Why I Think You Should Start Saving Lives

What kinds of things would you do to save a life? You would probably call the police if you saw someone being attacked, you might dive into a lake to save a drowning child. If there was a crisis like this, you might have an urge to help, you would probably find it difficult to just go home and switch on the TV. But in reality, you could be intervening in crises and saving lives all the time.

At some point, we all became staggeringly calm about the crises we face, about the fact that nearly half the world’s population live on less than $2.50 a day. These people mostly live in poverty because of where they happened to be born. But how would you feel if instead of leaving it to chance like this, the government started knocking down every other house on your street, forcing those people out of their homes and making them live on less than $2.50 a day? If that started happening we’d be panicked, we’d be outraged at the unfairness of it all.

I’ve lost some important people in my life to cancer. If someone would have told me that I could have saved any one of them for $2,838, I’d have found $2,838. Cancer, though, isn’t very easy to treat. There’s still no cure despite millions of pounds being spent in research towards this end. But not all suffering is so difficult to prevent. I found out that a charity called the Against Malaria Foundation (recommended by the charity evaluators GiveWell and Giving What We Can) distributes bednets at a cost of only $2,838 per life saved. So I can save someone else’s parent or child or friend for that amount. And actually, every time I choose to spend money on life-saving causes rather than on little things I don’t really need, I’m contributing to saving years of healthy life, so long as I donate to really effective charities like this one. Otherwise, it’s much more unlikely that my money will do the same amount of good, or any good at all.

As long as I’m doing the most good I possibly can with my time and money, it doesn’t matter so much about where the people are that I’m helping, or whether they’re suffering from cancer or malaria or anything else. We all know what it feels like to be hurt, to be upset or see people we love in pain. Hunger feels the same the world around. Existential risks like global warming or the threat of artificial intelligence would hurt me as much as they would hurt you. While suffering is universal, the ways that we can prevent suffering differ enormously. Giving What We Can have reported that some charities can be a thousand times more effective than others. So you could give $1 to Charity A or $1000 to Charity B and the amount of good done would be the same. Of course, we all want to make the biggest difference possible. In the same way that you’d want to make sure your weekly shop wasn’t full of gone-off food, or your new phone wasn’t broken, aspiring effective altruists want to be sure that the things they spend money on actually work. And, if possible, we want them to do more than just work, we want them to be really good, even the best they can possibly be for the money we have. That means we want strong, rational, scientific evidence—the kind of evidence we now demand in the medical world. Remember the progress made in medicine when people finally started to rely on methodical tests and evidence, rather than just what felt right or what seemed good?

When we have limited resources and so much suffering (now and in our future world), all our choices about where we spend our time and money become extremely important. If we choose to spend $2000 on a holiday, that holiday may well be extremely worthwhile, but we should recognise that we’re implicitly choosing not to spend this money on alleviating our collective suffering.

When we start taking altruism seriously and focusing on its effectiveness, trying to systematically improve the world by how we spend our time and money, poverty and other types of unnecessary suffering can be a thing of the past. With the effective altruism movement, the end of this suffering has become a real possibility, something we can be excited about, so much so that some people are now deliberately going into high paying careers so that they can give away more money and save more lives, ‘earning to give’. Many are choosing careers based on how much good they can do, using advice from 80,000 Hours, an organisation who give careers advice about the most effective altruistic careers. As it turns out, working for a non-profit isn’t necessarily the best way to make the biggest impact. 80,000 Hours (so-called after the amount of time you spend working in your life) have researched a whole load of careers to see which ones make the most difference.

One of the most important goals of the effective altruism movement is to show people how much of a positive impact they can have—as things stand, a relatively small part of the population know about how much good they can do. And yet, there are so many people that want to help others, to step into the crises and change something in their brief time on earth.

By growing the effective altruism movement, we can let others know about the opportunities available and therefore multiply our impact. Organisations that are focused on building the effective altruism movement are sometimes called ‘meta charities’ or ‘meta organisations’. For instance, the Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN) are helping to develop local groups or ‘chapters’ all over the world, run by volunteers who organise meetups and events to discuss and learn about effective altruism. Giving What We Can encourages people to donate 10% of their income to the most effective charities. They have donated over $13,000,000 and raised over $600,000,000 in pledged donations. Raising for Effective Giving (REG) encourages poker players to donate 2% of their winnings to the most effective charities, and have moved over $1,000,000. EA Outreach held 3 global conferences in 2015, in San Francisco, Melbourne and Oxford, gathering those who are keen to explore the field of effective altruism.

People are making huge changes as individuals too. Hundreds of individuals are organising events in their area with philosophers, economists, researchers, academics, politicians and so on, all seeking to do the most good in the most effective way. Oxford Professor Will MacAskill published ‘Doing Good Better’ to challenge our preconceptions about how we should be doing good. Students like Beth Barnes are joining TED conferences and creating visions for those that are serious about preventing suffering. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna are working closely with GiveWell to work out how to spend their money most effectively. Scott Weathers is currently working on supporting the Reach Every Mother and Child Act.

Instead of measuring success in terms of money, effective altruists are measuring success in terms of the amount of good they can do, and how many years of life they can save. We want to earn billions of dollars so that we can eradicate poverty, animal suffering, catastrophic risk and more. We want to harness people’s brilliance, their creativity and intelligence to efficiently and productively produce high-impact literature, film, marketing strategies, start-ups, research projects, policies, non-profits, gadgets, businesses, computer programmes and whatever else is most effective in alleviating suffering.

So many of us, and so many non-human animals experience so much pain—this we know to be true. When there’s so much of it, it’s difficult to know how to help or where to start. It can be debilitating. It feels as if it’s just something we have to accept, but by changing our approach and concentrating on the outcome evidenced by our interventions, we can drastically change the landscape of suffering.

In ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’, Viktor E Frankl writes, ‘We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.’ Even in the most terrible circumstances, Frankl marvels at our freedom to choose our attitude, to do all that we can to help others and improve the world around us. It’s as simple and wonderful as giving away a piece of bread when you have more than you need. If we can do more to help, we should.