I know I’m 5 years late on this but on the offchance someone sees this, I just want to mention I found Yvain’s/Scott Alexander’s essay on the subject incredibly useful*.
The tl;dr: Use universalizability for your actions moreso than direct utilitarianism. His suggestion is 10% for various reasons, mainly being a round number that’s easy to coordinate around and have people give that exact number. Once you’ve done that, the problems that would be solved by everyone donating 10% of their income to efficient charities are the responsibility of other people who are donating less than that amount (I’d also suggest trying to spread the message as much as possible, as I’m doing here).
Of course it’d be better to donate more of your income. I would say that if feeling bad about donating 10% causes you to donate more, then… donate more. If it just causes you to feel like you’ll never be good enough so you don’t even try, it’s useless and you’d do more good by considering yourself completely absolved. 10% is also incredibly useful for convincing people who aren’t already convinced of unlimited utilitarian duty to donate to efficient charity.
I know I’m 5 years late on this but on the offchance someone sees this, I just want to mention I found Yvain’s/Scott Alexander’s essay on the subject incredibly useful*.
The tl;dr: Use universalizability for your actions moreso than direct utilitarianism. His suggestion is 10% for various reasons, mainly being a round number that’s easy to coordinate around and have people give that exact number. Once you’ve done that, the problems that would be solved by everyone donating 10% of their income to efficient charities are the responsibility of other people who are donating less than that amount (I’d also suggest trying to spread the message as much as possible, as I’m doing here).
Of course it’d be better to donate more of your income. I would say that if feeling bad about donating 10% causes you to donate more, then… donate more. If it just causes you to feel like you’ll never be good enough so you don’t even try, it’s useless and you’d do more good by considering yourself completely absolved. 10% is also incredibly useful for convincing people who aren’t already convinced of unlimited utilitarian duty to donate to efficient charity.
*http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/