In the U.S. alone, more than $400 billion are donated to charity each year—equivalent to two percent of American GDP. This generosity is wonderful, but these gifts don’t do nearly as much good as they could. In recent years, researchers have started studying the effectiveness of different charities, just as investors study the effectiveness of different companies. These researchers ask questions like: How much money does it cost for this charity to save someone’s life? The answers are stunning. Charity experts estimate that the most effective charities are about 100 times more effective than typical charities. For example, you can do more good by donating $100 to a highly effective charity than by donating $10,000 to a typical charity.
Joshua Greene is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, where he teaches “Evolving Morality: From Primordial Soup to Superintelligent Machines,” one of the university’s most popular courses. He is also the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, which integrates moral philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to explain the underlying causes of modern conflict. Josh’s latest applied research has led to novel, evidence-based strategies for reducing political animosity and inspiring thousands of people to support nonprofits addressing extreme poverty, climate change, and other pressing societal issues. His new organization is GivingMultiplier.org.
Shermer and Greene discuss:
- GivingMultiplier
- Effective Altruism
- Longtermism
- Altruism, reputation, and self-reputation
- Measuring effective philanthropy
- Giving & philanthropy seems like a rich-person’s game. How can average people participate?
- Ndugu Effect
- Donor fatigue
- Public vs. Private solutions to social problems
- Dual process theory of moral judgment (determined by both automatic, emotional responses and controlled, conscious reasoning. “central tension” in ethics between deontology (rights- or duty-based moral theories) and consequentialism (outcome-based theories) reflects the competing influences of these two types of processes: “Characteristically deontological judgments are preferentially supposed by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically consequentialist judgments are preferentially supported by conscious reasoning and allied processes of cognitive control”
- Trollyogy and moral dilemmas
- fMRI brain scans and trolly problems
- Abortion
- Incest
- Immigration
- Capital punishment
- Polarizing politics and what to do about it.
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This episode was released on December 17, 2024.
