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

by Peter Singer

Publisher:

Yale University Press

, 2020

Overview

An argument for putting sentiment aside and maximizing the practical impact of our donated dollars: “Powerful, provocative” (Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times).
 
Peter Singer’s books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency ever since the appearance of Animal Liberation. Now he directs our attention to a challenging new movement in which his own ideas have played a crucial role: effective altruism. Effective altruism is built upon the simple but profoundly unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the “most good you can do.”
 
Such a life requires a rigorously unsentimental view of charitable giving: to be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas, and shows how, paradoxically, living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment than living for oneself.
 
Doing the Most Good develops the challenges Singer has made, in the New York Times and Washington Post, to those who donate to the arts, and to charities focused on helping our fellow citizens, rather than those for whom we can do the most good. Effective altruists are extending our knowledge of the possibilities of living less selfishly, and of allowing reason, rather than emotion, to determine how we live. Doing the Most Good offers new hope for our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Product Details

• Title: The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
• Author: Peter Singer
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2020
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 228
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9780300182415, 9780300180275, 0300180276, 0300182414
• Resource ID: LLS:9780300182415
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-21T19:53:47Z

About Peter Singer

Peter Singer has been called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" as well as the father of the modern animal rights movement. He teaches at Princeton University and the University of Melbourne and is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethics, and for his writings on the obligations of the affluent to aid those living in extreme poverty. In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. Singer has written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 40 books, including Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; How Are We to Live?; Rethinking Life and Death; The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason); The Life You Can Save; and, most recently, The Most Good You Can Do. His works have appeared in more than 25 languages.