Why I Just Took The Giving What We Can Pledge

Crosspost of my blog article.

I just took the Giving What We Can pledge, which is a pledge to give away at least 10% of my income over the course of my life to highly effective charities. I think you should take it too!

We live in a time of unprecedented prosperity and abundance. Americans today live like kings in the ancient past. We have access to technology that would have been considered magic even just a few hundred years ago. Even relatively poor Americans are richer than nearly everyone who has ever lived.

At the same time, the world is filled with huge and pressing problems. Children whose parents survive on two dollars a day die in their beds, because their parents can’t afford medical care. Animals by the billions are tortured in factory farms. Existential threats imperil the entire future.

For this reason, I pledged to take a small haircut (at least 10% of my income) to address the world’s most pressing problems. For a while I’ve been giving more than 10% of my earnings to effective charities (somewhere around 20%). But now, for the first time, I took the official pledge.

It’s staggering just how much good one person can do. You can help many animals per dollar by donating to effective animal charities. For a few thousand dollars you can save a person’s life (and if you buy my weird insect arguments, each dollar given to GiveWell can save thousands of insects from a lifetime of suffering). And money donated to Longtermist charities can potentially, in expectation, bring about many lifetimes of bliss per dollar.

There’s a lot about ethics that isn’t obvious. It’s hard to know whether utilitarianism is the right ethical theory, whether desert is real, and which theory of well-being is right. But other ethical issues aren’t difficult. Whether people should give some of their money to prevent immense needless death and suffering is among the least tricky ethical issues. If you give away, say, 10% of your earnings, and earn 50,000 dollars a year, you can save a whole, entire human life every year.

(You can prevent someone like the adorable child displayed in the photo above from dying every year by giving away 10% of your income!)

That’s insane! It’s incredible that we have such profound ability to do good. We’ve all lost loved ones, and we all know how tragic it is for a life to be lost. You can prevent that every single year if you earn the median U.S. income and donate 10%. And for the same amount of money, every year you can spare thousands of animals from a lifetime in a cage or save 75 million shrimp from a painful death! By giving away 10% of the income of the median American every year, you can help a number of animals greater than the human population of the U.K..

One of life’s greatest tragedies is the loss of a child. It’s a tragedy so profound, it leaves a lasting impact on all the people who ever knew the child. The world no longer has the child in it, no longer with their laughs or cries, no longer with the ability to grow older, make friends, and fall in love. There is a void where the child used to be.

I signed the Giving What We Can pledge because I recognize that routinely preventing that scale of tragedy is worth spending at least 10% of my income on.

I think you should do the same.

Part of the reason is altruistic. By donating even modest amounts of money, you can prevent horrifying things from happening to lots of others. But even if you’re self-interested, you should still take the pledge. Those who give more tend to be happier and more fulfilled.

The world is gripped by a profound crisis of meaning. Lots of people feel hollow and empty, despite advanced technology and unprecedented wealth. Though their momentary existence is pleasant, it’s not connected to a deeper narrative. There’s nothing deeper they work towards. Making helping others a significant part of your life is an excellent way to make your life meaningful. A self-centered life is nihilistic and meaningless.

You’ll live a happier life if you feel like your life is working towards some important goal. If when you turn 80, you know you’ve helped hundreds of people and millions of animals, you’ll be able to look back on your life with deep pride. You won’t, like so many, feel you’ve wasted your life on social media, at parties, and in pursuit of cheap pleasure. You’ll know you spent your life on something greater, something that mattered, something truly important.

You’ll know that there are adults in the world who only survived childhood because of your donation. You’ll know that there are thousands of animals who didn’t have to rot in a cage because of your donation. You’ll know that you worked towards making the world a better place. When your time finally comes, you’ll be able to look back on all the ways you made the world better and smile.

I am not suggesting you give away all your money, bringing yourself down to the poverty line for this. But at the very least, I suggest you give 10%. Helping others should be a non-trivial part of a life well lived. Even if you earn the median U.S. income, after giving away 10% of your income, you’ll still be one of the richest few percent of people who ever lived.

Ultimately, I took the pledge because saving others from death and suffering is worth more than a bit of extra expenditure. Others matter, whether they’re far away people or animals of a different species. They matter enough, that I plan, for the rest of my life, to give away some portion of my money to helping them, and I hope you do the same!

Anyone who takes the Giving What We Can pledge and sets up routine donations in response to this article gets an automatic subscription to the blog!