This isn’t a substantive answer like those above—but I think you can get a lot of Effective Altruism off the ground with 2 premises that are widely agreed by most moral philosophies but are generally under-attended: 1) Consequences matter (which any moral philosophy worth its salt agrees, although to varying extent on what else matters) 2) Pay attention to scope, i.e. 100X lives saved is way, way better than saving one life.
There’s a lot more complexity and nuance to views in Effective Altruism, but I think this is a common core (in addition to lives having equal moral value etc.) that is robust for almost all plausible ethical approaches.
This isn’t a substantive answer like those above—but I think you can get a lot of Effective Altruism off the ground with 2 premises that are widely agreed by most moral philosophies but are generally under-attended:
1) Consequences matter (which any moral philosophy worth its salt agrees, although to varying extent on what else matters)
2) Pay attention to scope, i.e. 100X lives saved is way, way better than saving one life.
There’s a lot more complexity and nuance to views in Effective Altruism, but I think this is a common core (in addition to lives having equal moral value etc.) that is robust for almost all plausible ethical approaches.
Richard Ngo writes about this here.
Thanks for linking that! I couldn’t remember where I had read the framing first