Another Failed Critique of Effective Altruism

Why are they soooooo bad.

If you think that

1. We should do the most good we can

2. Data and reasoning are relevant to that

This is sufficient to be broadly on board with effective altruism. Thus, when criticizing effective altruism, people have to make some very absurd claims, to resist the obvious pull of the arguments for effective altruism.

This paper in arguing against EA made a dizzying array of non sequiturs, unjustified claims, and horrendous reasoning. I thought it would be worth responding to.

The authors starts saying, “The main criticism on EA is that by donating to charities EA leaves fundamental moral issues such as global poverty and injustice intact. EA, arguably, does not promote radical institutional change which could lead to an ultimate eradication of the problems that may endanger people’s lives in the first place.”

This critique is often repeated but it’s just nonsense for quite literally dozens of independent reasons.

1. Brian Berkeley points out that the institutional critique doesn’t apply, the effective altruism movement does do research into the cost effectiveness of institutional reform, it just often finds it’s less effective. However, in cases where it’s more effective, EA does systemic reform.

2. EA already does work on systemic change. Nick Cooney of the humane league is an effective altruist who got McDonalds, Dunkin’ Donuts, General Mills, Costco, Sodexo and many more to adopt cage-free egg policies. Lincoln Quirk reduced the costs of remittances dramatically, which is valuable given that remittances provide far more money overseas than foreign aid flows. Scott Weathers lobbied for the reach every mother and child act which would allow USAID to look for evidence before spending money overseas. Effective altruists have also pushed for criminal justice reform. The distinction is, unlike other movements we look for systemic reforms that work rather than ones that make us feel cool and radical.

3. As Fodor points out it “is quite plausible, indeed I think history indicates overwhelmingly probable, that even if all EAs on the planet, and ten times more that number, denounced the evils of capitalism in as loud and shrill voices as they could muster, that nothing whatever of any substance would change to the benefit of the world’s poor. As such, if our main objective is to actually help people, rather than to indulge in our own intellectual prejudices by attributing all evil in the world to the bogeyman of ‘capital’, then it is perfectly reasonable to ‘implore individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them’, rather than ‘saying something’ (what exactly? to whom? to what end?) about ‘the system that determines how those necessities are produced’.”

4. As Alexander argues, if everyone donated 10% to effective charities it would end world poverty cure major diseases and start a major cultural and scientific renaissance but if everyone become devoted to systemic change we would probably have a civil war.

5. There are already issues that do a bunch of research into politics such as the brookings institution. If ea were to become more political it would likely become a brookings institute or cato institute esque group.

6. Political campaign generally don’t result in particularly radical change, it’s unlikely that capitalism will be eliminated in the near future.

7. EA’s may work in opposite directions if they’re split on issues of systemic change and cancel out. Thus, rather than having a movement around influencing institutions in opposite ways, we should just do good things.

8. EA’s do systemic reform. 80,000 hours is the top job advisory EA organization, and one of its top recommendations is going into government. Other high ones include being a journalist, public intellectual, earning to give, or a researcher. EA definitely does systemic reform.

9. The fact that there are so many other people working on systemic reform means that EA’s working on systemic reform wouldn’t do very much and would be canceled out.

Next Ioannidis says “EA is both a philosophy and a movement. As Peter Singer, one of the founding fathers of EA, tells us, it “is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most we can.”1 Similarly, along with William McAskill, another founding father of EA, they write that EA “is a growing community based around the idea of aiming to do the most good one can.”2 The most good is construed as being charitable to those who need help to save their lives. Charity is construed mainly in monetary terms, in money. Donating money to charities supposedly saves lives around the world and, thus, ends up being how one can do “the most good.” Donating to charities that can provide a proven record that they save or that they have the potential of saving the most lives possible is how one does “the most good” effectively.”

This is either an outright lie or a gross lack of research. EA is not just about donating. If you google effective altruism and click on the first search result you will realize that EA is not just about donating. To quote effective altruism.org, a source that Ioannidis should surely have read before opining on EA,

“For most of us, a significant amount of our productive waking life — over 80,000 hours on average — is spent working. This is an enormous resource that can be used to make the world better. If you can increase your impact by just 1%, that's equivalent to 800 hours of extra work.

80,000 Hours — named after the time you spend in your career — is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people figure out in which careers they can do the most good.

First, you need to consider which problem you should focus on. 80,000 Hours has many suggestions for problems where one person can make a substantial impact.

Next, you need to consider the most effective way to address the problem. At this point, it is useful to consider multiple approaches. Organizations working on these problems generally need more policy analysts, researchers, operations staff, and managers. But you might also consider more unconventional options.

80,000 Hours also provides a set of tools to help people make decisions, and seek out especially promising career opportunities to share on their job board.

Read 80,000 Hours' career advice”

So the claim that EA is just about donating is complete bullshit. It is not a disputed fact, it’s not debatable. It’s just fiction indicative of virtually no research on the subject or intentional dishonesty.

Next Ioannidis claims “In this paper, I would like to risk the hypothesis that EA presupposes the sacrifice of those that it purports to save. With EA, the poor or those in need of being saved from the conditions of poverty are literally and figuratively stuck, shackled in their poverty. To risk an analogy, if the condition of a business is its original funding, its monetary foundation, then the sacrifice of those found in current need come to be the funding of EA which allows the business of capitalism to keep working.” This is a rather hefty claim—that EA is literally shackling people. I would assume he meant figuratively, but he went out of his way to claim it was literal.

Next, in an attempt to defend his exclusive focus on out of context quotes from Singer he claims “They may rest on the development of (the) moral arguments by Peter Singer and others. But the development requires a seed. This seed may not be visible in what has developed – the acorn seed is not visible from the outside. In his writings, Singer identifies the seed of EA in his argument advanced in his 1972 paper.10 Based on the textual evidence, there is no other philosophical argument to be found as a seed. In this paper, the focus is to philosophically explore such founding or fathering, that is, begetting argument of or for EA.”

This is false once again. EA emerged in the late 2000s, as a community formed out of Giving What we Can. While Singer’s ideas were relevant to EA’s, his writings didn’t begin EA. This is a googleable fact. Other writers like Sidgwick, Parfit, Bentham, Mill, and Nagel had ideas that were important for EA, but calling them the philosophical underpinnings of EA would be misleading. I have never read Singer’s 72 paper and neither have many EA’s.

Next it is claimed “Singer’s 1972 article starts with the following: “As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter and medical care.”12 Whether used literally or figuratively, the death of the Other seems to have motivated Singer to explore whether or not we have a duty to help and save those who are dying. But where does this duty come from? Singer says that if it is in our power to act in such a way as to prevent something bad from happening; and if this prevention would not entail our sacrificing something of comparable importance, then we have to act in that way. This principle follows from an “assumption,” that is, “that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.”13 At this instance, Singer does not say that death is bad but qualifies badness as a particular kind of death. This qualification opens up the possibility of asking the reason of such a particular death.”

Yes, finding that there are people who are dying and could be helped easily SHOULD motivate us to take actions to prevent them from dying. Singer does not say that badness is a type of death, he says death is a type of badness, which it obviously is. When people die, that is bad.

Singer gives the analogy of a child drowning in a shallow pond, who could be saved if we waded in. He says we’d agree that we should wade in, and then he argues that this is analogous to failing to give to charity when we could save someone’s life.

Ioannidis continues, writing “If we were to be as logically strict as Singer asks to do, then we would struggle to see how this drowning child comes easily under the category of suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. Since we do not have historical or contextual information, this child might have ended up being drowning for a million different reasons other than the category which we assumed to be bad. Nevertheless, let us wade in this murky logical pond and try to follow Singer. Let us give him a free pass for the moment, or as it is usually said, let us be charitable to Singer and allow him to make manifest this duty. Let us assume that we feel that we ought to wade in and pull out the drowning child.”

This bizarre little dig at Singer totally misses the point. Singer’s broader principle is that we should sacrifice things of little importance in order to save people’s lives. This would be true regardless of whether doing so involves giving them food, shelter, medical care, or taking them out of a pond. What was the point of including this inane jab?

Next, Ioannidis says, “In order for a strict parity between the two cases to obtain we have to secure parity for each individual variable between the case of the drowning child and the case of the distant Other. Singer has already given us some reasons for which perception is analogous in both cases. So far, we have secured the parity of perception as an act. However, we have not analogised the content of perception.34 If the parity of the content of perception does not obtain, then the overall parity will fail. If the extension from child to refugees does not prove to be analogical, then the further analogy from East Bengal as the distant Other to any Other could not pass either.”

How one perceives it is not morally relevant. If one came across a button that could save a drowning child a world away if they waded into the pond, they should do so. Pointing out differences does not establish that the differences are morally relevant.

Next Ioannidis says “There are two issues that make the parity of the content of perception difficult to obtain. First, the child is one and the refugees are many. Logically, we can say with Heraclitus35 that the one and the many are in the end one – so that we can assume logical parity in classes, i.e. class of child and class of refugees. We have to assume a logic of classes to make the analogy happen. The logical parity can be achieved by thinking of thinking of a class of drowning children to be saved and then thinking of a class of refugees to be saved – the parity is between a thinking of classes. This, however, goes beyond perception. Initially we were asked to think of a perception of a child and then a perception of refugees. Yet, the analogy is not between what is thought to be perceived – or having been perceived – but of a reworked thought; a thought with classes. If the variable of perception is to be kept, as Singer aims to do, then we would have to imagine as many children as refugees – that is the meaning of strict analogy in all levels.”

This point is responded to by Singer at various points. If you saw a drowning child, the presence of other drowning children would not affect your calculus. While drowning children are small in number, there’s no reason why the best way to categorize people is as drowning children vs refugees. We can instead think of both as people in severe jeopardy, making both groups large. This does not change the normative evaluation of the situation.

If you were dying and someone could save your life, the number of other dying children would not affect the morality of them prioritizing a nice car over saving you life.

Ioannidis next goes on a strange screed about thought experiments, writing “The perception of the child is not just a perception of a child; it is a perception of a drowning child. Our perception has already been classified as ‘child’ and ‘drowning.’ How do we know that the child is drowning? It is given by the scenario of course. But to perceive that a child is drowning and to know that a child is drowning are two different things. Singer says “see” but this ‘seeing’ which should lead to our moral intuition of feeling compelled to help would have to be a knowing that this is the case. Here Singer enjoys and enjoins the senses of ‘seeing’ in order to neutralise the distance which is always implied in perception. Seeing a child drowning in an authentic act of perception does not immediately entail knowing that the child is indeed drowning. The child could be playing or faking and the like. I can see something which would turn out to be something else.”

For the purpose of the hypothetical it is stipulated that we know the child is drowning. Maybe we see them flapping around before going under in a river. One needs no impressive foresight to realize that a child is drowning.

The unhinged anti thought experiment musings don’t end there. “We could suppose37 that the child requires help and we know better what kind of help to provide in order to save them. But the presupposition here is that the child cannot save itself hence our act(ion) is deemed necessary. However, the class of refugees may quantify over persons who know what they need to do to save their lives. If they could reason like we do, could we not ask them what kind of help they need? Would we not be stealing their autonomy as reasonable people if we assumed that we know better how to save them? If we assume a logical parity between ‘children drowning’ and ‘refugees dying of hunger,’ then we would be sacrificing the autonomy of refugees as follows: First, the categories ‘drowning’ and ‘dying of hunger’ are bad with respect to the imminent death that they imply. Second, the categories ‘children’ and ‘refugees’ end up being analogous with respect to not being able to avert the condition of badness. Yet, the category ‘refugees’ includes or may include both ‘children’ and ‘adults whereas the category ‘children’ should exclude ‘adults.’ With Singer’s analogy, however, we could end up doing the following: with respect to autonomy of action and reflecting and acting responsibly, we would be treating the children as refugees and the refugees as children.”

NO! It’s a thought experiment. Obviously there are some differences. The point is merely that there are not morally relevant differences. We should save people’s lives at minimal costs to ourselves. Singer’s point was that there are not morally relevant differences. Let’s take all of the differences between the two cases.

A One group is of refugees. This obviously doesn’t matter. If we saw a drowning dying we should save their life.

B They are dying of hunger rather than drowning. This also doesn’t matter. If we could either prevent a person from drowning or starving to death, it would not be significantly more important to prevent the drowning.

C One group is of children. This also doesn’t matter. If an adult was drowning in a pond, we should also save them.

When the trolley problem is given and analogized to bridge, the claim is not that pushing someone is identical to flipping a switch. The point is that there is no morally relevant difference. The same is true here.

Next, Ioannidis says, “Apart from the moral issue involved in this type of thinking, we shall focus on its logical problems. The logical flaw is generated here from an implicit use of a metaphor. ‘Pulling the child out of the pond’ is used to arrive to the idea of ‘pulling the Other out of their suffering and death.’ But in our case the issue is of creating an analogy, a logical parity, not a metaphor. To assume that the class of ‘drowning child’ is analogous to the class of ‘refugees dying from’ with respect to evaluating the badness of their condition cannot be saved that easily unless we provide some more charity to Singer.”

NO!! They are not logically identical. Singer merely argues that there’s no morally relevant difference. To refute this, rather than taking weird potshots and passive aggressive digs at Singer, Ioannidis would have to actually give some differences that are morally relevant. This he has not done.

He does try to give a symmetry breaker but it fails miserably. “Yet, even with more (logical) charity what we save here will haunt us if we look at the type of aid we could provide. To understand this further we need to introduce an auxiliary concept, the ‘body.’ The provision of the aid in the case of the child was “wading in” and “pulling out” which refer to one’s own body. Bodies come into contact. The aid comes from one’s body and, more importantly, from the power of one’s body. We agreed with Singer that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”38 Now, through the referential opacity of ‘power’ Singer moves into suggesting that providing aid as donating money is analogously powerful to “wading in” and “pulling out” someone who is drowning.39 But such a logical move does not follow. Even if we presuppose that in the end of both events people’s lives are saved, one bodily action is not as powerful as the other precisely because in the case of donating money more bodies will be involved in this saving supplementing the power of wading in and pulling out.40 Let us think this in re(-)verse: To punch someone is not necessarily analogous with having someone hired to punch them. The analogy would obtain, if it would, concerning the impact on the receiver i.e. being hurt. The ends may be analogous but the events are not. Thus, the logical extension of the two scenarios cannot obtain unless we give more charity to bridge this logical gap.”

Okay so now let’s make some modifications to the scenario. Rather than wadding into the pond and pulling out the child, you can wade into the pond and press a button that would push a child out of the pond a mile away. This is morally indistinct from pulling out the child. There is no bodily contact, but it’s still a moral obligation. Bodily contact is sometimes morally relevant but it is not always. In this case, it is not.

Continuing, the claim is made that “This evaluation comes from an assumption and this assumption harbours a belief in that things can be bad or good in themselves, objectively. In his later writings, Singer does not claim that this is an assumption but a truth and that “the eternal truths of reason can generate feelings in all human beings.”41 Following Henry Sidgwick, Singer argues that there are “self-evident fundamental moral principles, or axioms, which we grasp through our reasoning capacity.”42 One such axiom is that everyone’s good, or let us say well-being, is of equal importance and thus we are bound to regard each other’s well-being as our own. It is thus reason that plays a generating force for acting for the well-being of the Other. Supposedly, reason can motivate us to help the other. Yet, the scenario that Singer proposed initially was not meant to show how reason works or should work in the case of the drowning child but how there is a moral intuition generated at the instance of ‘seeing’ someone dying. The problem that Singer tries to solve is that of being motivated to help regardless if it is judged to be the moral thing to do.”

This is a total misunderstanding of the argument. Singer argues that if we are logically consistent and hold certain modest moral principles these logically commit us to thinking that we should donate lots to charity. He separately is a moral realist. These are not related. Much like one can make arguments for consistency for veganism, while also being a moral realist, Singer can argue for consistency, while also thinking that we can derive morality from undeniable ethical axioms.

Ioannidis argues against moral realism, “Before we proceed into the issue of motivation we shall pause and reflect a bit on this philosophical idea of objectivity in what is good. This view is often called “objectivity in ethics” or “moral realism-universalism.” The opposing view to realism would be relativism, meaning that there are no truths about right or wrong.”

This is false. The opposing view would be anti-realism. Relativism is a specific type of anti-realism. Other types include non-cognitivism, error theory, and constructivism.

“A moral intuition of right or wrong is equated with a judgement since we are in the realm of evaluating something. In this case, there are moral judgements which can be true or false. Reason is that which can help us reach those fundamental moral truths. However, this creates a circularity. If reason is what can lead us to moral truth then what is moral truth? Obviously that which is coming from reason, that is, reasonable. Unless we fall into a vicious regress we would have to say that truth here is also the good. And what is good? That which reason allows us to grasp. As we shall shortly explore, unless we presuppose some ultimate end or a regulating idea, truth and reason do not make much sense in explicating each other.43”

This is equivocation on the word reason. Reasoning is a method for arriving at true beliefs. However, there are certain things that give us reasons to care about them—such that if we are fully reflective, devoid of error, and impartial, we will care about them. Reasoning allows us to figure out good things. Good things give us reason to care about them.

We can compare this to the epistemic case. What is rational to believe? Well, what we have reason to believe, or what we’re justified in believing. What are we justified in believing? Certain particular things. Those particular things have the substantive property of being reasonable to believe, a quality we can discover through careful reasoning.

“Singer, who espouses Darwin’s evolutionary theory of being, tries to show that helping others is a fundamentally true judgment and also consonant with the theory of evolution which poses as an end one’s own survival and the perpetuation of the species.44”

Several points.

1. Helping others is not a judgement nor is helping others true or false. This would be like saying that it is true that tables.

2. Evolution does not have normative implications. Evolution describes how we got here, not what we should care about.

3. Evolution propagates organisms that are able to pass on their genes. This does not mean that evolution gives us ultimate ends. Evolution makes smallpox exist. This does not mean that it is good for smallpox to exist. Evolution results in humans raping each other to pass on their genes. This does not make it morally justified.

This is also the way that other philosophers who espouse moral universalism attempt to conceptually fund their thoughts. The argument is essentially transcendental. For instance, as Rachels tells us: “There is a general point here, namely, that there are some moral rules that all societies must embrace, because those rules are necessary for society to exist.”4

This is a total bastardization of everything witten in metaethics.

1. Rachels is being misconstrued. Rachels was providing an into to moral philosophy and was explaining how cultural relativists could criticize their culture, namely, by arguing that certain things which are required for their culture to exist are being violated by certain practices.

2. There is a weird equivocation between moral realism and moral universalism. One could think that morality was objective, but they could think that it was objectively good to do whatever one’s culture is doing. Similarly, most anti-realists aren’t relativists. There are lots of error theorists, non-cognitivists, and relativists (obviously the non cultural relativist kind) who would be happy to condemn torturing infants for fun, regardless of which culture did it.

3. If one has read the Point of View of the Universe, they would realize that this is not how Singer argues for realism. None of his arguments are about moral realism being necessary for society. Nor is this the argument made by other contemporary meta-ethicists. This is just a complete misunderstanding of everything.

4. Something being necessary for society does not affect its evaluations at the margins nor contain moral significance. One needs Oxygen for society to exist. This doesn’t mean we should be Oxygen maximizers.

5. No one thinks that utilitarianism is necessary for society to exist, least of all Singer.

Unless there is universality of how cultures act in some fundamental respects, cultures would not have existed in time. What this transcendental thinking, however, does not reveal is why we, be it singularly or collectively, should exist or survive. For whatever reason, I can inquire into the reason of existence and I cannot find any compelling argument of why I, as a person who reasons, should exist – whether I evolved or was created. And this is why I should exist does not only refer to my origins but also to my purpose in life.

This would perhaps be a mark against Singer’s theory if it were arguing in the way that the strawman of Rachels argued. However, he is not, so this is not. Singer argues that reason can allow us to grasp dee moral truth, the same way that it can allow us to learn mathematics. One of those moral truths is that if you exist and positively contribute to the world that is good. Thus, Singer CAN account for why one should exist and do things that are good.

Why is this relevant to our discussion? It is relevant because Singer admits that surviving without meaning, that is, purpose in life, does not make much sense and is “a self-defeating enterprise.”46

Let me read the surrounding context in the Singer article.

Many will say that it is naive to believe that people could shift from a life based on consumption, or on getting on top of the corporate ladder, to one that is more ethical in its fundamental direction. But such a shift would answer a palpable need. Today the assertion that life is meaningless no longer comes from existentialist philosophers who treat it as a shocking discovery: it comes from bored adolescents for whom it is a truism. Perhaps it is the central place of self-interest, and the way in which we conceive of our own interest, that is to blame here. The pursuit of self-interest, as standardly conceived, is a life without any meaning beyond our own pleasure or individual satisfaction. Such a life is often a self-defeating enterprise. The ancients knew of the ‘paradox of hedonism’, according to which the more explicitly we pursue our desire for pleasure, the more elusive we will find its satisfaction. There is no reason to believe that human nature has changed so dramatically as to render the ancient wisdom inapplicable.

Singer was not saying things about deeper meaning. He was just saying that even if one is self interested, they should help others, because that is a good way of improving ones own life. If one only tries to better their life and ends up unhappy and makes other people’s lives worse, that is a bad life.

Continuing,

Perhaps, evolution is an effect of having a meaningful life and not the cause of it. It is not that we all have reason that we perpetuate our species, but we perpetuate our species as a result of creating a reason, a purpose in life which motivates us to go on.

1. Evolution came first so it isn’t the effect of having a meaningful life but the cause. However, this doesn’t mean that our meaning is directly evolutionary. All of the happiness one ever experiences has its causal origins in their parents procreation, but that doesn’t mean that their parents procreation is what gives them meaning in any significant sense.

2. Rather than this weird speculation Ioannidis could have read Singer. His views are quite clear.

3. A reason in the sense Singer describes is not a motivational reason. One might have a reason to do X but not be motivated to do it. I may have a reason not to procrastinate, but I may procrastinate anyways.

4. We don’t have a reason to all perpetuate our species in the moral sense. Perpetuating our species is sometimes, but certainly not always what we have reason to do.

According to Singer in his later effective altruist writings, in the natural development of his arguments, securing the well-being of the Other does not seem to be propelled exclusively by a mandate of reason, nor by an immediate intuitive compulsion but of a personal pursuit of happiness which would come about by creating a meaningful life. And this meaning means having a purpose since we “live in a time when many people experience their lives as empty and lacking in fulfilment.”47 In this case, however, helping the Other does not come from the well-being of the Other being the reason as an end in itself, but instead it is a personal reason to have a meaningful life. Ethics “offer a solution. An ethical life is one in which we identify ourselves with other, larger, goals thereby giving meaning to our lives.”48 From reason we now move to “the need” of finding “meaning and fulfillment in life” and thus many people turn to effective altruism as a way of giving their lives a purpose it would not otherwise have.”49 Reason alone cannot motivate the enterprise, the business for producing the well-being of the Other; it cannot find, fund, and found a (foundational) ground to help the Other unless it attempts a detour whereby it gives self-satisfaction – from a universal reason we pass into a personal reason. What we have here, then, is not a need but a desire for a meaningful life which is fulfilled by helping the Other. And for this desire to be fulfilled the Other must be in need of help. Does this mean that the Other must be constantly in need of help for us to keep beli(e)ving in a meaningful life (as effective altruists)?50

Suppose I said the following.

“Join my club, it will make the world better and its really fun.”

This would not mean that the reason to make the world better is just for fun. Singer was providing multiple good reasons to be effective altruists. Even if one is self interested, they should help others because it gives personal fulfillment.

For one to figure out what Singer thinks in his later writings, it might be worth reading his later writings, in which he is crystal clear that reason alone is sufficient to establish that we should help others. In the Point of View of the Universe he devotes an entire chapter to arguing that we shouldn’t act in our best interest and in fact that we have decisive reason to do what is best overall

On page 163 he says “…any form of dualism of practical reason undermines morality.”

On page 174 he said “… we believe that his response to the evolutionary critique provides a basis for a solution to his own, very different, worry about the dualism of practical reason and its dismaying implications for the project of putting ethics on a rational footing” 

ON page 189 he writes

“Crisp accepts what he calls ‘the Self-Interest Principle’, which states, in effect that any agent has a reason to do what makes her life go better, the strength of the reason varying in proportion to the extent to which her well-being will be improved.  But this principle itself can be debunked, in much the way that Crisp debunked the acts and omissions distinction.”

On page 196 he writes

“…partial reasons can be debunked and that, whatever the ultimate good may be, we have overriding reasons to aim at it impartially.”

On page 197 he writes

“… he could have gone further and rejected what he refers to as personal and partial reasons.” 

On page 197 he writes “… we can tentatively conclude that all reasons for action are impartial, and the dualism that led Sidgwick to fear ‘an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct’ can, at least on the level of rationality, be dissolved”

It’s weird that Singer is accused of having views that he’s devoted an entire chapter arguing against based on the fact that he says that even if one is self interested it follows from their values that helping others is good.

Singer thinks that helping others makes people happy often so they should do it. No part of this commits him to the view that one should make people unhappy so they can then make them happy and feel fulfilled. Singer would argue against this given that he is not an egoist and argues forcefully against egoism. This is such a stretch that I’d be surprised if Ioannidis didn’t rupture a ligament.

To explore this hypothesis we would need to go back to the semantic ambivalence of the parameter (4) of providing aid. In the case of the drowning child, the provision of aid is wading in and pulling out. It happens once with one’s body. Once again, there is no ‘again’ or a gain in saving the child. It happens once for the child itself and not for us – hapax. The child is saved from imminent death and then it is on its own.51 In the case of the Other who dies of poverty, lack of shelter or medical care, could we say something analogous? It is right at this moment that the history of each scenario becomes important concerning the provision of aid. If we were to do all that is in our power to wade in and pull out the Other from imminent death coming from poverty, lack of shelter and lack of medical care what would that mean? For the latter two, the lack already sign posts us their fulfillment. We can provide shelter and medical care. Effective altruists do argue about that and they also seek to realise it – there is no doubt about that. But what about poverty? What is the lack that is fundamentally implied in poverty? Earlier we followed Singer in thinking that poverty relates to the lack of food. We ought to help those who die of famine. But famine and poverty in the developments of EA are translated in terms of money. Poverty is represented in monetary terms presupposing a capitalist economy.

As we saw earlier, Singer doesn’t think people should help others just for fulfillment. He thinks that fulfillment provides an extra reason for egoists to help others. To answer the question posed, the lack is in terms of money. When people don’t have money they can’t buy things that would make their lives better. The reason that a capitalist economy is presupposed is because the economy is in fact capitalist. If it were not, then the alternative would be presupposed.

McAskill writes: For almost all of human history – from the evolution of Homo sapiens two hundred thousand years ago until the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago – the average income across all countries was the equivalent of two dollars per day or less. Even now, more than half of the world still lives on four dollars per day or less. Yet, through some outstanding stroke of luck, we have found ourselves as the inheritors of the most astonishing period of economic growth the world has ever seen, while a significant proportion of people stay as poor as they have ever been.52 I let the reader decide how much ‘luck’ has to do with the ‘lack’ of food as a result of the building of our colonial empires; how much ‘luck’ and ‘lack’ is involved in slavery, genocide and ethno-cleansing which have made us, the western world, the inheritors of the abundance that MacAskill describes. Instead, I would like to underscore how effective altruists do not reflect on their presupposition that poverty should be construed in capitalist terms.

When Macaskill says luck, he means we are lucky that we are well off rather than being on the brink of starvation, as most people have been throughout human history. Macaskill doesn’t think that prosperity is random—that just wasn’t the question at hand. Claiming that effective altruists don’t reflect on X obviously can’t be established by looking at one statement by them. Ioannidis doesn’t mention the holocaust in this article but that doesn’t mean that the holocaust is not reflected on by academics.

As MacAskill says, when it comes “to helping others, being unreflective means being ineffective.”53 It is not the case that poverty, for almost all of human history, was a matter of income and money. Plato for, instance, describes poverty (πενία) as aporia (ἀπορία): “ἡ οὖν Πενία ἐπιβουλεύουσα διὰ τὴν αὑτῆς ἀπορίαν παιδίον ποιήσασθαι ἐκ τοῦ Πόρου.”54 And aporia, as a quick semantic and etymological analysis would suggest, relates to the inability to move – ultimately to what the body cannot do.55 Because we take the current capitalistic system of exchanging goods for granted, we now think that the poor is the one who does not earn beyond a numerical monetary threshold in a capitalist setting. The poor, then, are not the ones who are not able to sustain themselves foodwise, through the power of their bodies, but the ones who cannot participate in the current system of exchanging goods effectively so as to be able to have food or whatever else.

MacAskill is using poverty in the modern sense because he is describing the people who we can help easily. Most people have little money and their lives could be made better with more money. He does not use poverty to mean immobility because there are not large numbers of immobile people who can be helped easily. Plato did not use the word poverty because he was not speaking English. MacAskill was speaking English so he used the word poverty. While Plato may have used a word like poverty, MacAskill has no reason to use Plato’s word because the people thing he was talking about was better captured by the word poverty. This is at best pedantry and at worst misunderstanding the entire edifice of language. If people are starving, rather than quibbling about history and the etymology of words, we should do something to help them.

Taking such representations for granted will not allow EA to wade in and pull out the poor from poverty but will always be limited in trying “to end the extreme poverty.”56 Would that mean that there should always be poverty? Why should there always be poverty? Whereas MacAskill seems to neglect the philosophical and historical developments of representing poverty, Singer takes for granted that altruism should be defined within the capitalist setting: “Like it or not, for the foreseeable future we seem to be stuck with some variety of capitalism, and along with it come markets in stocks, bonds, and commodities.”57 Since EA sticks to capitalism, EA is always going to be ineffective since it does not reflect on the phenomenon of poverty and the development of its representation. If we really were to be altruistic (effectively), then we should realise Singer’s analogy differently by reflecting on how to wade in and pull out the other from poverty and not just from the way poverty is represented within a capitalist setting.58 But, perhaps, that requires another economy, an economy which would not be charitable to sustaining the condition of poverty as, arguably, takes place in capitalism. Such economy would not make an allowance, would not allow the poor to exist as capitalism does. It would not aim to eradicate extreme poverty but, rather, it would aim at not allowing the existence of the poor or the aporous. But such a possibility requires a thinking where poverty is not represented in monetary terms, a representation which has created the opacities we have explored. However, effective altruists are not likely to promote such a passage precisely because it cannot be quantified in the epistemic terms they accept in order to be convinced about its importance.59 We are, thus, stuck with a representation of poverty in monetary terms and this representation allows only a thinking of the eradication of a type of poverty and not the eradication of poverty itself. This means that by being charitable to this (representation of) poverty we sustain it. Just as, in this paper so far, we have been giving representational charity to EA in terms of logically bridging their argument without being able to offer us a passage to altruism, so too, giving monetary charity within a system which sustains the existence of those who have and those who have not, i.e. capitalism, not only is not effective altruism, it is neither authentically altruistic. If poverty did not take place would we need to give to charity? What would the meaning of giving to charity be if there was no poverty? With poverty represented with(in) capitalism, charity becomes its crutch. Charity is not like wading in and pulling out someone from a drowning pond, but maybe like throwing a life jacket, a life preserver. Preserving the life of the poor in the conditions that they are found also preserves the conditions which endangered them in the first place; it is not saving them from these conditions. Following EA which relies so much in giving monetary charity within a capitalist setting we do, in one sense, sacrifice something of comparable importance: the possibility of trying to authentically free the poor from poverty.60 And, if we take Singer to the letter that EA offers a purpose in life, as we explored earlier, then that would mean that our meaningful lives in EA would require the sacrifice of the poor’s possibility to authentically overcome poverty.

1 Ending extreme poverty is good.

2 EA doesn’t just focus on extreme poverty, it also focuses on disease, existential threats, and animal suffering.

3 Even if EA didn’t end poverty that wouldn’t mean poverty would never end.

4 Unless there’s a good way of ending poverty by individual people who would otherwise be EA’s taking actions this is just pie in the sky nonsense. I debated Ioannidis and he had no advice for what effective altruists should do to solve the root of the problems. Given that, rather than doing nothing, we should try to end extreme poverty.

5 Capitalism is very popular and alternatives to it are unpopular and have failed historically. Thus, we shouldn’t try to eliminate it because it won’t be successful.

6 EA’s are very sympathetic to efforts to do things other than eradicate poverty. However, if attempting to eradicate poverty is more effective than random other things, we should try to eradicate poverty.

7 If poverty went away then we wouldn’t keep fighting poverty. Then EA’s would do other better things.

8 EA’s want to eradicate poverty because they want to maximally better the world.

9 Even if EA’s wanted to preserve poverty to feel good this wouldn’t be a problem because EA’s don’t have the ability to eradicate poverty.

10 Lots of EA’s don’t represent poverty in monetary terms. Pointing to singular utterances from MacAskill doesn’t characterize the entire movement.

Ultimately, this article irritates me for three main reasons.

First, the scholarship and quality of the arguments are very low.

Second, the misrepresentation of EA’s is just egregious.

Third, this propagandistic misdirection is in pursuit of criticizing a movement that’s saving millions of people, improving the lives of billions of animals, and reducing the odds of the end of the world. If one is being misleading to attack a movement, they should at least do it for one that is bad.

If all EA’s were convinced of Ioannidis’ critique there would be millions more dead people and the world would be much worse. Poor reasoning, poor representations, resulting in poor outcomes are a uniquely pernicious trichotomy.