The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen

Effective altruists (EAs) seek to persuade the globally wealthy to donate a proportion of their income to do good, and specifically to donate it to those charities that will do the most good, in expectation, with the given amount of money donated. Their movement began in the mid-2000s with the charity evaluators GiveWell and Giving What We Can, which focus on how to do good for humans who are currently alive. Animal Charity Evaluators was founded in 2012, and focuses on non-human animals, whether wild or domestic, bred for food, labour or entertainment. Despite its title and subtitle, the present volume is pitched as a critique only of this latter, animal-focused part of the movement, though nearly all of the worries the contributors raise tell equally against the human-focused part, if they tell against either. The volume also includes a coda by the editors where they address the community’s recent turn to longtermism, which says that, as well as all humans and all non-human animals alive today, our moral circle should include those that will live in the future, including the very far future; and since, barring a catastrophe, these future beings will outnumber those currently living, longtermists say it is more urgent to do good for them. As well as the original charity evaluators, a series of further effective altruism organisations has emerged, including grant-making organisations, research institutes, a vast discussion board known as the Effective Altruism Forum, and a variety of regular conferences around the world. So what began less than two decades ago as websites ranking charities by effectiveness has become both a large movement, with an estimated 7,400 active members, but also, importantly, an extremely well-funded one, with an estimated forty-six billion dollars pledged to effective altruism causes.

It is only right that a movement of this size and power, backed by this much funding and seeking to make a substantial difference in the world, should be subject to scrutiny. This volume seeks to provide that. The editors of the book are philosophers known for their work on animal ethics, among many other things; and the contributors include them alongside other scholars, activists, and scholar-activists in animal and vegan advocacy.

The book includes many criticisms of effective altruism. Unfortunately, the editors chose not to focus each chapter on a specific criticism, but rather on the worries most prominent in the mind of the chapter’s author. But, inevitably, many of the authors have similar lists of worries and only limited space to describe them, and so we read only brief versions of the same concerns again and again, and we rarely find the extended exploration they deserve. In what follows, I pick out what I take to be two of the book’s central objections to the guiding principles of effective altruism, though the book wisely takes both guiding principles and actual practices as legitimate targets for criticism. The objections are these: (i) the moral theory that underpins much effective altruism conflicts both with an ethics of care and with the ethics of self-determination espoused by many liberation movements; (ii) in the debate between reform and revolution, EAs pick reform, while the authors contend in favour of revolution. Of course, I too have only limited space and can’t treat the concerns in sufficient detail. My aim is to persuade each side of the debate that the other has something to offer.

Besides the two issues I will cover, the criticisms of effective altruism voiced in the volume include: its lack of diversity; its willingness to accept donations from the extremely wealthy; its willingness to work with morally compromised corporations; its lack of attention to local cultures in the countries it affects; its inattention to cultures of sexual harassment in the charities with which it works; and many, many more.