Take The Giving What We Can Pledge

An easy way to save a bunch of lives

When you talk about giving to effective charities, one of the most common refrains is that it’s trivial—of course we should do it, how could anyone deny that? Advocates of effective giving are accused of advocating for an utterly trivial thesis. But despite huge numbers of people claiming that it’s obvious that one should give to effective charities, almost no one does that.

It’s not hard to do. There’s a pledge called the Giving What We Can Pledge that you can take and, at the press of a button, durably give 10% of your income to effective charities. You can also delay when the giving starts if, for example, you’re currently a student. There’s another one that you can take with similar ease to give away 1% of your income, if you think 10% is too much!

The money will go to extremely effective charities. It goes to GiveWell top charities, which have been vetted to be extraordinarily effective, saving lives for around 5,000 dollars each. If you think giving to animal charities is more effective, you can give to Animal Charity Evaluators top charities with similar ease!

Most people give some money to charity. But when people do so, they typically don’t look that hard into the effectiveness of their charity. This is a huge problem, given that the best charities can be hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the typical charity. The charities that you give to if you take the pledge have been carefully vetted to be extraordinarily effective—more effective than all the other charities that GiveWell analyzed through their very thorough process, involving high-quality analysis of various economic studies.

It’s hard to overstate just how valuable taking the pledge is. Giving to effective charities and convincing others to do the same is almost surely the most valuable thing I’ll ever do. If you earn 50,000 dollars a year—which I’d guess is less than most of you guys earn, given that my readers are disproportionately highly educated, which correlates with greater income—and you take the Giving What We Can pledge to give 10%, you’ll end up giving about 5,000 dollars away per year.

You’ll save one life a year. An entire human won’t be dead because of one year of donation. An entire human being will be able to live past the age of five, will be able to accomplish grand things, will avoid a grisly early demise because of something you did. That’s way more important than pretty much everything else you can do. If you bring soup for a sick person, you make their sickness a bit less bad. Yet that’s nothing—nothing—compared to ending their illness, fully preventing a death. And this can be done at fairly minimal cost. One year of the pledge will accomplish more good than every nice thing you ever do in your life.

When thinking about effective giving, it’s easy for the lives saved to be seem sort of abstract. This impulse must be resisted: it’s important, when thinking about whether to take the pledge, to concretely and vividly imagine the good you can do. Picture a young child that you know—maybe 4 or 5 years old. Imagine how horrible it would be for that person to die after having a horrible fever, all of their loved ones helpless to stop it, all of the things they could have achieved gone. Their essence destroyed, their laughter gone, the constant chattering commentary typical of young children snuffed out forever, never to return. This is the kind of thing you can prevent, over and over again, by giving a small percentage of your income to effective charities.

Imagine that the people dying were not nameless faceless strangers but you or your loved ones. The loss of you or your mother or father or brother would be an incomparable tragedy. But it’s not just a tragedy—it’s one that we can prevent with the press of a button. By taking a small haircut—just a few percent of one’s income—the typical American can prevent this tragedy from taking place every year of their life.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has an old post talking about the death of his brother. It’s long, I won’t quote it in full, but it’s at least worth quoting part of it:

My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.

He died November 1st. His body was found without identification. The family found out on November 4th. I spent a week and a half with my family in Chicago, and am now back in Atlanta. I’ve been putting off telling my friends, because it’s such a hard thing to say.

I used to say: “I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out.” I still have four living grandparents, but I don’t think I’ll be saying that any more. Even if we make it to and through the Singularity, it will be too late. One of the people I love won’t be there. The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren’t looking. Of all the people I had to protect, I never thought that Yehuda might be one of them. Yehuda was born July 11, 1985. He was nineteen years old when he died.

I never knew Yehuda Yudkowsky, nor will I ever know him, unless there is an afterlife of some sort. But when one reads about stories like this, when one vividly pictures the horrors of a death, even of a far-away stranger, it becomes clear that preventing that is more important than frivolously spending a few thousand dollars. The life of Yehuda Yudkowsky is worth more than a cheap car. So is the life of the nameless, faceless children whose deaths we can avert, who die because of our apathy, our indifference.

Philosophers have devised all sorts of ingenious philosophical arguments for why we should give a significant share of our income to effective charities. Peter Singer has argued that our indifference in the face of children we can save is morally like walking past drowning children, rather than wading into a pond and saving them. We can prevent extremely bad things from happening at comparatively minor cost; morality dictates we do so.

I think this argument works, for what it’s worth, as do a host of similar arguments. But we don’t need complex philosophical arguments for this truth. When one reflects on the value of life—when I reflect on the tragic death of my grandfather, for example—it becomes extraordinarily clear that preserving an innocent life is far, far more important than preserving a few percent of one’s salary for a year. The next time you see a four-year-old, imagine how much good would be done if their life was saved. You have the opportunity to do that much good—to do as much good as Ted Bundy did bad, an amount of good that I would have thought impossible a few years ago. For that reason, I’d encourage you all to take the pledge.

I’m happy to provide a free paid subscription to anyone who takes the pledge in response to this post—just email me at untrappedzoid@gmail.com for verification!