EA - David Edmonds's biography of Parfit is out by Pablo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: David Edmonds's biography of Parfit is out, published by Pablo on April 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, by David Edmonds, was published a few days ago (Amazon | Audible | Goodreads | Oxford).The book is worth reading in full, but here are some passages that focus specifically on Parfit's involvement with effective altruism:In his retirement, an organization with which he felt a natural affinity approached him for support. The Oxford-based charity Giving What We Can (GWWC) was set up by Toby Ord, an Australian-born philosopher, and another young philosopher, Will MacAskill. The charity's direct inspiration came from Peter Singer. Singer had devised a thought experiment that was simple but devastatingly effective in making people reflect on their behavior and their attitude to those in need. [...]This thought experiment has generated a significant secondary literature. Certainly, the GWWC initiators found it compelling. Their mission was to persuade people to give more of their income away and to donate to effective organizations that could make a real difference. [...]There were spinoff organizations from GWWC such as 80,000 Hours. The number refers to the rough number of hours we might have in our career, and 80,000 Hours was set up to research how people can most effectively devote their time rather than their money to tackling the world's most pressing problems. In 2012, the Centre for Effective Altruism was established to incorporate both GWWC and 80,000 Hours.Since its launch, the effective altruism movement has grown slowly but steadily. Most of the early backers were idealistic young postgraduates, many of them philosophers. If Singer was the intellectual father of the movement, Parfit was its grandfather. It became an in-joke among some members that anyone who came to work for GWWC had to possess a copy of Reasons and Persons. Some owned two copies: one for home, one for the office. But it took Parfit until 2014 to sign the GWWC pledge. And he agreed to do so only after wrangling over the wording.Initially, those who joined the GWWC campaign were required to make a public pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to charities that worked to relieve poverty. Parfit had several issues with this. For reasons the organizers never understood, he said that the participants had to make a promise rather than a pledge. He may have believed that a promise entailed a deeper level of commitment. Nor was he keen on the name "Giving What We Can". 10% of a person's income is certainly a generous sum, and in line with what adherents to some world religions are expected to give away. Nevertheless, Parfit pointed out, it was obvious that people could donate more. [...]Parfit also caviled at the word 'giving'. He believed this implied we are morally entitled to what we hand over, and morally entitled to our wealth and high incomes. This he rejected. Well-off people in the developed world were merely lucky that they were born into rich societies: they did not deserve their fortune.Linguistic quibbles aside, the issue that Parfit felt most strongly about was the movement's sole focus, initially, on poverty and development. While it was indeed pressing to relieve the suffering of people living today, Parfit argued, there should be an option that at least some of the money donated be earmarked for the problems of tomorrow. The human population has risen to a billion, and faces existential risks such as meteors, nuclear war, bioterrorism, pandemics, and climate change. Parfit claimed that between (A) peace, (B) a war which kills 7.5 billion people and (C) a war which killed everyone, the difference between (B) and (C) was much greater than the difference between (A) and (B). [...]Given how grim human exist...