes, however, we need to do more complicated judgements. On limited resources, there is always the situation where you need to choose between two options. For example, do you help a talented child or a elder in suffering. I think we should let each individual to choose where he wants to contribute. This should assure that each domain will receive some care.
If you ask me, the most impacting actions we can make is to help the future of Humanity. While we might have intuitions on what would help the most, there is no clear recipe. Maybe you helped an elder that motivated a poor worker, that after three generations resulted in a new Einstein.
However, helping people to achieve their true potential of producing welfare and knowledge and get rewarded for it seems like a good approximation for an optimum approach in most cases.
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