'Beneficentrism', by Richard Yetter Chappell

I'm a big fan of your philosophical writing and your attempts to philosophically defend and refine utilitarianism and effective altruism. I also really like your more general idea here of pushing people to think less about avoiding wrongdoing and towards thinking more about rightdoing.

I think one thing I'd wonder is what it means to make something a "central life project" and what kind of demandingness this implies. Is GWWC membership sufficient? Is 30min of volunteering a week sufficient? This is the hard part I think about satisficing views (even though I personally am definitely a satisficier when it comes to ethics).

I'm also curious what you mean by "[y]ou could accept any number of views about partiality and/or priority" since I think this actually runs counter to one of the core tenets of what I think of effective altruism, which is the radical empathy/impartiality of extending our care to strangers, nonhuman animals, future people, etc. In fact, I often think you gain a lot more by convincing people to adopt the radical empathy and "per dollar effectiveness maximization" views of effective altruism even if they then don't maximize their efforts / make EA a central life project. That is, I think someone devoting 1% of their income to The Humane League will create more benefit for general welfare than another person devoting 10% of their income to charities that laypeople typically think of when they think they are helping the general welfare.

I think the main way to rescue this is to insist strongly on the radical impartiality part but not insist on making it the sole thing a person does with their resources, or even their resources set aside to philanthropy.

I like the idea, though I think its funny that we go from "It'd be helfpul to have a snappy name for this view," to another opaque and easily confused made up philosophical term.  Maybe 'Helping other peopleism'. 

From the links you posted, the most powerful argument for effective altruism to me was this:

"(Try completing the phrase "no matter..." for this one.  What exactly is the cost of avoiding inefficiency?  "No matter whether you would rather support a different cause that did less good?" Cue the world's tiniest violin.)"

Unless someone had a kind of limited egotism (that perhaps favored only themselves and their friends, or themselves and their family, or themselves and their country, etc.), or a sadist, I don't see how they could disagree that making the world a better place in the best way possible is the moral thing to do.

Here is one criticism of EA that I have found powerful:

"Since many people are driven by emotion when donating to charity, pushing them to be more judicious might backfire. Overly analytical donors might act with so much self-control that they end up giving less to charity."

However, many of the charities that one wouldn't give to might have been harmful. So while one might miss opportunities by being analytical, they would also avoid mistakes. Also, it would be desirable to know what actions are helpful and for what reasons, so such actions can be sustained and not just happen some of the time by chance. Sustaining those actions would be better over the long term.

This is a nice concept, and it reminds me of the beginning of Nate Soares' Replacing Guilt book/blog post series. Specifically, the idea "you're allowed to fight for something," featured on the main page. Both Beneficentrism and Soares' early posts are focused on convincing people that there are goals worth achieving. Beneficentrism promotes a specific goal (general welfare), while Soares is more generally saying that it's OK to pick a goal and try to achieve it, but the tone feels pretty similar to me.