Isn’t one purpose of effective altruism to be “clever in understanding human needs”? If we aren’t spending dollars in any more effective ways than regular folks are when they spend their paychecks, we have failed miserably. In the current climate, it is still quite possible to do a tremendous amount of good with relatively few dollars. There are probably several organizations that can either save or drastically improve a life for less than $5,000. I can’t imagine that ordinary people are spending their money during the course of their day in a manner that even approaches this sort of highly leveraged effectiveness.
The purpose of charity in the first place is to do more good than we would normally do when spending our money. Otherwise, we would have no good reason to ever donate to any charities. The purpose of effective altruism is to identify the very best ways of spending money in order to do the most good. If we aren’t even beating the average Joe’s personal spending habits, why are we here?
Hi Scott. I’ve had one paper published in philosophy, and I’ve had several others accepted to conferences. I’m certainly not as credentialed as Will, but I might be able to give some tips. My guess is that many of these are not particularly unique to philosophy. First, it’s always good to reference other relevant philosophical work. We all know what hedonistic utilitarianism is, but if you’re going to write a paper about the implications of effective altruism for a hedonistic utilitarian, you should still clearly define the concept and cite major works on the topic. Second, clear writing is always preferred over convoluted writing. Sometimes people think philosophers want to sound smart and intentionally use complicated language, but the reverse is true. Sure, philosophy sometimes does legitimately require an understanding of technical terms, but good philosophical writing aims to be as clear as possible. Third, a good format to follow is abstract, introduction, argument, conclusion. Abstracts are extremely useful because they allow people to get the gist of your argument very quickly. Fourth, it is often better to make a genuine contribution to a narrow problem than to not really contribute anything to a broad topic. Finally, a good practice is probably to just read some published philosophy work. That is the best way to get an idea of the writing quality and organizational nature of publishable papers. I believe Will has some of his papers posted on his site. I’ve read some of his work, and I think it’s a good example of clear writing. That’s probably a good place to start.
Most CFPs request papers that have been prepared for blind review as well, so be sure to do that.