This is the most foundational, influential, and classic article in effective altruism. It’s fitting that the Review coincides with this article’s 50th anniversary. This article defends and discusses the proposition
If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.
This proposition sounds quite reasonable and simultaneously has broad implications. Singer continues:
The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.
Topics discussed capaciously include:
Demandingness
The drowning child
Oughts deriving from counterfactual effect—what is best in the real world—rather than what is best in an imaginary world in which everyone acts like you or everyone is moral
Intuition in ethics
Oughts for individuals vs groups
More key quotes:
Neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil.
and
People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look “well-dressed” we are not providing for any important need.
More generally, this is Peter Singer’s signature article, and one of the most influential articles ever published in ethics. This article is a significant part of the intellectual foundation and motivation for effective altruism. Insofar as “The purpose of the Review is to figure out which writings from the EA community have produced actual value,” this post should easily be at the top.
This is the most foundational, influential, and classic article in effective altruism. It’s fitting that the Review coincides with this article’s 50th anniversary. This article defends and discusses the proposition
This proposition sounds quite reasonable and simultaneously has broad implications. Singer continues:
Topics discussed capaciously include:
Demandingness
The drowning child
Oughts deriving from counterfactual effect—what is best in the real world—rather than what is best in an imaginary world in which everyone acts like you or everyone is moral
Intuition in ethics
Oughts for individuals vs groups
More key quotes:
and
More generally, this is Peter Singer’s signature article, and one of the most influential articles ever published in ethics. This article is a significant part of the intellectual foundation and motivation for effective altruism. Insofar as “The purpose of the Review is to figure out which writings from the EA community have produced actual value,” this post should easily be at the top.