The Most Good You Can Do

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.