Abstract
Effective Altruism is a social movement which encourages people to do as much good as they can when helping others, given limited money, time, effort, and other resources. This paper first identifies a minimal philosophical view that underpins this movement, and then argues that there is an analogous minimal philosophical view which might underpin Effective Justice, a possible social movement that would encourage promoting justice most effectively, given limited resources. The latter minimal view reflects an insight about justice, and our non-diminishing moral reason to promote more of it, that surprisingly has gone largely unnoticed and undiscussed. The Effective Altruism movement has led many to reconsider how best to help others, but relatively little attention has been paid to the differences in degrees of cost-effectiveness of activities designed to decrease injustice. This paper therefore not only furthers philosophical understanding of justice, but has potentially major practical implications.
Highlights
Effective Altruism is a social movement which encourages people to do as much good as they can when helping others, for example when giving to charity
Just as the combination of Impartial Altruism with Maximizing Altruism, along with an assumption of practical relevance, provides the minimal philosophical underpinning for Effective Altruism, the combination of Impartial Justice with Maximizing Justice may serve to underpin Effective Justice, a social movement encouraging the maximally effective promotion of impartial justice, given limited resources
Perhaps the main philosophical hurdle to seeing the force of Impartial Justice and Maximizing Justice is a failure to accept that justice can be promoted, or that it is the sort of thing the appropriate response to which can be promotion
Summary
Effective Altruism is a social movement which encourages people to do as much good as they can when helping others, for example when giving to charity. The movement was spurred by an appreciation of the substantial differences in cost-effectiveness between charities, that is, differences in the average amount of good done per dollar donated to charities. Similar remarks apply to donations of time and expenditures of effort Their central recommendation is to use resources put to altruistic purposes, so as to do the most good with them, without violating any side constraints there might be.. This paper will begin by outlining the normative constituents of the minimal philosophical view underpinning this central recommendation of Effective Altruism. For all we argue here, these assumptions (plausible as they are) may fail to hold, and many activities characteristic of participation in the Effective Altruism movement – donating to certain charities and encouraging others to do likewise, publicly discussing how to do the most good with one’s career, providing cost-effectiveness information to others, etc. Crisp and Pummer philosophical view which might underpin Effective Justice, a social movement that would encourage promoting justice most effectively, given limited resources.
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