The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer

If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone.

He estimated that, while maintaining an attractive quality of life, he could donate enough to cure eighty thousand people of blindness or to save around fifty thousand years of healthy life.

So the question she asks herself is not how much she should give, but how much she should keep.

“If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”

“We don’t need people making sacrifices that leave them drained and miserable. We need people who can walk cheerfully over the world, or at least do their damnedest.”

Hume’s influential view that reason can never initiate an action because all action starts with a passion or desire.