I don't object to the idea that "you should do the most good you can with the resources you've got" or "the wealthy and the lucky have an obligation to those who aren't." Regardless of philisophical commitments, those seem like more or less obvious principles.
Where I get a little dubious though is when we try to reduce doing good to metrics like "lives saved per dollar." That's great as far as it goes, but pursuing a first-order utilitarian conception of how we do good risks losing sight of the forest for the trees. If we live in a world with enough to feed everybody, and some of us are overweight and some of us are starving, how much should we be investing in structural political change vs buying bags of charity wheat? When should we be mitigating the consequences of poverty, and when should we be addressing the fact of poverty in the first place?
It's better than doing nothing, but ultimately "Effective Altruism" as technocratic optimization of charity without a commitment to a political project seems limited. Obviously you can walk and chew gum at the same time, and doing what you can inside the system you've got is great, but I don't see a lot of imagination around "the world doesn't have to be this way" inside that community. I'm not a socialist, but I'm sympathetic to a lot of socialist arguments, and I don't see that we should be taking the social systems that organize the wealth and production of the world as inevitable or natural.
I don't object to the idea that "you should do the most good you can with the resources you've got" or "the wealthy and the lucky have an obligation to those who aren't." Regardless of philisophical commitments, those seem like more or less obvious principles.
Where I get a little dubious though is when we try to reduce doing good to metrics like "lives saved per dollar." That's great as far as it goes, but pursuing a first-order utilitarian conception of how we do good risks losing sight of the forest for the trees. If we live in a world with enough to feed everybody, and some of us are overweight and some of us are starving, how much should we be investing in structural political change vs buying bags of charity wheat? When should we be mitigating the consequences of poverty, and when should we be addressing the fact of poverty in the first place?
It's better than doing nothing, but ultimately "Effective Altruism" as technocratic optimization of charity without a commitment to a political project seems limited. Obviously you can walk and chew gum at the same time, and doing what you can inside the system you've got is great, but I don't see a lot of imagination around "the world doesn't have to be this way" inside that community. I'm not a socialist, but I'm sympathetic to a lot of socialist arguments, and I don't see that we should be taking the social systems that organize the wealth and production of the world as inevitable or natural.