"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is an essay written by Peter Singer in 1971 and published in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1972. It argues that affluent persons are morally obligated to donate far more resources to humanitarian causes than is considered normal in Western cultures. The essay was inspired by the starvation of Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, and uses their situation as an example, although Singer's argument is general in scope and not limited to the example of Bangladesh. The essay is anthologized widely as an example of Western ethical thinking.
Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, United States. In addition to his Yale appointment, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, Norway, a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University, Australia, and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire's Centre for Professional Ethics, England. Pogge is also an editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist (1980), Philosophical Problems of Equality (1995), Human Nature after Darwin (2000), and The Ethics of Transplants (2012).
Charity is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need. It serves as a humanitarian act, and is unmotivated by self-interest. Various philosophies about charity exist, with frequent associations with religion.
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead.
Adam Swift is a British political philosopher and sociologist who is professor at University College London. He has published books on liberalism and communitarianism, on social class, social mobility and social justice, on the philosophical aspects of school choice, on the ethics of the family, on how to make education policy, and on the regulation of religious schools, as well as an introduction to contemporary political philosophy.
Toby David Godfrey Ord is an Australian philosopher. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called effective altruists, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement has achieved significant popularity outside of academia, spurring the creation of university-based institutes, research centers, advisory organizations and charities, which, collectively, have donated several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.
William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He was a Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better (2015) and What We Owe the Future (2022), and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty (2020).
Dylan Matthews is an American journalist. He is currently a correspondent for Vox, an online media venture.
Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference is a 2015 book by William MacAskill that serves as a primer on the effective altruism movement that seeks to do the most good. It is published by Random House and was released on July 28, 2015.
Jim Greenbaum is a former telecom entrepreneur who made a fortune through his telecom company Access Long Distance, and then switched to full-time philanthropy through his foundation, the Greenbaum Foundation.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based organisation that builds and supports the effective altruism community. It was founded in 2012 by William MacAskill and Toby Ord, both philosophers at the University of Oxford. CEA is part of Effective Ventures, a federation of projects working to have a large positive impact in the world.
Charity assessment is the process of analysis of the goodness of a non-profit organization in financial terms. Historically, charity evaluators have focused on the question of how much of contributed funds are used for the purpose(s) claimed by the charity, while more recently some evaluators have placed an emphasis on the cost effectiveness of charities.
Ben Delo is a British entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and former executive of BitMEX. In 2022, Delo pleaded guilty to a United States Bank Secrecy Act violation and received a 30-month probation sentence.
Eva Love Vivalt is a Canadian economist. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto and the director of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.
Longtermism is the ethical view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. It is an important concept in effective altruism and a primary motivation for efforts that aim to reduce existential risks to humanity.
What We Owe the Future is a 2022 book by the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. It advocates for effective altruism and the philosophy of longtermism, which MacAskill defines as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time." His argument is based on the premises that future people count, there could be many of them, and we can make their lives better.
In the philosophy of effective altruism, an altruistic act such as charitable giving is considered more effective, or cost-effective, if it uses a set of resources to do more good per unit of resource than other options, with the goal of trying to do the most good. In a book written by effective altruism scholars Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola, the effectiveness of helping is defined by how many lives you save or how much good you otherwise do with a given amount of resources.
