While this is all correct philosophically - Singer's point is a good one, even if he overdid it himself and got just a bit heavily into eugenics as well - I think you're not reckoning enough with the fact that these assholes *are the EA movement in practice*. (I'm speaking here as someone who's closely followed these assholes for over a decade now.)
EA as it is is what happens if a neoreactionary gets a dictionary and looks up "altruism" - often literally. There was a front-paged post on the EA Forum just recently putting forward race science (and citing Richard Lynn) as effective altruism. It got heavily upvoted.
The answer to the observably terrible reality is not to proffer the brochures harder and say that's not *real* EA. Because it is, in the same way Creflo Dollar really is Christianity in observable real-world practice.
You can shout at people that they're looking at the clear facts on the ground wrong, but the bad Christians are not the observers' problem to fix, and the bad EAs aren't the observers' problem to fix.
If I recall correctly (I read it a long time ago) what Peter Singer wrote was that there should be the option for people to end their lives or the lives of profoundly disabled children if there was no way they would do anything but live in misery, a stance that he took as a utilitarian. This piece is not about that but just saying "eugenics" is not really accurate. In any case saying that people are corrupting the basic idea of EA for terrible ends is the same thing I am saying above.
I’m not sure that you can call the bad Christians Christianity in practice. It’s just too diverse a group. I might agree, though, that the EA crowd seems to be more uniformly awful right now--at least the parts I hear about.
Irrespective of that, I think his argument is meant to be, or perhaps better said I take his argument as being, that we should please not use these jerks as an excuse to not be altruistic in a straightforwardly effective manner... because you know there are people out there that will use the silliness of the de-facto voices of EA as an out to not actually do anything worthwhile for the world.
Good article, though a bit belabored. Re the final question about changing the system vs. charity, the applicable quotation is “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist." Of course they meant that in a bad way; and it doesn't mean you shouldn't feed the poor. The quote is from Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, a liberation theologian.
By the rubric of effective altruism, pushing for political change is of much greater value than offering charity. It just gets the wrong people uncomfortable. It's no surprise they crucified Jesus, preaching as he did.
EA appears to be rife with contradictions. It conflates or confuses altruism with charity. Charity, in the practice of the real world, is a sideline activity. Altruism, in contrast, is a characteristic daily behavior of any good human community. It is not a charitable giving distinct from routine “business”, rather it is a fundamental aspect of community behavior.
The “effective” part of EA reflects an effort to reduce altruism to narrow measurement (ala Bill Gates’ metrics) which removes all the complexity (including) politics of the community. Reminiscent of how the Supreme court has narrowed the legally acceptable goals of public corporations to profit measured in money.
EA is simply another face of neoliberalism. And not a persuasive one.
Not convinced? Think the difference between mollifying the effects of poverty and removing the structural supports for the reproduction of poverty.
Your statement about the need for humility is spot on, and most of what you say is correct. However, my introduction to Singer being a Pinker book left me wondering how good the philosophy could actually be. That economists will argue for days that marginal gains in capitalism are the most effective way of helping the most people and will hold up reams of studies claiming to prove it says to me that the measurement part is too easy to derail and allows people to ignore values-based giving and make bad decisions based on bad data. We should always strive to be better, but the nonprofit world is so rife with poor metrics and data analysis that effective altruism may just be a cover for those who don't wish to have values.
I used to attend a Quaker meeting where we met with local Mennonites and discussed their philosophy of "Live simply that others may simply live." Living simply meant simple clothes, because caring about clothes and spending money on it was vanity and not what God wanted. God would prefer that money, time, and energy be spent in helping others and seeking better connection to and sensitivity to guidance from Him. There were Quakers who lived so cheaply that they didn't owe any taxes, because they objected to their taxes being used for war. I had an evangelical Christian friend who also dressed simply and lived in a poor neighborhood to have more money to help her neighbors.
I admire these people and find them appealing and humane. The EA people scare me. A devotion to "efficiency" and the intellectual constructs and arguments involved in deciding what is most "efficient" always seems to lead to technocratic callousness. Theoretically, it should be possible to be efficiently altruistic, but, in practice, as soon as some maximization metric comes into play, much that is human and humble and compassionate seems to leak out.
What if your next door neighbor is in need, but is not the most needy? Your heart (which Quakers might say is God's leading) might say to help him. EA seems to say the opposite. I don't think I'll ever be able to get past that.
As you point out where a lot of the trouble arises is when people take it upon themselves to calculate what exactly will produce the greater good, a process that is very open to being warped.
There’s a little bit of narcissism inherent with calling your generosity altruism. I read a piece about misdirected charity from a more libertarian POV the other day that I don’t fully agree with. But between that and your piece, I think I’ll exclusively donate to animal shelters from now on.
I came to comment specifically to mention the problems with trying to measure "efficiency" in altruistic work. I've spent the last 4 years working in a tech-adjacent nonprofit, watching some really good programs get the ax because they "didn't scale". But also, my co-workers and I have been working to unionize for the last two years. We finally got recognized and then spent more than a year being told that every single wage or benefit improvement we asked for was impossible because it would increase overhead, and all major charity rating organizations put heavy weight on low overhead. So just remember the next time you visit Charity Navigator or whatever, the worse a charity treats their employees the higher they score. Overhead, in this case, is short for paying your employees a living wage.
We need to support grassroots groups in communities of color and youth to change the world. I leave charity to others. I support the Movement Voter Project which has been doing that since 2016 with good success. I do that not out of a sense if altruism, but because I want to live in a different world that us based on justice not charity.
I think I agree with you but feel this is insufficient at the same time. The very basic principles of EA are sound but I don't feel like you can just ignore the rotten edifices that have been built on top of it.
MacAskill may well be a well meaning guy who practices what he preaches but he still double thought his way into buying a £12m mansion for the movement.
So yes look for the charities that will use your money most effectively. But never let that search for efficiency be more important than the humanity that drives it. Because that's where so many of the arseholes went wrong.
I have never read Macaskil--nor do I feel obligated to!--but "buying a $12m mansion to talk about saving the poor" seems completely opposite of the message that Peter Singer was trying to get across.
Swings and roundabouts really. The central message is the same but they both go too far in their own way. Nothing I've seen from MacAskill (though I'm hardly an authority on him) has thrown up red flags the way Singer's flirtation with eugenics did. But he's far more responsible for driving the idea away from the good core concepts.
I hope you'll take some time to read the critics of Singer's advocacy for eugenics - literally saying the world would be a better place if parents aborted all disabled fetuses, though he always follows it by saying nice things about actual disabled people. And then consider how Singer's EA contains concealed eugenic principles - of course a world without disability would be better. While always saying nice things about actual disabled people.
He's learned to cloak his earlier eugenics first in animal rights and now in EA, and it seems like his efforts to wash his reputation has worked. It certainly hasn't been a dealbreaker for most.
Mentioned this in another comment but I don't think just saying "eugenics" gives a fair picture of what Singer was saying, and in any case although I know that position of his gets a lot of attention, that is not why I originally read him or got interested in him and is not what this post is about. Also I think saying "EA is about eugenics" is not true at all. Maybe you don't like Singer but those are two separate topics. One of the points I'm trying to make here is: separate the good ideas from the people that you may or may not like.
I am skeptical that there are good ideas here, beyond the quotidian "do good things! use data!" Sure, if that's it, then that's fine, but that's not what's going on here. I don't think you can simply ignore his root positions on eugenics and then say that his methodology for determining what's best in the future isn't poisoned by that root position.
"One might reasonably argue that these efforts are more likely to be effective without the baggage associated with the charismatic Princeton philosopher building arguments on the backs of people with disabilities. This is likely true. However, while efforts to improve charitable giving might be better off without attacking disabled people, Peter Singer almost certainly wouldn’t enjoy his current status without of his controversial views. There is little fame in arguing to save the lives of disabled people. Anyone can do that.
By removing the attacks on disabled people, Singer’s ideas become milquetoast, almost mainstream liberal platitudes about being nice to animals and using data in decision-making. To put it another way, in so far as effective altruism is compatible with disability rights, it offers nothing new. And in so far as it is new, it is not compatible.
This may well be why Singer so frequently uses disabled people as examples when advocating for animal rights or effective altruism. To say that one should care about impact in charitable giving is banal, barely worthy of a book deal, let alone a career as a celebrity philosopher. Even advocating against arts funding or for limits on animal testing could be dismissed as mere tinkering, not worthy of the attention and admiration upon which Singer has made his career. It is only with the additional element of taking away from people with disabilities that these ideas become revolutionary. To kill is to show that one means it. "
So either EA is so anodyne as to be irrelevant or it requires taking the brave hard positions that end up in eugenics. I don't see a third way, but perhaps I'm too shallow a thinker, just mad at Singer, and not able to see the ideas without the person. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that engagement with these ideas end up calling for euthanasia, for stripping away expensive resources from people like my son, in exchange for more effective forms of managing the future. Perhaps it is true that I can't look at ideas with their origins in a man who thinks the world would be undeniably, indisputably, better, if my son wasn't born. But perhaps it's also true that the people who can afford to be unemotional are those with the least at stake. Perhaps all these things. We'll never know.
I don't actually think you can separate his ideas from him, unless "use data" and "Be nice to animals" are the ideas. Which are not, you know, exciting ideas. It's the eugenics that gets him the big bucks. Silicon Valley loves eugenics.
Or, if readers would like to not be gross and eugenics-y, they can give money to organizations that help disabled folks, seeing as Peter Singer advocated that disabled lives are worth less and parents of disabled infants should be free to murder them, and they can read about Harrier McBryde's Johnson's interactions with Singer instead. Just a *real* EA kind of suggestion.
I would say that Singer not entertaining abandonment of capitalism while hosting a ritzy party to promote EA is exactly the problem with EA. Without the non-profit tax incentives, I doubt he would care at all. Since we know that non-profits are by and large ineffective in executing "the most good" or even any good, then that's a secondary indictment here.
Additionally, I don't see EA ever reducing the cost of housing, providing public healthcare, fixing infrastructure, etc. because the premise of EA is ultimately a tax break for large shareholders. If you fix all of the problems, then what would you ever donate to? Nevermind the political muck of trying to fight against the more fascistic elements of capitalism within the bourgeoisie controlled State.
I just don't find EA to have a feasible materialist backing right now. If it did have one, we wouldn't be debating on the individual, neoliberal contributions, we'd be recognizing these things as collective problems that require collective solutions, not nickle and diming the general public while sipping cocktails at a fancy soiree.
Taxes, progressive taxation, annihilation of tax havens and conduit countries, modernization of legal infrastructure and framework to make tax avoidance impossible. Anything else is fluff and fancy PR.
That's the trouble with anecdotal examples of so many things that happen because of SBF or Kanye or some other usually famous rich dude...i.e. what the media loves to report. What would make this article rock would be if there was a sprinkle of actual data or research. Something like "947 of 1000 EA acts resulted in the positive outcomes intended, 33 were a wash or questionable, and 20ish were blatant rip-offs and/or virtue signaling marketing exercises". Maybe I'm over-optimistic.
Otherwise...SPOT ON! Babies good. Bathwater not so much.
I have always associated Peter Singer with animal welfare, yet he now seems to focus purely on human welfare, which is also good, yet seems part of a general shift away from recognizing our moral responsibilities to non-humans. I get the impressions that when people get to the big time, like Singer, they need to frame their consciences around the human to maintain their influence. It's a trend I've seen deepening for at least two decades.
While this is all correct philosophically - Singer's point is a good one, even if he overdid it himself and got just a bit heavily into eugenics as well - I think you're not reckoning enough with the fact that these assholes *are the EA movement in practice*. (I'm speaking here as someone who's closely followed these assholes for over a decade now.)
EA as it is is what happens if a neoreactionary gets a dictionary and looks up "altruism" - often literally. There was a front-paged post on the EA Forum just recently putting forward race science (and citing Richard Lynn) as effective altruism. It got heavily upvoted.
The answer to the observably terrible reality is not to proffer the brochures harder and say that's not *real* EA. Because it is, in the same way Creflo Dollar really is Christianity in observable real-world practice.
You can shout at people that they're looking at the clear facts on the ground wrong, but the bad Christians are not the observers' problem to fix, and the bad EAs aren't the observers' problem to fix.
edit: my own writeup on EA for centrist finance readers: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/06/ineffective-altruism-ftx-and-the-future-robot-apocalypse/
If I recall correctly (I read it a long time ago) what Peter Singer wrote was that there should be the option for people to end their lives or the lives of profoundly disabled children if there was no way they would do anything but live in misery, a stance that he took as a utilitarian. This piece is not about that but just saying "eugenics" is not really accurate. In any case saying that people are corrupting the basic idea of EA for terrible ends is the same thing I am saying above.
Singer has not only said it repeatedly, he said it while promoting effective altruism https://ncd.gov/newsroom/04232015
I’m not sure that you can call the bad Christians Christianity in practice. It’s just too diverse a group. I might agree, though, that the EA crowd seems to be more uniformly awful right now--at least the parts I hear about.
Irrespective of that, I think his argument is meant to be, or perhaps better said I take his argument as being, that we should please not use these jerks as an excuse to not be altruistic in a straightforwardly effective manner... because you know there are people out there that will use the silliness of the de-facto voices of EA as an out to not actually do anything worthwhile for the world.
oh sure, I agree. I mean, I'm nitpicking Hamilton's post in my comment. Main thing is to do some good, and think a bit first.
Good article, though a bit belabored. Re the final question about changing the system vs. charity, the applicable quotation is “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist." Of course they meant that in a bad way; and it doesn't mean you shouldn't feed the poor. The quote is from Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, a liberation theologian.
Well done.
By the rubric of effective altruism, pushing for political change is of much greater value than offering charity. It just gets the wrong people uncomfortable. It's no surprise they crucified Jesus, preaching as he did.
EA appears to be rife with contradictions. It conflates or confuses altruism with charity. Charity, in the practice of the real world, is a sideline activity. Altruism, in contrast, is a characteristic daily behavior of any good human community. It is not a charitable giving distinct from routine “business”, rather it is a fundamental aspect of community behavior.
The “effective” part of EA reflects an effort to reduce altruism to narrow measurement (ala Bill Gates’ metrics) which removes all the complexity (including) politics of the community. Reminiscent of how the Supreme court has narrowed the legally acceptable goals of public corporations to profit measured in money.
EA is simply another face of neoliberalism. And not a persuasive one.
Not convinced? Think the difference between mollifying the effects of poverty and removing the structural supports for the reproduction of poverty.
Your statement about the need for humility is spot on, and most of what you say is correct. However, my introduction to Singer being a Pinker book left me wondering how good the philosophy could actually be. That economists will argue for days that marginal gains in capitalism are the most effective way of helping the most people and will hold up reams of studies claiming to prove it says to me that the measurement part is too easy to derail and allows people to ignore values-based giving and make bad decisions based on bad data. We should always strive to be better, but the nonprofit world is so rife with poor metrics and data analysis that effective altruism may just be a cover for those who don't wish to have values.
I used to attend a Quaker meeting where we met with local Mennonites and discussed their philosophy of "Live simply that others may simply live." Living simply meant simple clothes, because caring about clothes and spending money on it was vanity and not what God wanted. God would prefer that money, time, and energy be spent in helping others and seeking better connection to and sensitivity to guidance from Him. There were Quakers who lived so cheaply that they didn't owe any taxes, because they objected to their taxes being used for war. I had an evangelical Christian friend who also dressed simply and lived in a poor neighborhood to have more money to help her neighbors.
I admire these people and find them appealing and humane. The EA people scare me. A devotion to "efficiency" and the intellectual constructs and arguments involved in deciding what is most "efficient" always seems to lead to technocratic callousness. Theoretically, it should be possible to be efficiently altruistic, but, in practice, as soon as some maximization metric comes into play, much that is human and humble and compassionate seems to leak out.
What if your next door neighbor is in need, but is not the most needy? Your heart (which Quakers might say is God's leading) might say to help him. EA seems to say the opposite. I don't think I'll ever be able to get past that.
Quakers are cool.
As you point out where a lot of the trouble arises is when people take it upon themselves to calculate what exactly will produce the greater good, a process that is very open to being warped.
There’s a little bit of narcissism inherent with calling your generosity altruism. I read a piece about misdirected charity from a more libertarian POV the other day that I don’t fully agree with. But between that and your piece, I think I’ll exclusively donate to animal shelters from now on.
I came to comment specifically to mention the problems with trying to measure "efficiency" in altruistic work. I've spent the last 4 years working in a tech-adjacent nonprofit, watching some really good programs get the ax because they "didn't scale". But also, my co-workers and I have been working to unionize for the last two years. We finally got recognized and then spent more than a year being told that every single wage or benefit improvement we asked for was impossible because it would increase overhead, and all major charity rating organizations put heavy weight on low overhead. So just remember the next time you visit Charity Navigator or whatever, the worse a charity treats their employees the higher they score. Overhead, in this case, is short for paying your employees a living wage.
We need to support grassroots groups in communities of color and youth to change the world. I leave charity to others. I support the Movement Voter Project which has been doing that since 2016 with good success. I do that not out of a sense if altruism, but because I want to live in a different world that us based on justice not charity.
I think I agree with you but feel this is insufficient at the same time. The very basic principles of EA are sound but I don't feel like you can just ignore the rotten edifices that have been built on top of it.
MacAskill may well be a well meaning guy who practices what he preaches but he still double thought his way into buying a £12m mansion for the movement.
So yes look for the charities that will use your money most effectively. But never let that search for efficiency be more important than the humanity that drives it. Because that's where so many of the arseholes went wrong.
I have never read Macaskil--nor do I feel obligated to!--but "buying a $12m mansion to talk about saving the poor" seems completely opposite of the message that Peter Singer was trying to get across.
Swings and roundabouts really. The central message is the same but they both go too far in their own way. Nothing I've seen from MacAskill (though I'm hardly an authority on him) has thrown up red flags the way Singer's flirtation with eugenics did. But he's far more responsible for driving the idea away from the good core concepts.
I hope you'll take some time to read the critics of Singer's advocacy for eugenics - literally saying the world would be a better place if parents aborted all disabled fetuses, though he always follows it by saying nice things about actual disabled people. And then consider how Singer's EA contains concealed eugenic principles - of course a world without disability would be better. While always saying nice things about actual disabled people.
He's learned to cloak his earlier eugenics first in animal rights and now in EA, and it seems like his efforts to wash his reputation has worked. It certainly hasn't been a dealbreaker for most.
Here's the piece I tend to share first, a bit out of date now, but the essential place to start: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html
I've enjoyed your work this year. Thanks for any seconds of time you're willing to give to this.
Mentioned this in another comment but I don't think just saying "eugenics" gives a fair picture of what Singer was saying, and in any case although I know that position of his gets a lot of attention, that is not why I originally read him or got interested in him and is not what this post is about. Also I think saying "EA is about eugenics" is not true at all. Maybe you don't like Singer but those are two separate topics. One of the points I'm trying to make here is: separate the good ideas from the people that you may or may not like.
I am skeptical that there are good ideas here, beyond the quotidian "do good things! use data!" Sure, if that's it, then that's fine, but that's not what's going on here. I don't think you can simply ignore his root positions on eugenics and then say that his methodology for determining what's best in the future isn't poisoned by that root position.
You should read McBryde Johnson (https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KE0.DPy-.t4ZXgeXG75iY&smid=url-share) before talking about Peter Singer, but for the sake of this blog post, I'd like to suggest this piece instead: http://nosmag.org/effective-altruism-and-disability-rights-are-incompatible-peter-singer/
Here's the nut:
"One might reasonably argue that these efforts are more likely to be effective without the baggage associated with the charismatic Princeton philosopher building arguments on the backs of people with disabilities. This is likely true. However, while efforts to improve charitable giving might be better off without attacking disabled people, Peter Singer almost certainly wouldn’t enjoy his current status without of his controversial views. There is little fame in arguing to save the lives of disabled people. Anyone can do that.
By removing the attacks on disabled people, Singer’s ideas become milquetoast, almost mainstream liberal platitudes about being nice to animals and using data in decision-making. To put it another way, in so far as effective altruism is compatible with disability rights, it offers nothing new. And in so far as it is new, it is not compatible.
This may well be why Singer so frequently uses disabled people as examples when advocating for animal rights or effective altruism. To say that one should care about impact in charitable giving is banal, barely worthy of a book deal, let alone a career as a celebrity philosopher. Even advocating against arts funding or for limits on animal testing could be dismissed as mere tinkering, not worthy of the attention and admiration upon which Singer has made his career. It is only with the additional element of taking away from people with disabilities that these ideas become revolutionary. To kill is to show that one means it. "
So either EA is so anodyne as to be irrelevant or it requires taking the brave hard positions that end up in eugenics. I don't see a third way, but perhaps I'm too shallow a thinker, just mad at Singer, and not able to see the ideas without the person. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that engagement with these ideas end up calling for euthanasia, for stripping away expensive resources from people like my son, in exchange for more effective forms of managing the future. Perhaps it is true that I can't look at ideas with their origins in a man who thinks the world would be undeniably, indisputably, better, if my son wasn't born. But perhaps it's also true that the people who can afford to be unemotional are those with the least at stake. Perhaps all these things. We'll never know.
trouble with Singer is that his good ideas are better than he is
I don't actually think you can separate his ideas from him, unless "use data" and "Be nice to animals" are the ideas. Which are not, you know, exciting ideas. It's the eugenics that gets him the big bucks. Silicon Valley loves eugenics.
Or, if readers would like to not be gross and eugenics-y, they can give money to organizations that help disabled folks, seeing as Peter Singer advocated that disabled lives are worth less and parents of disabled infants should be free to murder them, and they can read about Harrier McBryde's Johnson's interactions with Singer instead. Just a *real* EA kind of suggestion.
I would say that Singer not entertaining abandonment of capitalism while hosting a ritzy party to promote EA is exactly the problem with EA. Without the non-profit tax incentives, I doubt he would care at all. Since we know that non-profits are by and large ineffective in executing "the most good" or even any good, then that's a secondary indictment here.
Additionally, I don't see EA ever reducing the cost of housing, providing public healthcare, fixing infrastructure, etc. because the premise of EA is ultimately a tax break for large shareholders. If you fix all of the problems, then what would you ever donate to? Nevermind the political muck of trying to fight against the more fascistic elements of capitalism within the bourgeoisie controlled State.
I just don't find EA to have a feasible materialist backing right now. If it did have one, we wouldn't be debating on the individual, neoliberal contributions, we'd be recognizing these things as collective problems that require collective solutions, not nickle and diming the general public while sipping cocktails at a fancy soiree.
Taxes, progressive taxation, annihilation of tax havens and conduit countries, modernization of legal infrastructure and framework to make tax avoidance impossible. Anything else is fluff and fancy PR.
Off point here but just want to say, thank you for existing even *more* outside of the news/calendar cycle. I can't stand the lazy end-of-year takes!
We need actions not words. Res non verba.
Thanks Hamilton. Wish you all a reasonable good year. Just 0.001% happier will be great.
That's the trouble with anecdotal examples of so many things that happen because of SBF or Kanye or some other usually famous rich dude...i.e. what the media loves to report. What would make this article rock would be if there was a sprinkle of actual data or research. Something like "947 of 1000 EA acts resulted in the positive outcomes intended, 33 were a wash or questionable, and 20ish were blatant rip-offs and/or virtue signaling marketing exercises". Maybe I'm over-optimistic.
Otherwise...SPOT ON! Babies good. Bathwater not so much.
The dickheads are such a problem.
I have always associated Peter Singer with animal welfare, yet he now seems to focus purely on human welfare, which is also good, yet seems part of a general shift away from recognizing our moral responsibilities to non-humans. I get the impressions that when people get to the big time, like Singer, they need to frame their consciences around the human to maintain their influence. It's a trend I've seen deepening for at least two decades.
I first heard of Will McAskill through the animal welfare thing, too. Another data point for you.