An Open Letter to Most Critics of Effective Altruism

Ugh

Dear critic,

Congratulations! You’ve made a career—or perhaps just gotten fame—out of attacking a movement that is quite literally dedicated to doing the most good it can. No doubt the starving kids who have been fed because of Givedirectly or the kids who would have died of malaria—and their parents too—are really grateful that you’ve warned the world about those vicious do-gooders who have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

You know, most people are irritated by those altruists. Who do they think they are, Gandhi? Spending careers doing good in ways that are weird—like getting well-paying jobs to donate and save lives, rather than getting the warm fuzzy feeling of helping on the ground in a concrete way, the way you do. Or, well, I guess you write articles about why the people saving lives are bad, which is sort of like getting your hands dirty and doing on-the-ground charitable work.

It’s as if they care more about doing good than spending time at cocktail parties with other writers who can pat themselves on the back about how trenchant their critique is. It’s like they care more about the lives of children dying of malaria and animals being tortured in factory farms than the warm fuzzy glow we get when we do philanthropy. Look, if doing good is about doing good, rather than getting grants for ineffective charities—the ones the EAs don’t fund—combined with getting a warm fuzzy glow, then sign me out. It’s cold, calculating, and dehumanizing, after all, to care more about others than about the good feeling you get when you help them. Who cares if children are drowning if it doesn’t feel good to save them, right?

We’re all annoyed by these guys—for one, they’re nerds, and we don’t like nerds, right? And for another, they’re doing good a lot. Makes the rest of us feel bad. But you, dear critic, don’t just feel guilty about it—you explain why they’re white supremacists. Ah yes, very convenient—if helping others not die of malaria is white saviorist and objectionable then the rest of us can continue to comfortably sit on our asses when children are dying that we could save. The rest of us just feel envy, but you don’t—you explain why the people we feel envy about are actually racist. There, now we don’t have to feel envious of their virtue anymore, or feel any moral compulsion to do anything other than what is convenient.

And have you heard about the longtermism stuff. It’s crazy—eugenics, I like to say. If you’re opposed to the end of the world because you think that utopia is better than a barren rock, that’s eugenics—you want to mold the future according to your will. You know what we call that? Eugenics! Of course, you explain that we can all just repeat the slogan “it’s good to make people happy, not happy people.” There, that settles it, right? It’s not like philosophers have, for decades, produced literally dozens of arguments against that view, such that defenders of the view are sparse in philosophy departments and are mostly on the defensive, arguing that the view isn’t obviously false, rather than arguing that it’s true.

So once again, thank you so much for your noble work. You let the rest of us who are annoyed by those hardcore do-gooders justify ourselves. The reason we don’t donate to charities that save lives and instead book our third vacation to the Bahamas isn’t because we’re assholes or don’t value human lives—pfft, of course not. It’s because donating would be white saviorist—and we really can’t have that.

All the best,

Bentham’s Bulldog