Effective altruists talk a lot about ethics. It’s fun to get into the nitty-gritty of virtue ethics versus deontology. But, frankly, the core effective altruist beliefs are platitudes, the kind of thing I teach my four-year-old. “It is bad to hurt animals.” “Every person matters equally, even if they are poor or black or far away.” “We should care about the effects of our actions on future generations.” “We should try to figure out what ways of helping people work the best and do those instead of ones that don’t work as well.”
But if you actually take those platitudes seriously they lead to bizarre actions. You donate a kidney to a stranger. You skip a vacation to pay for children you don’t know not to get a disease you can’t pronounce. You shut down a charity that donors love because the evidence isn’t good enough. You decide that rather than being a doctor you’ll help sentient beings more if you become a food scientist and make soybeans taste really really good. You spend a lot of time talking about worries that sound like science fiction movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This is just so powerful and so true, tbh it almost made me tear up, really describes well what we should be about here.
Thank you so much for writing this.
This is just so powerful and so true, tbh it almost made me tear up, really describes well what we should be about here.