Effective altruists call us to apply evidence-based reasoning to maximize the effectiveness of charitable giving. In particular, effective altruists assess causes in terms of their scope, neglectedness, and tractability, and then recommend devoting resources to the cause that scores best on these criteria. So far, effective altruists concerned with animal suffering have seen these criteria as supporting interventions that improve the lives of layer hens, and they now seem to think that these criteria support directing efforts toward broilers. In this paper, however, we argue that the effective altruist framework commits animal advocates to focus at least as much attention—if not more—on fish.

What I seek to do in this paper is to reemphasize what I see as the forgotten or neglected other half of the effective altruist equation. Effective altruists need to take seriously the ways in which their actions contribute to systemic inequality and structural violence. Charitable donation is not enough to create a paradigm shift or stop systemic injustice. In tackling systemic injustice, the ascetic response may allow effective altruists to attack the roots of the problem more directly. Further, the cost-benefit analysis and randomized controlled trials favored by the movement can produce distinctly biased perceptions that leave effective altruists blind to the political dimensions of many types of harm. Balancing ascetic approaches to combating suffering may temper the overzealous focus on cost-effective charities and make room for the support of the causes this narrow focus excludes. Ultimately, this paper defends the basic tenets of effective altruism: that we have a duty to reduce suffering in the world and that we should apply our powers of reason in order to make our labors maximally effective.

Leftwing critiques of philanthropy are not new and so it is unsurprising that the Effective Altruism movement, which regards philanthropy as one of its tools, has been a target in recent years. Similarly, some Effective Altruists have regarded anti-capitalist strategy with suspicion. This essay is an attempt at harmonizing Effective Altruism and the anti-capitalism. My attraction to Effective Altruism and anti-capitalism are motivated by the same desire for a better world and so personal consistency demands reconciliation. More importantly however, I think Effective Altruism will be less effective in realizing its own ends insofar as it fails to recognize that capitalism restricts the good we can do. Conversely, insofar as anti-capitalists fail to recognize the similarity in methods which underlie Effective Altruism thinking about the world, it too risks inefficiency or worse, total failure in replacing capitalism with a more humane economic system. I first argue that Effective Altruism and anti-capitalism are compatible in principle by looking at similarities between Effective Altruist theory and some Marxist writing. I then go on to show that the theoretic compatibility can be mirrored in practice. I demonstrate this by considering and replying to objections to anti-capitalism as they might be raised by Effective Altruists and by replying to objections to Effective Altruism as they might be raised by anti-capitalists. I conclude by suggesting that their reconciliation would lead to better outcomes from the perspective of a proponent of either view. In short, an “Anti-Capitalist Effective Altruism” is not just possible, it’s preferable.

As effective altruists often point out affluent people can do great good for others without having to make significant self-sacrifices. What is the correct moral assessment of patterns of giving that bring about great good and yet carry little in the way of self-sacrifice? Here I will clarify this question, state why it is important, and argue for an answer to it. After sketching the intuitive category of the morally best acts, I argue that self-sacrifice is not a condition that an act must meet to be among the morally best acts. I argue that self-sacrifice is instead a condition that agents must meet to be deserving of the highest praise.

According to the metaethics of R. M. Hare, we determine morality objectively by making a moral judgment, committing to the moral principle underlying that judgment, and then logically extending that moral principle to all relevantly similar cases. This metaethical system called universal prescriptivism had a major impact on Peter Singer, whose arguments for radically improving animal welfare and alleviating global suffering frequently rely on Hare-ian appeals to logical consistency. Hare’s work in metaethics is largely rejected now, but Singer’s popularity has kept Hare’s prescriptivism alive through the many animal welfarists and effective altruists who have borrowed Singer’s style in their own logic-based calls for the obligation to reduce suffering impartially. In this paper, I will describe Hare’s metaethics, show how this has served as Singer’s own metaethics for most of his academic career, and then I will describe a problem for Hare’s system that is particularly relevant to effective altruists who have been influenced by Singer’s early writings and may be repeating the mistakes that Hare bequeathed to Singer.

Some philosophers argue that we should limit procreation—for instance, to one child per person or one child per couple—in order to reduce our aggregate carbon footprint. I provide additional support to the claim that population size is a matter of justice, by explaining that we have a duty of justice towards the current generation of children to pass on to them a sustainable population. But instead of, or, more likely, alongside with, having fewer children in in each family, we could also create families with more than two parents. I explore this possibility by pointing out the ways in which multi-parenting can advance children’s interests: in higher levels of well-being, in non-monopolistic child-rearing, and in a future opportunity to become themselves parents.

Most Act-Utilitarians, including Singer are Permissivists who claim that their theory usually permits abortion. In contrast, a minority, including Hare and Tännsjö, are Restrictionists who assert that Act-Utilitarianism (AU) usually limits abortion. I argue that both Permissivists and Restrictionists have misunderstood AU’s radical implications for abortion: AU entails that abortion is, in most cases in the economically developed world, morally obligatory. According to AU, it is morally obligatory for A to do F in circumstances C if and only if A’s doing F in C produces at least as much total net value as any other action that A could do in C. As mentioned above, AU has generally been seen to be fairly permissive about abortion. A little more exactly, AU is usually thought to hold that abortion is morally permissible in most cases, even during the second and third trimester. But not all AUs are Permissivists. Restrictionists maintain that the value of the future good that the fetus will experience over an entire life is likely to often outweigh the value of the good that its female parent will lose if the fetus is not aborted. Neither Permissivists nor Restrictionists have understood AU’s implications for abortion, at least as it concerns those living in economically developed countries today. First, Restrictionists have failed to recognize the marginal costs that a person in the developed world incurs on future people. One life lived now in the developed world consumes more resources (and contributes more to global warming) than a life lived in the developing world, and in the process makes the prospects of future people considerably worse. Restrictionists ignore these costs when they claim that it is often morally impermissible to abort fetuses. Second, Permissivists have not gone far enough when they have claimed that abortion is morally permissible. Singer and others have argued that we in the developed world ought to redirect much of our wealth to the underdeveloped world because its marginal value is much higher there than here. But the average cost of raising a child in the United States is almost $13,000 per year. Hence, by forgoing a child (including aborting a fetus) one can save and maintain, on average, between 6 and 65 people per year. Thus, AU entails that almost everyone in the developed world who is financially capable of supporting a child should not do so, even if that means aborting a fetus.

Many environmental philosophers have argued that there is an obligation for individuals to reduce their individual carbon footprints. However, few of them have addressed whether this obligation would entail a corresponding duty to limit one’s family size. In this paper, I examine several reasons that one might view procreative acts as an exception to a more general duty to reduce one’s individual greenhouse gas emissions. I conclude that none of these reasons are convincing. Thus, if there is an obligation to reduce one’s unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions, then people should also limit the size of their families when they have the means to do so.

I believe most acts of human procreation are immoral, and I believe this despite also believing in the truth of moral particularism. In this paper I explain why. I argue that procreative acts possess numerous features that, in other contexts, seem typically to operate with negative moral valences. Other things being equal this gives us reason to believe they will operate negatively in the context of procreative acts as well. However, most people’s intuitions represent procreative acts to be morally permissible in most circumstances. Given moral particularism, this would normally be good evidence that procreative acts are indeed morally permissible and that the features that operate negatively elsewhere, simply do not do so in the context of procreative acts in particular. But I argue that we have no good reason to think our intuitions about the ethics of human procreation are accurate. Our most reliable source of insight into the ethics human procreative acts are not our intuitions those acts themselves, but our intuitions about the typical moral valences of the features such acts possess. If that is correct, then acts of human procreation are most likely wrong.

Recently, there has been a concerted effort to shift bioethics’ traditional focus from clinical and research settings to more robustly engage with issues of justice and health equity. This broader bioethics agenda seeks to embed health related issues in wider institutional and cultural contexts and to help develop fair policies. In this paper, we argue that bioethicists who ascribe to the broader bioethics’ agenda could gain valuable insights from the interdisciplinary field of environmental justice and transportation justice, in particular. We then proceed to demonstrate the importance of adopting an intersectional approach to transportation and health. The paper concludes with the argument that intersectional gender inequality is of particular importance when studying both health equity and the unequal distribution of burdens associated with transportation systems in local contexts. This essay is meant to be the beginning of a robust conversation concerning health equity, transportation justice, and intersectional distributions of both benefits and burdens.

The goal of this article is to deepen the concept of emerging urban mobility technology. Drawing on philosophical everyday and urban aesthetics, as well as the postphenomenological strand in the philosophy of technology, we explicate the relation between everyday aesthetic experience and urban mobility commoning. Thus, we shed light on the central role of aesthetics for providing depth to the important experiential and value-driven meaning of contemporary urban mobility. We use the example of self-driving vehicle (SDV), as potentially mundane, public, dynamic, and social urban robots, for expanding the range of perspectives relevant for our relations to urban mobility technology. We present the range of existing SDV conceptualizations and contrast them with experiential and aesthetic understanding of urban mobility. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential undesired consequences from the depolitization of technological development, and potential new pathways for speculative thinking concerning urban mobility futures in responsible innovation processes.

Karachi is considered the economic hub of Pakistan, but it lacks a systematized public transport service. Although the demand-supply gap in the transport sector and the poor quality of this deregulated service affects everyone, it wreaks havoc for women, manifesting in the form of social exclusion. Men can benefit from alternative, (and sometimes cheaper) private modes of transport such as motorbikes, which are socially discouraged for women, making them dependent on their male counterparts. Despite the seriousness of this issue, there is little literature showing how women are differentially deprived of their agency due to gender disparity in society. To better understand this issue, the aim of this paper is to study the cultural foundations of transport poverty to assess their impact on women’s life opportunities. For this purpose, the experiences of women while using public transport have been analysed. The study has identified a variety of reasons why women curtail their mobility. It concludes that the social exclusion of women motivates a greater concern for their freedom of movement and that their needs be adequately reflected in transportation policies.

In recent years, philosophical examinations of automated vehicles have progressed far beyond initial concerns over the ethical decisions that pertain to programming in the event of a crash. In turn, this paper moves in that direction, focusing on the motivations behind efforts to implement driverless vehicles into urban settings. The author argues that the many perceived benefits of these technologies yield a received view of automated vehicles. This position holds that driverless vehicles can solve most if not all urban mobility issues. However, the problem with such an outlook is that it lends itself to transportation planning for automated vehicles, rather than using them as part of planning efforts that could serve urban mobility. Due to this condition, present efforts aimed at improving transportation systems should resist dogmatic thinking. Instead, they should focus on goals that keep topics such a human flourishing, sustainability, and transportation justice firmly in view.

Systems of urban transportation are largely shaped through planning practices. In transport economics, the benefits of infrastructure investments consist mainly of travel time savings calculated using monetary values of time. The economic interpretation of the value of travel time has significantly shaped our urban environment and transportation schemes. However, there is often an underlying assumption of transferability between time and money, which arguably does not sufficiently take into account the specific features of time. In this paper, we analyze the various properties of time as an economic resource using findings in behavioral economics and psychology. Due to limitations in the standard model, it is proposed that an alternative model value should be investigated in which time rather than money is the primary carrier of and the basic features of such a model are outlined. An improved understanding the nature of time as a source of utility puts us in a better position to determine what aspects of time matter. Additionally, the analysis can be applied to further develop modeling where value of time plays a significant role; such as new models for the planning of urban transport.

The concept of hospitality has seen a strong revival in the literature on migration and among pro-migrant activists. However, its meaning, its scope, and the nature of the obligations it imposes remain contested. Open-border advocates see hospitality as a moral principle of openness that should trump nationalist arguments for closure, while nationalists tap into the home analogy and compare the state to a household welcoming migrants as guests, whose stay should accordingly be temporary and marked by gratitude. Some consider hospitality a virtue that should translate into a personal responsibility to open one’s doors to others, while some politicise the concept to apply it to borders and state duties towards migrants. This paper unpacks the various literal and metaphorical meanings of the age-old concept of hospitality, and the shortcomings of its rhetorical uses. It then argues for a conception of hospitality as a principle of care towards displaced people. Hospitality alleviates ordinary obstacles that prevent a functional life in a new environment and allows for home-making practices. It is triggered by the vulnerability created by displacement, i.e., the material, emotional and political harms resulting from the loss of a home.

In this essay I explore how travel and border-crossing for abortion care constitutes a challenge to methodological nationalism, which serves to obscure such experiences from view. Drawing up field research conducted at two abortion clinics in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I also explore some implications of regarding pregnant people who travel for abortion care as a type of migrant, even (but not necessarily) if they are U.S. citizens and legal residents. Finally, I assess how this discursive shift can make important contributions to pandemic and migration ethics.

An increasingly wide array of moral arguments has coalesced in recent work on the question of how to confront the phenomenon of climate change driven displacement. Despite invoking a range of disparate moral principles, arguments addressing displacement across international borders seem to converge on a similar range of policy remedies: expansion of the 1951 Refugee Convention to include ecological refugees, expedited immigration (whether individual or collective), or, for entire political communities that have suffered displacement, even the ceding of sovereign territory. Curiously, this convergence is observable even across the distinction of interest for this paper: the distinction between arguments that proceed in the vein of reparations and arguments that reach their conclusion without invoking any reparations. Even though as a collection they appear to point in the same direction, I argue that non-reparative arguments that seek to address climate change driven displacement have several shortcomings, such that climate justice should be understood to include an indispensable role for reparations.