The Ethical Imperative of Effective Altruism



Saving More Lives is Better



Some Responses


Our Opportunity Cost



Doing Both?


The Ethics of Every Purchase




2 thoughts on “The Ethical Imperative of Effective Altruism

  1. All seems reasonable. But just to throw in another idea. Rather than giving to direct life saving charity what about boosting the economy of a country such that they can sustainably look after their own people.

    Development. Just a thought.


  2. This runs into the same problem as welfare economics.You are assuming some relationship between the utilities of various people. As a matter of actual fact, people do not value the lives of strangers living far away as much as the welfare of themselves and of those close to them. Thus the concept of “American Lives Equivalent” – as seen on the nightly news. One cute white girl gets hurt and the TV is all over it. 100,000 brown people are homeless from an earthquake – it might get a mention perhaps. One might argue that one should value others the same as people like us, but we don’t and that is another argument. You are missing this step IMHO.

    Also, you are ignoring another issue from economics – externalities. Saving someone’s life may be immediately costly to others. As an example, the introduction of antibiotics and medicine to Africa allowed more nutritionally deprived people to survive. This increased the population with the result that the calories per person per day in Africa is lower now than 100 years ago, or so I once read. “Saving a life” may be costly to others and may, on some accountings, make overall welfare worse. If you believe people have positive externalities you should be advocating people across the world to have more children, something few do, apart from religious organisations wanting more members.

    Also, you ignore several other second order effects. More people means more pressure on all sorts of resources, which means resources depletion, resource contention, more pollution etc will happen sooner, with the attendant wars, famines etc down the track. Collapse of our civiliization must be considered a real risk – given the many that have collapsed in the last (see book “The collapse of complex societies”) Feeding the poor may mean more poor people and a *bigger* problem tomorrow. It may come at the cost of rake-offs by corrupt dictators, propping up their rule and encouraging violence, loss of human rights etc.

    There is also a need for a balance between measures that have immediate benefits (feeding the poor0 and those that promise a pay-off later on. Eg SENS’s program could save 100,000 lives every day. Maybe donating to them might make the difference. There is also an issue that we are perhaps uncertain about the best measures to improve the the long term welfare of humanity and so a diverse approach has possible merit, as opposed to a monoculture. One could also have the view that unless humans develop true AI we will face a catastrophe that we cannot handle at some time. This would result in a virtual infinite loss of human life and potential and therefore should be a higher priority.

    Good that you have raised the issue but there are many subtleties.


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