How would you approach an introduction to Effective Altruism in 1 hour in a class of second-year Philosophy students?
I had planned to focus on characterizing the movement in terms of applied ethics, compatible with different deontological, areteic, consequentialist, etc., normative ethics. Then talk about the “ITN Framework”, see the most typical EA causes and see how what we should prioritize varies according to our empirical and moral beliefs. Ex: ethics focused on suffering would prioritize s-risks over x-risks, classical utilitarianism the other way around, etc. And I don’t think an hour allows me to delve further and I want to leave some time to questions and objections.
I would start with some version of the child drowning scenario in Peter Singer’s Famine Affluence and Morality.
That’s what I did. It went pretty well. Thank you