Doing Good Better, an introduction to effective altruism, was recently reviewed by Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books, Europe's most successful literary magazine.

The article reads as critical of effective altruism, though is also careful to point out its advantages and our responses.

Overall, it's some of the most thoughtful criticism of effective altruism from someone outside our community I've seen in some time. Amia made a real effort to understand in our position, and had a lengthy discussion with Will before she published the article. At the same time, Amia clearly has a different world view from most of us, so it can make for frustrating reading.

Because of this, I think we should make an effort to welcome this feedback and try to learn from it - it'll need to be an active effort because my gut response is defensive!

To help get us going, in the rest of this post I've taken some key extracts from the article and added my comments.

A new generation of moral philosophers is determined to break with this tradition of ineffectuality. The goal of the ‘effective altruists’ is not only to theorise the world, but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it.

The author focuses heavily on effective altruism's roots in moral philosophy, which makes sense in the context of a review of Will's book, but is a bit unfair on the movement overall. The founders of the other organisations mostly don't have backgrounds in academic philosophy.

MacAskill proposes that ‘good’, here, can be understood roughly in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (Qalys)

This may be a misunderstanding. Will talks at length about QALYs in the book as one way to compare outcomes, but he doesn't propose that's how to understand "good" in general. Rather "good" would be understood as the welfare of sentient beings, of which health is just one component.

[on the negative effects of seeking jobs in finance] Up until recently MacAskill argued that such effects were morally irrelevant

Not that they're irrelevant, just that they're (i) smaller than they look and (ii) permissible in the context of doing a large amount of good through donations.

MacAskill is evidently comfortable with ways of talking that are familiar from the exponents of glob

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Doing Good Better

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