The argument that MacAskill put to Sam and a small group of Harvard students in the fall of 2012 went roughly as follows: you, student at an elite university, will spend roughly eighty thousand hours of your life working. If you are the sort of person who wants to “do good” in the world, what is the most effective way to spend those hours? It sounded like a question to which there were only qualitative answers, but MacAskill framed it in quantitative terms. He suggested that the students judge the effectiveness of their lives by counting the number of lives they saved during those eighty
...more
