The mistake lies in not seeing the human being as a kind of cultural species. The use of reason—which is within the reach of even psychopaths—tells us that a truly human life demands an ideological choice. We constantly face dilemmas, and if we are sufficiently rationally trained, we know that these choices are made based on cultural principles given to us.

The solution is to realize that we can act on the cultural environment itself. Instead of accepting ourselves "as we are" and then making—supposedly—the right choice, we have to choose what we want to become, and that future expectation of ourselves will then make the right choice.

The person with problems who comes to Alcoholics Anonymous does not accept herself "as she is." She does not consider herself a free person who wants to make the right choice. She wants to be changed and conditioned.

Pascal's Wager is an antique. If you want to consider long-term existential risk from the perspective of obtaining possibilities for infinite bliss, you'd better turn to old Fyodorov. Fyodorov proposed eternal bliss as an altruistic action—effective altruism—by our descendants toward their ancestors (us, for example) thanks to the development of futuristic technology. 

It's especially noteworthy because Fyodorov died before Einstein postulated that time is a dimension. Today, already very accustomed to science fiction (as in the movie "Interstellar" or the TV series "Devs"), we can consider that iseveral unknown dimensions exist, all of which raises the expectation that a future altruistic humanity will rescue all of humanity from the past and grant them "infinite bliss" (physicist Frank Tipler also proposes something similar).

Furthermore, this Fyodorov thing has the advantage of being adaptable to present altruistic action. By participating in an altruistic movement, such as EA or any other past or future, we could add the incentive that we are enabling a future high-tech altruistic civilization.

Nationalism is another form of tribalism, and this in turn is a consequence of the social behavior of animals (ethology), for whom group identity and territory are instinctive referents for aggressive behavior.

Once again, I dare to suggest that any human question regarding altruism must be viewed in relation to the civilizing process. Humans today continue in a process of cultural evolution aimed at achieving aggression control. 

The aggressive instinct was necessary in social mammals given the struggle for scarce resources. With human intelligence and its cooperative capacity (which implies potentially infinite economic resources), the aggressive instinct now remains only an obstacle, and the entire process of civilization must be viewed in terms of the development of cultural resources to achieve the desired goal of controlling aggression. Without aggression, altruism would be the default human economic activity.

Cosmopolitanism is nothing other than non-nationalism. The default human social attitude (cooperative and caring, even with strangers we may never meet) toward all our fellow human beings.

There is no positive value in nationalism of any kind. No more than there may be, for example, in the social conception of militarism (spirit of sacrifice, camaraderie, etc.).

A very valuable post, because it addresses altruism as a social fact, with the emotional and motivational implications that can make an altruistic social initiative viable or not.

Altruism cannot depend on solitary willpower, just as children who pass the Mischel test do not do so by forcing their will, but by using parallel strategies.

The great success of altruism—yet to come—will always depend on understanding altruism as the economic dimension of a lifestyle based on mutual love, charity, and benevolence, somewhat in the old-fashioned style of the Christian ideal (although stripped of the old traditions of the supernatural, of course). And this is no longer "utilitarianism" but "virtue ethics."

In a lifestyle based on prosocial emotionality, the rewards of altruistic action will be framed in a close environment of affective human relationships. This emotional experience will more than compensate for the maternal sacrifices that altruistic action may require and the temporary demands of leading a non-aggressive life in a society like today's, which is still far from an ideal of benevolence.

I think it's a good idea to write about personal motivations for altruism. It's undeniable that the most important aspect of altruistic action is the effects it has on people in need, but there's no greater cost-benefit for altruistic action than exploring and expanding the emotional complexities involved in what we generally call "prosocial behavior."

Why not be a saint? There's nothing magical about it. We're used to psychopathic, autistic, and neurotic personalities. We must view "sanctity" as an attainable human reality, related to well-known concepts such as the altruistic personality and psychological altruism. It's feasible to control these types of experiences by making use of all the resources of rationality and humanistic sensitivity informed by science.

All altruistic behavior has its motivations, and psychological rewards are legitimate, both in the exclusively private sphere and in lifestyle and community settings.

Delving deeper into this issue could be the greatest contribution to effective altruism.

From the perspective of the process of civilization as the embodiment of human cultural evolution (moral evolution toward prosociality), concern about long-term altruism becomes unnecessary. All human problems will be solved if we remain constant in a culture of controlling aggression and fostering the altruistic personality (empathy and the rational development of an economy based on altruism).

Whether this will lead to the voluntary self-extinction of humanity in the long run or whether it will lead us down the path of transhumanism to "become like gods" is something we should not worry about today. If you want authentic "effective altruism," take the path of virtue ethics and avoid getting into the dead ends of the dilemmas inherent in utilitarianism and deontology.

It's always valuable to bring the issue of speciesism up for discussion. If altruism refers to preventing the suffering of others, we will always depend on the truthful information provided to us about which living beings are at risk of cruel treatment. The case of shrimp is one among many. Another may be the lethal activity of predators in the wild (wolves, lions, etc.).

My contribution to the matter is that the best investment in developing altruistic activity would be to effectively participate in ensuring the psychological transformation of people from altruistic ideas to people emotionally motivated to altruism. You can save 20,000 shrimp, but if you turn 20,000 Homo sapiens into altruistic activists, you will have saved many millions more shrimp. There's nothing more utilitarian than developing the sensitivity of hundreds, thousands, since we know that all human beings are prone to psychological altruism (based on empathy) and that such inclinations can be activated by natural stimuli.

Imagine that you pursue a career as an actor and become a big Hollywood star. You use your fame to preach universal goodness, and your money to create a foundation of psychologists and other social scientists, whom you task with designing a mass social movement capable of making altruistic behavior attractive as a lifestyle.
There you have it.

Thank you for your comment. I start from the idea that the most effective altruism is not based so much on mutual support - in the material sense - as on participation within a culture of altruistic values ​​where support is above all of an emotional, affective nature. We would then be more in the field of "virtue ethics" than of a utilitarian type. Economic acts would be a necessary material consequence of an emotional state. Here I am with Hume: reason is the slave of the passions (but we can rationally shape our own passions: that is psychology).
The most intelligent altruistic action would be to help build that emotional state that would compose an altruistic ethos. That was what the so-called "compassionate religions" did before, but today we have more cognitive instruments... apart from those they already had. Jonathan Haidt comments that the ancients did not know much about science but were good psychologists, and he himself names an "emotion of elevation" as a motivator of behavior.
On the other hand, in books such as Larissa MacFarquhart's "Strangers Drowning" we find contemporary evidence of sufficiently motivated altruistic actors. What is missing is an ideology of behavioural improvement.

Inequality has reached obscene limits in our time, considering the technological advances. A social system that allows such immorality cannot be stable. Moreover, history shows that labor productivity and technological progress can occur under all kinds of social conditions. And greed is not necessarily related to increased productivity.