Quotessence
Home / Authors / William MacAskill

William MacAskill Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllEffective AltruismCharityImpartialityAltruismCause NeutralityClimate ChangeDoing GoodDoing Good BetterEvidence Based AltruismEvidence Based Charity

Famous William MacAskill Quotes

“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 beet 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.”

PovertyCharityExtreme PovertyGlobal PovertyPoverty ReductionEffective AltruismMarginal UtilityMarginal Value
Book:Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
Create image

“We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up opportunities to make a tremendous difference.”

ThinkingReasonVirtueCharityIntelligenceHelping OthersDoing Good
Book:Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
Create image

“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.”

ImpartialitySaving LivesEffective AltruismCause Neutrality
Book:Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
Create image

“Effective altruism is about asking "How can I make the biggest difference I can?" and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's true, and a committment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be. As the phrase suggests, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's best for the world, and a commitment to do what's best, whatever that turns out to be.”

AltruismImpartialityUtilitarianismEffective AltruismWorld ImprovementDoing Good BetterEvidence Based AltruismEvidence Based Charity
Book:Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
Create image

“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.”

Climate ChangeGlobal WarmingTragedy Of The CommonsGlobal Catastrophic RiskExpected HarmExpected Value
Book:Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
Create image