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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.… (more)
User reviews
For completeness, Singer even examines possible risks of human extinction and the likelihood of reducing them: asteroid strike; nuclear war; pandemic of natural origin; pandemic caused by bioterrorism; global warming; nanotech accident, tiny self-replicating robots multiplying until the entire planet is covered in them' physics research producing hyperdense matter; super-intelligent unfriendly artific1al intelligence. For some of these, it is difficult to estimate the risk, and even when the risk is able to be determined, the way to reduce it is not. As an illustration, Singer weighs up the possible cost of preventing an asteroid strike against estimates or the financial value of a human life. Personally I'm not planning to worry about human extinction, but logically, according to Singer's utilitarian goal of saving the greatest number of lives, it has to be considered.
Singer's prose is as utilitarian as his philosophy: clear, simple and direct. A useful and thought-provoking book.
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.
•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.