Usually a fan of Jacobin's stuff, but this is a joke. There are valid critiques of effective altruism, sure, but this goes way too far. Of course there are structural, material causes of poverty and suffering. If I have $1,000 in my pocket, though, it's not particularly clear how I can help address those issues other than helping people on a smaller scale. At the end of the day, providing an answer that helps save a couple of lives (who may themselves go on to affect structural change!) is better than endless leftist infighting that likely brings about no positive change at all.

Of course I, like most of Jacobin's readers, would prefer that Singer were explicitly anti-capitalist. However, his call that we bring a more analytical viewpoint to how we seek to bring about maximal good is, I think, a valuable one. I suspect that some critiques of his philosophy are oftentimes subconsciously motivated by a desire to evade the guilt at how much better we Westerners are than the vast majority of the people on this planet. It's easier to pat ourselves on the back for social media posts than it is to donate the majority of our incomes to charities.

That's not really accurate to history, though, superstition never went away, nor did the people calling it out as such, nor is it dependent on education or the 'general population' - eg. some more highly educated people might be more rather than less inclined to defend religion when lower class people were just sick of institutional religious exploitation.

It is true that they are logically consistent, but there seems to be a practical tension between the two. By praising billionaires for their charity work, you legitimize deep systemic inequalities. The billionaires that love to do charity are the same ones that lobby against progressive taxation, anti-trust policies, safety and environmental protection...

There's a useful concept in mathematics called a "local maximum."

One way to solve a problem is to simply do the thing that most directly relates to maximizing a desired attribute in ourselves and the world. This is roughly analogous to the "greedy algorithm" in computer science, and it's what Singer largely advocates for.

However, it usually results in getting stuck in local maxima--a space where any different incremental actions lead to a result that is worse than the result we're currently. It is often the case that in the total probability space of reachable solutions, there may be better solutions, but we will have to go through a temporary period of pain or reduced effectiveness to get there. But since we don't yet have that new solution--the problem isn't fully solved yet--we can't know for sure that we actually can get to a better solution than the local maximum that we've found.

There's a element of wisdom involved in apprehending that what we've found is merely a local maximum, not the global maximum. And there's a element of risk in striking out for the the higher peak across the valley. Call it a calculated risk or--if you want a drop of poetry--a leap of faith.

This criticism of Singer is essentially that he lacks the courage to step out from the local maximum that he's found. Whether it's a fair criticism or not depends on one's overall judgement of the situation.

Totally agree. Singer is politically very much on the left. I think the authors confuse Singer’s pessimism about systemic change with a lack of desire for it.

Well that automatically brings capitalism into the picture if you want to answer any of those questions. The plane is owned by people who only have 1 purpose for owning that plane, if we were to use it for anything else we would be breaking the law

But when we humans create something new, we use real life existing objects . For example, you cannot think of a color your eyes can't see.

Disagree, I think in the UK we easily have sufficient public support for veganism, and at absolute minimum for welfare legislation that would have the inevitable effect of drastically reducing then likely eliminating meat consumption, it's the actions and practical understanding that haven't caught up. It's an edgelord minority willing to look at animal ag. and go 'this is fine', very few think or want to say that.

Yes, they can mimic, but that will always be based on existing data. The thinking part would be to create something new.

If we can program something that can imagine, then truly, all that we are has been passed.

There are several rules you can apply to scrutinize your own consumption. "the least amount of harm", for example. And/or the lower forms of life are more acceptable to eat or breed for slaughter (for example, a cow is less ok to eat than lice). Most use a combination. I think hunted animals can be fine since it's necessary to keep wildlife populations in control. Some might disagree and that's okay by me. But if you're at the level were a cow is just as problematic to eat as a carrot would be, then I dont think you've made an honest effort to think through your choices.

For example, imagine that people have the choice to buy clothes from sweatshops or from a factory where the workers have rights and decent pay. We can discuss the choice from a lot of angles: maybe the sweatshop is good for the economy, maybe the good factory makes it money by slave labour further down the production line. Maybe maybe maybe - totally fine and something worth discussing. But if you're stance is "I like the sweatshop I like the clothes and it's fine." Then you're not really, honestly, engaging with the question and you're just covering up the dissonance.

We’re well over halfway there. The number of people living in extreme poverty today is lower than it has been in hundreds of years (when it represented the majority of the worlds population). In terms of percentages, it has fallen from 80% in 1820 to 20% in 2015 thanks to large scale globalization and international relief organizations.

Unfortunately, research has consistently found that most Americans (and likely other first world inhabitants) are ignorant of the vast progress made in reducing world poverty, many even believing that it has increased. Better communication is necessary so that people who live in a first world bubble remain connected to the progress that has happened and continue to be motivated to finish the job by contributing (individually and via their government) to NGOs on the ground actually working to improve lives around the world.

https://www.humanprogress.org/what-19-in-20-americans-dont-know-about-world-poverty/

https://books.google.com/books?id=j-4yDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/world/global-poverty-united-nations.html

If you're opposed to large scale efforts to stop babies from dying needlessly, I think it's time to rethink your ethical framework. Large-scale social change is insanely difficult to bring about, and history has shown that it almost never has the results the people pushing for it expect. If you're okay with just letting people die for no good reason while you wait around for it, I seriously doubt you actually care about people at all. You're just a poser who likes to feel good about yourself without actually having to do anything.

They do, it's called profit.

I don’t think anyone knows which is more likely to work at a global system level. But it is demonstrably easier for a single individual to dramatically change the life of another individual through charity (I have done it several times). For me to achieve the same through politics is incredibly diffuse and difficult to prove, especially if I eschew electoral politics as many Jacobin writers would probably suggest.

Obviously I’m happy that some people work on behalf of the poor through politics, and I vote for them. But I could spend my whole life without accruing any evidence whatsoever that I had actually improved anyone’s life. It’s almost a faith based activity, whereas the fruits of my charitable work are obvious,

The other issue is that in politics, the harder you work, the harder your opponents are motivated to work. In charity there are seldom opponents. Hardly ever is there a person who makes it their life goal to re-impoverish people.

"Well, here we are and here we are and here we go" powerful words

>The problem with ‘overthrow the whole system and put in my ideologically pure alternative’ is that it tends to be undemocratic ( but for their own good because they are too stupid, evil or brainwashed to know what good for them of course) and all ideologies tend to have unintended consequences when faced with real life that may be worse than the one overthrown (and often the intended methods are morally suspect.)

Not really, it tends to assume false consciousness and that people would already agree if they weren't being mislead. Most people in our society -UK here- even already easily agree animals have moral value, claim to care about them, back laws protecting them and want further such legislation, frequently express horror at footage of animal agriculture or outright refuse to watch it yet continue to act according to the status quo and counter to their own apparent beliefs, for various reasons. I can't think of an actual instance of such an ideology being implemented with unintended consequences, examples?

Charity also is not counter to ideological consistency aimed at systemic change - I donate to vegan charity Viva, for example.

Why only charge them for the downside?

Let's say that the transport system that runs on oil and coal generates ten times the value (just picking numbers) of the sale price of the oil and coal that powered it. Should the company get a share of that?

Singer doesn't advocate for giving to charity because he thinks it'll miraculously solve poverty--he advocates for it because it simply makes the world a better place. If you lived in a hypothetical world where you knew that you couldn't personally accomplish any political changes, and you saw a child drowning in a nearby lake, would you jump in and rescue them, or would you continue walking because saving the kid wouldn't solve any of the systemic problems of our economic system?

The question of whether to spend effort on getting people to donate to charity vs getting people to push for policy changes isn't so easy to answer when you factor in likelihood of success. Political change is quite difficult for any person to accomplish--there's no shortage of left-wing academic figures who got a lot of attention advocating for change but had little impact overall. In contrast, Singer has been extremely successful at getting a lot of people to donate to charity. What's better: A high probability of convincing 1,000 people to donate and save 10,000 lives, or an unknown but probably very low probability of convincing the entire US to reform its political system? Do you save the drowning children in front of you or do you gamble on a tiny chance of a vastly higher payoff?

(Plus, you can multitask by donating to charity and also voting for good politicians or policies. Singer votes, and isn't silent about who he votes for.)

I think this article presents a reasonable oversight of Singer's ethics, but goes farther than is warranted.

The author seems to treat the decision as one between giving a lot to charity or working toward systemic change. It's true that charitable giving doesn't do much to solve systemic problems and this is an issue with Singer's work. That being said, giving to charity can be done at the same time as working toward systemic change. We can try to eradicate the disease while also treating the symptoms. Thus, it seems that the author sets up a false dichotomy.

Technology is a force multiplier, true, but it works for all sides and it's owned by the wealthy. I'm skeptical of it.

Facebook helped organize the people voting for Donald Trump and Brexit.

That will happen around the time pigs fly.

Perhaps if companies were required to pay for ALL the consequences of their operations (e.g., oil and coal companies pay for cleaning up all the pollution they cause - otherwise known as externalities: "a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved"), they would be more likely to use their resources more wisely.

Even more ridiculous: Charity has existed for literally thousands of years and has yet to solve poverty. Yet people hold on to the notion that this will eventually work.

When? Are we half way done with the project of eradicating poverty? Or is it just another 2000 years perhaps?

But someone would say that dall-e can do that too. In reality, that AI program just smashes pictures from the internet together.

I believe it might be more accurate to not talk about technology but the essence of technology, as that is what Heidegger is really interested in. Furthermore saying that "everything is now measured by its instrumental value" seems to slightly misrepresent the phenomenological relation we now have, how things are not merely seen or measured as, but ARE only its instrumental value. A stationary airplane is no longer an airplane that can move an x amount of people, but becomes ONLY the potential of this transport of people.