The Most Good You Can Do
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Average rating3
15
Ratings5
Average rating3
An argument for putting sentiment aside and maximizing the practical impact of our donated dollars: “Powerful, provocative” (Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times). Peter Singer’s books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency ever since the appearance of Animal Liberation. Now he directs our attention to a challenging new movement in which his own ideas have played a crucial role: effective altruism. Effective altruism is built upon the simple but profoundly unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the “most good you can do.” Such a life requires a rigorously unsentimental view of charitable giving: to be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas, and shows how, paradoxically, living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment than living for oneself. Doing the Most Good develops the challenges Singer has made, in the New York Times and Washington Post, to those who donate to the arts, and to charities focused on helping our fellow citizens, rather than those for whom we can do the most good. Effective altruists are extending our knowledge of the possibilities of living less selfishly, and of allowing reason, rather than emotion, to determine how we live. Doing the Most Good offers new hope for our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
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I'm already a supporter of effective altruism so I don't think I learned anything new from reading this book, but it was good to get a refresher nonetheless. Felt a bit repetitive in some parts but overall it's a great introduction to the topic.
I'm already a supporter of effective altruism so I don't think I learned anything new from reading this book, but it was good to get a refresher nonetheless. Felt a bit repetitive in some parts but overall it's a great introduction to the topic.
As an admirer of much of Singer's work, the most charitable view I can offer is that effective altruism has not aged well since 2015.
Singer mentions “class” several times in his examples, but in all but one case he means it in the sense of an academic lecture, rather than socio-economic strata. It's quite a telling gap he avoids but there's a constant theme in Singer's examples of virtuous altruists:
•they're are all from relatively privileged backgrounds. Access to generational wealth and connections makes the decision to live on only median national salary less harrowing.
• the concept of establishing a career in the financial sector to then pursue altruism is blind to how the industry itself immiserates the poor and needy the altruist will eventually help.
• the complete bypass of public methods of redistribution and collective action–TAXES! Singer constructs an ethical obligation without a requisite policy obligation throughout. The idea of charities redistributing altruism rather than accountable public institutions (i.e. government) is just such a bizarre neoliberalism oversight to cap it off.
In a sense, Singer is proposing effective altruism as a way to put the current structure of society towards a more ethical distribution. He invests a lot of time praising people who believe they don't need to exploit the structure anymore but issue comparatively little pressure towards an ethical obligation for a change to the exploitation underlying it. Effectively, the altruism Singer is heralding is at best a secular prosperity gospel.
