Consequentialists: Who is the greatest person alive?

[Jebus]

First question: If one defines the greatest human beings as s/he who has had caused the greatest pleasure to suffering ratio, who would you choose?

Second question: more complex question, who would you choose if someone's ability to do good were factored into the equation. In other words, a person like Soros or Gates may be in a privileged position to do good but is he doing as much as he could/should. In the second question, please note the person you think is punching the hardest above his weight:

[Zelur]

Hm... Interesting Question. Probably Gary Yourofsky.

[Jebus]

Hm... Interesting Question. Probably Gary Yourofsky.

I would have to agree.

[brimstoneSalad]

It's difficult to evaluate, since we also have to think about time and chaos -- the probability of payoff.

Ingrid Newkirk was earlier on the scene, and PETA actually sponsored Gary, giving him the resources to do what he did early on in his lecture career. If Gary gets credit for people going vegan, doesn't Newkirk get credit for making Gary?

Gary has no doubt been influential in many places, and helped inspire many people to go vegan, but there are important questions to ask.

-How much does Gary owe to PETA? And how well were those resources spent (what's the opportunity cost)?
Convincing people to go vegan is great, but convincing them to cut back on meat consumption is much easier (costs less) and may do more overall good.

-Was Gary's popularity more of a fluke? It seems to have depended on one of his speeches going viral, which is a hard matter to predict. How much credit do we get for being *lucky*?
To give an example, I could play a ten million dollar lottery today, and promise to give all funds I win to Mercy for animals.
Am I really a better person for winning than losing?

These things both inform what we could call Gary's "moral debt", if we're using a debt based mechanism of normalization.
E.g. if somebody expends resources to educate you that pay off in your going vegan, you have to first pay forward a comparable expenditure (in addition to going vegan) before truly being neutral going forward.

Second question: more complex question, who would you choose if someone's ability to do good were factored into the equation.

I think it's rather the same question.

For example, if Gates hadn't created Windows, somebody else would have done something similar and become rich instead. What would have been the likely opportunity cost? Would the other person have been better or worse than Gates?

It's the same sort of question we have to ask of PETA's resources and the probability of Gary becoming popular.

One of the things that makes it so difficult to evaluate these situations is the inability to know exactly what would have, or could have, happened otherwise if the subject didn't exist.
"No man is an island"; we're cogs in a very elaborate machine of causal chains of ideas and resources.

The often crucial question seems to be "how efficient is this particular cog, with regard to moral output, given input?"

If we ignore input and look at output only, then we really just need to ask who is at the top of that chain of causality (and still alive, as your question frames).
Oldest people in the animal rights/welfare movement?
Probably Peter Singer, who can claim a substantial influence over the movement going back to the 70s, and whose book influenced Newkirk to start PETA.

http://www.peta.org/about-peta/learn-ab ... iberation/

It was then that I saw a need for an organization that would educate people about animal suffering and work to win their basic rights. That year I started PETA.

Peter Singer -> Ingrid Newkirk -> Gary Yourofsky

Or maybe Richard D. Ryder, who is even older, and coined Speciesism, leading to the writing of Animal Liberation:

The book was reviewed by Peter Singer in 1973 in The New York Review of Books, in which he argued that it was a call for the foundation of an animal liberation movement. The article led the New York Review to commission a book from Singer, published as Animal Liberation (1975).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D ... Speciesism

These causal chains are not hard to follow. We'd just have to follow it until we reach somebody who is dead.