Why effective altruism
There are many good articles, books and videos about different aspects of effective altruism: for example
- Yvain's Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...
- Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save, and TED talk
- Eliezer Yudkowsky's Circular Altruism
- Holden Karnofsky's Effective Altruism Summit Keynote Address
but I was having trouble finding an article that gives a comprehensive overview, while still being short enough to read in 20 minutes, so I thought I'd write one.
Maximizing the sum of utilities
Roughly speaking, effective altruists seek to direct their altruistic efforts toward maximizing:
The sum of (positive effect on a given person) for all people.
This presupposes that
1. It makes sense to assign a number to the positive effect on a given person. Effective altruists generally don't actually assign numbers, but they do make rough comparisons. For example, intuitively, if a surgeon does an operation that allows a young medical patient to live another 10 years, the positive effect is about 10 times as large as doing an operation that allows the patient to live just 1 year longer. 2. It makes sense to compare the positive effect on person A with the positive effect on person B. Intuitively one can make some comparisons: for example, intuitively, saving somebody's life is better than giving someone else a candy bar, and even better than giving 10,000 people candy bars, so that saving someone's life is at least 10,000 times as good as giving someone else a candy bar.
Roughly speaking, effective altruists subscribe to the Gates' Foundation's principle that "all lives have equal value" so that enabling person A to live another 10 years is about as good as enabling person B to live another 10 years. This isn't exactly true: for example, if person A leads a very happy life and person B leads a miserable life, an effective altruist might decide that it's more valuable to enable person A to live another 10 years than it is to enable person B to live another 10 years, but the gist of it is true.
The principle "
What's the rationale for maximizing the sum, and for adopting the principle "all lives have equal value"? /
A common intuitive objection that people give to this conceptual framework is that they don't care about everyone equally, for example, a parent may care more about his or her children than about people who he or she doesn't know.