Saunders-Hastings, Emma. "Forum Response: The Logic of Effective Altruism". The Boston Review, 6 July 2017.

Saunders-Hastings, Emma. "Forum Response: The Logic of Effective Altruism". The Boston Review, 6 July 2017.

• The effective altruism movement has achieved two objectives in encouraging at least some people to give more and providing resources to calculate where donations will have the greatest positive impact. 
• The point that charitable donation should be better directed is not new, dating at least from the 'scientific philanthropy' movement of the late 1800s. At that point men like Andrew Carnegie argued that charities should be better run and donations given where they would have the greatest impact for the poor. 
• The biggest shift from scientific philanthropy to effective altruism is that the early form assumed that poverty was mainly a consequence of the degraded moral character of the poor themselves, meaning that better supervision was needed to ensure that the immoral poor did not misuse the money. Effective altruism does not have these moralistic undertones.
• The similarities in the immediate goals of effective altruism and scientific philanthropy should warn men like Dr. Singer, because there is a definite chance of donors becoming paternalistic and assuming too much agency over the use of funds for the global poor.
• There are many charities where things like mosquito nets can be purchased, giving needed goods without giving agency or purchasing power to the poor. In the case of healthcare this is probably acceptable, but one needs to remain on high alert for other circumstances where the logic of effective altruism is being used to curtail purchasing choices for the poor.