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  1. Introduction to the Symposium on The Most Good You Can Do.Anthony Skelton - 2016 - Journal of Global Ethics 12 (2):127-131.
    This is the introduction to the Journal of Global Ethics symposium on Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically. It summarizes the main features of effective altruism in the context of Singer's work on the moral demands of global poverty and some recent criticisms of effective altruism. The symposium contains contributions by Anthony Skelton, Violetta Igneski, Tracy Isaacs and Peter Singer.
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  • The Ethical Principles of Effective Altruism.Anthony Skelton - 2016 - Journal of Global Ethics 12 (2):137-146.
    This paper is an examination of the ethical principles of effective altruism as they are articulated by Peter Singer in his book The Most Good You Can Do. It discusses the nature and the plausibility of the principles that he thinks both guide and ought to guide effective altruists. It argues in § II pace Singer that it is unclear that in charitable giving one ought always to aim to produce the most surplus benefit possible and in § III that (...)
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  • Philosophical Examinations of the Anthropocene.Richard Sťahel (ed.) - 2023 - Bratislava: Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences, v. v. i..
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  • Why Not Effective Altruism?Richard Yetter Chappell - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (1):3-21.
    Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.
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  • Doing Less Than Best.Emma J. Curran - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Cambridge
    This thesis is about the moral reasons we have to do less than best. It consists of six chapters. Part I of the thesis proposes, extends, and defends reasons to do less than best. In Chapter One (“The Conditional Obligation”) I outline and reject two recent arguments from Joe Horton and Theron Pummer for the claim that we have a conditional obligation to bring about the most good. In Chapter Two (“Agglomeration and Agent-Relative Costs”) I argue that agent-relative costs can (...)
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  • Political ignorance is both rational and radical.Adam F. Gibbons - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-22.
    It is commonly held that political ignorance is rational, a response to the high costs and low benefits of acquiring political information. But many recent critics of the claim that political ignorance is rational instead urge that it is a simple consequence of agents not concerning themselves with the acquisition of political information whatsoever. According to such critics, political ignorance is inadvertent radical ignorance rather than a rational response to the incentives faced by agents in democracies. And since political ignorance (...)
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  • Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2023 - Dissertation, University College London
    This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Compensation Duties.Kian Mintz-Woo - 2023 - In Gianfranco Pellegrino & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change. Springer. pp. 779-797.
    While mitigation and adaptation will help to protect us from climate change, there are harms that are beyond our ability to adapt. Some of these harms, which may have been instigated from historical emissions, plausibly give rise to duties of compensation. This chapter discusses several principles that have been discussed about how to divide climate duties—the polluter pays principle, the beneficiary pays principle, the ability to pay principle, and a new one, the polluter pays, then receives principle. The chapter introduces (...)
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  • Against Commitment.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3511-3534.
    In his famous ‘Integrity Objection’, Bernard Williams condemns utilitarianism for requiring us to regard our projects as dispensable, and thus precluding us from being properly committed to them. In this paper, I argue against commitment as Williams defines it, drawing upon insights from the socialist tradition as well as mainstream analytic moral philosophy. I show that given the mutual interdependence of individuals (a phenomenon emphasised by socialists) several appealing non-utilitarian moral principles also require us to regard our projects as dispensable. (...)
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  • Should I Offset or Should I Do More Good?H. Orri Stefánsson - 2022 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 25 (3):225-241.
    ABSTRACT Offsetting is a very ineffective way to do good. Offsetting your lifetime emissions may increase aggregated life expectancy by at most seven years, while giving the amount it costs to offset your lifetime emissions to a malaria charity saves in expectation the life of at least one child. Is there any moral reason to offset rather than giving to some charity that does good so much more effectively? There might be such a reason if your offsetting compensated or somehow (...)
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  • Offsetting Harm.Michael Deigan - 2022 - In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 12.
    It is typically wrong to act in a way that foreseeably makes some impending harm worse. Sometimes it is permissible to do so, however, if one also offsets the harm increasing action by doing something that decreases the badness of the same harm by at least as much. This chapter argues that the standard deontological constraint against doing harm is not compatible with the permissibility of harm increases that have been offset. Offsetting neither prevents one's other actions from doing harm (...)
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  • Carbon pricing ethics.Kian Mintz-Woo - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (1):e12803.
    The three main types of policies for addressing climate change are command and control regulation, carbon taxes (or price instruments), and cap and trade (or quantity instruments). The first question in the ethics of carbon pricing is whether the latter two (price and quantity instruments) are preferable to command and control regulation. The second question is, if so, how should we evaluate the relative merits of price and quantity instruments. I canvass relevant arguments to explain different ways of addressing these (...)
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  • (1 other version)Maximal Cluelessness.Andreas Mogensen - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1):141-162.
    I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance and inscrutability of the indirect effects of our actions, conjoined with the plausibility of a permissive decision principle governing cases of deep uncertainty, known as the maximality rule. I conclude that (...)
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  • The Most Good We Can Do or the Best Person We Can Be?Michel Bourban & Lisa Broussois - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (2):159-179.
    We challenge effective altruism (EA) on the basis that it should be more inclusive regarding the demands of altruism. EA should consider carefully agents’ intentions and the role those intentions can play in agents’ moral lives. Although we argue that good intentions play an instrumental role and can lead to better results, by adopting a Hutchesonian perspective, we show that intentions should, first and foremost, be considered for their intrinsic value. We examine offsetting and geoengineering, two so-called solutions to climate (...)
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  • Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism.Michael Plant - 2019 - Dissertation, Oxford University
    Suppose you want to do as much good as possible. What should you do? According to members of the effective altruism movement—which has produced much of the thinking on this issue and counts several moral philosophers as its key protagonists—we should prioritise among the world’s problems by assessing their scale, solvability, and neglectedness. Once we’ve done this, the three top priorities, not necessarily in this order, are (1) aiding the world’s poorest people by providing life-saving medical treatments or alleviating poverty (...)
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  • Morality and Practical Reasons.Douglas W. Portmore - 2021 - Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
    As Socrates famously noted, there is no more important question than how we ought to live. The answer to this question depends on how the reasons that we have for living in various different ways combine and compete. To illustrate, suppose that I've just received a substantial raise. What should I do with the extra money? I have most moral reason to donate it to effective charities but most self-interested reason to spend it on luxuries for myself. So, whether I (...)
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  • Effective Altruism’s Underspecification Problem.Travis Timmerman - 2019 - In Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 166-183.
    Effective altruists either believe they ought to be, or strive to be, doing the most good they can. Since they’re human, however, effective altruists are invariably fallible. In numerous situations, even the most committed EAs would fail to live up to the ideal they set for themselves. This fact raises a central question about how to understand effective altruism. How should one’s future prospective failures at doing the most good possible affect the current choices one makes as an effective altruist? (...)
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  • The Ethics of Police Body-Worn Cameras.Frej Klem Thomsen - 2020 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 7 (1):97-121.
    Over the past decade, police departments in many countries have experimented with and increasingly adopted the use of police body-worn cameras. This article aims to examine the moral issues raised by the use of PBWCs, and to provide an overall assessment of the conditions under which the use of PBWCs is morally permissible. It first reviews the current evidence for the effects of using PBWCs. On the basis of this review the article sets out a teleological argument for the use (...)
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  • Draining the pond: why Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor is self-defeating.Anton Markoč - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1953-1970.
    Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...)
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  • The Problem of Peer Review is the Most Important Philosophical Problem.Matthew Mckeever - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (3):286-295.
    As philosophers we should have as one of our aims to produce as much philosophical knowledge as possible. A lot of potential philosophical knowledge is lost because of the flaws of the peer review system, and so a lot of philosophical knowledge would be gained were the system improved. Accordingly, as authors we should write papers about how to fix peer review, and as editors we should accept such papers if they are good. This paper presents some familiar problems with (...)
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  • You Oughta Know: A Defence of Obligations to Learn.Teresa Bruno-Niño & Preston J. Werner - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):690-700.
    Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight leisure time, we exercise a great amount of agency over what we know and what we can do. In this paper we argue, using a framework first developed (...)
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  • Moral Offsetting.Thomas Foerster - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276):617-635.
    This paper explores the idea of moral offsetting: the idea that good actions can offset bad actions in a way roughly analogous to carbon offsetting. For example, a meat eater might try to offset their consumption of meat by donating to an animal welfare charity. In this paper, I clarify the idea of moral offsetting, consider whether the leading moral theories and theories of moral worth are consistent with the possibility of moral offsetting, and consider potential benefits of moral offsetting. (...)
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  • Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”: Three Libertarian Refutations.J. C. Lester - 2020 - Studia Humana 9 (2):135-141.
    Peter Singer’s famous and influential article is criticised in three main ways that can be considered libertarian, although many non-libertarians could also accept them: 1) the relevant moral principle is more plausibly about upholding an implicit contract rather than globalising a moral intuition that had local evolutionary origins; 2) its principle of the immorality of not stopping bad things is paradoxical, as it overlooks the converse aspect that would be the positive morality of not starting bad things and also thereby (...)
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  • Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology.Guy Kahane, Jim A. C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, Lucius Caviola, Nadira S. Faber, Molly J. Crockett & Julian Savulescu - 2018 - Psychological Review 125 (2):131-164.
    Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate a (...)
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  • Engaging charitable giving: The motivational force of narrative versus philosophical argument.Eric Schwitzgebel, Christopher McVey & Joshua May - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (5):1240–1275.
    Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how (...)
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  • What (If Anything) is Wrong with High-Frequency Trading?Carl David Https://Orcidorg191X Mildenberger - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 186 (2):369-383.
    This essay examines three potential arguments against high-frequency trading and offers a qualified critique of the practice. In concrete terms, it examines a variant of high-frequency trading that is all about speed—low-latency trading—in light of moral issues surrounding arbitrage, information asymmetries, and systemic risk. The essay focuses on low-latency trading and the role of speed because it also aims to show that the commonly made assumption that speed in financial markets is morally neutral is wrong. For instance, speed is a (...)
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  • The Ethical, Political and Economic Challenges of Effective Altruism.Mateusz Kucz & Piotr Rosół - 2020 - Ethics in Progress 11 (1).
    This paper presents a critical evaluation of ethical and philosophical concerns about the effective altruism as an ethical position. Effective altruists claim that one of our important ethical obligations is to do the most good possible, with the biggest possible positive impact. This impact should be measured with rational tools and by evaluating the effectiveness of our actions. At first glance, this might seem as a consensus building position, a good starting point for building a community of people wanting to (...)
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  • The Hidden Zero Problem: Effective Altruism and Barriers to Marginal Impact.Mark Budolfson & Dean Spears - 2019 - In Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In this chapter, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears analyse the marginal effect of philanthropic donations. The core of their analysis is the observation that marginal good done per dollar donated is a product (in the mathematical sense) of several factors: change in good done per change in activity level of the charity in question, change in activity per change in the charity’s budget size, and change in budget size per change in the individual’s donation to the charity in question. They (...)
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  • (1 other version)Maximal cluelessness.Andreas Mogensen - manuscript
    I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance and inscrutability of the indirect effects of our actions, conjoined with the plausibility of a permissive decision principle governing cases of deep uncertainty, known as the maximality rule. I conclude that (...)
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  • Climate Donations Inspired by Evidence-Based Fundraising.Benjamin S. Freeling, Matthew J. Dry & Sean D. Connell - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Everyone has an opportunity to contribute to climate solutions. To help people engage with this opportunity, it is critical to understand how climate organizations and fundraisers can best communicate with people and win their financial support. In particular, fundraisers often rely on practical skills and anecdotal beliefs at the expense of scientific knowledge. Fundraisers could be motivated to achieve a substantial boost in funding for climate solutions, if there is evidence of the financial gains that science-based fundraising makes available. In (...)
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  • Investing and Intentions in Financial Markets.Carl David Mildenberger - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (1):71-94.
    Ethical investors are widely thought of as having two main goals. The negative goal of avoiding their investments to be morally tainted. The positive goal to further a certain ethical value they embrace or some normatively laden idea they hold by investing their money in a certain company. In light of these goals, the purpose of this paper is to provide an account of how we can explicitly include investors’ intentions when conceiving of ethical investment. The central idea is that (...)
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  • Two views of assistance.Pietro Maffettone & Ryan Muldoon - 2017 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 43 (10):998-1021.
    The article makes two substantive contributions to the existing literature on the ethics of international assistance and global justice. First, it builds what we take to be a widely held set of propositions about international assistance into a consistent view, and articulates a strong case against its desirability. Second, it sketches a more attractive alternative. To do so the article uses Sen’s idea of agent-oriented development as a starting point while at the same time providing a generalization of Sen’s account (...)
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  • To Buy or Not to Buy? The Moral Relevance of the Individual Demand in Everyday Purchase Situations.Rebecca Ullrich & Bernward Gesang - 2020 - Food Ethics 5 (1-2).
    The question of the moral relevance of the individual demand is fundamental to many purchase decisions of daily consumer life. Can a single purchase make a difference for the better or worse? Each individual consumer could argue that companies are unlikely to adjust their production due to one single item more or less being sold. He might therefore decide not to change his consumption behavior but instead to rely on the effort of others, a pattern commonly referred to as collective (...)
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  • Effective Altruism and the Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion.Pellegrino Gianfranco - 2017 - Essays in Philosophy 18 (1):44-67.
    Effective altruism is committed to Altruistic Maximization – the claim that any impact of giving to charities ought to be maximized at the margins and counterfactually. This may lead to counterintuitive or contradictory conclusions in certain cases. For instance, when we can bring about a substantial benefit to few or a tiny benefit to a larger number at the same cost, spreading of benefits across a great number of recipients can compensate substantial loss for fewer people. However, sometimes the perspective (...)
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  • Innocent Preferences in Hume's Morality.Shaharyar Masood - unknown
    Hume believes it is common and natural for people to have preferences for character traits similar to their own, but he remains silent on how to separate the innocent preferences from the blameworthy ones. This paper looks to Hume's morality to answer this question, ultimately arguing for two jointly sufficient criteria: 1) a preference is innocent so long as it doesn’t prevent one from adopting the general point of view and 2) a preference is innocent so long as it is (...)
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  • Altruismo eficaz Y aplicación de principios éticos: Una oportunidad para la educación para la ciudadanía global en la universidad.Xosé Luís Pastoriza Rozas - 2021 - Agora 41 (1).
    This paper analyses the suitability of Effective Altruism as an ethical frame for the practices of Education for Global Citizenship in the University. According to Effective Altruism, altruistic and solidary practices should be based not only on emotional decisions, but also on a rational analysis to achieve the greatest possible impact for the benefit of third parties. Simultaneously, Universities promote Education for Global Citizenship that includes the development of competencies for the application of ethical principles focused on the improvement of (...)
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  • Poverty and the Peril of Particulars.Jordan Arthur Thomson - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4):661-677.
    Moral extremists argue for a demanding duty of poverty relief by leveraging powerful intuitions about our duties to rescue those close at hand. I clear the way for a less demanding duty by arguing that this argumentative strategy commits the extremist to a conception of our duty in the face of global poverty that is deeply at odds with our convictions about how we may discharge that duty. These convictions reveal that global poverty and easy rescue cases give rise to (...)
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