Effective altruism, tithing, and a principle of progressive giving

ABSTRACT

How much should someone contribute to trying to prevent unnecessary deaths and severe hardships? MacAskill, Mogensen, and Ord propose tithing for most of the rich (as measured by income), which has been influential in the effective altruism community. My aim in this article is to contribute, through amending their proposal, to their important project of searching for a weak or very weak principle of sacrifice that would still revise upward how much money goes to the most effective organizations. I do so by presenting four objections to their argument based on demandingness, fairness, net wealth, and historical and contemporary injustices. Then, I show that a principle of progressive can overcome these objections and better fits the reasons MacAskill, Mogensen, and Ord give in favour of their principle than their proposed operationalization of tithing.

KEYWORDS:

• Tithing
• effective altruism
• progressive giving
• Peter Singer
• over-demandingness objection
• William MacAskill
• Toby Ord
• Andreas Mogensen

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers, Lydie Cabane, Wouter Kalf, Honorata Mazepus, James Pattison, Andrei Poama, Ajume Wingo, Scott Wisor, the participants at the Leiden University Center for Political Philosophy, and the Netherlands Institute for Government 2019 Conference for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper and to Gordon Bearn for introducing me to work of Peter Singer many years ago.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this helpful suggestion.