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This is: Defining Effective Altruism, published by William_MacAskillon the effective altruism forum.
Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer have put together an excellent collection of essays on effective altruism, which will be coming out soon.
Effective altruism is still widely misunderstood in academia, so I took the opportunity to write up my thoughts on how effective altruism should be defined and why, and to respond to some of the most common misconceptions about effective altruism. I hope that having a precise definition will also help guard against future dilution or drift of the concept, or confusion regarding what effective altruism is about. You can find the essay (with some typos that will be corrected) here. Below I’ve put together an abridged version, highlighting the points that I’d expect to be most interesting for the Forum audience and trying to cut out some philosophical jargon; for a full discussion, though, the essay is better.
The definition of effective altruism
I suggest two principal desiderata for the definition. The first is to match the actual practice of those who would currently describe themselves as engaging in effective altruism. The second is to ensure that the concept has as much public value as possible. This means, for example, we want the concept to be broad enough to be endorsable by or useful to many different moral views, but still determinate enough to enable users of the concept to do more to improve the world than they otherwise would have done. This, of course, is a tricky balancing act.
My proposal for a definition (which is making CEA’s definition a little more rigorous) is as follows:
Effective altruism is:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and
(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.
(i) refers to effective altruism as an intellectual project (or ‘research field’); (ii) refers to effective altruism as a practical project (or ‘social movement’).
The definition is:
Non-normative. Effective altruism consists of two projects, rather than a set of normative claims.
Maximising. The point of these projects is to do as much good as possible with the resources that are dedicated towards it.
Science-aligned. The best means to figuring out how to do the most good is the scientific method, broadly construed to include reliance on careful rigorous argument and theoretical models as well as data.
Tentatively impartial and welfarist. As a tentative hypothesis or a first approximation, doing good is about promoting wellbeing, with everyone’s wellbeing counting equally. More precisely: for any two worlds A and B with all and only the same individuals, of finite number, if there is a one to one mapping of individuals from A to B such that every individual in A has the same wellbeing as their counterpart in B, then A and B are equally good.[1]
The ideas that EA is about maximising and about being science-aligned (understood broadly) are uncontroversial. The two more controversial aspects of the definition are that it is non-normative, and that it is tentatively impartial and welfarist.
Effective Altruism as non-normative
The definition could have been normative by making claims about how much one is required to sacrifice: for example, it could have stated that everyone is required to use as much of their resources as possible in whatever way will do the most good; or it could have stated some more limited obligation to sacrifice, such as that everyone is required to use at least 10% of their time or money in whatever way will do the most good.
There are four reasons why I think the definition shouldn’t be normative:
(i) a normative definition was unpopular among leaders of the comm...
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