Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T02:37:06.103Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effectiveness and Demandingness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2020

Brian Berkey Open the ORCID record for Brian Berkey [Opens in a new window]
Brian Berkey*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It has been argued in some recent work that there are many cases in which individuals are subject to conditional obligations to give to more effective rather than less effective charities, despite not being unconditionally obligated to give. These conditional obligations, it has been suggested, can allow effective altruists (EAs) to make the central claims about the ethics of charitable giving that characterize the movement without taking any particular position on morality's demandingness. I argue that the range of cases involving charitable giving in which individuals are subject to conditional effectiveness obligations is in fact quite narrow. Because of this, I claim, EAs must endorse the view that well off people have at least fairly demanding unconditional obligations.

Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 368 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ashford, E. 2003. The demandingness of Scanlon's contractualism, Ethics, 113(2): 273–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashford, E. 2018. Severe poverty as an unjust emergency, inThe Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, ed. by Woodruff, P. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 103–48.Google Scholar
Berg, A. 2018. Effective altruism: How big should the tent be? Public Affairs Quarterly 32(4): 269–87.Google Scholar
Boesch, B. 2018. Integrity, identity, and choosing a charity, in The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, ed. by Woodruff, P. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 149–77.Google Scholar
Horton, J. 2017. The all or nothing problem. Journal of Philosophy, 114(2): 94–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krishna, N. 2016. Add your own egg, The Point Magazine, 11. January 13, 2016. https://thepointmag.com/2016/examined-life/add-your-own-egg. Accessed June 18, 2019.Google Scholar
Lichtenberg, J. 2015. Peter Singer's extremely altruistic heirs, The New Republic. November 30, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/124690/peter-singers-extremely-altruistic-heirs. Accessed June 18, 2019.Google Scholar
MacAskill, W. 2015. Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back (New York: Penguin Random House).Google Scholar
MacAskill, W. 2018. Understanding effective altruism and its challenges, in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, ed. by Boonin, D. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 441–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacAskill, W., Mogensen, A., and Ord, T. 2018. Giving isn't demanding, in The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, ed. by Woodruff, P. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 178–203.Google Scholar
McMahan, J. 2018. Doing good and doing the best, in The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, ed. by Woodruff, P. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 78–102.Google Scholar
Ord, T. 2013. The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness in global health, Centre for Global Development. www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1427016. Accessed June 18, 2019.Google Scholar
Pummer, T. 2016. Whether and where to give, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(1): 77–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Scheffler, S. 1994. The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, T. 2018. Are we conditionally obligated to be effective altruists? Philosophy & Public Affairs, 46(1): 36–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, P. 1972. Famine, affluence, and morality, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3): 229–43.Google Scholar
Singer, P. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Srinivasan, A. 2015. Stop the robot apocalypse, London Review of Books, 37(18): 3–6.Google Scholar
Woodruff, P. 2018. Afterword: Justice and charitable giving, in The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy, ed. by Woodruff, P. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 204–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar