Imagine you’re travelling through a conflict zone. During a long bus ride, there’s an explosion, and the bus flips over. When you regain consciousness, you find yourself in the midst of chaos. Your travel companion is trapped under the wheels, looking into your eyes and begging for help. A few metres away, an injured child screams in pain. At the same time, you hear the ticking of another explosive device, but you don’t know where it is, or when it’ll go off. In the distance, you hear gunshots.
Whatever you decide to do will be wrong in some major way. Save your friend? The child still screams. Take care of the child? The bomb keeps ticking. Defuse the bomb? While you consider the options, your friend dies in front of you.
I’m writing this in comfortable surroundings: the sunlight shines through the window of my Oxford home. That peaceful scene is how the world appears to me. But, in the morally relevant sense, the conflict zone I’ve just described is a much truer depiction of reality.
There are any number of people who need your help right now. Instead of a travelling companion trapped under a bus in front of you, there is the homeless woman who lives a few miles away. There is a child screaming in pain, but she’s in Mozambique, dying of malaria. Rather than a ticking bomb, we have an increasing risk of global catastrophe from extreme climate change, or misaligned AI, or the next pandemic. These are just some of the problems that face you. And, just as in the conflict scenario, you do in fact have the power to help. You can donate to organisations that address these problems; you can advocate for more attention to go towards them; you can switch careers to work on them directly. Anyone alive today therefore finds themselves in the mother of all philosophical thought experiments, living with every moral dilemma ever devised, all at once.
So how, exactly, should we respond to this reality? The reaction that feels appropriate is to scream or break down in tears. But that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. The hero in the war zone is not paralysed by the suffering they see. Instead, they survey their surroundings. They calculate. They make hard trade-offs.
Over the last 14 years, I’ve helped to develop and promote an idea called effective altruism – the use of evidence and reason to figure out how to do as much good as possible. A movement of people has emerged who take this idea seriously and act on it.
At the very core of effective altruist thought is an attempt to recognise our painful reality for what it is. We don’t, normally, think of the homeless woman a few miles away, or the child dying of malaria in Mozambique, or the ticking time bombs of global catastrophe. But we should. In our moral reasoning, we must bring these issues on stage and make them vivid. Imagine if the homeless woman was your mother. Imagine if the child was dying right in front of you. Imagine if the risk of global catastrophe was a rising flood, and you could see that any day now it might overwhelm your city’s defences.
And so what should we do? First, we must assess our options, and prioritise among them. In the conflict zone, it would be a mistake to simply aid the first person you see. Instead, you would try to work out who you could help the most, like a doctor engaging in triage. There would be no easy answers. Addressing the most pressing needs would mean accepting that some people will not be helped. Similarly, in normal life, we should work on the highest priority problems; that means having to accept that we simply won’t be able to do everything.
Second, we must act. It’s natural not to want to make these decisions, weighing the suffering of one person against the suffering of another. But it would be a mistake, too, to turn away from the suffering entirely, overwhelmed, or be so lost trying to resolve the moral dilemma that you never do anything. In an emergency situation, you would try to help as many people as you could, by as much as you could, and you would pursue that aim with seriousness and commitment. I think that we should aspire to do the same when trying to do good in our everyday lives, too. Modern moral philosophers tend to assume that, for most actions open to us, the question of what to do is a matter of personal prerogative. They focus on the constraints on our actions: a list of “thou shalt nots”. This would make sense if moral reality matched the reality I see when I look around my Oxford living room. But it makes little sense when we live in a war zone.
There are, of course, constraints on action, even on actions that aim to help others; except in all but the most extreme situations, you shouldn’t kill or steal for the greater good. But in a war zone, the stakes are just so high that our focus should be on the impact we have. If a wartime doctor reviews her day, she might well think: “I should have got more fully informed consent from such-and-such patient.” But her main concern would be: “Did I help others as much as I could?”
Unfortunately, the emergency scenario we live in will not end soon. Most likely, it will persist as long as you or I are alive. For that reason, acting ethically means looking after yourself, too. My grandmother worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war, where Alan Turing famously cracked the Enigma code. She worked extremely hard, and had a nervous breakdown as a result. But as a child I remember her describing, with some fondness, how they would dance in the evenings. She was right to dance.
If we want to improve the world, we cannot focus merely on how bad things are. Our attention, instead, should be on what we can do to make things better. And that difference is truly enormous. Even just by choosing to donate a fraction of your annual income to the most effective organisations, every year you can save a child’s life, or save thousands of animals from suffering, or prevent greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to many people’s lifetime carbon footprints, or make a real reduction to the chance of all-out global catastrophe.
No matter how much we do, how well we succeed, the problems of the world will remain. Your friend may still die. That child may still scream in pain. But, crucially, we can make things better: with careful reasoning, a willingness to prioritise, and focused resolve, we can leave the world a brighter place than we found it.
• William MacAskill is a philosopher at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. His book What We Owe the Future is published by Oneworld (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Further reading
The Precipice by Toby Ord (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer (Yale, £13.99)
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef (Piatkus, £10.99)
