What is Reddit's opinion of The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically?

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You have a highly valuable and desired skill set. Might I recommend reading: http://www.amazon.com/Most-Good-You-Can-Effective/dp/0300180276/

You may be able to help these organizations A LOT more by not donating your time to them per se.

Anyway, just an alternative approach worth considering. Love your attitude and wish more engineers were like you!

Cheers!

I'm only finding out about it and have just read Peter Singer's recent book (The Most Good You Can Do). It turns out that there will be two more books on this topic published in 2015 (link).

> All the assumptions at all levels are always of concern and need to be balanced, none can be summarized as "Y" and then taken for granted.

I'm not saying that axiomatic assumptions should be taken for granted. I'm saying you either accept them, or you don't. Tentative axioms can be proven through previous reasoning, but all arguments rely on fundamental axioms that cannot be proven at all. They are either self-evident, or they are not.

As to whether or not they can be summarized and abstractly represented, I see no reason why they can't. Repeating "this is all much more complicated" many times isn't an alternative argument. Brennan's many children drowning representation doesn't even phase Singer's claims, it either leads the reader to agree that you ought to spend the rest of your life saving drowning children, or to agree with Singer that you should do so only up to the point that saving more children would cost you personally more than it would gain them. Contrary to what Brennan claims, that doesn't automatically make the argument fail, nor does it (at face value) lead to the conclusion that you shouldn't be saving drowning children, it just means that the argument is calling for much more than what someone who doesn't see the full logical entailment of Singer's initial argument might initially conclude. Brennan seems to think that Singer is amongst that camp, despite all evidence to the contrary.

>I will say that I largely stand by utilitarian thinking, and agree with the general principle of maximizing the well-being of sentient creatures.

Then why are you asking if we have a duty to others? Obviously, by any utilitarian standards people will have various duties to the people around them, you can't really maximize well-being if no one has any moral obligations. I'm not even sure what the point would be to a discussion of morality that doesn't include moral obligations.

>Any attempt to summarize these moral problems of which lives to save is ultimately incomplete when it leaves that factor out.

Singer's arguments, when taken in full rather than out of context, do not leave all other factors out. In fact, he has done a great deal more work to tease out relevant factors that make moral actions effective rather, than simply a matter of having one's heart in the right place. That requires practical thinking about the real world.

>Simply saying "we have a duty" is a gross oversimplification.

I suppose that would be true. Who is simply, or merely, saying this?

>It may well be said that we have a duty to the well-being of future generations to let some of us die in the present.

It might, but since neither you nor Brennan have given any argument in this direction, it really doesn't touch on anything Singer has said.

>rejecting bogus axioms is necessary to avoid wasting time on bogus arguments.

So what is the bogus axiom of utilitarianism in general that you are rejecting?

>In this case in particular, I think Singer pulls a dangerous move when he attempts to base his moral reasoning on a grossly oversimplified fantasy scenario, rather than just directly addressing the particulars of the real problems, and honestly and completely addressing all of the very real details that roll into how and why people make their decisions.

At this point I honestly have to ask, have you ever read any of Singer's books? Are you really aware of his arguments at all? If not, I really recommend that you do so because this claim is baseless.

You might be interested in a book called The Most Good You Can Do. It addresses a lot of what your talking about and is well written

http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Good-You-Can/dp/0300180276