“These ideas aren’t wholly original to us or the effective altruism community. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached about a version of earning to giv

“These ideas aren’t wholly original to us or the effective altruism community. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached about a version of earning to give in the 18th century. He advocated the principles: “Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can.” And he even caveated this advice with sensible constraints, saying in a sermon that we shouldn’t work so hard that we hurt ourselves and that we should “gain all we can without hurting our neighbour.”” “For this reason, many people think it’s our top recommendation for the majority of people. But it’s not.” “Might you do harm in a high-earning career? Yes, some high-earning careers can do a lot of harm. We don’t recommend taking careers you think might be harmful in order to donate. First, if the harm done by the work offsets the good done by your donations — including both direct and indirect harms — then that’s clearly overall negative for the world and bad by any lights. But even if you think the donations might outweigh the costs of a harmful career, we think doing harm “for the greater good” is almost never a good idea. And if you think you might be the exception, you’re almost certainly not. This is for many reasons, so we’ve written a separate article about why not to take a harmful career in order to do more good.”