Crossposted from my totes amazing blog that you should all check out immediately! 

There’s been a lot of talk recently about effective altruism and what demands it makes on giving. Contrary to the claims of its critics, effective altruists do not hold that one must give away all of their money. They’ll generally say that it would be best to give away almost all of your money—that a perfect saint would give away all their money above probably around 30,000 dollars. Crucially, this is something we should all hold! It would be a better thing if you saved a life instead of going on a vacation. But insofar as our practical moral norms of what to reasonably expect from others are built for men and not angels, we cannot expect people to give away all of their wealth. The standards for saintliness are different from the normal standards for morality.

So, then the natural question is: how much does morality require us to give? The amount we’re required to give, when we can save lives for just a few thousand dollars, is obviously more than nothing but less than everything.

Here’s a parallel question: how much are you required to give to your kids. Obviously the answer is not nothing. Similarly, ordinary norms hold that giving near the bare minimum is impermissible. If you’re very wealthy, and you only barely keep your kids healthy and fed, never spending money on anything they’d enjoy—going to restaurants for their birthday, buying toys when they’re young, and so on—you’re not meeting your demands as a parent.

Or more broadly: how great are your parental obligations? How much time do you have to spend doing nice things for your kids? Once again, there’s no clear bright line. The same goes for your obligations to your parents, friends, and the like. There’s no clear threshold—spend 10% on your kids—but what morality requires is that you do a lot. That you make helping your kids a major part of your life.

When it comes to charitable giving, I believe that the answer is the same. There is no precise dollar amount that you must give. 10% is a good heuristic, and you ought to give more if you’re wealthier. What morality requires is that it’s a big and major thing that you do. Like with regards to parenting, there isn’t a precise cutoff: morality requires that giving is one of your major life projects. C.S. Lewis, in a characteristically sharp passage, writes:

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.

The drowning child argument is often given to argue for the obligatoriness of charitable giving. It goes like this: imagine you came across a child drowning in a pond. You could wade in to save them. But crucially, doing so would require ruining your suit. Are you morally required to save them?

Most everyone answers: of course. But then the question arises: doesn’t that also imply an obligation to give? For just a few thousand dollars, you’ll save a life. Yes, the children drowning are nearer, and you can see them directly, but those don’t seem morally relevant. You’d still be obligated to save the child if you couldn’t see them, and had to ruin a suit to swim to the bottom of a pond and press a button that would see them. Whether a person is near to you just isn’t morally important.

But now suppose that there were constantly lots and lots of children drowning. In that case, you wouldn’t be required to spend all of your time and money pulling kids out of the pond. But at the very least you’d be required to make saving those children a big deal—a major thing that you do. If we think saving the children from the pond is analogous to charitable giving, the same applies to charity.

Thus, I think that when it comes to effective giving The Moral Law doesn’t require you to give some highly exact percent of your paycheck. It isn’t that if you give 10%, you’re in the clear, but 9.9%, then you’re a moral monster, and 10.1% is just gratuitous. The more the better. No exact amount is required, but you should give enough so that it’s a major thing that you do. If you’re not sure how much to give, 10% is a safe bet!

 

 


 

Comments


No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 12m read
 · 
Economic growth is a unique field, because it is relevant to both the global development side of EA and the AI side of EA. Global development policy can be informed by models that offer helpful diagnostics into the drivers of growth, while growth models can also inform us about how AI progress will affect society. My friend asked me to create a growth theory reading list for an average EA who is interested in applying growth theory to EA concerns. This is my list. (It's shorter and more balanced between AI/GHD than this list) I hope it helps anyone who wants to dig into growth questions themselves. These papers require a fair amount of mathematical maturity. If you don't feel confident about your math, I encourage you to start with Jones 2016 to get a really strong grounding in the facts of growth, with some explanations in words for how growth economists think about fitting them into theories. Basics of growth These two papers cover the foundations of growth theory. They aren't strictly essential for understanding the other papers, but they're helpful and likely where you should start if you have no background in growth. Jones 2016 Sociologically, growth theory is all about finding facts that beg to be explained. For half a century, growth theory was almost singularly oriented around explaining the "Kaldor facts" of growth. These facts organize what theories are entertained, even though they cannot actually validate a theory – after all, a totally incorrect theory could arrive at the right answer by chance. In this way, growth theorists are engaged in detective work; they try to piece together the stories that make sense given the facts, making leaps when they have to. This places the facts of growth squarely in the center of theorizing, and Jones 2016 is the most comprehensive treatment of those facts, with accessible descriptions of how growth models try to represent those facts. You will notice that I recommend more than a few papers by Chad Jones in this
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achieve 25% on its Frontier Math
Omnizoid
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
Edit 1/29: Funding is back, baby!  Crossposted from my blog.   (This could end up being the most important thing I’ve ever written. Please like and restack it—if you have a big blog, please write about it). A mother holds her sick baby to her chest. She knows he doesn’t have long to live. She hears him coughing—those body-wracking coughs—that expel mucus and phlegm, leaving him desperately gasping for air. He is just a few months old. And yet that’s how old he will be when he dies. The aforementioned scene is likely to become increasingly common in the coming years. Fortunately, there is still hope. Trump recently signed an executive order shutting off almost all foreign aid. Most terrifyingly, this included shutting off the PEPFAR program—the single most successful foreign aid program in my lifetime. PEPFAR provides treatment and prevention of HIV and AIDS—it has saved about 25 million people since its implementation in 2001, despite only taking less than 0.1% of the federal budget. Every single day that it is operative, PEPFAR supports: > * More than 222,000 people on treatment in the program collecting ARVs to stay healthy; > * More than 224,000 HIV tests, newly diagnosing 4,374 people with HIV – 10% of whom are pregnant women attending antenatal clinic visits; > * Services for 17,695 orphans and vulnerable children impacted by HIV; > * 7,163 cervical cancer screenings, newly diagnosing 363 women with cervical cancer or pre-cancerous lesions, and treating 324 women with positive cervical cancer results; > * Care and support for 3,618 women experiencing gender-based violence, including 779 women who experienced sexual violence. The most important thing PEPFAR does is provide life-saving anti-retroviral treatments to millions of victims of HIV. More than 20 million people living with HIV globally depend on daily anti-retrovirals, including over half a million children. These children, facing a deadly illness in desperately poor countries, are now going