Peter Singer And Effective Altruism

Peter Singer | New York Review Of Books | 12th May 2015

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing
Ideas About Living Ethically
by Peter Singer, Yale University Press, 211 pp., $25.00
FOR PETER SINGER, effective altruism is an emerging movement
with the potential of spreading to a point when people all over the
world may be ready to commit themselves to a new ethical ideal:
to do the most good they can. Singer is clear that applying this ideal
will involve departures from normal practice, including choosing to
live very modestly in order to be able to give a substantial part of
ones income to good causes, adopting a high-earning profession in
order to give still more, and being ready to donate a part of oneself
(blood, bone marrow, or a kidney, for example) so that others can live
longer.
Altruists may not feel that what they are doing is a sacrifice; they
may find personal fulfillment in giving away much of their income
and some of their body parts. This does not detract from their
altruism, since their overriding concern is to do the most good they
can. At present there are still relatively few effective altruists; but
Singer believes this situation could change. He is associated with the
Centre for Effective Altruism at Oxford University, which appears to
be in the business of preparing people for what Singer describes as
ethical careers. Once the idea of devoting ones life to doing the
most good no longer seems strange, he believes, effective altruism
may become mainstream. If this happens, Singer expects that the
new ideal would spread more rapidly.
Currently teaching at Princeton and the University of Melbourne,
Singer is known for his attacks on speciesism, a term he
popularized. In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our
Treatment of Animals, Singer condemned speciesism as a prejudice
or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of ones own
species and against those of other species. In books and articles he

has argued that it would be wrong to give greater weight to the

interests of some profoundly disabled human beings than to
normally functioning dogs or chimpanzees. He reiterates this view
in The Most Good You Can Do, where he writes: We wrong animals
whenever we give less weight to their interests than we would, in
the same circumstances, give to a human with similar capacities.
Singer bases these views on a version of utilitarianismthe
philosophy, associated with nineteenth-century British thinkers such
as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, according
to which the purpose of morality is to maximize value wherever it
exists in the world. Utilitarian thinkers have differed about what
exactly it is that has value. Some have believed the fundamental
good to be the satisfaction of preferencesSingers viewwhile for
others it has been pleasure or happiness.
What utilitarian thinkers are agreed on is that more of what is good
is always better than less, and we should live so that we do as much
good as possible. Some have maintained that maximizing the good is
compatible with retaining much of generally accepted morality,
while others (such as Bentham and Mill) have demanded radical
revisions in prevailing moral beliefs. Singers version of utilitarianism
is of the radical variety. He has little interest in squaring
utilitarianism with prevailing moral attitudes. Instead he views the
morally counterintuitive results of utilitarianism as signs of its
superior rationality.
In The Most Good You Can Do, Singer tells us that one of the sources
of the movement for effective altruism was an article that he wrote
in 1972 while he was a junior lecturer in Oxford called Famine,
Affluence and Morality, in which he argued that given the great
suffering that occurs during famines and similar disasters, we ought
to give large portions of our income to disaster relief funds. In the
article he suggested that there is no logical stopping place in
giving away ones income for such a cause until we reach the point
of marginal utilitythat is, the point at which by giving more, one
would cause oneself and ones family to lose as much as the

recipients of ones aid would gain. Judged by the test of marginal

utility, Singer admits he may be failing to live ethically. He and his
wife, he tells us, were only giving away about ten percent of our
modest income when he wrote the article. Since then the
percentage has increased, and they are now giving away about onethird of what we earn and aiming to get to half, but that still isnt
anywhere near the point of marginal utility.
Singer goes on to describe the lives of others who have taken up
effective altruism. We learn of Julia Wise, who believes that every
dollar she spends is taken out of the hands of someone who needs it
more than she does, and who when considering buying a portion of
ice cream would constantly ask herself, Do I need this ice cream as
much as a woman living in poverty elsewhere in the world needs to
get her child vaccinated? This made grocery shopping a
maddening experience, until she and her husband decided how
much they would give away, drew up a budget based on what was
left, and Julia no longer had to scrimp on ice cream. Addressing
Singers class, she confessed that ice cream is really important to my
happiness. Similar reasoning led her to overcome her belief that it
would be immoral to have children, which she strongly wished to do:
she decided that if she could look forward to being a parent she
would be of more use to the world than she would be if she were
a broken-down altruist.
Aaron Moore, an Australian international aid worker and artist, on
discovering he was in the top one percent of the human species as
measured by income (though he didnt own a house or car), sold his
possessions and donated those he believed would not sell to the
Salvation Army, so that he was left with nothing but the clothes he
was wearing. Is it okay, he asked, for us to be going to movies and
drinking chai lattes while 1.4 billion people are living in extreme
poverty?
Zell Kravinsky, another speaker at Singers class and a real estate
multimillionaire, gave almost his entire fortune to charity, but feeling
he still had not done enough to help others, he arranged with a

hospital to donate one of his kidneys to a stranger. Citing scientific

studies, Kravinsky reasoned that not making a donation of his kidney
would mean he valued his life four thousand times more than that of
a stranger. Singer writes approvingly that Kravinsky puts his
altruism in mathematical terms.
In a similar vein, Singer quotes from an e-mail he received from a
student at another university, who wrote: Last Tuesday, I bit the
utilitarian bullet: I anonymously donated my right kidney to whoever
could use it the most The idea of donating a kidney popped into
my head in an Ethics class.
From the tone of Singers descriptions of these and others he regards
as effective altruists, it is clear that he expects his readers to share
his admiration for them. Why Singer thinks these people are
admirable is an interesting question. The reason is not that they
have strong emotions of empathy for the people they benefit. In a
chapter entitled Is Love All We Need?, Singer is explicit that effective
altruism does not require the kind of strong emotional empathy that
people feel for identifiable individuals.
Indeed, in Singers view empathy can be an obstacle to effective
altruism. Citing a study in which one group of people was shown a
photograph of a single child who needed an expensive life-saving
drug and another group was shown photographs of eight children all
of whose lives could be saved for the same sum, he reports that
those who were shown the photo of the single child gave more.
Singer is indignant:
To effective altruists, this is an absurd outcome, and if emotional
empathy is responsible for it, then so much the worse for that kind of
empathy. Effective altruists are sensitive to numbers and to cost per
life saved or year of suffering prevented.
For Singer, the appeal of altruism comes from the fact that in his
view it is required by reason. When effective altruists feel empathy, it
is because their recognition of the importance of acting for the good
of the whole brings about an emotional response within them. In
holding this rationalistic view Singer departs from earlier thinkers

who have promoted altruism as a social movement. Though we hear

nothing of its history in this book, the belief that organized altruism
can be a means of improving human life is not new. The sociologist
Pitirim Sorokin (18891968) founded the Center for Creative
Altruism at Harvard University in the late 1940s, in the belief that
altruism could be organized as a force for good. Unlike Singer,
Sorokin thought of altruism as concern for others motivated by love
and empathy, the study of which he termed amitology. Sorokin did
not claim to be the first to have suggested that altruism could be
turned into a social movement. Correctly, he credited the idea to the
French philosopher Auguste Comte (17981857), who in fact
invented the term altruism (from the Latin alteri, or others).
An exponent of what he called positive philosophya system of
ideas based on the belief that science alone can provide genuine
knowledgeComte created an influential movement, now largely
forgotten, that in its heyday helped shape the thinking of figures
such as the novelist George Eliot and the Social Darwinist theorist
Herbert Spencer. Comte did not believe that altruism could be
promoted simply, or even mainly, by an improvement in human
powers of reasoning. A complex system of practices was needed,
including daily rituals, which Comte propagated as part of a
positivist church that he founded. Some of these practicessuch as
touching at regular intervals the parts of ones skull that were
associated, according to theories of phrenology that were popular at
the time, with altruistic impulsesmay seem eccentric today.
Singer makes no reference, here or so far as I know in any of his
writings, to Comte, and he differs from the French thinker in
suggesting that strong emotions of empathy may be detrimental to
effective altruism. Yet there are some clear parallels between
Comtes way of thinking and Singers version of utilitarianism. One of
the central tenets of positivism was that ethics should become a
branch of science. Ethical dilemmas were soluble problems like
those found in chemistry and physics. By applying the methods of
scienceobservation, experimentation, and measurementmoral

quandaries could be resolved in ways that left no room for doubt. In

this positivist view moral questions had objective answers, which
could be discovered by anyone who possessed the necessary
knowledge and powers of reasoning. Moral disagreement could only
be a result of ignorance or irrationality.
Singers view is not dissimilar. Considering how someone should
donate $100,000, he maintains that there are objective answers to
the question, What is the best cause? In a choice between donating
funds to an art museum or using the funds to cure blindness among
poor people in developing countries, he has no doubt that giving
them to art museumswould not do the most good. He arrives at
this conclusion by a process of computation: Suppose [a] new
museum wing will cost $50 million, and over the fifty years of its
expected useful life one million people will enjoy seeing it each
year, for a total of fifty million enhanced museum visits. Since you
would contribute 1/500th of the cost, you could claim credit for the
enhanced aesthetic experiences of one hundred thousand visitors.
He then goes on to argue that, if the cost of a cure for blindness is
$100 per person, one thousand people could be cured of blindness.
Having made this calculation, it seems to Singer incontrovertible
that sparing a thousand people from blindness is better than
enhancing the aesthetic experience of a hundred thousand museum
visitors.
It is not only in questions of charitable giving that Singer believes
there are objectively right answers. He considers the question
whether guards at Auschwitz could be justified in serving in this role
if they believed correctly that refusing to do so would have led only
to their replacement by someone else, perhaps someone who would
have been even more brutal. After considering and rejecting some
counterarguments, Singer concludes:
Strictly utilitarian effective altruists could not accept these views
and so would have to accept the implication that, on a plausible
reading of the relevant facts, at least some of the guards at
Auschwitz were not acting wrongly.

Anyone who thinks otherwise, Singer believes, is mistaken.

It is evident from these examples that effective altruism, as Singer
understands it, requires some radical departures from common moral
beliefs. For him this is not a weakness but a strength of the ideal he
is advocating. But why should anyone give up their moral
convictions in order to do the most good? For most human beings,
living ethically is not about doing the most good. It has to do with
holding to precepts of right conduct, such as those that enjoin them
to discharge obligations to those for whom they are responsible;
cultivating virtues and striving to avoid vices; and refusing to
perform actions they believe are wrong in all circumstances.
Living ethically may require careful reasoning; but the purpose of
such reasoning is not normally to establish what will do the most
good. Rather, it is to balance the claims of a variety of goods; to
determine how different values are to be applied in the
circumstances and decide which of them is most important in cases
of conflict. In some cases there may be no single right answer to
these questions.
In the view of most people, a good life need not maximize anything.
According to Singer, these peoplethe great majority of human
beings that have ever livedare being irrational. But what reason is
there to accept Singers view that a rational human being will aim to
do the most good? After all, none of the canonical utilitarian thinkers
has ever been able to explain why anyone should devote their lives
to maximizing value in the world. Neither Bentham nor Mill was able
to provide a convincing justification for the utilitarian principles that,
in different ways, they both held to be fundamental in moral
reasoning. Even the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838
1900), who is generally, and rightly, considered to be the greatest
utilitarian thinker, confessed that he could find no such justification.
Two principles seemed to Sidgwick self-evident: a principle of
rational egoism, which implied that selfishness was as reasonable a
basis for living as concern for others, and a principle of rational
benevolence, requiring that one should aim not at the good of

anyone in particular but at the good of all. Sidgwicks difficulty,

which he called the dualism of practical reason, came from the fact
that these two principles are in conflict, and as far as he could
determine this conflict was rationally insoluble. At the end of The
Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick felt forced to admit an ultimate and
fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is
Reasonable in conduct.
Sidgwick is important for Singer, since it is only when Singer
discusses him that he presents anything resembling an extended
defense of the utilitarian view that morality requires doing the most
good. Unfortunately Singers account of Sidgwicks thinking is patchy
and misleading. Correctly, he writes that Sidgwick held that there
are self-evident fundamental moral principles, or axioms, which we
grasp through our reasoning capacity; but he omits to inform the
reader that Sidgwick believed these principles to be irreconcilably at
odds. About Sidgwick, Singer writes:
For our purposes the most relevant of these principles are as follows:
The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the
point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any
other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that
more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other.
To this statement Sidgwick adds another claim, this time about what
a rational being should aim at: And it is evident to me that as a
rational being I am bound to aim at good generallyso far as it is
attainable by my effortsnot merely at a particular part of it. From
these two principles Sidgwick deduces what he calls the maxim of
benevolence in an abstract form: Each one is morally bound to
regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except
in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less
certainly knowable or attainable by him.
Singer comments that this is exactly the kind of principle that
would guide receptive people to do the things that effective
altruists do. If we were purely rational beings, he goes on, we would

see that it is more rational to aim at the good of all than the good
of some smaller group.
Given that Sidgwick spent much of his life struggling to reconcile
principles he believed to be rationally self-evident and in his own
view failed to do so, pronouncing one of these principlesthe
maxim of benevolenceto be the most relevant is questionbegging and disingenuous. For Sidgwick, rational egoism and
impartial benevolence could be reconciled only if the moral order of
the world ensured that practicing such benevolence would be in
everyones long-term self-interest. This was a belief derived from
religion for which Sidgwickwho resigned from his fellowship at
Trinity College when he could no longer accept the tenets of the
Church of England as was required of fellows of Cambridge colleges
at the timecould find no rational basis. But while he rejected
Christianity, Sidgwick never wholly freed his thinking from theism.
His reference to the point of view of the Universe is an example
of this influence. Unless some kind of presiding deity is assumed, the
universe has no point of view.
That value should be maximized appears obvious to Singer. Nowhere
in this book does he tell us why this should be so. As a result the
claim that living ethically means doing the most good is left hanging
in midair. Plausibly, the idea that practical rationality must mean
maximizing something belongs in economics (if it belongs anywhere)
rather than ethics. Those who believe it would be wrong to serve as
a guard in a Nazi death camp even if doing so would prevent greater
suffering are not guilty of any flaw in reasoning. They are refusing to
be complicit in practices they believe to be categorically and
intrinsically wrong. To surrender this belief for the sake of a
utilitarian theory of negative responsibility (which asserts that one
is responsible for evils that one could have prevented) would be a
fundamental compromise of their moral integrity. If this is required
by utilitarian ethics, so much the worse for utilitarianism.
Singer considers the argument, made some forty years ago by the
late British philosopher Bernard Williams, according to which the

utilitarian ideal of doing the most good requires people to step aside
from the projects and attachments that give meaning to their lives.
Adopting the point of view of the universe, Williams argued, is an
impossibility; but to the extent that universal benevolence is
adopted as an overriding goal, it has the effect of alienating people
from their convictions.
Singer rejects this argument on the ground that effective altruists
are, to a greater extent than most people, living in accord with their
valuesthat is, with their core conviction that we ought to live our
lives so as to do the most good we can.
Later Singer writes:
Effective altruists seem to have achieved what Williams thought
cannot be done. They are able to detach themselves from the more
personal considerations that otherwise dominate the way in which
we live.
But such detachment illustrates the alienation that Williams
criticizes. Whether or not they find fulfillment in the way they live,
effective altruists are bound to view their lives not as ends in
themselves but as means to the greatest good.
Not everyone will share Singers unqualified admiration for the
people he describes. In the eyes of many, having a body part
removed in order to bite the utilitarian bullet or obsessing about
the moral iniquity of ice cream will be seen as examples of lives
deformed by a simple-minded and disputable theory. Nor will many
accept that ordinary human attachments fall short of some higher
ideal of rational impartiality. If people prefer to give priority to the
needs of their own children over the needs of others living in
poverty, or the well-being of a loved one with Alzheimers over that
of a dog or chimpanzee, they are not backsliding from an ideal of
universal benevolence; they are honoring the ethical understandings
that shape their lives.
In contrast, for effective altruists, whose overriding concern is to do
the most good they can, any weight they give to more personal
considerations can only be a moral lapse as well as a failure of

rationality. It is true that a type of utilitarianism can be developed

that takes account of these human frailtiesa split-level theory in
which utilitarian reasoning applies when we are theorizing about the
nature of value, while in practical ethics we rely on non-utilitarian
motives and practices. But an indirect version of utilitarianism of this
kind still implies that in giving special weight to our personal goals
and relationships we are being irrational and less than fully moral. If
we make allowances for our human frailties, it is in order to be of
more use to the world. If we were purely rational beings, we
would care only about the good of the whole.
It may be that some good can come from effective altruism. Singer is
right that some kinds of sufferingthat involved in factory farming
of animals, for exampleare given insufficient attention in current
moral thinking. Even so, a life shaped by a thin universal
benevolence is an unattractive prospect. For many of us a world in
which our own projects and attachments were accorded value only
insofar as they enabled us to maximize the general good, where
human values were subject to a test of marginal utility and the relief
of suffering given overriding priority over aesthetic pleasure, would
be hardly worth living in. Happily there is no reason to suppose that
any such world will come into being. If history is our guide we can
expect Singers movement for effective altruism to go the way of
Comtes church of positivism, which has passed into history as an
example of the follies of philosophy.
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