EA-relatable quotes

“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

“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

“[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)

“[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)

“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

“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)

“[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

“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

“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

“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)

“[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 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

“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)

“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

“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)

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

— Jeremy Bentham

“Work on matters that matter the most.”

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

“[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

“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)

*“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

“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

“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

“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)

“[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…

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Elon Musk

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

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

— Isaac Levi, Conflict and Social Agency (1982)

“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)

“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)

“[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

“[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)

“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)

“[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

“[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

“Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.”

— Faithless, Mass Destruction

“Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction.”

— Faithless, Mass Destruction

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

— Elie Wiesel

“*If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”*
— *Desmond Tutu

“Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.”

— Slavoj Zizek

“A winner has to speak not of the world as it is, but of the world as it should be!”

— Sosuke Aizen, Bleach (anime)

“A distinction is sometimes drawn between ‘man-made’ famines and famines caused by nature. [B]laming nature can, of course, be very consoling and comforting. It can be of great use especially to those in positions of power and responsibility. Comfortable inaction is, however, typically purchased at a very heavy price – a price that is paid by others, often with their lives.”

— Jean Drèze, Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), pp. 46-47

“We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented.”

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

“[I]f it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”

— Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)

“When my absence doesn’t alter your life, then my presence has no meaning it it.”

— unknown

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

— Audrey Hepburn

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

— Albert Einstein

“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

“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

“[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

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

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

“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

“If we are going to live an ethical life, it is not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots. If we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little.”

— Peter Singer, The why and how of effective altruism (TED Conference, 2013)

“Love for all sentient beings instead of hate for everyone that looks different than you.”

— Johannes Ackva

“DEDICATED TO

Siang, Aline, Eve and the welfare of all sentients”

— Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare Economics: Introduction and Development of Basic Concepts (1979)

“[T]he good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.”

— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

“[T]he good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing the more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other. And it is evident to me that as a rational being I am bound to aim at good generally, – so far as it is attainable by my efforts, – not at a particular part of it.”

— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

“[T]he good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other.”

— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics: 7th edition (1907), p. 382

“We have next to consider who the “all” are, whose happiness is to be taken into account. Are we to extend our concern to all the beings capable of pleasure and pain whose feelings are affected by our conduct? Or are we to confine our view to human happiness? The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and (I believe) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle… it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being.”

— Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

“The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.”

— Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

“[A]s moral philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based on “Not everyone, just me!” falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an objective standpoint as a person just like others. It is like insisting that “here,” the point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place in the universe.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 11: The Fear of Nihilism, p. 186

“A Reasonable Person cannot have self-esteem while ignoring the interests of others whose well-being she recognizes as equally significant.”

— Richard Keshen, Reasonable self-esteem

“Lest I offend anyone else by doubting their worth, let me begin by doubting my own. I am not depressed; I think I have an adequate sense of self by standard psychological criteria; I think I am not deficient in ordinary self-esteem; I am certainly not deficient in everyday self-centredness and selfishness. And yet, if I ask myself in a cool hour whether I have some deep intrinsic ‘worth’ that grounds the importance of what happens to me, or that justifies anyone, myself or another, in caring about things for my own sake, I do not find it. Much that goes on in my life is important (in a small way); much of it has intrinsic value, both positive and negative. And those facts matter to how I should be treated. But the idea that they either depend on or manifest my personal ‘worth’ is what escapes me.”

— Donald Regan, Why Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, 2004, p. 228)

“It was a random accident of fate that I was born into my own lucky circumstances. But people born in other circumstances are just as real as I am, no matter where they live, or how similar they are to me. Before I decide what to do with my money, I will try to see through the eyes of all the people my decision affects. I will imagine the future of the world after each decision I could make. Only then will I decide.”

— Aaron Gertler, Utilitarian Thought Experiments

“[T]he Golden Rule is theoretically inferior to the Impartial Observer Formula and Kant’s Consent Principle. But this rule may be, for practical purposes, the best of these three principles. By requiring us to imagine ourselves in other people’s position, the Golden Rule may provide what is psychologically the most effective way of making us more impartial, and morally motivating us. That may be why this rule has been the world’s most widely accepted fundamental moral idea.”

— Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume One (2011)

“Unspeakably more depends on what things are called, than on what they are.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“[I]f it’s ever okay to take some time off from morality, it’s only so that you can do more good after the R&R.”

— Nakul Krishna, Add Your Own Egg (The Point Mag, 2016)

“Forget about measuring yourself against a standard of perfection, and just 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.

So forget about the lives that you’re not saving or didn’t save yesterday when you were just playing with your kids at the beach. You want to live in a world where you get to play with your kids at the beach, but you also get to rescue someone else’s kid from a burning building, from malaria or cholera, or a civil war. You get to do that.”

— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)

“I could either save a 100,000 years of healthy life, or I could garnish my own already happy life with some extra bells and whistles.”

— Toby Ord

“Suppose that I steal whenever I believe that I will not be caught. I may be often caught, and pushed. Even in self-interested terms, honesty may therefore be the best policy for me. [Cases like these on whether the self-interest theory of rationality is self-defeating] are not worthy discussing. If this is the way in which [the self-interest theory] is self-defeating, this is no objection to [it]. [It] is self-defeating here only because of my incompetence in attempting to follow [it]. This is a fault, not in [the self-interest theory], but in me. We might object to some theory that it is too difficult to follow. But this is not true of [the self-interest theory].”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 5

“Since, according to maximizing utilitarianism, any act that fails to maximize is wrong, there appears to be no place for actions that are morally admirable but not required, and agents will often be required to perform acts of great self-sacrifice. This gives rise to the common charge that maximizing utilitarianism is too demanding. [H]ow should a utilitarian respond to this line of criticism? One perfectly respectable response is simply to deny the claims at the heart of it. We might insist that morality really is very demanding, in precisely the way utilitarianism says it is. But doesn’t this fly in the face of common sense? Well, perhaps it does, but so what? Until relatively recently, moral “common sense” viewed women as having an inferior moral status to men, and some races as having an inferior status to others. These judgments were not restricted to the philosophically unsophisticated. Such illustrious philosophers as Aristotle and Hume accepted positions of this nature. Many utilitarians (myself included) believe that the interests of sentient non-human animals should be given equal consideration in moral decisions with the interests of humans. This claims certainly conflicts with the “common sense” of many (probably most) humans, and many (perhaps most) philosophers. It should not, on that account alone, be rejected.”

— Alastair Norcross, The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism (The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism, 2006, p. 218)

“[I]t is a mistake to suppose that the moral views of effective altruists can be rejected on the ground that they are more demanding than people now and in the past have thought that morality could be. It may well turn out that future people will view the failure of affluent people to take individual action to save the lives of people in impoverished areas in much the way we now look back on the drivers of slaves, who were also acting in conformity with ‘the view of most people’ at the time.”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism

“[T]he problem with [the claim that importance to oneself of one’s own projects and attachments limits the extent to which morality can demand that one provide assistance to others] is that, to the extent that it is plausible, it ought also to apply to other equally or more onerous demands that morality might be supposed to make. If my being me and having my own life can exempt me from the moral reason I might otherwise have to save someone unrelated to me (even though she is she, with her own life), it seems that these same facts should also exempt me from the moral reason I have not to kill this person if killing her were as important to me or my projects as avoiding having to save her is.”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism

“Professional philosophers [h]ave been more interested in using the issue of famine relief as a club with which to beat utilitarianism over the head for its allegedly extreme demandingness than they have been in upholding the moral necessity of doing far more than most of us do now to aid those in distress – or in exploring why our culture is resistant to that message.”

— William Shaw, Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism (1999), p. 287

“Mattering as a means is a way of mattering. Your desires would be pointless only if acting rationally did not matter. S claims that, when you are deciding what to do, compared with acting rationally, nothing matters more. This claim is justified even when what it would be rational for you to do is to make yourself disposed to act irrationally. What matters most, even here, is that you do what it would be rational for you to do.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 46

“We tell someone that such and such a thing is what morality requires, and he replies that he agrees with us but does not see why he should do what morality requires. What could we say in reply? The individual could have reasons of prudence to do the same thing that morality requires, but, if he asks that question, it is probable that he does not have those reasons or that they are not enough for him. But, if they are not reasons of prudence, what other kinds of reasons is he looking for? What is the meaning of ‘should’ in the question ‘why should I be moral?’ The only possible answer is that the reasons in question must be moral ones and that the duty alluded to by the expression ‘should’ must be amoral duty, since our practical reasoning does not admit reasons and duties of a higher order. But the person who asks these questions will not, of course, be satisfied with an answer which presupposes what he is doubting. What is he in fact asking? The very question seems to involve a contradiction, since once adequately articulated it reads: What moral reason do I have to do what morality prescribes, which is not a reason which is derived from morality itself? This is like asking who is the lucky woman who is the wife of the richest bachelor on earth, and being distressed that we do not get an answer.”

— Carlos Santiago Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights (1991), pp. 81-82

“A morality is not incoherent simply because, in its own terms, it would be better not propagated.”

— Jonathan Glover, “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It” (1975)

“[T]he demands of morality pervade every aspect and moment of our lives – and we all fail to meet its standards. [F]ew of us believe the claim, and [n]one of us live in accordance with it. It strikes us as outrageously extreme in its demands[.] The claim is deeply counterintuitive. But it is true.”

— Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality, (1989), p. 2

“Morality can demand a lot. Let’s say you’ve been falsely accused of murder, you’ve been sentenced to death, and you realize that you can escape if you kill one of your guards. Morality says you can’t kill him, even though it means you’re going to lose your life. That’s just how it is. Well, it turns out that we can save 1,000 people’s lives. If you don’t do that, then you have to say that it’s permissible to value yourself more than 1,000 times as much as you value strangers. Does that sound plausible? I don’t think that sounds very plausible.”

— Toby Ord

*“Ethics is thinking about what the perfect world looks like, and then trying to make ours look more like it.”

— Lukas Gloor

“After dissolving personal identity and survival, it seems, the central question of “How should one live?” becomes “How should the world be?””

— Matīss Apinis

“What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”

— William Godwin

“It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.”

— Sir Peter Ustinov

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

— Martin Luther King

“20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.”

— Mark Twain

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”

— Karen Lamb

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.”
(“If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the Infernal regions.”)

— Virgil, Aeneid (between 29 and 19 BC)

“Is it not enough to have a strong will in order to fight for peace and justice? In that case, I want strength. I want the strength to help me create peace. If it is not enough to believe in justice, then I will become justice. I will seek out the evils in this world and wipe them out like the clouds in the sky. I swear I will… for justice.”

— Kaname Tosen, Bleach (anime)

“[I]magine that aliens that want to toy with you in particular have put a black hole on a collision course with Earth. Imagine that the only way to redirect it is using alien tech on an alien space ship that has been left on Earth and which can be piloted only by you and you alone – and that, to destroy the black hole, you must cross the event horizon, never to return. Would you save the world then? And if so, would you do it only grudgingly? [W]ould you go all out to save the world, or would you put in a token “best effort”, a token “at least I tried”, and then go back to enjoying your remaining time? And if you can’t go all out even in incredible imaginary scenarios where everything depends on you, what are you holding out for?”

— Nate Soares, Desperation (2015)

“The bells which toll for mankind are – most of them, anyway – like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.”

— Peter Medawar, The Future of Man (1959)

“You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and this created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

“By the end of this book, if not before, you may come to have a fuller appreciation of some of your central beliefs about yourself, and some of your related attitudes. In particular, you may come to realize more fully that, even as you yourself most deeply believe, after several more decades at most, you will cease to exist, completely and forever. In the light of this awareness, and according to your deepest values, perhaps you will make the most of your quite limited existence.”

— Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness, and Value (1990), p. 3

“Why do you move so slowly? Do you think this is some kind of game? You must move faster, your mind cannot conceive of the stakes we are dealing with. It is only through luck and my continued forbearance that you’re even alive. Now move.”

— Dr. Janice Polito (System Shock)