In thinking about ethics, we should not hesitate to question ethical views that are almost universally accepted if we have reasons for thinking that they may not be as securely grounded as they appear...
Is the fact that other people are not doing their fair share a sufficient reason for allowing a child to die when you could easily rescue that child? I think the answer is clear: No. The others have,...
Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.
One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. F...
Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country’s oil to American corporations, among them...
Perhaps it is not love that motivates effective altruists but empathy, the ability to put oneself in the position of others and identify with their feelings or emotions. Writers like de Waal and Jerem...
Reflecting this difference is the Indian state of Kerala. Although it is one of the poorer parts of the country, it has higher literacy and greater gender equality than much of the rest of India. With...
Sidgwick thinks these judgments give rise to a dictate of reason, by which he means that if we were purely rational beings, it would motivate us to action. Human beings are not purely rational beings,...
The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency. . . . At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle...
Until we boycott meat, and all other products of animal factories, we are, each one of us, contributing to the continued existence, prosperity, and growth of factory farming and all the other cruel pr...
Where those who hold the liberal conception of freedom would say we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says we are not free because we do not control...
The deaths of children in poor countries from diarrhea, measles, and malaria have become part of the background of the world we live in, and if we know about it at all, we are likely to believe that i...
They took this as a law of nature, a self-evident necessary truth. On the contrary, says Marx, it bears the stamp of a society ‘in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of...
As for the cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer who keeps an animal of comparable intelli...
From the perspective of an effective altruist, Tzu Chi does some surprising things. After the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, Tzu Chi raised funds to distribute hot meals to survivors,...
If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don’t really need. Around the world, a billion people struggle to live eac...
Our own happiness, therefore, is a by-product of aiming at something else and is not to be obtained by setting our sights on happiness alone.
As the United States lagged behind the civilized world in outlawing human slavery, so the United States now lags behind in softening the unrestrained brutalities of animal slavery.
Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self...
Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clot...
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