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A philosopher’s guide to caring deeply
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Jun 30, 2025
According to philosopher Meghan Sullivan, effective altruism may overlook the moral importance of seeing others as individuals. She explains how love should guide how we care for both present and future humans.
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One of the major trends in the ethics of philanthropy in the last 40 or so years has been a focus on rational efficiency when you give money to charitable causes
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This movement, which is sometimes called the effective altruism movement, says that the best way to give to others is not emotional, but instead very rational
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How do you make the most efficient investment in a good charity that's going to have the best return on that investment
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The love ethic is similar to effective altruism in the sense that it's an ethical framework that asks you to care about strangers
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But there is where the similarities end. The love ethic says when you're giving money to charity, if you're just blindly making financial transactions on the Internet
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you don't really know the story behind the people that are suffering from that issue
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If you don't see them as particular individuals with dignity, then you are not living up to your most important moral obligations
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The love ethic is a form of virtue ethics. It holds that ultimately the most important focus of our moral work should be on forming our own characters
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should be on making us into the kind of people who are capable of responding to these needs in others
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rather than just trying to calculate the effects that particular donations are having on the world And in fact one of the really interesting dimensions of our ability to love is that we
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can love even merely future, merely possible people. Think about expectant parents who are
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very excited to bring a new child into the world. They might know nothing of that stranger right now
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but they're capable of imagining the life that they hope for that person and realizing that a
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a person that they will come to love in the future, is going to have dignity and is going to have needs
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that they themselves can provide for right now. Many of the utilitarians think only in terms of expected outcomes
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They think about future people as patients, things that we are doing something to or for
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that will either be successful or it won't be. The love ethic thinks about future generations
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as fellow people with dignity who are going to be engaged with projects
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that we are going to start and they are going to choose whether to continue
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And part of loving them is loving the fact that they might be very, very different to us
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The love ethic is asking us to feel something about the people who are in need, who are around us
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to open ourselves up to have that kind of emotional reaction again, and also giving us a glimmer of hope that maybe our emotions, especially one particular emotion
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might be the path forward for us learning how to build a better society
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where people are genuinely cared for
#Charity & Philanthropy