Reddit reviews The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty

Adding to that, if you have utilitarian-leaning tendencies, you may want to consider researching effective altruism. In a nutshell, it suggests that when attempting to do good for the world that you should take an evidence-based approach. So rather than donating to a charity because it sounds nice and tugs at your heartstrings, you should figure which (possibly unsexy) organizations are doing the most good. It's very possible for a charity to have a high Charity Navigator rating because its administrative overhead is very low while the actual charity work it does is ineffective.

Relevant organizations/resources:

• A TED Talk by Peter Singer, philosopher and proponent
  
• The Life You Can Save, a book by Peter Singer that readably and compellingly (in my opinion) articulates this approach
  
• GiveWell, a meta-charity that has a lot of information on their approach to giving and does a lot of research on its favorite charities
  
• Centre for Effective Altruism: an Oxford-based organization that aims to promote this philosophy
  
  Of course, you should always give to charities that you like, rather than blindly following what strangers on the internet tell you. But when I give money, I like the idea of trying to maximize worldwide good per dollar.
  
  And I'd also recommend that you research arguments against the practice:
  
  
• One written by a believer as a test of their understanding of the arguments against it
  
• A column by NYT columnist David Brooks
  
• Art is a selfish waste of time, says effective altrusim
  
• An article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review: note, however, that it's very name-cally and hand-wavey
  
• A compare/contrast with a movement called "philanthrolocalism"

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
   
2. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
   
3. A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
   
4. Dune by Frank Herbert
   
5. The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

/r/ethical_living does have some interesting posts, but I'd also like more resources!

Free bonus: some other possible compassionate choices

• Don't waste, especially don't waste food (Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart)
  
• Be generous (The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty by Peter Singer)
  
• Practise Ahimsa
  
• Donate blood and register for bone marrow and (post mortem) organ donation
  
• Volunteer
  
• Love your enemies
  
• Celebrate July 29th

> I'd rather get moral and spiritual advice from some random rabbi or imam.

"The sheep gives shitty advice - I'll talk to the goose or the dog next time, that'll be so much better."

Why not try to figure shit out on your own. Read a book on ethics or two. Or talk to Humanists. Relying on friends and family for advice is OK too. Actually, doing just about anything will result in better things than following the advice of organized religion.

You should check out a book by Peter Singer called The Life You Can Save. He goes into some detail addressing your point that "You can be an ethical person by simply doing things that aren't unethical."

For example, say you were walking in a park next to a lake. You see a young child drowning in the lake and you are the only one who can do anything about it. Do you have a positive obligation to save that child? By your logic, as long as you did not actively push the child into the lake, you are in the clear morally. But I think in a direct example like this, you would agree that you do in fact have a positive obligation to help.

That is the moral obligation to give to charity, but because the starving child is not in front of us we don't feel like we are on the hook.

If money can buy you happiness, them presumably one is not choosing money rather than happiness. Instead, one is choosing more happiness over less happiness.

I can't think of any philosopher who has ever argued that it makes more sense to get money than to be happy, except for the ones who have argued that one has a duty to help others as much as possible, which entails earning lots of money and donating it to charity. See here and here for details. Apart from that though, the choice seems pretty easy: happiness, because money is only useful as a means to some other end, whereas happiness is an end in itself.

This is easily my favourite question from this sub - "surely we are all too lazy?" In fact I don't have any meaningful comeback to you. I think you're largely right at the moment thanks to general inertia of the population. It's harder going against the norm than it is to go with it.

So let's put your question aside and I want to write to you personally. For me, the path to veganism involved being an addict, being 60kgs (120lbs) overweight, being in chronic pain, being chronically depressed and anxious. I didn't become vegan specifically to stop those things (except to help me lose weight), they were just part of my partying lifestyle for 30 years. In fact, the catalyst for me was one day telling my friend that if I had any self control I would be vegan. I was explaining to her about bobby calves after she asked. I was not even a vegetarian. I realised after then that the story of my life was one in which I had no self control. I literally didn't even want to do my basic self-care (washing, eating properly) every day. I realised that my work was based around reducing suffering for poor people, but my personal life was entirely concerned about increasing suffering to myself. That really ate away at me. I realised that knowing about and agreeing with the ethical aspects of veganism but not being a vegan was just another element of not having any self-control. Once I decided to become vegan, it really helped me with the other issues I had because it's something that can keep me steady despite myself. Like an anchor - I can float away to some extent but it will always keep me from harming myself too much. I realised that veganism was actually the easiest thing to manage compared to all the other shit I had created for myself. But luckily the healthy eating aspect that I choose to follow has helped me with most of my problems. I am still working on my addictive personality, but my addictions are far less destructive now.

The other thing I want to tell you is that we all have cognitive dissonance about our lifestyles but that shouldn't stop us from making some good steps towards positive change. I mentioned above that I work to reduce suffering. I have always donated a substantial amount of money to charity and am a researcher working specifically to improve poverty around the world. I'm also a gamer btw. Noone in their right mind would ever call me a monk. As I mentioned I have lived this lifestyle for a lot longer before I became vegan. So you don't have to be an extremist in order to live a decent life.

The way I see it is that I am always going to make some bad choices but the main elements of my life are anchors that mean that when I do have trouble with decisions, I know I'm not far off where I need to be. This has been helpful for me for a long time.

If you want to figure out how to walk a more ethical path when making decisions about charity, I really recommend reading The Life You Can Save. If you want to just shoot the breeze with me about poor life choices, feel free to PM me.

https://smile.amazon.com/Life-You-Can-Save-Poverty/dp/0812981561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473030892&sr=8-1&keywords=the+life+you+can+save

This book is about applied ethics rather than normative ethics. But its still tied to one of the most important concepts in ethics. Namely that most people think of ethics as day to day niceness, but in reality certain things they can do simply dwarf others in terms of importance. So those are the better ones to focus on.

this is exactly what i do. don't know what i believe right now, but i do believe in tithing/some version of the law of consecration. could no longer bring myself to pay tithing to the church, but still wanted to donate to a real charity. GiveDirectly seems like about as good as it gets.

The best part is, I'm on the verge of convincing my amazing TBM spouse to agree with it. She and I read "The Life You Can Save" by Peter Singer, and it really opened her up to the idea. Really a great book, I'd encourage anyone to read it. Singer's Effective Altruism movement is essentially a secular form of the law of consecration.

Just in case anyone is in a remotely-similar situation, here are the points I made in our conversation after we had both read the book:

• The church only donates $40 mil per year in humanitarian work, which is abysmal for a church that brings in at least $5-7 BIL in tithing
  
  
• The Church has no measurement of the impact of their humanitarian work, it's all outputs (i.e you can't tell how much good your donations actually do)
  
  
• They spend much of their money on malls, for profit businesses, and expensive real estate. We are vegetarians (sometimes vegans, but not always), and she was really sad to learn the church owns one of the largest cattle ranches in the US, as well as for-profit hunting preserves. Why spend our money on things we don't support?
  
  
• They are not transparent in their use of tithing funds, which is contrary to the D&C's "common consent" requirement
  
  
• Singer talks about considering "Room for Growth" when choosing where to donate, i.e. is this charity maxed out with donations, or could they still put them to good use? Even though my TBM wife believes that much of what the church does is helpful, i.e. printing and distributing BoMs, I argued that if they can afford to build mega malls with tithing money, they probably don't need our $ to print more BoMs. Therefore, our money would go farther with GiveDirectly than by donating to the church.

Peter Singer talked about this in 'The Life You Can Save'

http://smile.amazon.com/Life-You-Can-Save-Poverty/dp/0812981561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427395966&sr=8-1&keywords=the+life+you+can+save

I'm sure some people here have some strong opinions on him [I do too] but I actually do recommend this book.

David Benatar is pretty well known for explicitly arguing that having children is unethical (see his *Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence)

Peter Singer is phenomenal for his breadth of topics, he does discuss the ethics of overpopulation and consumption fairly regularly (see this little speech or his book The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty).

Other than that, as TychoCelchuuu suggests, the SEP is a good place to start.

Peter Singer's arguments concerning extreme poverty convinced me to donate a portion of my income to highly effective charities a long time ago, long before I started pursuing FI. And while I view FIRE as a goal worth striving for, I view donating to charity as a moral imperative. That's my reason for continuing to donate to charity. It's just more important to me.

If you'd like to learn more, check out this TED Talk by William MacAskill.