Questioning Effective Altruism and the Relief of Poverty

If we all lived strictly by the mantra of effective altruism, we would necessarily sacrifice public luxuries that make life tolerable for those living beyond subsistence. That’s the point of an interesting if inconclusive essay on effective altruism.  To most donors, music, theatre, art, sports, and education are necessary luxuries.  It’s oxymoronic but those donors want to enrich more than they want to save lives.  Those donors assert a broad definition of charity.  To someone mostly concerned with hunger and homelessness, public luxuries are good for the soul but maybe they don’t deserve scarce subsidies.  That approach limits charity to helping poor people. I think effective altruists agree with the second approach.  To an effective altruist, necessary luxuries are wasteful — ineffective — compared to what else might be accomplished with charitable dollars. I don’t disagree, necessarily. 

Effective altruism believes in utilitarianism expressed as the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  It remains and always will be impossible, though, to quantify the “greatest” good. If everybody has enough to eat but nobody ever hears any music, have we achieved the greatest good?  That’s the ultimate point of in opposition to effective altruism, according to the essay.   

Effective altruism applies utilitarianism as though it is an objective standard.  Assuming objectivity, effective altruism values public good according to aggregate benefit. It is therefore ineffective to support local theatre or donate to the Little League if  children elsewhere in the world are starving. The essay disagrees with that argument but first it presents what is perhaps the strongest recent case in support of effective altruism:

When Notre Dame caught on fire in 2019, affluent people in France rushed to donate to repair the cathedral, a beloved national landmark. Peter Singer wrote an essay questioning the donations, asking: How many lives could have been saved with the charitable funds devoted to repairing this landmark? In an interview, Singer suggested that it might have been interesting to leave Notre Dame in a state of some disrepair, as a reminder of the many impoverished people in the world who need the money that might have been spent fixing it. He does not want to give his money to museums in affluent countries, he added, impishly noting the Museum of Modern Art’s recent $450 million expansion: “MoMA was a perfectly good museum before it did that.”

But then the essay takes issue with the philosophy underlying Singer’s objection to the extent it discourages donors from giving to nonprofits pursuing public luxuries, local or otherwise.  She does not call nonprofit theatre or museums “public luxuries,” that’s my phrase: 

There is nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to do the most good possible. But it’s also worth asking if some charity should be reserved for causes outside optimization — extending the deepest sources of meaning in our own lives toward others and strengthening the communities we are part of. We may consider whether there’s really a one-size-fits-all template to answer a question that’s as old as scripture and as ever-shifting as global news. Surrounded by problems that need attention, how should a person try to do good?

For all the affluent people who have taken up the E.A. mantle, criticisms of the movement have also multiplied. Skeptics point out that it frays people’s already threadbare ties to local charities like soup kitchens and shelters, worsening civic isolation. A billionaire pledging to do “the most good” with his or her fortune can also provide a justification for having that fortune to begin with, no matter how it was acquired. And channeling money only toward causes with measurable impact can undermine funding for squishier sources of good.

“The poor will always be with us” anyway, is what I am sort of hearing.  So maybe its ok that charity sometimes ignores the poor as it pursues public luxuries.  I don’t remember the old dusty case that interpreted the Statute of Charitable Uses to include activities that do not necessarily involve relief of poverty.  But its an age old conundrum.  

darryll k. jones