Why Criticisms of Effective Altruism Suck
“You’re raising all of these objections because you’re sleeping with your girlfriend. Am I right?” All the blood drained from the young man’s face. He was caught. He was rejecting God because he didn’t like God’s morality.
—Frank Turek.
Bashing effective altruism is all the rage these days. The Bulwark claims effective altruists are like those claiming that one can get into heaven through indulgences—because effective altruists recommend spending your money to help others rather than on oneself. Wenar claims effective altruism is bad because one can, by going on Google Scholar, find a few articles criticizing things sort of related to EA—even though the downsides are generally accounted for by EA models. Nathan Robinson thinks effective altruism is bad because it assumes utilitarianism which implies you should feed your child to a shark to prevent a tornado from killing five people (given how confused he is, however, this is only around average in terms of confusion). Critics of EA write these scathing, polemical pieces evincing about as much knowledge of EA as is possessed by the typical sewer rat, and quite a bit less moral conviction.
What’s striking about this is just how terrible all these pieces are. They’re all well-written, dressed up in the language typical of a thorough drubbing. But when one looks in any detail at all of the ways they think EA goes wrong, their rhetorical firepower crumbles like sand. Every substantive claim they make ends up being false, often in egregious ways that have been explained over and over again by effective altruists. Probably all of the worst reasoned pieces I’ve come across this year have been criticisms of effective altruism. These people do not know what they are talking about and it shows. Watching the typical EA critic attempt to reason about ethics is a bit like watching a dolphin tap dance.
Why is this? Why is it that effective altruism brings out a unique combination of rhetorical viciousness and intellectual stupidity, like little else? Why is it that critics of effective altruism end up sounding like Noam Chomsky at his most vicious and reasoning like anti-vaxxers? I think there’s a pretty straightforward answer, though it is a bit cynical.
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