This TED Talk features moral philosopher and writer Will McCaskill, recorded live at TED 2018.

This is a graph that represents the economic history of human civilization.

There's not much going on, is there?

For the vast majority of human history,

pretty much everyone lived on the equivalent of one dollar per day

and not much changed.

But then something extraordinary happened.

The scientific and industrial revolutions,

and the basically flat graph you just saw,

transforms into this.

What this graph means is that in terms of power to change the world,

we live at an unprecedented time in human history.

And I believe our ethical understanding hasn't yet caught up with this fact.

The scientific and industrial revolutions transformed both our understanding of the world

and our ability to alter it. What we need is an ethical revolution so that we can work out. How do we use this tremendous

bounty of resources to improve the world? For the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have developed

a philosophy and research program that we call effective altruism. It tries to respond to these radical changes in our world,

uses evidence and careful reasoning to try to answer this question.

How can we do the most good?

Now, there are many issues you've got to address if you want to tackle this problem,

whether to do good through your charity or your career

or your political engagement,

...