P
Peter Singer — the drowning child.
If you would ruin your shoes to pull a drowning child from a pond, distance and numbers cannot be what excuses you from the same obligation to a child you cannot see. Everything else follows from refusing to let that argument go.
Meet them — context →
The shared center — held across the tradition
The same money saves twenty lives or one, and which it does is findable.
The founding observation is about variance rather than generosity: interventions differ in cost-effectiveness by orders of magnitude, so the choice of where to give matters more than the decision to give.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Whether the far future outweighs everything happening now.
The longtermist argument is that the number of people who could exist dwarfs the number who do, so reducing existential risk beats treating malaria. It split the movement and the split has never closed.
Go deeper — context →
Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
Ordinary naturalism; the distinctive commitment is to expected value as the tool for deciding what to do
After death
None asserted. The longtermist wing's concern with future generations is about people who will exist, not about anyone surviving death.