Here’s an interesting article by Peter Singer, who teaches ethics at Princeton University. It’s an interesting question – if you really want to do the most good, should you work less and spend your time doing something really good, should you try to find a job where you get paid to doing something sort of good, or should you find a job that’s not that good but pays well, and give your money to people who are really good at doing good? Should you help one person who is suffering today, or save your money and effort so you can help more people tomorrow, maybe even people who haven’t been born yet, or even animals or plants. Do you do good things to the point of exhaustion and risk burnout, or do you take a little break and endulge yourself today, thereby conserving your mental fortitude to be good tomorrow? Everybody has to answer these questions for themselves, but the most important thing is that everyone needs to be taught from an early age to be challenging themselves with these questions. We need to think about whether each of our daily decisions and actions is ethical or not, and if not, to at least make the choice consciously and understand and accept the consequences. This may be our best defense against accidentally letting our world fall apart while we are distracted by mindless consumerism.
Two years later Wage graduated, receiving the Philosophy Department’s prize for the best senior thesis of the year. He was accepted by the University of Oxford for postgraduate study. Many students who major in philosophy dream of an opportunity like that—I know I did—but by then Wage had done a lot of thinking about what career would do the most good. Over many discussions with others, he came to a very different choice: he took a job on Wall Street, working for an arbitrage trading firm. On a higher income, he would be able to give much more, both as a percentage and in dollars, than 10 percent of a professor’s income. One year after graduating, Wage was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities. He was on the way to saving a hundred lives, not over his entire career but within the first year or two of his working life and every year thereafter…
Effective altruism is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most good we can. Obeying the usual rules about not stealing, cheating, hurting, and killing is not enough, or at least not enough for those of us who have the good fortune to live in material comfort, who can feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families and still have money or time to spare. Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.
Most effective altruists are millennials—members of the first generation to have come of age in the new millennium. They are pragmatic realists, not saints, so very few claim to live a fully ethical life. Most of them are somewhere on the continuum between a minimally acceptable ethical life and a fully ethical life. That doesn’t mean they go about feeling guilty because they are not morally perfect. Effective altruists don’t see a lot of point in feeling guilty. They prefer to focus on the good they are doing. Some of them are content to know they are doing something significant to make the world a better place. Many of them like to challenge themselves to do a little better this year than last year.
Coursera has a version of Peter Singer’s Princeton course here.