Effective or affective?; that is the question. You almost always want to use effective, except where it doesn't feel right. Honoring that feeling is an incarnate life I wish for everyone.

There is a person in need on a planet's moon circling Betelgeuse. Should we build a self-landing rocket to take a step toward that person? Do small decisions enable tipping points that create unexpected change?; yes. Are these choices drowned by the noise?; mostly yes.

Elon Musk is an innovative, rich, and pariahid idiot. Spacetime does not allow consciousness to transcend starry nights. But we look to the heavens to express our goodwill. There are no answers in the stars; we better hold to our yards, playgrounds, and dirt.

Give Well - https://www.givewell.org/ is where I put my discretionary dollar. My fields' expense limits those dollars, and they need their own fertilizer.

When there are no clear answers in a debate between effect and affect, that is where Philosophy makes inroads. There are several objects to consider: time, space, need, and ability. Understanding your feelings is a first misstep, and hopefully, Theron can help make those steps more manageable.

Strong agreement here with the third paragraph above. As a principle, one shouldn't assume permissibility to take possession of a distant portion of land before one has taken good care of one's own. As extraterrestrial lands are about as distant as they come, the notion of setting up colonies there in order to escape a ruined earth is idiocy in the extreme, to use your well chosen term. Another term we might come to is "sustainability", as necessarily conditioned by a radical subversion of the wage-slave system, so that internal labor determination of the grounds of resource-consumption can override those of determination by external possession, or, if you like, so that the interests of stakeholders in use of the product can override those of shareholders in the profits from its sale. From these two terms, Idiocy and Sustainability, can one move on to a third? What term could be arrived at which brings both in relation to Altruism?

Still learning vocabulary of philosophy, even as I write more about it. Just finished a piece wherein I discuss axiology and deontology. And what their meanings have to do with real world circumstances.
Might share some of that, depending on how well it turns out. Altruism is hard to nail down in a relativistic climate. Because just when you think it is being done, it is found to have personal ulterior motive(s). Similar to that other vehicle for largess, philanthropy, also discussed in this venue. I have little stomach for or patience with altruism these days. It just does not ring.

Someone took a shot at this phrase (EA), a day or so ago, while taking one at another philosopher, who had remarked, during an interview, concerning his wish that philosophers get more involved with things that matter. And write for other people---not only other philosophers. I like the spirit of that whole notion. Sorta reminds me of Harry Frankfurt. And, if you believe that is a slight towards Mr. Frankfurt, you miss the point.

I know this is a re-run and no one will read this, but, the guy says, 'I think 10% "tithing" and using that for helping strangers or whatever, or else one whole kidney, gives you a member card in the eff. alt. club...
This is regardless of how much money you have or whatever.... where does he get 10%? I calculated it to be 21.357%

Also, what if the baby in the pond is svelte, and beautiful with absolutely iridescent blue eys, and there are 4 grotesquely fat babies on the other side of the pond - sorry, am I confusing trolleyology with effectivology?

help me freaking jesus.....

greg slater

ummm....why do have to join the effective altruist club to go to heaven?...It's just another random religion with a bunch of arbitrary rules like don't save babies in the pond and don't eat pork on Tuesdays.... this is insane....insane... as you guys argued, any ethical system is hopelessly arbitrary and saves some or elevates some principles while screwing others, etc etc...

ughh.... as usual philosophy provides no guidance whatsoever...

Isn't the decision of whether to save the baby in the pond depend on how far into the pond the baby is? Like if the baby is 5 feet from the shore in 1 foot of water? Or whatever...
This is philosophy at work.... useless, right?

Philosophical forum in context of legitimate use of public utilities in civic environments is like a fire-hydrant in a neighborhood of dog-walkers. Olfactory distinctions in canine neurologies constitute regular social interactions by deposit duration from individual contributors diversely inspected at singular locations. Rather than limited proximate correspondence with the benefit of intonation and gesticulation, an unlimited distant correspondence is made possible by the site-specific collection of olfactory stimuli limited only by the duration of their effectiveness, not the number of its depositors.

But instead of sniffing around at the hydrant base as is appropriate in the social intercourse of canine species, philosophers can often be observed sniffing around at the roots of being, to borrow for a second time Armstrong's phrase. Take Pummer and MacAskill's piece in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (c. 2020 John Wiley & Sons Lt./ed. H. LaFollette), which explains that "effective altruism" is not just an idea but a movement, which is welfarist, maintaining that everyone's in principle a kind of altruist, impartial, meaning that its aim should not be determined by target-compatibility with individual goals of the deploying agent, and prioritist, which balances impartiality by expending the greatest effort where there is the greatest need. The trick apparently is to manage the adjustable threshold where what individuals can do, the "how", is linked up to what needs to be done, the "what". An example is offered where a specific quantity of resources is allocated which is enough to do only one of two equally expensive goals: cure headaches for ten thousand people or prevent the death of one person. The tendency is to opt for the latter in principle, but it's pointed out that in practice and with more difficult examples, such as something like two people losing one leg or one person losing two, a clear answer can not always be determined. And further complications result in expanding considerations to non-human species. In part for these reasons I suggest that participant Johnqeniac may have overlooked some aspects of potential value in the posts of 12/18/22 above. For one thing, it has a good response to the ground-level skeptical objection that, because the unforeseeable effects of altruistic action outnumber the foreseeable effects to such an extent that resources might be wasted on "shots in the dark", all resources should be committed only to goals whose outcome can be reliably forecast. This is answered by a claim of the privileged status of practical value of shared goals over epistemic value of theoretical justification;-- which is not to imply that the latter is left out of the "effective altruism" project, but only that the working out of its epistemology must be subordinated to the original shared intentionality expressed in the principle of welfarism, contained as an axiomatic assumption, which asserts that altruistic designs are a native characteristic of human beings. Does that sound about right?

In further response primarily to participant johnqeniac's tripartite critique of the broadcast's representation of effective altruism as ambiguous, unstable, and impossible, in the three posts of 12/18/22 above, respectively, I think it's worth suggesting that if it can't be justified on verifiable empirical grounds, it might be so on unverifiable metaphysical grounds. Consider Pummer's distinction (between the two sides of which occurs an unexplained tirade against utilitarianism) between short-term rescue and nearby-rescue. Reference to the first is a time-expression contrasted with "long-term structural change", undertaken not out of care for the imperiled, but for the anticipated adverse effect on one's ethical self-assessment were it not undertaken. Reference to the second is an expression of space and presumably contrasted with "far off rescue" or something like that. The point is to stress the distinction between the date of rescue and its location, so that effective altruistic determination of a rescue's date derives from something one might not do but should, (as determined by anticipation of post-hoc internal reflection), whereas determination similarly of a rescue's place is based on a default-proximity in connection with distant-rescue preclusion, so that a generic rescue-duty can be appealed to.

Extrapolating a metaphysical premise from Pummer's analysis, then, one might make the case that duty to rescue can be defined by location and rescue-date can be understood as a feeling of being a rescuer. What might that entail in environments where there's very little difference between the date of occurrences and their location, as obtains at the upper limits of rapidity in causal transmission? If the study of altruism is itself an act of altruism, as put forward in the piece in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Effective Altruism, p.6), how would one tell it apart from the ability of distant rescue withholding its date?