The Most Good You Can Do
Overall Thoughts
Overall, a good book to explore community service and explore how to expand how much good you do in this world by helping others. It covers an expansive set of causes to consider and think about while explaining effective altruism. Some sections dove too deep and didn’t interest me as much leading to a lower rating.
“Who knows what changes the twenty-first century, with its enormous expansion of personal communications and thus of contacts with others both near and far, will bring to human nature, to our brains, and to our moral sense?”
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Section One: Effective Altruism
What is Effective Altruism?
“Altruism is contrasted with egoism, which is concern only for oneself, but we should not think effective altruism as requiring self-sacrifice, in the sense of something necessarily contrary to one’s own interests.”
There is concern for others, and although it is not egoism, it does not mean there is no ego attached to this action.
“[Effective Altruists] know that saving a life is better than making a wish come true and that saving three lives is better than saving one.”
Saving a life now empowers the person who is alive to keep on making their wish come true themselves. Three is greater than one.
“What counts as ‘the most good’? Effective altruists will not all give the same answer…they would agree that a world with less suffering and more happiness in it is, other things being equal, better than one with more suffering and less happiness.”
Less suffering and more happiness would lead to overall happiness being greater.
“Effective altruists can accept that one’s own children are a special responsibility, ahead of the children of strangers.”
Caring for one’s own family first and then helping others.
A Movement Emerges
“Quoting scientific studies that show the risk of dying as a result of making a kidney donation to be only 1 in 4,000 he says that not making the donation would have meant he valued his life at 4,000 times that of a stranger,”
The conclusion of 4,000 times is an abysmal metric. What value does it add in saying how much more you value yourself than a stranger than guilt-tripping someone?
“In 2011 MacAskill and his friends founded 80,000 Hours, so named because that is roughly the number of hours people spend working in their careers. 80,000 Hours does research on which careers do the most good, offers free career coaching, and is building a global community of people seeking to change the world for the better.”
We work ~80,000 hours in our lifetime! What a metric.
Section Two: How to do the Most Good
Living Modestly to Give More
“Ambrose, a fourth-century archbishop of Milan who was later canonized and became known as one of the four original Great Doctors of the Roman Catholic Church. Ambrose said that “when you give to the poor, “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him, what is his. For what has been given in commons for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself.”
This implies that any possession one has is from the collective and when sharing it with someone else, it is theirs. If it is not mine then it must also not be theirs. It is no ones. So, you are giving something from the collective to another in the collective.
“Giving everything one owns to the poor is going to make it hard to earn more and thus to give more. You need to dress respectably to get a job, and today you may need a laptop and a smartphone too. The best way of maximizing the amount you can give will depend on your individual circumstances and skill, but trying to live without at least a modest level of comfort and convenience is likely to be counterproductive.”
Compounding change over time rather than a fixed amount upfront provides more of a more realistic approach to giving.
“Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it is time to reconsider.”
Emotions are hints of change in actions.
“Giving helps relieve that any guilt that might arise from that thought because it makes Rhema feel that ‘in some small way. I’m working toward building the kind of world I would want to live in.”
Teamwork makes the dream work. Giving what you want to someone else in turn helps you provide something in your own journey. We cannot do it alone.
“Altruism needs to be watched, challenged and nurtured, otherwise it risks becoming stale and automatic.”
Conscious effort rather than habitual roboticism.
Earning to Give
“In the nineties if you had said people would have looked at you oddly, and you would have felt very alone in what you were doing.”
Without widespread technology, as it is today in the 21st century, there was a defined culture in thinking. Now it is much more malleable.
“The consequentialist notion of complicity does have implications that many people will reject. It implies…that the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly if their refusal to serve in that role would have led only to their replacement by someone else, perhaps someone who would have been even more brutal towards those who were about to be murdered there.”
This is a matter of reasoning to justify one’s own actions. It's like in work where once you leave, the business will replace you. We can justify it on both sides and the guards have their reasoning. You can’t please everyone.
Other Ethical Careers
No Quotes
Giving a Part of Yourself
“GiveWell.org says it costs about $2500 to save a human life, so as far as I’m concerned giving $5000 to anti-malaria efforts is a great deed than giving four people kidneys.”
One deed does help more than the other. Even though there is a difference, both change lives.
“The proportion of people who donate a kidney to a stranger in Britain is three times higher than the United States.”
Disparities like this are a pattern in the United States in comparison to Europe
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Section Three: Motivation and Justification
Is Love All We Need?
“Perhaps it is not love that motivates effective altruists but empathy, the ability to put oneself in the position of others and identify with their feelings or emotions.”
Depending on the definition of love, both can be argued. Say, love is wanting others to feel happier. This aligns with the effective altruist’s mission and they would have to also have empathy. Saying it is binary doesn’t fully align.
“Each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainably by him.”
Helping people is helping people.
One Among Many
“The influence that ‘the point of view of the universe’ has on one’s behavior will vary from person to person. Perhaps it is significant that many effective altruists decide on their overall goal while they were still quite young, before they were too deeply embedded in more particular projects…”
Childhood does have a large effect on the development of one’s actions. The word ‘many’ stands out and that could be a potential study to see the background of those who identify as effective altruists.
“We can speculate that people with a high level of abstract reasoning ability are more likely to take the kind of approach to helping others that is characteristic of effective altruism.”
Does abstract reasoning correlate with empathy?
“Who knows what changes the twenty-first century, with its enormous expansion of personal communications and thus of contacts with others both near and far, will bring to human nature, to our brains, and to our moral sense?”
The rise of social media brought connection and the speed continues to grow. We are more connected than ever before.
Altruism and Happiness
“Money however is not an intrinsic good. Rather than saying that something is a sacrifice if it will cause you to have less money, it would be more reasonable to say that something is a sacrifice if it causes you to have a lower level of well-being or, in a word, be less happy.”
That’s an interesting take on happiness and sacrifice. If you’re sacrificing money then it could lead to lower well-being depending on your finances. Thus, it would be a sacrifice. So, it’s diving deeper into a sacrifice when you are lowering your well-being.
“We should instead focus on whether what makes them happy involves increasing the well-being of others. If we wish, we can redefine the terms egoism and altruism in this way, so that they refer to whether people’s interests include a strong concern for others–it if does, then let’s call them altruists, whether or not acting on this concern for others involves a gain or loss for the ‘altruists.”
Mentioning this provides a scope away from the altruist doing the action and focuses on the people being aided.
Section Four: Choosing Causes and Organizations
Domestic or Global?
“If children get diarrhea, their parents are likely to be unable to get any medical assistance for them. Poor parents may have to watch their children die from easily treatable conditions.”
A gruesome experience to go through as a parent. To feel that powerless while your child is horrible.
“Target groups you care about that other people mostly don’t, and take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using.”
Smaller groups don’t have as many advocates. You can make a large change for the lives of those who are hidden from the greater populace.
Are Some Causes Objectively Better than Others?
“Telling people that there is ‘obviously no objective answer’ to such a question can only dampen their enthusiasm for pursuing this laudable quest.”
People want to be heard. Saying that response undermines their curiosity and interests for a non-universal answer.
Difficult Comparisons
“Nevertheless, all of these charities really have a common goal: trying to improve the well-being of the poor.”
The well-being of the poor and less fortunate.
Reducing Animal Suffering and Protecting Nature
“Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) concludes that the most effective way to help animals and prevent the largest amount of suffering is to be an advocate for farm animals. Whereas animal rescue will cost tens or even hundreds of dollars per animal saved, convincing people to reduce or eliminate their consumption of animal products saves animals at a fraction of this cost.”
A great metric to use to advocate for less of a meat diet for oneself.
Choosing the Best Organization
“We do not, at present, know enough to say whether policy advocacy offers better or worse value for money than direct aid programs.”
Curious to see what metrics they use to come to this conclusion. Who are those funding the study?
Preventing Human Extinction
“I have argued that effective altruists tend to be more influenced by reasoning than by emotions and thus are likely to give where they can do the most good, whether or not there is an identifiable victim.”
What makes someone more influenced by reasoning than emotions?
“The larger the number of people who are effective altruists, the greater the likelihood that at least some of them will become concerned about reducing existential risk and will provide resources for doing so.”
Having more people on an issue will lead to greater visibility.
“Other strategies that offer immediate benefits while reducing existential risks might be educating and empowering women, who tend to be less aggressive than men. Giving them greater say in national and international affairs could therefore reduce the chance of nuclear war. Educating women has also been shown to lead them to have fewer and healthier children and that will give us a better chance of stabilizing the world’s population at a sustainable level.”
To what points does the world’s population stabilize? A matter of resources and people being cycled optimally? How does that also expand with finding resources on potentially other planets?
Afterword
“Whether and, if so, when, that critical mass is reached will depend on the readiness of people all over the world to espouse a new ethical idea: to do the most good they can.”
All ethics have differing views. It would have to take an external force outside of humans to unite us and that would be a test in itself, but that has yet to be seen as well.
A very expansive conversation to explore the most good you can do.
