This article misrepresents Peter Singer. It gives an inaccurate description of effective altruism and provides poor objections to the strawmen she erected.
1. Peter Singer
The author misrepresents Peter Singer’s views several times throughout the article
Example 1: The author says that Singer is “comfortable” with the view that “there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia.” Supposedly, he considers such fatal judgments to be “morally imperative.”
Why does this misrepresent Singer’s view?
The quote is taken from a section in which Singer is describing the consequences of the “total” vs “prior existence” versions of utilitarianism. And Singer is presenting this hypothetical as an *unwelcome consequence* of the prior existence view. The full quote goes as follows (emphasis mine):
“Perhaps the best one can say [for the prior existence view] - *and it is not very good* - is that there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia.”
Singer goes on to say that “this is, at best, paradoxical” and he considers this a “counterintuitive consequence.” So, had the author read the two pages surrounding the quote she cited (or even the 12 preceding words in the very same sentence she cited!), she would have seen that Singer was not endorsing that conclusion.
Example 2: The author suggests that Singer is in favor of giving parents the right to kill their hemophiliac infants. In support of this, she quotes another passage from Practical Ethics: “if killing the hemophiliac in fact has no adverse effect on others excluding the infant, it would, according to the view be right to kill him.”
Here, the author is misquoting what was actually written. The full quote is as follows (emphasis mine):
“[I]f killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the *total view*, be right to kill him.”
As the full quote makes clear, Singer is again describing a consequence of a particular version of utilitarianism, not endorsing it. The author’s omission of the key qualifier and the odd inclusion of the phrase “excluding the infant” suggests she is not quoting directly from the text but rather getting her citations second-hand (perhaps from an hallucinating AI?).
2. What is Effective Altruism?
The author cites Peter Singer as the “unofficial” founder of effective altruism. She does not cite any of its literal organizational founders. Had she done so, she would find people explicitly rejecting Singer’s philosophical views.
For example, according to Will MacAskill, a co-founder of EA organizations like Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism, EA is defined as:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and
(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.
Contrast this with the way the author’s acquaintance describes it:
“Effective Altruism is a theory that we are obligated to do as much good as possible, that it’s ethically mandatory to give in the most effective way.”
Will MacAskill explicitly rejects this, saying, “effective altruism makes no claims about what obligations of benevolence one has.” If you choose to help others because you’re excited about the prospect of making the world a better place, you can still be an effective altruist. You don’t also have to feel obligated to do so.
Benjamin Todd, a co-founder of 80,000 Hours, says, “‘Doing the most good’ makes it sound like EA says you're morally obligated to focus 100% on the thing that most helps others (ie utilitarianism). I think the best version of EA doesn't make any moral demands at all.”
And what are the author’s objections to effective altruism?
Here’s one repugnant conclusion she suggests follows from EA:
“If our philosophy was that we could rationally and confidently make such choices—could assess which suffering matters more—didn’t that mean that we were creating a cutoff point below which sufferers were unworthy?”
Yes, obviously some suffering matters more than others—getting an arm chopped off is worse than getting a paper cut. But no, this does not mean that there is a cutoff below which sufferers are “unworthy.” A paper cut still hurts even if it’s minor. The mere fact that there is a scale of suffering from less to more does not mean that everything below some cutoff doesn’t matter. It all matters.
This misconception is central to many of the author’s criticisms. The author repeatedly expresses the concern that some people might be below some threshold, where their interests no longer matter. But this simply does not follow, neither from utilitarianism nor from effective altruism.
Another objection: The author bristles at Singer’s (and by connection effective altruist’s) assumption that we can know how others are feeling. She writes, “Singer affirms his personal ability, and, perforce, that of the society he envisions, to know and judge the value and affective experience of another.”
But, of course we can know others’ affective experiences! Why is it wrong to slap a stranger in the face? Because we know it will hurt them! Why is it good to give other people Christmas presents? Because we know it will make them happy!
We should not be solipsists—we in fact know a great deal about other people’s affective experiences. This does not mean we are perfect mind readers. We don’t know everything about how other people are feeling, and at times it might be extremely difficult. But this is different from saying we can’t know anything whatsoever.
Additional thoughts:
The author plays fast and loose tracing the history of ideas.
For example, she says that “EA led [Elon Musk] to engage with the idea of charity predicated on data” and that Musk’s philosophy “closely aligns” with effective altruism. This is another (AI-generated?) misquotation. Musk’s only favorable statement related to EA was a reference to a recently-published book by Will MacAskill. Musk tweeted of the book, “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.”
Three things are worth noting:
1. Will MacAskill’s book, titled What We Owe the Future, does not argue for effective altruism. Instead, it argues for taking seriously the welfare of future generations. The fact that Musk might happen to care about future generations does not mean he endorses effective altruism or that he’s been led to “engage with the idea of charity predicated on data.” These are entirely separate ideas.
2. Musk does not claim that the book influenced him in any way. Indeed, Musk has envisioned interplanetary colonies for decades, well before the publication of Will MacAskill’s book. And, it’s worth repeating, a concern for future generations is not the same as effective altruism.
3. Of Musk’s thousands of other tweets, he has only ever mentioned “effective altruism” twice, not in a positive way.
So it would not be warranted to say Musk identifies with or has been influenced by effective altruism, and it would be unwarranted to imply that anything Musk has done, whether with DOGE or SpaceX or anything else, is reflective of effective altruism.
In short, the article’s central criticisms rest on misquotations, misunderstandings, and guilt by the most tenuous associations. It’s unfortunate that the author’s experiences have led her to these conclusions. There are certainly important criticisms to be made of Singer and effective altruism more broadly, but these deserve more careful thought than the author was willing or able to give.
thank you! i had similar thoughts while reading. though i largely disagree with the author’s boss, some of the piece still felt somewhat dishonest and reactive (eg, even if sharp rankings of suffering probably suck, we really shouldn’t consider the magnitude of harms within triage at all?)
This is outside the limits of ‘healthy’ debate when you’re commenting on the author herself, not to mention the misogyny in calling a woman voicing her opinion “reactive.”
This is a really interesting piece, thank you Jen. I too felt a disquiet when I first heard Peter Singer discussing effective altruism. Thank you for eloquently helping me understand exactly why.
I was working for Oxfam Australia at the time and knew that so many important aspects of social and economic change and development would be neglected and un- or under-funded if we took a blind utilitarian and quantitative approach to assessing need and to giving. Support and funding would never get to the necessary—but harder to quantify and change—dimensions such as community empowerment and equitable resource distribution.
So, it makes sense that the utilitarian, effective altruism approach is appealing to the people who are already powerful and are heavily invested in the status quo.
Yes. Fueling the rise of this movement is the category error of Modern society that has dehumanized our culture and infects our conceptual architecture by turning everything into objects that can be measured, reduced and evaluated .
This piece is essentially anti-utilitarian - which in itself is fair enough - to the point where applying quantitative thinking to ethics is immoral and place you in cohort with the MAGA movement and the nazis.
Which is not only grossly unfair (it is selfevident that a ethic which does not concern itself with the (predictable) outcome of its practice is at best arbitrary, at worst self serving aestetics), but also backwards writing, starting out with a determined conclusion, and mangling the rationale to fit the goal.
And using Peter Singer as the ideological source is just lazy reading of him.
He is a utilitarian yes, and a brutally honest one at that, but he deserves to read thoroughly. And it should be noted by even the most superficial reader that he’s *not* advocating what he is accused of here, rather he is pointing out the danger of taking the utilitarian thoughts too far.
No policy, no matter how grand or ambitious it may be, will ever succeed unless the masses are “educated” and trained to live disciplined, responsible, and enlightened lives.
Thank you for writing this. I found it very interesting. I do have two points that I would like do add.
It seems as though a hugely important extension of your argument (that human lives cannot be quantified and that it is wrong to use data driven eugenics to do so) is ignored. Abortion. Now, leave aside many important arguments about abortion, and zero in on the one that I so commonly hear - why should we bring a child into such a broken world? Why should a woman give birth to a child that has to live in an underfunded foster system? Accepting that there may be other legitimate arguments about why people are having abortions, given the magnitude and scale of abortions it seems to me someone with your worldview should be more staunch in advocating for the lives of these infants that are killed in the name of cost concerns.
This isn’t to shame the women involved, and instead should inspire men to take more responsibility and care for children. But this argument seems incomplete if it is not willing to highlight such a huge ethical dilemma of our day that falls within the grounds of this argument.
Additionally, I think your points about DOGE bring up fair arguments. That said, it is simply true that our government is incredibly inefficient. Correcting that, as much as DOGE may have made serious mistakes, will NEVER be popular. We have a sovereign debt ballooning over 40 trillion dollars and no material reductions in cost coming. Given the nature of government and the social contract, which uses the threat of violence to take tax dollars from its people, it is imperative that we attempt to hold it to a standard of efficiency and effectiveness. While your critiques about how and what DOGE was cutting was fair, arguments against DOGE seem to fail to reckon with the issue of ballooning spending and the moral imperative to use tax dollars effectively.
Though one way of looking at effective altruism as you point out is trying to justify the capitalist biases by attaching costs to the outcomes that you’re biased against, Saying that it’s data driven efficiency
There also is merit in analysing data for “impact” work but attaching costs in a way which is much more humane. Do you think there is a way to use the same idea of cost to think about this differently? Other words, Clearly the problem is that current tools are too narrow, can they be expanded? Or is the whole data driven logic completely flawed and can never lead to any other outcome than what we see right now?
" If one believes fiercely in data, in the idea that all aspects of human life can be measured, quantified, and ranked, it is not a far leap to, consciously or subconsciously, assume that some lives can measure too low on the metric to matter."
I thought that quote got to the heart of the matter.
My follow-up question is this: In terms of policy—which is mentioned as the SV titans come to Washington and bring their beliefs—how should systems of governance prioritize lifesaving measures, in daily life, research, and also in times of great need? There is a pragmatic element to EA that I think so many people find appealing, but what do we think a viable decision-making alternative is?
i'm too sickened and furious about this to give this worthy entry a close reading; nevertheless offer my premature comment: effective altruism is now barely disguised eugenics and why not, the detention camps are barely disguised concentration camps - no doubt several of them are planned to become purposeful death camps ridding this nation of people with brown and black skin tones and Jews of all skin tones while the data centers raping communities are likely surveillance centers. Push back. Use our love of life to push back against the fascists. Daily with multiple calls and petitions. It works. The raging bully shivers and backs down.
This article misrepresents Peter Singer. It gives an inaccurate description of effective altruism and provides poor objections to the strawmen she erected.
1. Peter Singer
The author misrepresents Peter Singer’s views several times throughout the article
Example 1: The author says that Singer is “comfortable” with the view that “there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia.” Supposedly, he considers such fatal judgments to be “morally imperative.”
Why does this misrepresent Singer’s view?
The quote is taken from a section in which Singer is describing the consequences of the “total” vs “prior existence” versions of utilitarianism. And Singer is presenting this hypothetical as an *unwelcome consequence* of the prior existence view. The full quote goes as follows (emphasis mine):
“Perhaps the best one can say [for the prior existence view] - *and it is not very good* - is that there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia.”
Singer goes on to say that “this is, at best, paradoxical” and he considers this a “counterintuitive consequence.” So, had the author read the two pages surrounding the quote she cited (or even the 12 preceding words in the very same sentence she cited!), she would have seen that Singer was not endorsing that conclusion.
Example 2: The author suggests that Singer is in favor of giving parents the right to kill their hemophiliac infants. In support of this, she quotes another passage from Practical Ethics: “if killing the hemophiliac in fact has no adverse effect on others excluding the infant, it would, according to the view be right to kill him.”
Here, the author is misquoting what was actually written. The full quote is as follows (emphasis mine):
“[I]f killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the *total view*, be right to kill him.”
As the full quote makes clear, Singer is again describing a consequence of a particular version of utilitarianism, not endorsing it. The author’s omission of the key qualifier and the odd inclusion of the phrase “excluding the infant” suggests she is not quoting directly from the text but rather getting her citations second-hand (perhaps from an hallucinating AI?).
2. What is Effective Altruism?
The author cites Peter Singer as the “unofficial” founder of effective altruism. She does not cite any of its literal organizational founders. Had she done so, she would find people explicitly rejecting Singer’s philosophical views.
For example, according to Will MacAskill, a co-founder of EA organizations like Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism, EA is defined as:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and
(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rQu75k8uMFpdsp1y3JWlHP6kev3T-97N/view
Contrast this with the way the author’s acquaintance describes it:
“Effective Altruism is a theory that we are obligated to do as much good as possible, that it’s ethically mandatory to give in the most effective way.”
Will MacAskill explicitly rejects this, saying, “effective altruism makes no claims about what obligations of benevolence one has.” If you choose to help others because you’re excited about the prospect of making the world a better place, you can still be an effective altruist. You don’t also have to feel obligated to do so.
Benjamin Todd, a co-founder of 80,000 Hours, says, “‘Doing the most good’ makes it sound like EA says you're morally obligated to focus 100% on the thing that most helps others (ie utilitarianism). I think the best version of EA doesn't make any moral demands at all.”
https://x.com/ben_j_todd/status/1585615624969064449?s=20&t=JWuD42PqmO-nS50ERauPZQ
And what are the author’s objections to effective altruism?
Here’s one repugnant conclusion she suggests follows from EA:
“If our philosophy was that we could rationally and confidently make such choices—could assess which suffering matters more—didn’t that mean that we were creating a cutoff point below which sufferers were unworthy?”
Yes, obviously some suffering matters more than others—getting an arm chopped off is worse than getting a paper cut. But no, this does not mean that there is a cutoff below which sufferers are “unworthy.” A paper cut still hurts even if it’s minor. The mere fact that there is a scale of suffering from less to more does not mean that everything below some cutoff doesn’t matter. It all matters.
This misconception is central to many of the author’s criticisms. The author repeatedly expresses the concern that some people might be below some threshold, where their interests no longer matter. But this simply does not follow, neither from utilitarianism nor from effective altruism.
Another objection: The author bristles at Singer’s (and by connection effective altruist’s) assumption that we can know how others are feeling. She writes, “Singer affirms his personal ability, and, perforce, that of the society he envisions, to know and judge the value and affective experience of another.”
But, of course we can know others’ affective experiences! Why is it wrong to slap a stranger in the face? Because we know it will hurt them! Why is it good to give other people Christmas presents? Because we know it will make them happy!
We should not be solipsists—we in fact know a great deal about other people’s affective experiences. This does not mean we are perfect mind readers. We don’t know everything about how other people are feeling, and at times it might be extremely difficult. But this is different from saying we can’t know anything whatsoever.
Additional thoughts:
The author plays fast and loose tracing the history of ideas.
For example, she says that “EA led [Elon Musk] to engage with the idea of charity predicated on data” and that Musk’s philosophy “closely aligns” with effective altruism. This is another (AI-generated?) misquotation. Musk’s only favorable statement related to EA was a reference to a recently-published book by Will MacAskill. Musk tweeted of the book, “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.”
Three things are worth noting:
1. Will MacAskill’s book, titled What We Owe the Future, does not argue for effective altruism. Instead, it argues for taking seriously the welfare of future generations. The fact that Musk might happen to care about future generations does not mean he endorses effective altruism or that he’s been led to “engage with the idea of charity predicated on data.” These are entirely separate ideas.
2. Musk does not claim that the book influenced him in any way. Indeed, Musk has envisioned interplanetary colonies for decades, well before the publication of Will MacAskill’s book. And, it’s worth repeating, a concern for future generations is not the same as effective altruism.
3. Of Musk’s thousands of other tweets, he has only ever mentioned “effective altruism” twice, not in a positive way.
So it would not be warranted to say Musk identifies with or has been influenced by effective altruism, and it would be unwarranted to imply that anything Musk has done, whether with DOGE or SpaceX or anything else, is reflective of effective altruism.
In short, the article’s central criticisms rest on misquotations, misunderstandings, and guilt by the most tenuous associations. It’s unfortunate that the author’s experiences have led her to these conclusions. There are certainly important criticisms to be made of Singer and effective altruism more broadly, but these deserve more careful thought than the author was willing or able to give.
thank you! i had similar thoughts while reading. though i largely disagree with the author’s boss, some of the piece still felt somewhat dishonest and reactive (eg, even if sharp rankings of suffering probably suck, we really shouldn’t consider the magnitude of harms within triage at all?)
Apparently if you use numbers to help the world, you’re basically a Nazi 🤷♂️
This is outside the limits of ‘healthy’ debate when you’re commenting on the author herself, not to mention the misogyny in calling a woman voicing her opinion “reactive.”
This is so beautifully written and deeply thought provoking. Love seeing more journals publishing pieces centered on disability studies 🫶
I learned much from this essay and the subsequent commentary and discussion. Thank you.
This is a really interesting piece, thank you Jen. I too felt a disquiet when I first heard Peter Singer discussing effective altruism. Thank you for eloquently helping me understand exactly why.
I was working for Oxfam Australia at the time and knew that so many important aspects of social and economic change and development would be neglected and un- or under-funded if we took a blind utilitarian and quantitative approach to assessing need and to giving. Support and funding would never get to the necessary—but harder to quantify and change—dimensions such as community empowerment and equitable resource distribution.
So, it makes sense that the utilitarian, effective altruism approach is appealing to the people who are already powerful and are heavily invested in the status quo.
Yes. Fueling the rise of this movement is the category error of Modern society that has dehumanized our culture and infects our conceptual architecture by turning everything into objects that can be measured, reduced and evaluated .
This piece is essentially anti-utilitarian - which in itself is fair enough - to the point where applying quantitative thinking to ethics is immoral and place you in cohort with the MAGA movement and the nazis.
Which is not only grossly unfair (it is selfevident that a ethic which does not concern itself with the (predictable) outcome of its practice is at best arbitrary, at worst self serving aestetics), but also backwards writing, starting out with a determined conclusion, and mangling the rationale to fit the goal.
And using Peter Singer as the ideological source is just lazy reading of him.
He is a utilitarian yes, and a brutally honest one at that, but he deserves to read thoroughly. And it should be noted by even the most superficial reader that he’s *not* advocating what he is accused of here, rather he is pointing out the danger of taking the utilitarian thoughts too far.
No policy, no matter how grand or ambitious it may be, will ever succeed unless the masses are “educated” and trained to live disciplined, responsible, and enlightened lives.
Thank you for writing this. I found it very interesting. I do have two points that I would like do add.
It seems as though a hugely important extension of your argument (that human lives cannot be quantified and that it is wrong to use data driven eugenics to do so) is ignored. Abortion. Now, leave aside many important arguments about abortion, and zero in on the one that I so commonly hear - why should we bring a child into such a broken world? Why should a woman give birth to a child that has to live in an underfunded foster system? Accepting that there may be other legitimate arguments about why people are having abortions, given the magnitude and scale of abortions it seems to me someone with your worldview should be more staunch in advocating for the lives of these infants that are killed in the name of cost concerns.
This isn’t to shame the women involved, and instead should inspire men to take more responsibility and care for children. But this argument seems incomplete if it is not willing to highlight such a huge ethical dilemma of our day that falls within the grounds of this argument.
Additionally, I think your points about DOGE bring up fair arguments. That said, it is simply true that our government is incredibly inefficient. Correcting that, as much as DOGE may have made serious mistakes, will NEVER be popular. We have a sovereign debt ballooning over 40 trillion dollars and no material reductions in cost coming. Given the nature of government and the social contract, which uses the threat of violence to take tax dollars from its people, it is imperative that we attempt to hold it to a standard of efficiency and effectiveness. While your critiques about how and what DOGE was cutting was fair, arguments against DOGE seem to fail to reckon with the issue of ballooning spending and the moral imperative to use tax dollars effectively.
This is very scary stuff and unnerving read.
Not everything that matters can be counted.
Very well written piece Jen.
Though one way of looking at effective altruism as you point out is trying to justify the capitalist biases by attaching costs to the outcomes that you’re biased against, Saying that it’s data driven efficiency
There also is merit in analysing data for “impact” work but attaching costs in a way which is much more humane. Do you think there is a way to use the same idea of cost to think about this differently? Other words, Clearly the problem is that current tools are too narrow, can they be expanded? Or is the whole data driven logic completely flawed and can never lead to any other outcome than what we see right now?
Fantastic read, thanks so much for writing Jen.
" If one believes fiercely in data, in the idea that all aspects of human life can be measured, quantified, and ranked, it is not a far leap to, consciously or subconsciously, assume that some lives can measure too low on the metric to matter."
I thought that quote got to the heart of the matter.
My follow-up question is this: In terms of policy—which is mentioned as the SV titans come to Washington and bring their beliefs—how should systems of governance prioritize lifesaving measures, in daily life, research, and also in times of great need? There is a pragmatic element to EA that I think so many people find appealing, but what do we think a viable decision-making alternative is?
i'm too sickened and furious about this to give this worthy entry a close reading; nevertheless offer my premature comment: effective altruism is now barely disguised eugenics and why not, the detention camps are barely disguised concentration camps - no doubt several of them are planned to become purposeful death camps ridding this nation of people with brown and black skin tones and Jews of all skin tones while the data centers raping communities are likely surveillance centers. Push back. Use our love of life to push back against the fascists. Daily with multiple calls and petitions. It works. The raging bully shivers and backs down.