Peter Singer has come up with what struck me at the time as an obvious proposition, namely that we should maximize the good we can reasonably produce in the world with the means that are available to us. He rightly thinks that that should impact on the kind of work we do, and that it should also impact on the kinds of charities we support, and the amount of resources we donate towards their work. He thinks that we often do lousy jobs when we donate money to charitable causes. One of his examples is David Geffen giving 100 mio US$ to some performing arts place in Manhattan. I always held the view, for instance, that the kinds of research questions we decide to address are decisions that are not ethically neutral. If thru my work I can contribute toward others living better lives and I choose to instead investigate issues that are bound not to achieve that, I would make a choice that is ethically problematic.
So far, this all seems uncontroversial, or so you would have thought. Since then folks, often on the political left, have castigated Singer for allegedly individualising the problem of world poverty. Others have claimed that his proposition is a feel-good activity for white well-off folks with too much time on their hands.
Particular scorn was reserved for one of Singer's poster boys, who apparently works for a nasty bank and then donates a lot of the money he makes there to Singer-approved good causes. Apparently this shows what's wrong with this effective altruism thing Singer is promoting. The criticism is directed squarely at the guy's damage while 'on the job' so to speak, not so much at his donating his wealth to good causes.
I would be sympathetic to the argument about the banking guy, if the premise is correct that his day job causes more damage than he manages to fix with his donations. I don't, of course, know whether that is actually the case, neither do Singer's critics... nor does the banking guy. This is another sore point where Singer critics get excited, claiming that we cannot quantify what's best in any case most of the time. That's theoretically probably a sound criticism, but it misses the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is that the world will be made a better place by people making conscious choices that translate into them donating more to quality charitable causes aimed at improving human well-being (ie projects that demonstrably achieve those objectives) than if those same people chose not to do so. It really is that simple. Them considering over time how to alleviate the problem of poverty most effectively by donating deliberately toward projects that are efficient at lifting people out of poverty is a thing to be applauded.
A side effect of this 'considering possible projects to support' will inevitably be that some or many of those same donors consider how we got to having these problems in the first place. With a bit of luck they might decide that taking political action to change some of the economic rules of the game is what is called for. Their time spent on achieving this could also be a form of effective altruism.
Singer is motivating more people to think about these issues.
Oh, but here comes the other side's bigger picture argument. They are saying that by individualizing moral responsibility and reducing it unjustifiably to a matter of individual altruism we are missing the global structural injustices that give rise to these sorts of problems. You know, the kind of stuff Thomas Pogge, Amartya Sen and others like them have been droning on about for such a long time.
This criticism misses its target, at least to my mind. There is no doubt that Pogge's analysis of the harmful consequences of the world economic order as we know it is broadly correct. Nothing stops anyone to invest time and resources toward changing those rules of the world economic order, especially if we have decided - on reflection - that this would contribute the most toward changing the amount of poverty in the world. However, it seems fair to note that we have had such writings and demonstrations for about a century, and yet they're not quite motivating people to rise up to change the world.
So, frankly, such criticism more often than not comes from people that have done nothing much other than to go on and on about how bad capitalism is, without practically doing anything to improve the living conditions of the world's poor. I do think Singer and his crowd have done one better than that. There is nothing inherent in effective altruism that prevents people from motivating toward radical changes of the world economic order. For that reason I do not understand why critics seem to think it's an either-or type proposition.
