Reddit reviews The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

If someone is advocating for metacharities like Givewell, they have probably heard of effective altruism.

Although, if you haven't, I recommend Peter Singer's book The Most Good You Can Do. Its a pretty light read and is very approachable.

I'm not sure I accept that we're hardwired to eat meat. We're hardwired to eat, and yes, we're physiologically equipped so that meat is one of the many things we can chose to eat, but surely you see that that is in a completely different category than the drive for self-preservation?

>OK, so should you give all money to charity after expenses or after earning a certain amount since you could survive?

You're conflating aversion to inflicting harm with proactively preventing harm. I would argue that, yes, there is a responsibility to do both, but to different degrees. Interestingly there is indeed a movement advocating exactly what you suggest: that you should maximise your positive effect by working to earn as much as possible and give away everything you can to carefully selected recipients, once your basic needs are covered (see effective altruism).

>I alao take issue with saying meat is not needed

It always baffles me that people can say this to people that are living proof that it's not. Let me guess, you have a rare undiagnosed condition that demands meat and live in rural Mongolia where charred meat and yaks milk is all that's available?

>So you consider the potential to kill to be unvegan? What do you do about the consequences of that philosphy?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'potential to kill' or what consequences you have in mind.

Peter Singer has a book called The Most Good You Can Do which is all about having an impact on how readers live their lives.

/r/askphilosophy is for asking questions about philosophy as an academic discipline, which is a different usage of the word 'philosophy' than you're referring to here. (See this post for more information.) Philosophers in the first sense are, by and large, not in the business anymore of suggesting philosophies in the second sense.

There is, though, some work on these topics, like this book.

So I just finished reading Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do and he talks a lot about the ethics of working for an unethical business. The basic conclusion is that if you don't do the work there, somebody else will, and the person who is replacing your position there won't use their money in such an ethical way as you. So just take the job and use the money from your wages to support charities and ethical businesses.

Also, he kinda jokingly discusses the idea that technically you should do your job as poorly as you possibly can without getting fired, so you are less help to this unethical business than the person they would hire to replace you.

Peter Singer, to me, is the absolute clearest writer in philosophy, and I think he has an incredible knack for interesting theses. As a result, I think you can start pretty much anywhere with him.

I do work in ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics, though. The two articles I see referenced over and over again are "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and "Ethics and Intuitions". The former is a valid, tight, and incredibly fun-to-discuss argument about how we should donate all unnecessary funds to end abject poverty. The latter is an evolutionary debunking argument against intuitions and in favor of the practical reason that standard utilitarian views use. If you're into the former, he wrote a very accessible book recently, stemming from lectures at Yale, called The Most Good You Can Do, which I can recommend to pretty much anyone as an easy and provocative read. But if you're interested more in the theoretical stuff, as in how objective ethics is and how much it might regulate our lives, check out The Expanding Circle.

Overall, if you're interested in almost any applied ethical debate, Singer has written something relevant. You might just start there out of interest. But I really don't think you can go wrong with anything.

Ok. I haven't read his most recent books:

2015: about effective altruism

2014 coauthored: The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics

I'll look into the 2014 one.

Edit: Here's a quote from the blurb.

> The authors also explore, and in most cases support, Sidgwick's views on many other key questions in ethics: how to justify an ethical theory, the significance of an evolutionary explanation of our moral judgments, the choice between preference-utilitarianism and hedonistic utilitarianism, the conflict between self-interest and universal benevolence, whether something that it would be wrong to do openly can be right if kept secret, how demanding utilitarianism is, whether we should discount the future, or favor those who are worse off, the moral status of animals, and what is an optimum population.

So I was wrong, on account of outdated info. Thanks for letting me know!

Peter Singer has a new book out about that called The Most Good You Can Do.