“And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.”

— Isabella, Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

— John Donne

“[R]eason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true. [T]he perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.”

— Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (2000)

“Every time someone dies, a library burns. The experiences, skills, and relationships painstakingly built across a lifetime disappear forever. We cannot prevent any particular library from eventually having a fire, but we can make sure the fires are rare. Humans are precious, and that is why we should not wish them to age.”

— Anders Sandberg, Desperately seeking eternity (2016)

“[I]t seems to me that certain things, such as pain and suffering to take the clearest example, are bad. I don’t think I’m just making that up, and I don’t think that is just an arbitrary personal preference of mine. If I put my finger in a flame, I have a certain experience, and I can directly see something about it (about the experience) that is bad. Furthermore, if it is bad when I experience pain, it seems that it must also be bad when someone else experiences pain.”

— Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism

“The problem with death is not just that it can be painful, but that it also irreversibly prevents any more experience, any more action. Our social bonds are broken. Pain can be dealt with, but these other factors point at what makes life worth living. We should seek to live longer because we love life.”
— Anders Sandberg, Desperately seeking eternity (2016)

“Consider how strange is the question posed by someone who wants a justification for altruism about such a basic matter as this. Suppose he and some other people have been admitted to a hospital with severe burns after being rescued from a fire. “I understand how my pain provides me with a reason to take an analgesic,” he says, “and I understand how my groaning neighbor’s pain gives him a reason to take an analgesic; but how does his pain give me any reason to want him to be given an analgesic? How can his pain give me or anyone else looking at it from outside a reason?

This question is crazy. As an expression of puzzlement, it has that characteristic philosophical craziness which indicates that something very fundamental has gone wrong. This shows up in the fact that the answer to the question is obvious, so obvious that to ask the question is obviously a philosophical act. The answer is that pain is awful. The pain of the man groaning in the next bed is just as awful as yours. That’s your reason to want him to have an analgesic.”

— Thomas Nagel, The Limits of Objectivity (1980)

“Imagine a military doctor who comes across a battlefield laden with hundreds of injured soldiers in severe pain. The doctor calls for assistance, but the additional medical units will not arrive for thirty minutes. However, the doctor happens to have with him a bag of pain medicine that he can use to palliate the suffering around him. Would it be acceptable for him to treat five of the soldiers and then stop to read a comic book, arguing that he has produced some positive change in aggregated welfare and he needn’t spend all of his effort helping others? Similarly, would we countenance his decision to spend most of his limited supply of pain killer on the mildly injured patients nearest to him, even though many of those a bit farther away are in absolute agony? I believe that the answers ought to be ‘no’. Rather, triage – giving greatest medical attention to those who can be helped most in the least amount of time – represents the ethical imperative under these circumstances.”

— Brian Tomasik, On triage (Essays on Reducing Suffering / 80,000 Hours)

“There is no need to import superstition. We can begin with a mechanistic view of the world, one in which bits of energy and matter interact in various ways perhaps according to certain deterministic or probabilistic laws of causation; and in which people’s lives are determined by the interplay of their own desires, goals, commitments, urges, and impulses with those of other people, steered by different beliefs about the world, of varying degrees of falsehood and veracity, all within the limits imposed by nature; but a world that exhibits no transcendent purpose or meaning or design in any of its parts – no purpose, that is, outside the purely continent (and usually quite powerless) wills of individual people and animals. Nevertheless, surely it would be blindness to fail to see, at the very least, that some things in this purposeless world are objectively bad; that these things ought not to arise; that we are obliged by their very badness to prevent them from arising; and that certainly the experience of suffering in its many forms has this very property of objective badness that I have been describing, even if nothing else has it. It seems to me stranger to deny this than to affirm it.”

— Jeremy Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (1999), p. 113

“Most donors say they want to “help people”. If that’s true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don’t. In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. [T]hese people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.”

— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…

“Imagine that there is a button that, if pushed, will cause all sentient life to painlessly cease to suffer forever. [W]ould there be no obligation to press the button?”

— John Harris, Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs (2003)

“[T]here is only one best charity: the one that helps the most people the greatest amount per dollar. This is vague, and it is up to you to decide whether a charity that raises forty children’s marks by one letter grade for $100 helps people more or less than one that prevents one fatal case of tuberculosis per $100 or one that saves twenty acres of rainforest per $100. But you cannot abdicate the decision, or you risk ending up like the 11,000 people who accidentally decided that a pretty picture was worth more than a thousand people’s lives.”

— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…

“[S]omeone who does not see that the remediable suffering of others creates obligations is simply not a moral agent.”

— John Harris, Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs (2003)

“Unfortunately, giving to charity is often regarded in broader society merely as a generous use of our spare cash, and working for charities is seen as something someone does when they “feel a calling” to help others. Not participating in altruistic efforts is conceived of as a mere omission. But by not giving all we can, we are failing to help individuals whose suffering we could have prevented. Whether we harm them or neglect to help them, we have responsibility in their suffering either way. [U]ltimately, when we think about where to direct our resources, it is crucial that we consider all those whose suffering we have the ability to prevent.”

— Sentience Politics, Altruism, Numbers, and Factory Farms

“It’s easy for us, in our comfortable houses and with full stomachs, to muse about various moral abstractions that catch our interest. I say no. When you let other things displace the importance of suffering, that’s not an improvement but a failure of goal preservation. That future self would be failing to live up to what I care about now, and I don’t want that to happen. It’s the feeling other altruists would have if they started using all their money to buy expensive cars and mansions.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Horror of Suffering

“In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B – all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live.”

— Peter Singer, How Are We to Live?, Chapter “The Escalator of Reason” (1995)

“The single most important lesson I’ve learned in the past 20 years is that the irreducible heart of what matters is suffering. Back then, although I was sure I knew everything, I really didn’t know anything about suffering. Since then, though, I’ve developed a chronic disease, and experienced times when I thought I was going to die, times when I wished I would die. Back then, I worried about abstractions and words and principles; I argued about exploitation, oppression, liberation, etc. I didn’t take suffering seriously. Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem, well, to put it kindly, ridiculous.”

— Matt Ball

“In the western world, we tend to think of ethical living as a simple matter of being polite, obeying the law and making the odd donation to our favorite charities. But with just a bit more thought, there is so much more good we could do: with our donations, our careers and our lives.”

— The Most Good You Can Do promotion website

Oskar Schindler: “I could have got more out. I could have got more. I don’t know. If I’d just… I could have got more.”

Itzhak Stern: “Oskar, there are eleven hundred people who are alive because of you. Look at them.”

Oskar Schindler: “If I’d made more money… I threw away so much money. You have no idea. If I’d just…”

Itzhak Stern: “There will be generations because of what you did.”

Oskar Schindler: “I didn’t do enough!”

Itzhak Stern: “You did so much.”

[Schindler looks at his car]

Oskar Schindler: “This car. Goeth would have bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. Ten people. Ten more people.”

[removing Nazi pin from lapel]

Oskar Schindler: “This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person. A person, Stern. For this.”

[sobbing]

Oskar Schindler: “I could have gotten one more person… and I didn’t! And I… I didn’t!”

— _Schindler’s List (1993)

“[O]veremphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a ‘matter-of-fact’ habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without ‘ethical culture’ there is no salvation for humanity.”

— Albert Einstein (1953)

Rukia Kuchiki: “Wait, hold on!”

Ichigo Kurosaki: “What is it?”

Rukia Kuchiki: “Just where are you going? That boy is a complete stranger, isn’t he?”

Ichigo Kurosaki: “So what? I can’t just stand by and let this happen. You expect me to watch him die?”

Rukia Kuchiki: “Don’t be such a fool! In the eyes of a soul reaper all the spirits of this world are equal. Getting involved simply because spirits are nearby or they need help isn’t how it works. Leave him be. If you intend to help this child, then commit yourself to saving every spirit. You must be willing to go to any length, even to sacrifice your own life.”

— Bleach

“If we develop a better system for determining relevant causal relations so that we are able to choose actions that better produce our intended ends, it does not follow that we then must change our ethics. The moral impulse of utilitarianism is constant, but our decisions under it are contingent on our knowledge and scientific understanding.”

— Russell Hardin, Morality within the Limits of Reason (1990)

“Perform whatever thought experiments and meditations you have to to be able to imagine a situation where you would do everything in your power to achieve some outcome, without regard for the consequences (beyond their effect on the outcome). Figure out the circumstances under which you’d pull out all the stops and unbar all the holds and put everything you have into the struggle.”

— Nate Soares, Desperation (2015)

“[I]t remains true that there will always be a very small chance of some totally unforeseen disaster resulting from your act. But it seems equally true that there will be a corresponding very small chance of your act resulting in something fantastically wonderful, although totally unforeseen. If there is indeed no reason to expect either, then the two possibilities will cancel each other out as we try to decide how to act.”

— Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (1998), p. 65

“If you think about it, what we should want from our charity work is not that different from what we want when we reach for a can of soda. We should want as much value as we can get – that is, we should want to make the world as much of a better place as possible.”

— Nick Cooney, How To Be Great At Doing Good

“[Suppose that] the technology of lie-detection made us all wholly transparent. If we could never deceive each other, there might be an argument that showed that, according to S [(the Self-Interest theory)], it would be rational for everyone to cause himself not to believe S.

[S] would then be self-effacing. If we believed S, but could also change our beliefs, S would remove itself from the scene. It would become a theory that no one believed. But to be self-effacing is not to be self-defeating. It is not the aim of a theory to be believed. If we personify theories, and pretend that they have aims, the aim of a theory is not to be believed, but to be true, or to be the best theory. That a theory is self-effacing does not show that it is not the best theory.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 24

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”

— Friedrich Hayek

“It would be natural to want the best theory about rationality not to be self-effacing. If the best theory was self-effacing, telling us to believe some other theory, the truth about rationality would be depressingly convoluted. It is natural to hope that the truth is simpler: that the best theory would tell us to believe itself. But can this be more than hope? Can we assume that the truth must be simpler? We cannot.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 24

“To give away money is in easy matter in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.”

— Aristotle, Ethics (360 BC)

“Suppose that we all come to believe C [(Consequentialism)]. (This will seem less implausible when we remember that C can be a pluralist theory, appealing to different moral principles.) We then decide that C is wholly self-effacing. We decide that it would make the outcome best if we caused ourselves to believe some improved version of Common-Sense Morality. We might succeed in bringing about this change in our beliefs. Given changes in the world, and in our technology, it might later come to be true that the outcome would be better if we revised our moral beliefs. But if we no longer believed C, because we now believed some version of Common-Sense Morality, we would not be led to make these needed revision in our morality.

But, in order to believe this morality, we must have forgotten that this is what we did. We would simply believe this morality. We might therefore not be led to revise our morality even if it came to be true that our belief in this morality would increase the chances of nuclear war.

These claims should affect our answer to the question whether it would make the outcome better if we all ceased to believe C. We might believe correctly that there is some other moral theory belief in which would, in the short run, make the outcome better. But once Consequentialism has effaced itself, and the cord is cut, the long-term consequences might be much worse.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), pp. 41-42

“Saving a life is better than making a wish come true, and saving three lives is better than saving one.”

— Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do (2015)

“While one’s phenomenology is often called one’s “subjective experience”, this does not mean that facts about it lack objectivity. “Subjective” in “subjective experience” means “internal to the mind”, not “dependent on attitudes towards it.””

— Neil Sinhababu, The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

“With our decisions, here in our heads, we decide about how much horrible suffering there will or won’t be in the world.”

— Michael Moor, Impact through rationality (TEDxZurich, 2013)

“Though [f]eelings are subjective to the sentient concerned, they exist objectively. That my toothache is subjective to me does not make it non-existent.”

— Yew-Kwang Ng, Towards Welfare Biology

“[I]t is an objective fact whether a certain experience is pleasurable or unpleasurable, and relatedly whether a particular conscious individual is presently experiencing something pleasurable or painful. It is an objective fact, so we may put it, about a subjective state.”

— Timothy Sprigge, Is the esse of Intrinsic Value percipi?: Pleasure, Pain and Value (Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, 2000, p. 123)

“[W]hile the problem of interpersonal comparability of utility is a tricky one, it is not insoluble in principle. It is conceivable that, perhaps several hundred (or a thousand) years from now, neurology may have advanced to the stage where the level of happiness can be accurately correlated to some cerebral reaction that can be measured by a ‘eudaimonometer’. Hence the definition of social welfare [in terms of the sum total of individual happiness] is an objective definition, although the objects are the subjective feelings of individuals.”

— Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare Economics: Towards a More Complete Analysis (2004), p. 4

“The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 254

“Constructing a single “happiness” or “preference” evaluation from this complex system is not obvious. It would be akin to asking “How happy is General Motors?” or “What does General Motors prefer?” There are many pieces of the system you could look at when answering that question.”

— Brian Tomasik, This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral (Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 23, 2014)

“[M]oment utility is measured by collecting introspective reports, but this [i]s not necessary. Appropriately validated physiological measures of moment utility could be used instead, and may have important advantages. The most promising physiological indicator of momentary affect is the prefrontal cortical asymmetry in the electroencephalogram (EEG), which has been extensively validated by Davidson and his team as a measure of the balance of positive and negative feelings, and of the relative strength of tendencies toward approach or avoidance. A portable measuring instrument is not yet available, but is technically feasible. When success is achieved, Davidson’s technique will be a candidate for a continuous and non-intrusive indicator of moment utility.”

— Daniel Kahneman, Jason Riis, Living, and Thinking about it: Two Perspectives on Life (The Science of Well-Being, 2005, p. 292)

“Endorsing a particular view involves carefully weighing up different strengths and weaknesses; there’s no obviously correct position. (This becomes a theme when you start working on normative uncertainty. To an extent, this should be expected: we’re dealing with messy nonideal agents, who don’t have perfect access to their own values or to the normative truth).”

— William MacAskill, Will MacAskill on normative uncertainty (Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog)

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

— Mother Theresa

“Let’s say you think utilitarianism is true with some probability, and Kantian deontology is also true with some probability. Can you aggregate the recommendations of these two theories “across the probabilities”? Not easily. The Kantian theory offers an absolute recommendation, but should that carry the day if deontology is true with only 7%? More generally, even less absolute theories do not offer comparable frameworks for cross-theoretical aggregation. How does 6% truth for maximin, 13% truth for prioritarianism, and 27% truth for cosmopolitan utilitarianism all add up? It’s not like calculating true shooting percentage in the NBA, because there is no common and commensurable understanding of “points” across the different frameworks. This aggregation problem is actually tougher than Arrow’s, at least once we recognize there is justifiably uncertainty about the true moral theory.”

— Tyler Cowen, The difficulty of cross-theoretical aggregation

“Since we cannot save everyone, the best we can do is to save the greatest number.” / “Alors, comme on ne peut pas sauver tout le monde, le mieux qu’on puisse faire est de sauver le plus grand nombre.”

— Adriano Mannino interview quote in French translation (La Peniche, Altruisme efficace: Comment sauver 10 000 personnes en une vie? March 31st, 2016)

“In the hypothetical worlds where there are no third alternatives and all the actions before you, it doesn’t matter that all the actions lead to bad outcomes. The best choice is still quite clear: take the action that leads to the best outcome, and take it without remorse. [S]o in the real world, do the same. [L]ook at your actions available options again, and stop measuring them against an objective ideal, and start measuring them against each other. [T]hen, when you’re done and you’ve considered all available options, simply take the best action available. Take it, without suffering, no matter how bad it is. That is all there is to do.”
— Nate Soares, Choose without suffering (2015)

“No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

— attributed to Edmund Burke

“[Desperation is] about having a goal so important that the social concerns drop away, except exactly insofar as they’re relevant to the achievement of your goal. It’s about being willing to let yourself care more about the task at hand than about what everyone thinks about you, no matter how much they would deride you for fully committing.”

— Nate Soares, Desperation (2015)

“[S]uppose that Homer is faced with the painful choice between saving Barney from a burning building or saving both Moe and Apu from the building. [I]t is clearly better for Homer to save the larger number, precisely because it is a larger number. [C]an anyone who really considers the matter seriously honestly claim to believe that it is worse that one person die than that the entire sentient population of the universe be severely mutilated? Clearly not.”

— Alastair Norcross

“To make sense of interpersonal compensation it is not necessary to invoke the silly idea of a social entity, thus establishing an analogy with intrapersonal compensation. All one needs is the belief, shared by most people, that it is better for each of 10 people to receive a benefit than for one person to receive it, worse for 10 people to be harmed than for one person to be similarly harmed, better for one person to benefit greatly than for another to benefit slightly, and so forth.”

— Thomas Nagel, Libertarianism Without Foundations (1981)

“Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly both understandable and admirable, but it doesn’t give you good reason to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other. If that person had died in different circumstances it would have been no less tragic. What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered or died, not that they died from a specific cause. By all means, the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one should be harnessed in order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives per se, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair on those we could have helped more.”

— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“[W]hen [a] life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison.”

— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…

“The loss of a human life with all is joys and all its sorrows is tragic no matter what the cause, and the tragedy is not reduced simply because I was far away, or because I did not know of it, or because I did not know how to help, or because I was not personally responsible.”

— Nate Soares, On caring

“We live in a universe beyond the reach of God. It is a hard, uncaring universe where the challenges are not calibrated to your skills, and you can die from failing them. If we want to build a softer universe, without disease or hunger, where no-one has to waste away and die against their will, then we have to start from the utterly neutral one, the one with no second chances and no safety nets. This one.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Beyond the Reach of God (abridged by Raymond Arnold, Nate Soares)

“[A] dollar redistributed from a rich man to a poor man detracts less utility than it adds, and therefore increases the sum total of utility.”

— Paul Streeten, Why Development Aid? (1983), p. 380

“Truly virtuous people who are genuinely trying to save lives, rather than trying to reveal virtue, will constantly seek to save more lives with less effort, which means that less of their virtue will be revealed. It may be confusing, but it’s not contradictory.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Everybody knows that the same sum of money is of much greater value to a poor man that to a rich one. Give £10 a year to the man who has but £10 a year, you double his income, and you nearly double his enjoyments. Add £10 more, you do not add to his enjoyments so much as you did by the first £10. The third £10 is less valuable than the second, and the fourth less valuable than the third. To the possessor of £1,000 a year the addition of £10 would be scarcely perceptible; to the possessor of £10,000 it would not be worth slooping for. The richer a man is the less he is benefited by any further addition to his income. The man of £4,000 a year has four times the income of the man who has but £1,000; but does anybody suppose that he has four times the happiness?”

— John Stuart Mill, Primogeniture (The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 1988, p. 336)

“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.”

— Henry Ford

“One additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to the benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I [earning the typical US wage of $28,000 or ‎£18,000 per year]. [I]t’s not often you have two options, one of which is a hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we’d probably be pretty generous – next round’s on me! But that’s effectively the situation we’re in all the time. It’s like a 99% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life.”

— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

*“There’s a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It’s a nonrenewable resource. Once you’ve spent it, and if you’ve spent it badly, it’s gone forever.”

— Neil A. Fiore

“[T]here are strong reasons to think that additional resources can do a lot more good in the developing world than they can in richer countries. Simply put, an additional dollar is worth more when you have less money. Precisely because the developing world lacks resources, their biggest problems are ones that we have already figured out how to solve in richer economies, which have a much higher level of health and education. Preventing someone from getting a deadly or debilitating disease improves their life a huge amount, and it’s much harder to give someone a similar boost when their basic needs are already met.”

— Jess Whittlestone, Global Health and Development (2017)

“The good news is that [we don’t have] to give until it hurts. [T]hat is, if all of us in the affluent world would just give a couple percent of our income towards effective charities, that would make an enormous difference. [Y]ou might say, [w]hy not keep giving until it hurts? [T]here are two ways of thinking about that. One is, I can try to do a lot of good myself, but if I make a [s]aint out of myself where I’m living this impoverished life and giving all of my resources to other people, people will look at me and say “Wow, you’re inspiring, that’s really impressive,” and then not be really inspired and not really do something themselves. Whereas if you could say “Look, I’m a person just like you, and I mostly care about myself and my friends, and my family, but instead of giving nothing or almost nothing, I give this much,” and someone will look at that and say “You know what? I could do the same thing.” So in the long run I think that promoting a sustainable culture of altruism is probably a better strategy than trying to be a hero. Being a hero can you give more now, but it doesn’t light the fire that can get things going more broadly. [I] think if you think in the long, long run and think about how human cultural dynamics work, giving until it really hurts can do a lot of good now, but I don’t think it’s going to be a long run answer. I think the long run answer is getting everybody willing to care a little bit more.”

— Joshua Green, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (Talks at Google)

“[T]he average number of deaths from poverty each day is equivalent to 100 jumbo jets, each carrying 500 people (mostly children), crashing with no survivors. From a human perspective, severe poverty should be the top story in every newspaper, every newscast, and every news website, every day.”

— Leif Wenar, Poverty Is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent (Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, 2011, p. 104)

“[L]ove and solidarity are relative. To say that people are more caring toward their relatives is to say that they are more callous toward their nonrelatives. The epigraph to Robert Wright’s book on evolutionary psychology is an excerpt from Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” in which the protagonist broods about his daughter: “He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep…. He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.””

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), p. 245

“When Parfit’s reflections led him to a reductionist view of personal identity, he found it unfortunate that one cannot long maintain this view of the world, which removes the glass wall between oneself and others and makes one care less about one’s own death. Focusing on his arguments, one can only briefly stun one’s natural concern for one’s own future by reconceiving oneself in accordance with the reductionist view.

Our world is arranged to keep us far away from massive and severe poverty and surrounds us with affluent, civilized people for whom the poor abroad are a remote good cause alongside the spotted owl. In such a world, the thought that we are involved in a monumental crime against these people, that we must fight to stop their dying and suffering, will appear so cold, so strained, and ridiculous, that we cannot find it in our heart to reflect on it any farther. That we are naturally myopic and conformist enough to be easily reconciled to the hunger abroad may be fortunate for us, who can “recognize ourselves,” can lead worthwhile and fulfilling lives without much thought about the origins of our affluence. But it is quite unfortunate for the global poor, whose best hope may be our moral reflection.”

— Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (2002), p. 26

“Work on matters that matter the most.”

— Kaspar Etter, Superintelligence (GBS Switzerland, April 15, 2015)

“It makes no difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour’s child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. [T]he moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society. Previously[,] this may hardly have been feasible, but it is quite feasible now. From the moral point of view, the prevention of the starvation of millions of people outside our society must be considered at least as pressing as the upholding of property norms within our society.”

— Peter Singer

“Each to count for one, and none for more than one.”

— Jeremy Bentham

“[T]he status quo is the outcome of a system of national selfishness and political expediency, [n]ot the result of a considered attempt to work out the moral obligations of the developed nations[.]”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1993), p. 262

“Why do we save the larger number? Because we give equal weight to saving each. Each counts for one. That is why more count for more.”

— Derek Parfit, Innumerate Ethics (1978)

“In a lifetime, you can save 10,000 people or do nothing.” / “En une vie, vous pouvez sauver 10 000 personnes. Ou ne rien faire.”

— Adriano Mannino interview quote in French translation (La Peniche, Altruisme efficace: Comment sauver 10 000 personnes en une vie? March 31st, 2016)

“The moral value of quantification is that it treats all lives as equally valuable, so actions that bring down the highest numbers of homicides prevent the greatest amount of human tragedy.”

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), p. 173

“Were I to invoke logic, however, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

— Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

“To argue that we should not consider numbers is to argue that one person’s suffering can be more important than the similar suffering of many others.”

— Sentience Politics, Altruism, Numbers, and Factory Farms

“Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.”

— Faithless, Mass Destruction

“I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.”

— Jesus Christ, The Bible: The New Testament, Matthew 25:40 NLT

“[W]hen you live in an era filled to the top with levers you can push and pull that may alter the course of history and result in billions of beings [not suffering] it is not the time to find ways to rationalize why we aren’t helping more.”

— Andres Gomez Emilsson‎

“You know what? This isn’t about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain’s [immediate feeling] of comfort or discomfort. [T]hat feeling isn’t even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Circular Altruism

“[M]otive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent. He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble.”

— John Stuart Mill

“You know what? This isn’t about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain’s feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn’t even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Circular Altruism

“Things that mattered enormously to Kant—moral autonomy, motive—didn’t seem that important to Parfit. He thought that individual selves were less significant than other people thought they were, so he wasn’t that interested in motive; he thought that moral truths existed independently of human will, so he wasn’t going to place much value on autonomy in Kant’s sense. The driving force behind Parfit’s moral concern was suffering. He couldn’t bear to see someone suffer—even thinking about suffering in the abstract could make him cry. He believed that no one, not even a monster like Hitler, could deserve to suffer at all. (He realized that there were practical reasons to lock such people up, but that was a different issue.)”

— Larissa MacFarquhar, How to be Good (The New Yorker, September 5, 2011)

“[T]he victims do not care about the agent’s inner thoughts, their evolution towards “being good”, possible resentments [or] indifference. This argument is even stronger for an agent that we create deliberately to act morally since all of us will be the potential victims and it does not help us if an AI has a good will or behaves according to certain rules if this leads to suffering. A sufficiently powerful artificial intelligence is like a mechanism or a force of nature and we do not care whether a thunderstorm has good intentions or behaves according to some rules as long as it does not harm us.”

— Caspar Öesterheld, Machine Ethics and Preference Utilitarianism (May 25, 2015)

“[S]urely it is much worse to drown a piglet in a pond than to merely walk past her, letting her drown? But to the piglet, the result is the same. [W]hen considered from the perspective of the drowning piglet, the act-omission distinction is irrelevant. To anyone who is suffering, it makes no difference whether that suffering is caused by deliberate action or unintentional neglect — they suffer the same either way.”

— Sentience Politics, Altruism, Numbers, and Factory Farms

“If you are engaging in effective charity, thinking that the validity of your motives even compares to the benefits delivered to others is so self-absorbed as to be nonsensical. And that’s okay, as long as your scrupulous motivations don’t stop you from doing the charity. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter to the beneficiaries if you’re self-absorbed.”

— Holly Elmore, More on narcissism (July 30, 2016)

“I don’t see why having pure motives would in turn make-work into something valuable. If the community service is actually way, way less important than the motives it reveals, then the real problem is not that some people have insincere motives, but that the community is awarding status for pointless bullshit.”

— Holly Elmore, More on narcissism (July 30, 2016)

“Agency is undoubtedly a morally relevant trait; but it is one among many.”

— Isaac Levi, Conflict and Social Agency (1982)

“It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.”

— Jeremy Bentham

“To suppose that all formally valid laws are morally obligatory is a moral error.”

— John Dunn, Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke (1967)

“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)

“I am neither a community nor a state. I can determine only what I will do, not what my community or state will do. I can, of course, decide to concentrate my individual efforts on changing my state’s institutions, or indeed on trying to change global economic institutions, though the probability of my making a difference to the lives of badly off individuals may be substantially lower if I adopt this course than if I undertake more direct action, unmediated by the state. [I]t is obviously better, however, if people do both. [T]o suppose that the only acceptable option is to work to reform global economic institutions and that it is self-indulgent to make incremental contributions to the amelioration of poverty through individual action is rather like condemning a doctor who treats the victims of a war for failing to devote his efforts instead to eliminating the root causes of war.”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism

“If something is important enough, you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure.”

— Elon Musk

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

— Elie Wiesel

“Over your lifetime, your individual greenhouse gas contribution will only increase the temperature of the planet by about a half a billionth of a degree Celsius. That, you might think, is such a small difference as to be negligible, so you shouldn’t bother trying to reduce your personal emissions. This reasoning, however, doesn’t consider expected value. It’s true that increasing the planet’s temperature by half a billionth of a degree probably won’t make a difference to anyone, but sometimes it will make a difference, and when it does, the difference will be very large. Occasionally, that increase of half a billionth of a degree will cause a flood or a heatwave that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. In which case the expected harm of raising global temperatures by half a billionth of a degree would be fairly great. We know that something like this has to be the case because we know that, if millions of people emit greenhouse gases, the bad effects are very large, and millions of people emitting greenhouse gases is just the sum of millions of individual actions.”

— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction.”

— Faithless, Mass Destruction

“When thinking about risk from transport, you can think directly in terms of minutes of life lost per hour of travel. Each time you travel, you face a slight risk of getting into a fatal accident, but the chance of getting into a fatal accident varies dramatically depending on the mode of transport. For example, the risk of a fatal car crash while driving for an hour is about one in ten million (so 0.1 micromorts). For a twenty-year-old, that’s a one-in-ten-million chance of losing sixty years. The expected life lost from driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. Looking at expected minutes lost shows just how great a discrepancy there is between risks from different sorts of transport. Whereas an hour on a train costs you only twenty expected seconds of life, an hour on a motorbike costs you an expected three hours and forty-five minutes. In addition to giving us a way to compare the risks of different activities, the concept of expected value helps us choose which risks are worth taking. Would you be willing to spend an hour on a motorbike if it was perfectly safe but caused you to be unconscious later for three hours and forty-five minutes? If your answer is no, but you’re otherwise happy to ride motorbikes in your day-to-day life, you’re probably not fully appreciating the risk of death.”

— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way. It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering – in so far as rough comparisons can be made – of any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account.”

— Peter Singer

“[A]n interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be.”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1993), p. 21

“[W]hen we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected. [T]his means that we weigh interests, considered simply as interests and not as my interests, or the interests of people of European descent, or of people with IQs higher than 100. This provides us with a basic principle of equality: the principle of equal consideration of interests.

The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. This means that if only X and Y would be affected by a possible act, and if X stands to lose more than Y stands to gain, it is better not to do the act. We cannot, if we accept the principle of equal consideration of interests, say that doing the act is better, despite the facts described, because we are more concerned about Y than we are about X. What the principle really amounts to is: an interest is an interest, whoever’s interest it may be.”

— Peter Singer

“How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day.”

— Anne Frank

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”

— Herman Melville

“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”

— Albert Einstein

“As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands – one helping yourself, the other for helping others.”

— Audrey Hepburn