Giles Fraser gets a lot wrong about effective altruism (Loose canon, 24 November). Its proponents can easily shrug off Fraser’s supposed counter-examples. Effective altruism involves just a commitment to using charitable giving in the most effective way possible. Contrary to what Fraser claims, that’s not utilitarianism. Nor does it require that effective altruists prefer rescuing a bag of cash that can be used to save several children’s lives over rescuing an actual child. For of course rescuing the child is not charitable giving.
Fraser says effective altruism “forces all human need to express itself on a single comparable scale because of the giver’s rather nerdish requirement that the world possess some sort of measurable order”. But surely the world does possess at least some sort of measurable order? The “effective altruist” needn’t suppose the right thing to do is always entirely measurable/rationally calculable. They need only suppose that in so far as we can calculate the most effective way to give, we should. What’s wrong with that? Fraser raises a glass to the followers of effective altruism while at the same time taking the opportunity to patronise them as “nerdish”, “evangelical”, and “blinkered”. Why? I guess because they’re atheists, and he doesn’t want folk rejecting church and attending their meetings instead.
Stephen Law
Oxford
• Anyone wishing to find out more on this subject may like to read Doing Good Better by William MacAskill which highlights the effectiveness of de-worming programmes. I’m interested to read that those with this idealistic approach to “doing good” are mostly young, white, male and middle class. I’m old and female (but white and middle class) and I’m keen to make my charitable donations effectively. As usual, like many Guardian-reading pensioners, I will be adding my £200 winter fuel allowance to this Christmas’s extra charitable gifts. Maybe I’ll send it to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
Barbara Foster
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire
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