104 Sentences With "altruists" | Random Sentence Generator

When "The Altruists" opens, he's in debt, single and reclusive.

I think that many effective altruists are aware of that.

Effective altruists aim to do the most good they can.

And I think the effective altruists have asked really tough questions.

Effective altruists fret that their movement might, in fact, have very limited appeal.

What can effective altruists do to mitigate the potential negative perception of them?

Open Phil's position here is actually markedly less extreme than many effective altruists'.

Effective altruists believe that resources should be directed wherever they do the most good.

It can be linking up with other effective altruists virtually and talking about what you're doing.

When it comes to politics, there's no reason in principle why effective altruists shouldn't get involved.

Inevitably, even effective altruists have to accept a degree of uncertainty about the impact of their donation.

So it's not the case that effective altruists focus exclusively on things that are easy to measure.

Another objection is that many effective altruists are too concerned about the potential risks associated with machine superintelligence.

Keeping the volume down would at least be one easy way for altruists to improve the lives of locals.

I find that most people who've been working in the aid industry a long time get annoyed by the effective altruists.

The tyranny of the past is a central problem in "The Altruists," Andrew Ridker's intelligent, funny and remarkably assured first novel.

Visitors are welcome at the hotel (partly to deter "cult-like tendencies"), though prices for non-altruists are set above market rates.

The forum post invited effective altruists to live there free of charge for up to two years, to work on improving the world.

Many effective altruists, myself included, have over time become convinced that the vast majority of lives we can affect are in the future.

Thinking about this in the context of the effective altruism community, ask yourself: What percentage of effective altruists should be earning to give?

My reasoning failures aside, the effective altruists' tendency to rationally analyze everything is endearing, and I should disclose that I've been won over.

Altruists acknowledge a chequered past, give thanks for today's blessings and look forward to a better future—a straight line sloping up across time.

But fundamentally it's an AI alignment problem of exactly the same kind, if not the same scale, that MIRI and effective altruists worry about.

"EFFECTIVE altruists" are a community of people who dedicate their lives to helping others, using evidence and reason to do so as effectively as possible.

But effective altruists would respond that what matters isn't just what one does, but what would have happened if one hadn't acted in a particular way.

So that's why I've been hard on Make-A-Wish in the past, and why effective altruists like Peter Singer have criticized the group as well.

" Welch defines "effective altruists" as people who are "so committed to their social causes they seek high-paying careers primarily to maximize their ability to give away their earnings.

And Matthews has suggested that effective altruists might be spending too much time worrying about things like artificial intelligence and not enough time worrying about things like global poverty.

"The present findings directly link objectively measured empathy and altruism," the authors wrote, though they noted that their findings need to be replicated in less extreme altruists in the future.

Effective altruists, and GiveWell in particular, go to great lengths to emphasize that doing good abroad is just as valuable as doing it in America, and probably cheaper, as well.

THE ALTRUISTS By Andrew Ridker Even if it's true that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, it seems pretty clear that many have the same dilemmas and woes.

Then earn to give if you think you are unusually well-suited to it: perhaps in the 15 percent most well-suited, out of the wider community of aspiring effective altruists.

The increasing economic importance of AI, and the fact that it is so poorly understood, have led many altruists to believe it may soon become one of the biggest threats to society.

He is gradually building up a membership base through collaborations at Deloitte, where he tells me bio-hackers, virtual and augmented reality enthusiasts, effective altruists, technology entrepreneurs, and space enthusiasts meet regularly.

But I take your basic point: maybe effective altruists are too concerned about having high confidence that they'll do some good and should be more prepared to take gambles in different fields.

The team at Open Phil are effective altruists, members of a growing movement that commits itself to using empirical methods to work out how to do the most good it possibly can.

If altruism can spread when altruists cluster together, then its opposite — spite, or harming another organism even when one gains no individual benefit from it — can also spread if spiteful organisms cluster together.

All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren't that special, or at least maybe we don't have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world.

Instead of doing charity in a way that makes people feel good, effective altruists rely on rigorous, evidence-based analysis to decide how to donate money, where to donate, and which careers are most ethical.

And effective altruists—and I—would argue that then designing a "human friendly" superintelligence is a highly worthwhile task, even if the first superintelligent machine won't make its debut on Earth until the end of this century.

And while I've never heard it praised as a particularly cost-effective way to help humanity by effective altruists, it was surely a reasonably good cause for a famous and politically popular man to dedicate himself to.

Effective altruists also make one striking, controversial claim — that one good place to direct our money is toward securing and improving the lives of people who don't exist yet and may not exist for millions of years.

While contemporary issues like global poverty, disease, and animal welfare weigh heavily on the minds of many effective altruists, it is encouraging to see a growing number of people taking seriously the issue of humanity's long-term future.

Despite all the hand-wringing out there about the prospect of AI systems becoming our evil overlords, they're not megalomaniacs, nor are they altruists — they're just reflections of us in silicon, augmented with some pretty amazing computational power.

Drawing on this insight, effective altruists might emphasize the personal satisfaction that can arise from donating to effective causes, and talk about their own personal experience with the movement in ways that convey what it means to them.

Having a group of effective altruists based there, Mr Colbourn also notes, could be a hedge against the risk of losing too many members of the community in a catastrophic event, given their concentration in the south-east of England.

Here is how altruists contrast with narcissists:Look to the future—Rake over the pastPositive-sum—Zero-sumShare—ExcludeWork together—Gang upImprovement—StruggleOpponents complement—Opponents are traitorsImmigrants add variety—They threaten our way of lifeUnited by values—United by race and culture.

Effective altruists have, for complex sociological reasons I explored in a podcast episode, become very interested in AI as a potential "existential risk": a force that could, in extreme circumstances, wipe out humanity, just as nuclear war or asteroid strikes could.

Effective altruists argue that if you are choosing a career and want to help the world, you should not worry about how much good a profession does overall—rather, you should focus on the impact you would make if you join them.

For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity's continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality.

It may be tough to call towns like Rectum (in the Netherlands), Dildo (in Newfoundland, Canada), and Cummings (a small town in Georgia) home, but now residents of places whose names illicit mocking from strangers are getting a gift from the altruists at Pornhub.

Effective altruists tend to think the best charities will focus on an issue that meets three criteria: It's important (it affects many lives in a massive way), it's tractable (extra resources will do a lot to fix it), and it's neglected (not that many people are devoted to this issue yet).

Effective altruists believe donating to East Africa, where $1,500 is two or three years' salary, changes more lives for the better (or has a greater impact on the same number of lives) than donating within the Houston area — even after a hurricane in Houston, or in Puerto Rico, where the group is considering going next.

Like my colleague Dylan Matthews and many other effective altruists, I've signed the Giving What We Can pledge to give at least 10 percent of my income to highly effective charities, and certainly my first reaction when I heard Booker's numbers was delight that someone in the running for the presidency cares about this like I do.

Read More: Today's Kids Could Live Through Machine Superintelligence, Martian Colonies and a Nuclear Attack Caring about the far future leads to some effective altruists to focus specifically on what Bostrom calls "existential risks," or events that would either trip our species into the eternal grave of extinction or irreversibly catapult us back to the Paleolithic.

Shapiro, Marjorie (March 5, 2000). "Marge Says: The Altruists". Talkin' Broadway. Retrieved December 26, 2015.

Whereas "pure altruists" (sometimes referred to as "perfect altruists") are motivated solely by the desire to provide for a recipient, impure altruists are also motivated by the joy of giving (warm glow). Importantly, warm glow is distinctly non-pecuniary, meaning it arises independent of the possibility of financial reward. Therefore, the warm glow phenomenon is distinct from reciprocal altruism, which may imply a direct financial incentive. Warm-glow giving is a useful economic framework to consider public good provision, collective action problems, charitable giving, and gifting behavior.

The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution. But, as J. L. Mackie suggested, when there are many different groups, each with a different evolutionarily stable strategy, there is selection between the different strategies, since some are worse than others. For example, a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse.

Gunns Saviour a Reclusive Billionaire, ABC News, February 2012. He also has been known to "take a business approach to philanthropy."48 Asian Altruists, Forbes, February 2008.

In 2014, Marsh published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that concluded a spectrum existed with extreme altruists on one end and psychopaths at the other. She has also published multiple studies that show, when altruists watch someone else feel pain, they have levels of activity in similar regions of their brain as when they were feeling the pain themselves, and concluded that altruists are better at recognizing the fear of others. Marsh leads work at Georgetown with altruistic donors, particularly those who donated kidneys to strangers. Her work with children and adolescents has been used to show how different neural workings can lead to behavioral problems.

Some common priorities among effective altruists have included poverty in the developing world, the suffering of animals in factory farms, and risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth (see below).

People who embrace effective altruism are often called effective altruists.The term effective altruists is used to refer to people who embrace effective altruism in many published sources such as , , and , though as noted, calling people "effective altruists" just means minimally that they are engaged in the project of "using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good", not that they are perfectly effective nor even that they necessarily participate in the effective altruism community. While many effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit.

Marsh published The Fear Factor in 2017, a book about her research on aggression, altruism, and empathy in the context of neuroscience. The full title is The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between.

Stark models the formation of couples and the rule of imitation of parents and non-parents. He then asks what happens to the proportion of altruists in the population. Stark specifies a case where a unique and stable equilibrium is one in which the entire population will consist of altruists. The possibility that behavior that is seemingly altruistic is actually not, is taken up in “Transfers, Empathy Formation, and Reverse Transfers.”Stark, Oded and Falk, Ita (1998). “Transfers, empathy formation, and reverse transfers.” American Economic Review 88(2): 271-276. In that work Stark considers a donor and a recipient.

Effective altruists have argued that counterfactual reasoning is important to determine which course of action maximizes positive impact. Many people assume that the best way to help people is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services, but since charities and social- service providers usually can find people willing to work for them, effective altruists would compare the amount of good somebody does in a conventional altruistic career to how much good would have been done had the next-best candidate been hired for the position. According to this reasoning, the impact of a career may be smaller than it appears.

The three episodes Naked Beach Frenzy, Altruists, and Stimpy's Pregnant did not originally air on TNN, though they did air on other networks overseas, including Fox in Italy and MTV in Poland. They were also included in the Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes DVD set that was released on July 18, 2006.

David Brooks criticized the concept in his New York Times opinion column, arguing that, while altruists may start doing "earning to give" to realize their deepest commitments, their values may erode over time, becoming progressively less altruistic. Similarly, John Humphrys criticised this idea on the BBC Today programme, saying that people interested in becoming wealthy tend to be selfish and that idealistic young people will become cynical as they age. In addition, Brooks objected to the view on which altruists should turn themselves "into a machine for the redistribution of wealth." Peter Singer responded to these criticisms in his book The Most Good You Can Do by giving examples of people who have been earning to give for years without losing their altruistic motivation.

He has found these "Mitzvah heroes" in countless places around the world. And his challenge to everyone is that he "wants to turn ordinary people into superheroes". Siegel works with over 100 such altruists around the world. He "has a stable of everyday, real-life Mitzvah heroes, young and old, with projects ranging from the ordinary to the unusual".

Effective Altruism Global, abbreviated EA Global, is a series of philanthropy conferences that focuses on the effective altruism movement. The conferences are run by the Centre for Effective Altruism at Oxford University. Huffington Post editor Nico Pitney described the events as a gathering of "nerd altruists", which was "heavy on people from technology, science, and analytical disciplines".

Rocha's career began on stage in the August 1993 revival of the Jane Bowles play In the Summer House at the Vivian Beaumont Theater."In the Summer House". Playbill. Retrieved September 19, 2016. Since then she has been in multiple Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including Noises Off and Nicky Silver's comedy The Altruists where she created the role of Cybil.

The application of psychology for understanding conflict and extreme acts of violence can be understood in both individual and group terms. Political conflict is often a consequence of ethnic disparity and "ethnocentrism" Sumner (1906). On an individual level participators in situations of conflict can either be perpetrators, bystanders or altruists. The behavior of perpetrators is often explained through the authoritarian personality type.

MacAskill is the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit which conducts research on careers with positive social impact and provides career advice. Initially, the organization recommended earning to give as a career path with a high impact potential for effective altruists, though more recently it has deemphasised this approach, in favour of alternative paths like research, advocacy or policy reform.

Many effective altruists believe that reducing animal suffering should be a major priority and that, at the current margin, there are cost-effective ways of accomplishing this. Singer quotes estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the British organization Fishcount according to which 60 billion land animals are slaughtered and between 1 and 2.7 trillion individual fish are killed each year for human consumption. He argues that effective animal welfare altruists should prioritize factory farming over more overfunded popular causes such as pet welfare. Singer also argues that, if farm animals such as chickens are assigned even a modicum of consciousness, efforts to reduce factory farming (for example, by reducing global meat consumption) could be an even more underfunded and cost-effective way of reducing current global suffering than human poverty reduction.

"Altruria" derives from the Latin alter "the other". As opposed to egotism, altruism--a word coined during the first half of the 19th century by Auguste Comte--is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Thus, Altruria is a Utopian country inhabited exclusively by altruists, by people who believe that they have a moral obligation to help, serve, or benefit others, if necessary by the sacrifice of self interest.

Marsh is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health's 2007 Richard J Wyatt Memorial Award for translational research. In 2014, Marsh was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize for research on altruism she had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research she coauthored studied "extraordinary altruists", using people who donated kidneys to strangers. In 2016, Marsh was named a fellow in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

If enough people are altruists, sacrificing the payoff of first-round defection is worth the price in order to determine whether or not your opponent is an altruist. Nagel and Tang (1998) suggest this explanation. Another possibility involves error. If there is a significant possibility of error in action, perhaps because your opponent has not reasoned completely through the backward induction, it may be advantageous (and rational) to cooperate in the initial rounds.

While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit. People associated with the movement include philosopher Peter Singer, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Ben Delo, Oxford-based researchers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, professional poker player Liv Boeree, and writer Jacy Reese.

As well as interactions in reliable contexts of genetic relatedness, altruists may also have some way to recognize altruistic behavior in unrelated individuals and be inclined to support them. As Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene (Chapter 6) and The Extended Phenotype, this must be distinguished from the green-beard effect. The green-beard effect is the act of a gene (or several closely linked genes), that: # Produces a phenotype. # Allows recognition of that phenotype in others.

Much of Marsh's work pertains to the study of altruism and why people may help others at their own cost. More generally, she researches in the field of social and affective neuroscience and psychology. On the topic of altruism, Marsh's research has yielded more information about the amygdala, showing that in altruists, the amygdalae tend to be larger, and in psychopaths it tends to be smaller. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions and fear.

While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit. People associated with the movement include philosopher Peter Singer, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Ben Delo, Oxford-based researchers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, professional poker player Liv Boeree, and writer Jacy Reese Anthis.

Title page from the third edition of Political Justice by William Godwin Godwin supported individual ownership of property, defining it as "the empire to which every man is entitled over the produce of his own industry". However, he also advocated that individuals give to each other their surplus property on the occasion that others have a need for it, without involving trade (e.g. gift economy). Thus while people have the right to private property, they should give it away as enlightened altruists.

In 2011, he has been awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award by the Government of India. In April 2017, India Today magazine ranked him 9th in India's 50 Most powerful people of 2017 list. In 2018, Premji was conferred with Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) – the highest French civilian distinction by the French Government. In December 2019, Premji was cited by Forbes magazine as one of the 'Heroes of Philanthropy list of 30 altruists' in the Asia-Pacific region.

Another critical piece of evidence supporting the dual process account comes from reaction time data associated with moral dilemma experiments. Subjects who choose the "utilitarian" path in moral dilemmas showed increased reaction times under high cognitive load in "personal" dilemmas, while those choosing the "deontological" path remained unaffected. Cognitive load, in general, is also found to increase the likelihood of "deontological" judgment These laboratory findings are supplemented by work that looks at the decision-making processes of real-world altruists in life-or-death situations. These heroes overwhelming described their actions as fast, intuitive, and virtually never as carefully reasoned.

The book faced criticism from Current Affairs due to its focus on effective altruism. Nathan J. Robinson wrote: > The End of Animal Farming is written from the "effective altruist" point of > view, and carries both that movement's best and worst tendencies. At their > best, the effective altruists help hone our moral reasoning, and focus on > being useful rather than seeming virtuous. You can see that in Reese’s > approach: He wants to convince you that ending animal farming is possible, > and lay out a series of steps by which it might be achieved, not just show > that it's important.

The uniting philosophy of the T'au race is called "The Greater Good", which stresses communal living and cooperation, a convivial attitude to aliens, and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole. Most T'au sincerely believe they are on a noble mission to bring peace, justice, and progress to the rest of the galaxy. While on the surface the T'au may seem like wonderful altruists, especially when compared to the extremely brutal Imperium of Man, the fiction shows many sinister undertones. The T'au can be ruthless with alien cultures who don't fit into their utopian society.

The warm-glow model accounts for such inefficiency because impure altruists may be insensitive to the actual cause, and more sensitive to the act of giving or size of the gift. Thus, warm-glow may generate philanthropic inefficiencies to the extent that it desensitizes potential donors to the marginal impact of a given charity. In response to this concern, William MacAskill and colleagues have advanced a process of philanthropic allocation called "effective altruism". This methodology seeks to leverage logic and responsibility to identify effective charitable opportunities, thus minimizing the effect of warm-glow in the decision-making process.

She has studied the brains of children and adults who have psychopathic traits and found that it is strongly inherited, one factor of which is a fearless maternal influence. Children who display risky behavior, she concluded, are more prone to becoming psychopathic, and that such psychopaths are hard to detect as they may believe they are no different than those around them. In 2017 Marsh wrote Good for Nothing about the topic of altruists and psychopaths. In 2019, Marsh researched altruism in kidney donors and stem cell donors using behavioral investigations and brain imaging, as well as using those methods to study the causes of conduct problems in children and adolescents.

Originally "Emerald Twilight" was scripted by Gerard Jones and according to Previews Vol. III #8 (Aug 1993) and the November 1993 Comics Scoreboard, was to involve two sets of the extraterrestrial altruists known as the Guardians and Hal Jordan, a member of their intergalactic police force, the Green Lanterns, having to choose which set was real. DC Editorial did not think this idea was interesting enough to draw new readers so then-publisher Paul Levitz, along with senior group editors Mike Carlin, Dennis O'Neil, and Archie Goodwin, and Green Lantern editor Kevin Dooley plotted the "Emerald Twilight" story. It was given to Ron Marz to write.

Altruists discriminate between the individuals they help and favor relatives. Hamilton's rule explains the evolutionary rationale behind this selection with the equation , where the cost to the altruist must be less than the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the coefficient of relatedness . The more closely related two organisms are causes the incidences of altruism to increase because they share many of the same alleles. This means that the altruistic individual, by ensuring that the alleles of its close relative are passed on through survival of its offspring, can forgo the option of having offspring itself because the same number of alleles are passed on.

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era is a book written by Thomas C. Leonard and published by the Princeton University press which reevaluates several leading figures of the progressive era of American economics, and points out that many of the so-called "progressives" of the late 19th and early 20th century who created policies such as minimum wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen’s compensation, progressive income taxes and many others had beliefs rooted in Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics, revealing a dark underside to the economic reformers often considered by history to be the altruists in the story of American economic progression.

Earning to give has been proposed as a possible strategy for effective altruists. This strategy involves choosing to work in high-paying careers with the explicit goal of donating large sums of money to charity. MacAskill argues that it might even be worth earning to give in morally controversial careers, since the marginal impact of taking an unethical job is small if someone else would have taken it regardless, while the counterfactual impact of the donations would be large. However, 80,000 Hours have more recently argued that it is better to avoid careers that do significant direct harm, even if it seems like the negative consequences would be outweighed by donations.

This is because there are often hidden harms in following unethical careers, and because they think it is important to take moral uncertainty into account. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, criticized earning to give. He wrote that most people who work in finance and other high-paying industries value money for selfish reasons and that being surrounded by these people will cause effective altruists to become less altruistic. Peter Singer responded to these criticisms in his book The Most Good You Can Do by giving examples of people who have been earning to give for years without losing their altruistic motivation.

Philosophically, wild animal suffering may be an additional moral concern for effective altruists. In 2018, the book The End of Animal Farming by Jacy Reese Anthis discussed animal welfare issues from an effective altruism perspective, with a specific focus on the potential for cultured meat to address farm animal suffering and the importance of expanding the moral circle to help people care more about future beings, wild animals, invertebrates, and artificial sentience. Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an effective altruism organization that evaluates and compares various animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those that are tackling factory farming.Daniel Engber, "Save the Chicken", Slate, August 18, 2016.

Stark shows that allocation behavior and wellbeing of one family member depend on his altruistic link with another family member, how the timing of the intergenerational transfer of the family productive asset affects the incentive to engage in human capital formation, and how transfers from an adult to his parents impinge on future transfers to him from his own children. In addition, Stark shows how altruism, which in the beginning of his book is assumed, is explained: the transmission to or probable acquisition by children of parental traits and the exchange between siblings result in a stable equilibrium wherein no agent behaves nonaltruistically. In related work, Stark demonstrates how altruism can surge in a population of non-altruists.

Thus, while people have the right to private property, they should give it away as enlightened altruists. Godwin explained this approach stating, "[e]very man has a right to that, the exclusive possession of which being awarded to him, a greater sum of benefit or pleasure will result than could have arisen from its being otherwise appropriated." Yet to Godwin, benevolence was not to be enforced but instead a matter of free individual "private judgement." He did not advocate a community of goods or assert collective ownership as is embraced in communism, but his belief that individuals ought to share with those in need was influential on the later development of anarchist communism.

Many nonprofits emphasize effectiveness and evidence, but this is usually done with a single cause (problem) in mind, such as education or climate change. Effective altruists, however, seek to compare the relative importance of different causes and allocate resources among them objectively, a concept that is usually referred to as cause neutrality. Schubert said that the term cause neutrality has been used by various authors with different meanings and different decision rules. One approach to cause neutrality, for example, is to choose the highest priority causes based on whether activities in each cause area could efficiently advance broad goals, such as increasing human or animal welfare, and then focus attention on interventions in those cause areas.

Effective altruists have argued that selection of one's career is an important determinant of the amount of good one does, both directly (through the services one provides to the world) and indirectly (through the ways one directs the money earned based on the career). 80,000 Hours is an organisation in the effective altruism community that conducts research on which careers have the largest positive social impact and provides career advice based on that research. It considers indirect methods of altruistic employment, such as earning a high salary in a conventional career and donating a portion of it, as well as direct practices, such as scientific research. It was co-founded by William MacAskill and Benjamin Todd.

In fact, he spends little time making the moral case, > which is quite simple, and the bulk of the book is dedicated to solutions. > Unfortunately, the "effective altruists"' frustrating qualities are on > display too. In a chapter on how we might further "expand our moral circle," > Reese discusses some of the EA movement’s other pet causes (such as > preventing an artificially intelligent creature from enslaving humanity) and > mulls on moral questions about space colonization and the civil rights of > future robot servants. This eccentric altruism is not based on evidence, but > upon thought experiments about possible distant futures (Reese mentions > "whole brain emulation"), and causes some EA adherents to think their time > is wisely spent trying to help prevent far-fetched hypothetical future- > suffering rather than actual present-suffering.

Effective altruist organizations make philanthropic recommendations for charities on the basis of the impact from marginal funding rather than merely evaluating the average value of all donations to the charity. Effective altruists would avoid donating to organizations that have no "room for more funding" – those that face bottlenecks other than money which prevent them from spending the funds they have already accumulated or are expected to receive. For example, a medical charity might not be able to hire enough doctors or nurses to distribute the medical supplies it is capable of purchasing, or it might already be serving all of the potential patients in its market. There are many other organizations which do have room for more funding, so giving to one of those instead would produce real-world improvements.

Some effective altruists think that the interests of non-human animals should be accorded equal moral weight as similar interests of humans, so they work to prevent the suffering of animals (see below), especially animals raised in factory farms. There are many kinds of motivation and justification for impartiality, as for altruism. An argument for impartiality that has been influential among effective altruistsOn the influence of Singer's essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" see, for example: , , and was expressed by philosopher Peter Singer in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he wrote: > It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's > child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten > thousand miles away. ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond > the interests of our own society.

Author and philosopher Ayn Rand defended selfishness on ethical grounds. Her nonfiction work, The Virtue of Selfishness, argues that selfishness is a moral good and not an excuse to act with disregard for others: :The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self- interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

The movement that came to identify with the name effective altruism was created in the late 2000s as a community formed around Giving What We Can, founded in 2009 by philosopher Toby Ord with help from philosopher William MacAskill, who also co-founded 80,000 Hours in 2011. Those two groups, while planning to incorporate as a charity under a new umbrella organization, held a vote in late 2011 to choose a name for the new organization; the name "Centre for Effective Altruism" won. Ruairí Donnelly set up the "Effective Altruists" Facebook group in November 2012, and the movement gained wider exposure with Peter Singer's TED talk "The Why and How of Effective Altruism" in May 2013. Other contributions to the social movement were the writings of philosophers such as Singer on applied ethics and Bostrom on reducing the risk of human extinction, the founding of organizations such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save, and the creation of internet forums such as LessWrong.

In Jacobin magazine, Mathew Snow argued that effective altruism "implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place". Various critics have similarly objected to effective altruism on the basis of the fact that its proponents tend not to support political causes such as anti- capitalism that change "the existing global institutional order". Joshua Kissel has replied that anti-capitalism is compatible with effective altruism in theory, while adding that effective altruists and anti-capitalists have reason to be more sympathetic to each other. Brian Berkey has also argued that support for changing institutions such as capitalism does not contradict the principles of effective altruism, because effective altruism is open to any action that will have the greatest positive impact on the world, including the possibility of changing the existing global institutional order.

Focusing on the long-term future, some effective altruists believe that the total value of any meaningful metric (wealth, potential for suffering, potential for happiness, etc.) summed up over future generations, far exceeds the value for people living today. Some researchers have found it psychologically difficult to contemplate the trade-off; Toby Ord has stated that "Since there is so much work to be done to fix the needless suffering in our present, I was slow to turn to the future." Reasons Ord gave for working on long-term issues include a belief that preventing long-term suffering is "even more neglected" than causes related to current suffering, and that the residents of the future are even more powerless to affect risks caused by current events than are current dispossessed populations. Philosophically, attempts to reduce the suffering of future populations (given they exist) depend on attitudes toward pure time discounting, and initiatives focused on preventing human extinction (as opposed to preventing other dystopian futures) additionally depend on attitudes toward population ethics in order to compare with scenarios where future populations do not exist.

When "The Altruists" opens, he's in debt, single and reclusive. from The New York Times
I think that many effective altruists are aware of that. from Vox
Effective altruists aim to do the most good they can. from Vox
And I think the effective altruists have asked really tough questions. from Vox
Effective altruists fret that their movement might, in fact, have very limited appeal. from Economist
What can effective altruists do to mitigate the potential negative perception of them? from Vox
Open Phil's position here is actually markedly less extreme than many effective altruists'. from Vox
Effective altruists believe that resources should be directed wherever they do the most good. from Vox
It can be linking up with other effective altruists virtually and talking about what you're doing. from Vox
When it comes to politics, there's no reason in principle why effective altruists shouldn't get involved. from Vox
Inevitably, even effective altruists have to accept a degree of uncertainty about the impact of their donation. from Economist
So it's not the case that effective altruists focus exclusively on things that are easy to measure. from Vox
Another objection is that many effective altruists are too concerned about the potential risks associated with machine superintelligence. from Vice
Keeping the volume down would at least be one easy way for altruists to improve the lives of locals. from Economist
I find that most people who've been working in the aid industry a long time get annoyed by the effective altruists. from Vox
The tyranny of the past is a central problem in "The Altruists," Andrew Ridker's intelligent, funny and remarkably assured first novel. from The New York Times
Visitors are welcome at the hotel (partly to deter "cult-like tendencies"), though prices for non-altruists are set above market rates. from Economist
The forum post invited effective altruists to live there free of charge for up to two years, to work on improving the world. from Economist
Many effective altruists, myself included, have over time become convinced that the vast majority of lives we can affect are in the future. from Vox
Thinking about this in the context of the effective altruism community, ask yourself: What percentage of effective altruists should be earning to give? from Vox
My reasoning failures aside, the effective altruists' tendency to rationally analyze everything is endearing, and I should disclose that I've been won over. from Vox
Altruists acknowledge a chequered past, give thanks for today's blessings and look forward to a better future—a straight line sloping up across time. from Economist
But fundamentally it's an AI alignment problem of exactly the same kind, if not the same scale, that MIRI and effective altruists worry about. from Vox
"EFFECTIVE altruists" are a community of people who dedicate their lives to helping others, using evidence and reason to do so as effectively as possible. from Economist
But effective altruists would respond that what matters isn't just what one does, but what would have happened if one hadn't acted in a particular way. from Vice
So that's why I've been hard on Make-A-Wish in the past, and why effective altruists like Peter Singer have criticized the group as well. from Vox
" Welch defines "effective altruists" as people who are "so committed to their social causes they seek high-paying careers primarily to maximize their ability to give away their earnings. from CNBC
And Matthews has suggested that effective altruists might be spending too much time worrying about things like artificial intelligence and not enough time worrying about things like global poverty. from Vox
"The present findings directly link objectively measured empathy and altruism," the authors wrote, though they noted that their findings need to be replicated in less extreme altruists in the future. from Vice
Effective altruists, and GiveWell in particular, go to great lengths to emphasize that doing good abroad is just as valuable as doing it in America, and probably cheaper, as well. from Vox
THE ALTRUISTS By Andrew Ridker Even if it's true that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, it seems pretty clear that many have the same dilemmas and woes. from The New York Times
Then earn to give if you think you are unusually well-suited to it: perhaps in the 15 percent most well-suited, out of the wider community of aspiring effective altruists. from Vox
The increasing economic importance of AI, and the fact that it is so poorly understood, have led many altruists to believe it may soon become one of the biggest threats to society. from Economist
He is gradually building up a membership base through collaborations at Deloitte, where he tells me bio-hackers, virtual and augmented reality enthusiasts, effective altruists, technology entrepreneurs, and space enthusiasts meet regularly. from Vice
But I take your basic point: maybe effective altruists are too concerned about having high confidence that they'll do some good and should be more prepared to take gambles in different fields. from Vox
The team at Open Phil are effective altruists, members of a growing movement that commits itself to using empirical methods to work out how to do the most good it possibly can. from Vox
If altruism can spread when altruists cluster together, then its opposite — spite, or harming another organism even when one gains no individual benefit from it — can also spread if spiteful organisms cluster together. from Vox
All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren't that special, or at least maybe we don't have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. from Vox
Instead of doing charity in a way that makes people feel good, effective altruists rely on rigorous, evidence-based analysis to decide how to donate money, where to donate, and which careers are most ethical. from Vox
And effective altruists—and I—would argue that then designing a "human friendly" superintelligence is a highly worthwhile task, even if the first superintelligent machine won't make its debut on Earth until the end of this century. from Vice
And while I've never heard it praised as a particularly cost-effective way to help humanity by effective altruists, it was surely a reasonably good cause for a famous and politically popular man to dedicate himself to. from Vox
Effective altruists also make one striking, controversial claim — that one good place to direct our money is toward securing and improving the lives of people who don't exist yet and may not exist for millions of years. from Vox
While contemporary issues like global poverty, disease, and animal welfare weigh heavily on the minds of many effective altruists, it is encouraging to see a growing number of people taking seriously the issue of humanity's long-term future. from Vice
Despite all the hand-wringing out there about the prospect of AI systems becoming our evil overlords, they're not megalomaniacs, nor are they altruists — they're just reflections of us in silicon, augmented with some pretty amazing computational power. from Vox
Drawing on this insight, effective altruists might emphasize the personal satisfaction that can arise from donating to effective causes, and talk about their own personal experience with the movement in ways that convey what it means to them. from Vox
Having a group of effective altruists based there, Mr Colbourn also notes, could be a hedge against the risk of losing too many members of the community in a catastrophic event, given their concentration in the south-east of England. from Economist
Here is how altruists contrast with narcissists:Look to the future—Rake over the pastPositive-sum—Zero-sumShare—ExcludeWork together—Gang upImprovement—StruggleOpponents complement—Opponents are traitorsImmigrants add variety—They threaten our way of lifeUnited by values—United by race and culture. from Economist
Effective altruists have, for complex sociological reasons I explored in a podcast episode, become very interested in AI as a potential "existential risk": a force that could, in extreme circumstances, wipe out humanity, just as nuclear war or asteroid strikes could. from Vox
Effective altruists argue that if you are choosing a career and want to help the world, you should not worry about how much good a profession does overall—rather, you should focus on the impact you would make if you join them. from Economist
For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity's continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. from Vox
It may be tough to call towns like Rectum (in the Netherlands), Dildo (in Newfoundland, Canada), and Cummings (a small town in Georgia) home, but now residents of places whose names illicit mocking from strangers are getting a gift from the altruists at Pornhub. from Mashable
Effective altruists tend to think the best charities will focus on an issue that meets three criteria: It's important (it affects many lives in a massive way), it's tractable (extra resources will do a lot to fix it), and it's neglected (not that many people are devoted to this issue yet). from Vox
Effective altruists believe donating to East Africa, where $1,500 is two or three years' salary, changes more lives for the better (or has a greater impact on the same number of lives) than donating within the Houston area — even after a hurricane in Houston, or in Puerto Rico, where the group is considering going next. from Vox
Like my colleague Dylan Matthews and many other effective altruists, I've signed the Giving What We Can pledge to give at least 10 percent of my income to highly effective charities, and certainly my first reaction when I heard Booker's numbers was delight that someone in the running for the presidency cares about this like I do. from Vox
Read More: Today's Kids Could Live Through Machine Superintelligence, Martian Colonies and a Nuclear Attack Caring about the far future leads to some effective altruists to focus specifically on what Bostrom calls "existential risks," or events that would either trip our species into the eternal grave of extinction or irreversibly catapult us back to the Paleolithic. from Vice
Shapiro, Marjorie (March 5, 2000). "Marge Says: The Altruists". Talkin' Broadway. Retrieved December 26, 2015.
Whereas "pure altruists" (sometimes referred to as "perfect altruists") are motivated solely by the desire to provide for a recipient, impure altruists are also motivated by the joy of giving (warm glow). Importantly, warm glow is distinctly non-pecuniary, meaning it arises independent of the possibility of financial reward. Therefore, the warm glow phenomenon is distinct from reciprocal altruism, which may imply a direct financial incentive. Warm-glow giving is a useful economic framework to consider public good provision, collective action problems, charitable giving, and gifting behavior.
The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution. But, as J. L. Mackie suggested, when there are many different groups, each with a different evolutionarily stable strategy, there is selection between the different strategies, since some are worse than others. For example, a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse.
Gunns Saviour a Reclusive Billionaire, ABC News, February 2012. He also has been known to "take a business approach to philanthropy."48 Asian Altruists, Forbes, February 2008.
In 2014, Marsh published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that concluded a spectrum existed with extreme altruists on one end and psychopaths at the other. She has also published multiple studies that show, when altruists watch someone else feel pain, they have levels of activity in similar regions of their brain as when they were feeling the pain themselves, and concluded that altruists are better at recognizing the fear of others. Marsh leads work at Georgetown with altruistic donors, particularly those who donated kidneys to strangers. Her work with children and adolescents has been used to show how different neural workings can lead to behavioral problems.
Some common priorities among effective altruists have included poverty in the developing world, the suffering of animals in factory farms, and risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth (see below).
People who embrace effective altruism are often called effective altruists.The term effective altruists is used to refer to people who embrace effective altruism in many published sources such as , , and , though as noted, calling people "effective altruists" just means minimally that they are engaged in the project of "using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good", not that they are perfectly effective nor even that they necessarily participate in the effective altruism community. While many effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit.
Marsh published The Fear Factor in 2017, a book about her research on aggression, altruism, and empathy in the context of neuroscience. The full title is The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between.
Stark models the formation of couples and the rule of imitation of parents and non-parents. He then asks what happens to the proportion of altruists in the population. Stark specifies a case where a unique and stable equilibrium is one in which the entire population will consist of altruists. The possibility that behavior that is seemingly altruistic is actually not, is taken up in “Transfers, Empathy Formation, and Reverse Transfers.”Stark, Oded and Falk, Ita (1998). “Transfers, empathy formation, and reverse transfers.” American Economic Review 88(2): 271-276. In that work Stark considers a donor and a recipient.
Effective altruists have argued that counterfactual reasoning is important to determine which course of action maximizes positive impact. Many people assume that the best way to help people is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services, but since charities and social- service providers usually can find people willing to work for them, effective altruists would compare the amount of good somebody does in a conventional altruistic career to how much good would have been done had the next-best candidate been hired for the position. According to this reasoning, the impact of a career may be smaller than it appears.
The three episodes Naked Beach Frenzy, Altruists, and Stimpy's Pregnant did not originally air on TNN, though they did air on other networks overseas, including Fox in Italy and MTV in Poland. They were also included in the Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes DVD set that was released on July 18, 2006.
David Brooks criticized the concept in his New York Times opinion column, arguing that, while altruists may start doing "earning to give" to realize their deepest commitments, their values may erode over time, becoming progressively less altruistic. Similarly, John Humphrys criticised this idea on the BBC Today programme, saying that people interested in becoming wealthy tend to be selfish and that idealistic young people will become cynical as they age. In addition, Brooks objected to the view on which altruists should turn themselves "into a machine for the redistribution of wealth." Peter Singer responded to these criticisms in his book The Most Good You Can Do by giving examples of people who have been earning to give for years without losing their altruistic motivation.
He has found these "Mitzvah heroes" in countless places around the world. And his challenge to everyone is that he "wants to turn ordinary people into superheroes". Siegel works with over 100 such altruists around the world. He "has a stable of everyday, real-life Mitzvah heroes, young and old, with projects ranging from the ordinary to the unusual".
Effective Altruism Global, abbreviated EA Global, is a series of philanthropy conferences that focuses on the effective altruism movement. The conferences are run by the Centre for Effective Altruism at Oxford University. Huffington Post editor Nico Pitney described the events as a gathering of "nerd altruists", which was "heavy on people from technology, science, and analytical disciplines".
Rocha's career began on stage in the August 1993 revival of the Jane Bowles play In the Summer House at the Vivian Beaumont Theater."In the Summer House". Playbill. Retrieved September 19, 2016. Since then she has been in multiple Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including Noises Off and Nicky Silver's comedy The Altruists where she created the role of Cybil.
The application of psychology for understanding conflict and extreme acts of violence can be understood in both individual and group terms. Political conflict is often a consequence of ethnic disparity and "ethnocentrism" Sumner (1906). On an individual level participators in situations of conflict can either be perpetrators, bystanders or altruists. The behavior of perpetrators is often explained through the authoritarian personality type.
MacAskill is the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit which conducts research on careers with positive social impact and provides career advice. Initially, the organization recommended earning to give as a career path with a high impact potential for effective altruists, though more recently it has deemphasised this approach, in favour of alternative paths like research, advocacy or policy reform.
Many effective altruists believe that reducing animal suffering should be a major priority and that, at the current margin, there are cost-effective ways of accomplishing this. Singer quotes estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the British organization Fishcount according to which 60 billion land animals are slaughtered and between 1 and 2.7 trillion individual fish are killed each year for human consumption. He argues that effective animal welfare altruists should prioritize factory farming over more overfunded popular causes such as pet welfare. Singer also argues that, if farm animals such as chickens are assigned even a modicum of consciousness, efforts to reduce factory farming (for example, by reducing global meat consumption) could be an even more underfunded and cost-effective way of reducing current global suffering than human poverty reduction.
"Altruria" derives from the Latin alter "the other". As opposed to egotism, altruism--a word coined during the first half of the 19th century by Auguste Comte--is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Thus, Altruria is a Utopian country inhabited exclusively by altruists, by people who believe that they have a moral obligation to help, serve, or benefit others, if necessary by the sacrifice of self interest.
Marsh is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health's 2007 Richard J Wyatt Memorial Award for translational research. In 2014, Marsh was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize for research on altruism she had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research she coauthored studied "extraordinary altruists", using people who donated kidneys to strangers. In 2016, Marsh was named a fellow in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
If enough people are altruists, sacrificing the payoff of first-round defection is worth the price in order to determine whether or not your opponent is an altruist. Nagel and Tang (1998) suggest this explanation. Another possibility involves error. If there is a significant possibility of error in action, perhaps because your opponent has not reasoned completely through the backward induction, it may be advantageous (and rational) to cooperate in the initial rounds.
While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit. People associated with the movement include philosopher Peter Singer, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Ben Delo, Oxford-based researchers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, professional poker player Liv Boeree, and writer Jacy Reese.
As well as interactions in reliable contexts of genetic relatedness, altruists may also have some way to recognize altruistic behavior in unrelated individuals and be inclined to support them. As Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene (Chapter 6) and The Extended Phenotype, this must be distinguished from the green-beard effect. The green-beard effect is the act of a gene (or several closely linked genes), that: # Produces a phenotype. # Allows recognition of that phenotype in others.
Much of Marsh's work pertains to the study of altruism and why people may help others at their own cost. More generally, she researches in the field of social and affective neuroscience and psychology. On the topic of altruism, Marsh's research has yielded more information about the amygdala, showing that in altruists, the amygdalae tend to be larger, and in psychopaths it tends to be smaller. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions and fear.
While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit. People associated with the movement include philosopher Peter Singer, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Ben Delo, Oxford-based researchers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, professional poker player Liv Boeree, and writer Jacy Reese Anthis.
Title page from the third edition of Political Justice by William Godwin Godwin supported individual ownership of property, defining it as "the empire to which every man is entitled over the produce of his own industry". However, he also advocated that individuals give to each other their surplus property on the occasion that others have a need for it, without involving trade (e.g. gift economy). Thus while people have the right to private property, they should give it away as enlightened altruists.
In 2011, he has been awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award by the Government of India. In April 2017, India Today magazine ranked him 9th in India's 50 Most powerful people of 2017 list. In 2018, Premji was conferred with Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) – the highest French civilian distinction by the French Government. In December 2019, Premji was cited by Forbes magazine as one of the 'Heroes of Philanthropy list of 30 altruists' in the Asia-Pacific region.
Another critical piece of evidence supporting the dual process account comes from reaction time data associated with moral dilemma experiments. Subjects who choose the "utilitarian" path in moral dilemmas showed increased reaction times under high cognitive load in "personal" dilemmas, while those choosing the "deontological" path remained unaffected. Cognitive load, in general, is also found to increase the likelihood of "deontological" judgment These laboratory findings are supplemented by work that looks at the decision-making processes of real-world altruists in life-or-death situations. These heroes overwhelming described their actions as fast, intuitive, and virtually never as carefully reasoned.
The book faced criticism from Current Affairs due to its focus on effective altruism. Nathan J. Robinson wrote: > The End of Animal Farming is written from the "effective altruist" point of > view, and carries both that movement's best and worst tendencies. At their > best, the effective altruists help hone our moral reasoning, and focus on > being useful rather than seeming virtuous. You can see that in Reese’s > approach: He wants to convince you that ending animal farming is possible, > and lay out a series of steps by which it might be achieved, not just show > that it's important.
The uniting philosophy of the T'au race is called "The Greater Good", which stresses communal living and cooperation, a convivial attitude to aliens, and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole. Most T'au sincerely believe they are on a noble mission to bring peace, justice, and progress to the rest of the galaxy. While on the surface the T'au may seem like wonderful altruists, especially when compared to the extremely brutal Imperium of Man, the fiction shows many sinister undertones. The T'au can be ruthless with alien cultures who don't fit into their utopian society.
The warm-glow model accounts for such inefficiency because impure altruists may be insensitive to the actual cause, and more sensitive to the act of giving or size of the gift. Thus, warm-glow may generate philanthropic inefficiencies to the extent that it desensitizes potential donors to the marginal impact of a given charity. In response to this concern, William MacAskill and colleagues have advanced a process of philanthropic allocation called "effective altruism". This methodology seeks to leverage logic and responsibility to identify effective charitable opportunities, thus minimizing the effect of warm-glow in the decision-making process.
She has studied the brains of children and adults who have psychopathic traits and found that it is strongly inherited, one factor of which is a fearless maternal influence. Children who display risky behavior, she concluded, are more prone to becoming psychopathic, and that such psychopaths are hard to detect as they may believe they are no different than those around them. In 2017 Marsh wrote Good for Nothing about the topic of altruists and psychopaths. In 2019, Marsh researched altruism in kidney donors and stem cell donors using behavioral investigations and brain imaging, as well as using those methods to study the causes of conduct problems in children and adolescents.
Originally "Emerald Twilight" was scripted by Gerard Jones and according to Previews Vol. III #8 (Aug 1993) and the November 1993 Comics Scoreboard, was to involve two sets of the extraterrestrial altruists known as the Guardians and Hal Jordan, a member of their intergalactic police force, the Green Lanterns, having to choose which set was real. DC Editorial did not think this idea was interesting enough to draw new readers so then-publisher Paul Levitz, along with senior group editors Mike Carlin, Dennis O'Neil, and Archie Goodwin, and Green Lantern editor Kevin Dooley plotted the "Emerald Twilight" story. It was given to Ron Marz to write.
Altruists discriminate between the individuals they help and favor relatives. Hamilton's rule explains the evolutionary rationale behind this selection with the equation , where the cost to the altruist must be less than the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the coefficient of relatedness . The more closely related two organisms are causes the incidences of altruism to increase because they share many of the same alleles. This means that the altruistic individual, by ensuring that the alleles of its close relative are passed on through survival of its offspring, can forgo the option of having offspring itself because the same number of alleles are passed on.
Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era is a book written by Thomas C. Leonard and published by the Princeton University press which reevaluates several leading figures of the progressive era of American economics, and points out that many of the so-called "progressives" of the late 19th and early 20th century who created policies such as minimum wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen’s compensation, progressive income taxes and many others had beliefs rooted in Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics, revealing a dark underside to the economic reformers often considered by history to be the altruists in the story of American economic progression.
Earning to give has been proposed as a possible strategy for effective altruists. This strategy involves choosing to work in high-paying careers with the explicit goal of donating large sums of money to charity. MacAskill argues that it might even be worth earning to give in morally controversial careers, since the marginal impact of taking an unethical job is small if someone else would have taken it regardless, while the counterfactual impact of the donations would be large. However, 80,000 Hours have more recently argued that it is better to avoid careers that do significant direct harm, even if it seems like the negative consequences would be outweighed by donations.
This is because there are often hidden harms in following unethical careers, and because they think it is important to take moral uncertainty into account. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, criticized earning to give. He wrote that most people who work in finance and other high-paying industries value money for selfish reasons and that being surrounded by these people will cause effective altruists to become less altruistic. Peter Singer responded to these criticisms in his book The Most Good You Can Do by giving examples of people who have been earning to give for years without losing their altruistic motivation.
Philosophically, wild animal suffering may be an additional moral concern for effective altruists. In 2018, the book The End of Animal Farming by Jacy Reese Anthis discussed animal welfare issues from an effective altruism perspective, with a specific focus on the potential for cultured meat to address farm animal suffering and the importance of expanding the moral circle to help people care more about future beings, wild animals, invertebrates, and artificial sentience. Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an effective altruism organization that evaluates and compares various animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those that are tackling factory farming.Daniel Engber, "Save the Chicken", Slate, August 18, 2016.
Stark shows that allocation behavior and wellbeing of one family member depend on his altruistic link with another family member, how the timing of the intergenerational transfer of the family productive asset affects the incentive to engage in human capital formation, and how transfers from an adult to his parents impinge on future transfers to him from his own children. In addition, Stark shows how altruism, which in the beginning of his book is assumed, is explained: the transmission to or probable acquisition by children of parental traits and the exchange between siblings result in a stable equilibrium wherein no agent behaves nonaltruistically. In related work, Stark demonstrates how altruism can surge in a population of non-altruists.
Thus, while people have the right to private property, they should give it away as enlightened altruists. Godwin explained this approach stating, "[e]very man has a right to that, the exclusive possession of which being awarded to him, a greater sum of benefit or pleasure will result than could have arisen from its being otherwise appropriated." Yet to Godwin, benevolence was not to be enforced but instead a matter of free individual "private judgement." He did not advocate a community of goods or assert collective ownership as is embraced in communism, but his belief that individuals ought to share with those in need was influential on the later development of anarchist communism.
Many nonprofits emphasize effectiveness and evidence, but this is usually done with a single cause (problem) in mind, such as education or climate change. Effective altruists, however, seek to compare the relative importance of different causes and allocate resources among them objectively, a concept that is usually referred to as cause neutrality. Schubert said that the term cause neutrality has been used by various authors with different meanings and different decision rules. One approach to cause neutrality, for example, is to choose the highest priority causes based on whether activities in each cause area could efficiently advance broad goals, such as increasing human or animal welfare, and then focus attention on interventions in those cause areas.
Effective altruists have argued that selection of one's career is an important determinant of the amount of good one does, both directly (through the services one provides to the world) and indirectly (through the ways one directs the money earned based on the career). 80,000 Hours is an organisation in the effective altruism community that conducts research on which careers have the largest positive social impact and provides career advice based on that research. It considers indirect methods of altruistic employment, such as earning a high salary in a conventional career and donating a portion of it, as well as direct practices, such as scientific research. It was co-founded by William MacAskill and Benjamin Todd.
In fact, he spends little time making the moral case, > which is quite simple, and the bulk of the book is dedicated to solutions. > Unfortunately, the "effective altruists"' frustrating qualities are on > display too. In a chapter on how we might further "expand our moral circle," > Reese discusses some of the EA movement’s other pet causes (such as > preventing an artificially intelligent creature from enslaving humanity) and > mulls on moral questions about space colonization and the civil rights of > future robot servants. This eccentric altruism is not based on evidence, but > upon thought experiments about possible distant futures (Reese mentions > "whole brain emulation"), and causes some EA adherents to think their time > is wisely spent trying to help prevent far-fetched hypothetical future- > suffering rather than actual present-suffering.
Effective altruist organizations make philanthropic recommendations for charities on the basis of the impact from marginal funding rather than merely evaluating the average value of all donations to the charity. Effective altruists would avoid donating to organizations that have no "room for more funding" – those that face bottlenecks other than money which prevent them from spending the funds they have already accumulated or are expected to receive. For example, a medical charity might not be able to hire enough doctors or nurses to distribute the medical supplies it is capable of purchasing, or it might already be serving all of the potential patients in its market. There are many other organizations which do have room for more funding, so giving to one of those instead would produce real-world improvements.
Some effective altruists think that the interests of non-human animals should be accorded equal moral weight as similar interests of humans, so they work to prevent the suffering of animals (see below), especially animals raised in factory farms. There are many kinds of motivation and justification for impartiality, as for altruism. An argument for impartiality that has been influential among effective altruistsOn the influence of Singer's essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" see, for example: , , and was expressed by philosopher Peter Singer in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he wrote: > It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's > child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten > thousand miles away. ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond > the interests of our own society.
Author and philosopher Ayn Rand defended selfishness on ethical grounds. Her nonfiction work, The Virtue of Selfishness, argues that selfishness is a moral good and not an excuse to act with disregard for others: :The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self- interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.
The movement that came to identify with the name effective altruism was created in the late 2000s as a community formed around Giving What We Can, founded in 2009 by philosopher Toby Ord with help from philosopher William MacAskill, who also co-founded 80,000 Hours in 2011. Those two groups, while planning to incorporate as a charity under a new umbrella organization, held a vote in late 2011 to choose a name for the new organization; the name "Centre for Effective Altruism" won. Ruairí Donnelly set up the "Effective Altruists" Facebook group in November 2012, and the movement gained wider exposure with Peter Singer's TED talk "The Why and How of Effective Altruism" in May 2013. Other contributions to the social movement were the writings of philosophers such as Singer on applied ethics and Bostrom on reducing the risk of human extinction, the founding of organizations such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save, and the creation of internet forums such as LessWrong.
In Jacobin magazine, Mathew Snow argued that effective altruism "implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place". Various critics have similarly objected to effective altruism on the basis of the fact that its proponents tend not to support political causes such as anti- capitalism that change "the existing global institutional order". Joshua Kissel has replied that anti-capitalism is compatible with effective altruism in theory, while adding that effective altruists and anti-capitalists have reason to be more sympathetic to each other. Brian Berkey has also argued that support for changing institutions such as capitalism does not contradict the principles of effective altruism, because effective altruism is open to any action that will have the greatest positive impact on the world, including the possibility of changing the existing global institutional order.
Focusing on the long-term future, some effective altruists believe that the total value of any meaningful metric (wealth, potential for suffering, potential for happiness, etc.) summed up over future generations, far exceeds the value for people living today. Some researchers have found it psychologically difficult to contemplate the trade-off; Toby Ord has stated that "Since there is so much work to be done to fix the needless suffering in our present, I was slow to turn to the future." Reasons Ord gave for working on long-term issues include a belief that preventing long-term suffering is "even more neglected" than causes related to current suffering, and that the residents of the future are even more powerless to affect risks caused by current events than are current dispossessed populations. Philosophically, attempts to reduce the suffering of future populations (given they exist) depend on attitudes toward pure time discounting, and initiatives focused on preventing human extinction (as opposed to preventing other dystopian futures) additionally depend on attitudes toward population ethics in order to compare with scenarios where future populations do not exist.