Beneficiary group

One way to classify cause areas is by their beneficiary group, i.e. the group of entities the cause area helps. For example, global poverty alleviation targets the subset of humans in poverty, animal welfare activism targets non-human animals, and AI safety potentially helps all sentient beings.

In trying to find new cause areas, one might look for new beneficiary groups (“expanding the moral circle”) or look for specific subgroups within existing groups (e.g. depressed people as a subgroup of present people, or wild animals as a subgroup of all animals).

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