Effective altruism for everyone

Abstract

This article defends conditional effective altruism, the view that, if one is going to give to charity, one ought to give to the charity that would use one’s gift to do the most good. The authors argue that this view is supported by plausible claims about rescue cases, such as the claim that it is wrong to sacrifice one’s arm to save one stranger rather than five. These claims, in turn, support a general principle, termed Costless Good, which states that it is wrong to incur a cost to promote a good when one could instead incur the same cost to promote a greater good. However, the authors acknowledge that this principle is controversial and provide a less controversial principle called Costless Aid, which is compatible with thoroughgoing non-consequentialism, and still supports a robust variant of conditional effective altruism. This principle states that someone has a claim to aid if she is sufficiently badly off and one can sufficiently benefit her, and that it is wrong to incur a cost to satisfy a set of claims when one could incur the same cost to satisfy a weightier set of claims. – AI-generated abstract.