Hi,

I would like to give a donation to a good cause. Where would I put the money if I was a perfect utilitarian? Should I divide the donation into many causes?

I have tought about a donation to save rainforest via WWF and maybe something that would help factory animals. What are your opinions about theese examples?

Hi veg_77!! Welcome to the forum!

That's a difficult question we would all like to know the best answer to. Have you already made a decision?

If it's a big donation you'd probably want to do some research and give everything to the same charity to maximise expected value.

See this:http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/risk-averse.html.
And this:http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/why-expected-value.html

If not you'd still want to do some research, but you could make a donation first, then learn more about effectiveness and use that for your next donation. Choosing charities is a frequent discussion topic here and in the effective altruism community (hint: it's worth getting involved, if you aren't yet ). There's plenty of information on effectiveness of charities and I'm not sure how familiar you are with this so I'm just gonna mention some basics:

GiveWell.org - Evaluates charities and at the moment recommend some global poverty charities. Give Directly is their #1
EffectiveAnimalActivism.org (soon to be Animal Charity Evaluators) - Their current recommendation: The Humane League

And don't give it to WWF (that's my opinion). You most likely wouldn't be reducing animal suffering. For the reason why, read this: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html

Hi Sören!

Thanks for your interesting reply. You really might have made a change to how I think about wild animals and their suffering. Maybe donating to WWF might not be such a good idea? I would really appreciate discussion and opinions for both sides...

Hi veg_77

I agree with Sören about not donating to WWF. If you want to help factory-farmed animals, I'd actually first recommend Effective Animal Activism itself, which is fundraising currently. Or if you prefer, donate to one of its recommended charities.

I think there may be slightly more impact from donating to a new charity called Animal Ethics, which is the first charity I know of to tackle the issue of wild-animal suffering from a perspective that fully appreciates the extent of suffering in nature rather than merely trying to preserve natural suffering as much as possible. For more info on how to donate, I can send you an email if you're interested.

Finally, if you're into speculative causes, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute may be worth considering. I'm actually rather uncertain about the sign of its impact, but I currently incline slightly toward it being positive, and I think its work is extremely important.

If you'd like to discuss wild-animal suffering or anything else further, let me know! Feel free to connect on Facebook.

Thanks Brian, I wanted to add that I agree with everything that has been said. Especially that if you delve into these things further, donating to one of the charities Brian mentions instead of the 'official' recommendations I mentioned seems like a reasonable conclusion you could arrive at!

Brian, is Foundational Research Institute looking for donations?

Foundational Research Institute can accept donations, but we're not advertising ourselves at this point because we haven't really started. The other Swiss collaborators are busy with other things in the near term, and I'm reluctant to request donations for my own work because right now I'm studying very widely with as few external demands as possible. If I felt accountable to donors, it would constrain my ability to explore new topics without pressure to produce output.