这周我们要质疑有效利他主义。这是彼得·辛格的观点，你应该尽你所能去做，你应该通过做功课来弄清楚那是什么，并选择最好的方式去给予。例如，你不应该随便给别人10美元;你应该上网看看你能用这笔钱帮助多少人，然后把钱给他们。

Or better yet, give more than $10—maybe 10% of your annual income. After all, if you’re a good utilitarian you think everyone counts the same—including yourself! So there’s no reason you should be drinking $5 lattes when others are dying of thirst. As Singer says, “give until it hurts.”

Clearly the idea that people should be giving more is a good one. But is there something weird about having to do your homework first? If you see a random person on the street who’s in need of some help, why shouldn’t you just give them a bit of money?

One answer is that you could use that same money to help ten times as many people in the developing world. If you could improve (or even save) ten lives instead of just one, why wouldn’t you?

也许问题在于这种思考方式有点不人道。我们不是机器人:当我们看到有人需要帮助时，我们会同情他们——我们不会拿出计算器。难道我们不应该希望人们对周围的人感到同情吗?

An effective altruist might well answer as follows: it’s the “around them” thing that’s the problem. Surely it's a little parochial to care more about someone just because they happen to be near you. Why should we think that some person in Mozambique is less deserving of help than someone in Mountain View?

But still, consider the following thought experiment. Two houses are on fire on your block: your house, with a family member in it, and the neighbors' house, with two strangers in it. If saving two people is always better than saving one, dfo we really want to say that you should save the neighbors, just because there’s two of them? Surely most if not all of us would choose to save our family member. Would an effective altruist have to say that we're being selfish and unjust?

Or again, imagine if we were all effective altruists: we’d feed the starving in countries far away, but we’d never get around to feeding our own starving people—it would never be cost-effective enough.

And there's yet another objection to effective altruism, at least in one of its forms: it sometimes recommends that people refrain from going into professions like nursing and instead get a high-paying job on Wall Street, so they can earn zillions of dollars and give it all away. That may be good in the short term, but in the long term, isn't it just a way of leaving the bad system intact—the system that made so many people poor in the first place? Isn't the Benevolent Banker a weird kind of Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to give back to the poor?

So it's a real puzzle. Effective Altruism has raised something like 40 billion dollars for good causes, like the prevention of malaria, and has even convinced people to donate a kidney to unknown strangers in medical need. Yet it also raises some difficult questions.

Luckily our guest is a fan of effective altruism with some ideas of his own: Theron Pummer from the University of St. Andrews, author of the forthcoming book,The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism. It should be a great conversation.