““Personal identity” does not actually correspond to anything fundamental in the world, which is why some of the results of the anthropic trilemma actually feel weird to us, but it does still exist as a cognitive abstraction which our brains need in order to operate, and we can’t actually not believe in some kind of personal identity – at least, not for long.”
— Kaj Sotala, An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity (LessWrong, February 22, 2013)
“Nagel once claimed that it is psychologically impossible to believe the Reductionist View. Buddha claimed that, though it is very hard, it is possible. I find Buddha’s claim to be true. After reviewing my arguments, I find that, at the reflective or intellectual level, though it is very hard to believe the Reductionist View, this is possible. My remaining doubts or fears seem to me irrational. Since I can believe this view, I assume that others can do so too. We can believe the truth about ourselves.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 280
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains – cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasise into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modelling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modelling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
— Peter Watts
“[D]onors should aim their giving at beneficiaries in developing countries rather than in the UK because the typical British citizen was 100 times richer than the poorest 600 million people in the world. “You can therefore do about 100 times much more to improve their lives as you can to improve our lives,” he said.”
— William MacAskill paraphrased and quoted
“I am a utilitarian; I believe in trying to take actions whose outcomes are as good as possible. When I examine the trolley problem – or any similar dilemma – my goal is to bring about an end result that leaves as many people alive and healthy as possible.”
— Aaron Gertler, Utilitarian Thought Experiments
“I choose to die in a way that I know will be painful, but will save the lives of several other people. I am doing what, knowing the facts and thinking clearly, I most want to do, and what best fulfils my present desires. (In all my examples these two coincide.) I also know that I am doing what will be worse for me. If I did not sacrifice my life to save these other people, I would not be haunted by remorse. The rest of my life would be well worth living.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1983), p. 131.
“Our ability to track the inner state of beings in our lifeworld (our inner experience, including our representations of others) is a marvelous evolutionary innovation. [B]ut as long as we don’t fix its profound biases, we cannot rely on it to make ethical choices. We can only use it to understand the reality of the suffering of others.”
— Andres Gomez Emilsson, In Praise of Systematizing Empathy (Qualia Computing, April 2016)
“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone’s holy text.”
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“And when the time is to act, [w]e need to combine systematizing reasoning with compassion. We don’t need to make emotionally-charged calls to action sparked by individual incidents that affect a specially small number of sentient beings in particularly attention-grabbing ways. [O]nly by combining compassion, empathy and a strong systematizing style, can our minds grasp the enormity of the problem of suffering and why our local solutions are doomed to fail.”
— Andres Gomez Emilsson, In Praise of Systematizing Empathy (Qualia Computing, April 2016)
“If [the richest] 10% gave 10%, the first year would give enough to: eliminate extreme poverty and hunger, eradicate all neglected tropical diseases and many others besides, triple medical research, give everyone secondary education, permanently save every rainforest in the world, get us well on the way to fixing climate change, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, and have enough leftover to launch several manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what we’d do in year two. How can we make this happen? Luckily, there are some simple answers: give more, give more effectively, and encourage others to do the same.”
— Beth Barnes, Effective Altruism (TEDxExeter, 2015)
“Of course, it’s important to translate these feelings into action. Empathy purely by itself does not reduce suffering. But these warm, loving feelings can play an important role in our mental attitudes toward altruism work and represent a helpful supplement to the distress and anguish that we experience when thinking about terrible suffering. We can want to reduce extreme suffering both because it’s indescribably awful and because we deeply care about and feel part of those whom it afflicts.”
— Brian Tomasik, Personal Thoughts on Romance, Chapter: Universal Love
“Billions of humans in this world. And so many lives burdened and stunted by poverty, illness, trauma, war. Billions. Imagine if you could hear the sound of it all at once. That furious ocean of suffering, which is invisible to me because I’m here. Because of how quiet this street is. Because this street has conspired to squelch the sound and magnitude of that ocean. But you see, it’s not the suffering that gets me. I can accept suffering. Somewhere, someone will always be suffering, and I know that. It’s just the injustice of it. It’s that the injustice is so big, so absolute, it’s almost suffocating. It’s so much that you can’t swallow right. All around the world, billions of lives – billions, never given any relief, never given a way out of that ocean. So why me? Why do I get to walk down this street in silence? Why am I the one with a laptop and a messenger bag?”
— Haseeb Qureshi, Why I Became an Effective Altruist
“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
— Montesquieu
“Billions of humans in this world. And so many lives burdened and stunted by poverty, illness, trauma, war. Billions. Imagine if you could hear the sound of it all at once. That furious ocean of suffering, which is invisible to me because I’m here. Because of how quiet this street is. Because this street has conspired to squelch the sound and magnitude of that ocean. But you see, it’s not the suffering that gets me. I can accept suffering. Somewhere, someone will always be suffering, and I know that. It’s just the injustice of it. It’s that the injustice is so big, so absolute, it’s almost suffocating. It’s so much that you can’t swallow right. All around the world, billions of lives – billions, never given any relief, never given a way out of that ocean. [W]hat would you do if you lived in such a world? [T]o me, EA promises: if you want to do good in the world, I will show you the thing that will do the most good. And when the stakes are so high, and when the question is so dire and important, how could you not take up that promise? [T]hat’s why I became an effective altruist. Perhaps you’ll become one too.”
— Haseeb Qureshi, Why I Became an Effective Altruist
“Imagine what seven billion humans could accomplish if we all loved and respected each other.”
— Anthony Douglas Williams
“We care about suffering and flourishing, but it’s a commitment to putting the beneficiaries first. We live in a better world because we [help others]. Evidence-wise, we make a commitment to changing our minds.”
— Sebastian Farquhar, The State of the EA Union (Effective Altruism Global 2015: Oxford University)
“This human world in all it’s beauty and horrible mess is the starting point. Our wish to be better people defines a direction. Our sense of our own imperfection provides the force that pushes us forward. But if we would know where we were going, we would already be there.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Challenge of Friendly AI (Singularity Summit, 2007)
“[Perhaps m]y life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”
— Mother Theresaf
“[M]any kinds of reinforcement learning agents would, if given the opportunity, use a “delusion box” which allowed them to modify the observations they got from the environment. This way, they would always receive the kinds of signals that gave them the maximum reward. You could say, in a sense, that those kinds of agents only care about their subjective expectation – as long as they experience what they want, they don’t care about the rest of the world. And it’s important for them that they are the ones who get those experiences, because their utility function only cares about their own reward. [I]nstead of just caring about our subjective experience, we use our subjective experiences to construct a model of the world. We don’t want to delude ourselves, because we also care about the world around us, and our world model tells us that deluding ourselves wouldn’t actually change the world.”
— Kaj Sotala, An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity (LessWrong, February 22, 2013)
“The next stage in the development of a desirable form of sensitiveness is sympathy. There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child will cry because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose, affords the basis for the further developments. The two enlargements that are needed are: first, to feel sympathy even when the sufferer is not an object of special affection; secondly, to feel it when the suffering is merely known to be occurring, not sensibly present. The second of these enlargements depends mainly upon intelligence. It may only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is portrayed vividly and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other hand, go so far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important.”
— Bertrand Russell, Education and the Good Life, Chapter: The Aims of Education (1926)
“[W]hen I reflect, I see that I am an inconsistent mess of a brain born of a long and blind evolutionary process, full of desires and feelings and fears that capture everything I hold dear, and also a bunch of arbitrary junk that was kind of tacked on there. In making me, Time coughed up a reflectively unstable mind: the causal process of my past constructed me to value everything I value, and something that I (upon reflection) don’t.”
— Nate Soares on overcoming default settings and caring about all humans or sentient beings, Caring about something larger than yourself
“Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians
“[D]rop your obligations. Don’t try to help the world because you “should.” Don’t force yourself because you ought to. Just do what you want to do. And then, once you are freed of your obligations, if you ever realize that serving only yourself has a hollowness to it; or if you ever realize that part of what you care about is your fellow people; or if you ever learn to see the darkness in this world and discover that you really need the world to be different than it is; if you ever find something on this pale blue dot worth fighting for, worth defending, worth carrying with us to the stars: then know that there are those of us who fight, and that we’d be honored to have you at our side.”
— Nate Soares, Altruistic motivations (2015)
“I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for one self, one’s own family or one’s nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival, it is the foundation for world peace.”
— The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Messages on The Global Community World Peace
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say “Look at that, you son of a bitch.””
— Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016, Apollo 14 astronaut)
“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
“[T]apping into internal drive often requires tapping into a deep desire to make the world be different, in a world that’s very large and very hurting and very hard to change. When trying to do this, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the odds stacked against you – regardless of their scale.”
— Nate Soares, Being unable to despair (2015)
“Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.”
— Derek Parfit, The Unimportance of Identity (1995)
“Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
“Get rid of this foolish protection of greed and selfishness. Don’t fear but instead face the problems awaiting you. Maybe you’ll be ruined by it; maybe you’ll suffer agony. But once you have overcome your agony, and can endure, then you will arise stronger out of it. Then, you’ll have the power to change the world we live in.”
— Tachibani Kyouko, Golden Boy
“[I]f you want [i]ntrinsic drive, drop the illusion. Refuse to tolerify. Face the facts that you feared you would not be able to handle. You are likely correct that they will be hard to bear, and you are likely correct that attempting to bear them will change you. But that change doesn’t need to break you. It can also make you stronger, and fuel your resolve. So see the dark world. See everything intolerable. Let the urge to tolerify it build, but don’t relent. Just live there in the intolerable world, refusing to tolerate it. See whether you feel that growing, burning desire to make the world be different. Let parts of yourself harden. Let your resolve grow. It is here, in the face of the intolerable, that you will be able to tap into intrinsic motivation.”
— Nate Soares, See the dark world (2015)
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
— Andrew Boyd
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
“Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?”
— David Brooks, The Moral Bucket List
“When you are inspired… dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
— Patanjali
“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
— Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
“[Henry] Spira has a knack for putting things plainly. When I asked him why he has spent more than half a century working for the causes I have mentioned, he said simply that he is on the side of the weak, not the powerful; of the oppressed, not the oppressor; of the ridden, not the rider. And he talks of the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in our universe, and of his desire to do something to reduce it. That, I think, is what the left is all about. There are many ways of being on the left, and Spira’s is only one of them, but what motivates him is essential to any genuine left. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain life at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that that is just the way the world is, and always will be, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation.”
— Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left (1999), pp. 8-9
“The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.”
— Derek Thompson, The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)
“The mark of a civilized human is the ability to look at a column of numbers, and weep.”
— attributed to Bertrand Russell
“The most common misconception about morality: That it’s a human invention.”
— Paul Bloom
“Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”
— Paul Bloom, The Baby in the Well (The New Yorker, May 20, 2013)
“In a world full of people who couldn’t care less, be someone who couldn’t care more.”
— unknown
“Overcoming poverty is an act of justice… poverty is not natural. It can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. You can be that great generation.”
“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.”
— Fred Rogers
“A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create: the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope informed and fortified by thought.”
— Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (1918), p. 111
“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! WE care! There is light in the world, and it is us!”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
“All this fancy ethics and decision science stuff is actually about the unexpected possibility of all of us to become superheroes. Think about it, who would have thought that it’s within the power of all of us to actually save hundreds or even thousands of lives just by making better, more rational everyday decisions?”
— Adriano Mannino, Our daily life and death decisions (TEDxGundeldingen, 2014)
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
— Stanley Kubrick
“I guess basically no one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. One likes to look back and think that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others… It’s not a sense of duty, but rather this is what I want to do. I feel best when I’m doing it well.”
— Henry Spira
“Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”
— Timothy Snyder
“Trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience.”
— Holden Karnofsky, Excited Altruism (2013)
“”I have a dream,” said Harry’s voice, “that one day sentient beings will be judged by the patterns of their minds, and not their color or their shape or the stuff they’re made of, or who their parents were. Because if we can get along with crystal things someday, how silly would it be not to get along with Muggleborns, who are shaped like us, and think like us, as alike to us as peas in a pod? The crystal things wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. How impossible is it to imagine that the hatred poisoning Slytherin House would be worth taking with us to the stars? Every life is precious, everything that thinks and knows itself and doesn’t want to die. Lily Potter’s life was precious, and Narcissa Malfoy’s life was precious, even though it’s too late for them now, it was sad when they died. But there are other lives that are still alive to be fought for. Your life, and my life, and Hermione Granger’s life, all the lives of Earth, and all the lives beyond, to be defended and protected, EXPECTO PATRONUM!
And there was light.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 47: Personhood Theory
“We’re both highly motivated by the desire to make the world a better place. We find it exciting and energizing – and intellectually interesting – to be in a position where we’re trying to do as much good as possible.”
— Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky
“The universe is not indifferent. How do I know this? I know because I am part of the universe, and I am far from indifferent.”
— Scott Derrickson (h/t Preposterous Universe; fallacy of composition)
“I feel spiritually satisfied knowing I’m doing a decent job at helping to relieve suffering in the world (in expectation). This is the most important goal in life, to which everything else has value only instrumentally. Even love – as magical as it is – can’t compare in intensity to the horrors of extreme suffering that we need to work against. [L]ove is a gift that life gives us as we pursue our real purpose in this world: reducing and preventing agony by the least fortunate sentient beings.”
— Brian Tomasik, Personal Thoughts on Romance: Universal Love
“May all that have life be delivered from suffering.”
— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civilisation.”
— John Stuart Mill
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“[T]he fact that I consider charity to be above and beyond the call of duty does not mean that I am unwilling to give. I go above and beyond the call of duty every day. I aspire to moral excellence. Millions of people around the world suffer through no fault of their own. I have plenty of resources to help them, so I am glad to help. As an economist, of course, I don’t just want to express good intentions; I want my donation to do as much good as possible.”
— Bryan Caplan, A Supererogatory Provision
“If you light a lamp for someone else, it will brighten your path.”
— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Chapter V (1792)
“The secret to happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”
— Daniel Dennett
“My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”
— Bertrand Russell, Childhood Diary (1985)
“Write about the things that truly inspire you, and do it for the benefit of others – to reduce their suffering and to increase their happiness. That’s my advice. If you do that you will achieve real ‘success’, real passion, enthusiasm and fulfilment, with or without money and status.”
— David Edwards, Outside the Machine: How to be an Ethical Writer
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
— Bertrand Russell
“People are given the information resources to realize that a lot of us are metaphorically in that position that the Rockefeller Foundation was in a while ago. [T]oday there’s a lot of people that may be considered by others just normal middle class people. [W]hen you start comparing your life situation and living standards to the past or to the rest of the world, you realize that you actually have a huge amount of resources, power and information, [that] there’s people who have much less of these things, and that you can find them, you can understand things about them and you can find ways of how to help them – that’s all within your power. The combination of wealth, inequality and interconnectedness is increasing, so I believe we’ll see a world where more people will come up with this realization: “Wow, I’m really fortunate, I’m really powerful and I’m informed enough to do something with that power and make a positive difference.””
— Holden Karnofsky, Effective Altruism Summit 2013 speech
“*To live a life which you got by [by saying] “Well, I didn’t do any harm.”, is not terribly satisfactory.”
— Richard Hamming, You and Your Research (June 6, 1995)
“[W]e live at a time in which we have the technology easily to gather information about people thousands of miles away, the ability to significantly influence their lives, and the scientific knowledge to work out what the most effective ways of helping are. For these reasons, few people who have ever existed have had so much power to help others as we have today.”
— William MacAskill
“[W]e can make a surprisingly large life-changing difference to those in disadvantaged parts of the world – provided that our altruistic impulses are intelligently channelled.”
— Sir Martin Rees, Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (source)
“[J]ust realize that by dint of sheer good luck you get to do tremendous good in this world whenever you want. Today you could rescue a child from a burning building. You really can. This isn’t merely a metaphor. You can save a life today or over the course of the next year. A life that would otherwise not be saved, but for your action.”
— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)
“[I]t is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”
— Paul Bloom, The Baby in the Well (The New Yorker, May 20, 2013)
“We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.”
— Steven Pinker
“Until this century, most of mankind lived in small communities. What each did could affect only a few others. But conditions have now changed. Each of us can now, in countless ways, affect countless other people. We can have real though small effects on thousands or millions of people. When these effects are widely dispersed, they may be either trivial, or imperceptible. It now makes a great difference whether we continue to believe that we cannot have greatly harmed or benefited others unless there are people with obvious grounds for resentment or gratitude.”
— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 86
Altruism, empathy and opportunities and audacity to give:
“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
— Edwin Osgood Grover, variation on a quote by Edward Everett Hale, The Book of Good Cheer (1909)
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
— Anne Frank