Srinivasan, Amia. "Stop the Robot Apocalypse". London Review of Books, Vol.37, No.18 (2015): 3-6.

Srinivasan, Amia. "Stop the Robot Apocalypse". London Review of Books, Vol.37, No.18 (2015): 3-6.

• This piece is a book review of 'Doing Good Better: effective altruism and a radical new way to make a difference' by William MacAskill.
• The goal of the 'effective altruist' movement is to break from the philosophical tradition of being irrelevant to actual apply their philosophical beliefs in the real world. Two prominent leaders are William MacAskill and Toby Ord, both of whom attempt to 'do the most good' by giving away most of their wages to charities which have proven effects (1).
• In his book, Mr. MacAskill asserts both that we should do the most possible good, and that this requires having access to data about what constitutes good things. Mr. MacAskill has selected 'quality-adjusted life years' as his measure of the good, meaning that the value of lives saved can be calculated based on a combination of the increase in life-expectancy and the increase in life quality from the intervention (2).
• In addition to the calculus derived from quality-adjusted life years, Mr. MacAskill also asserts that the marginal utility of decisions needs to be taken into account. This means that the added value of your decisions must be taken into effect, encouraging less direct aid work and more donation (2-3).
• The advice of Mr. MacAskill and other effective altruists to take high-payer jobs, especially in the financial sector, has been contraversial because these jobs are many bad side-effects. Instead, Mr. MacAskill argues that if you did not take that job someone else would, and they probably would not use the money for charity, meaning that taking these jobs still results in a net benefit for the world (3).
• The book 'Doing Good Better' is a feel-good instruction to contributing tangible good, but fails to address the root causes of the global poverty to seeks to end. Currently the movement is convention and seeks to solve poverty within the framework of global capitalism, yet there is no reason why the calculus of 'doing the most good' would not justify supporting radical political causes which seek to revolutionize the political and economic order which created these inequalities (4-5).
• Effective altruism takes its philosophical lead from the work of Peter Singer, famous for claiming that spending money on minor luxuries rather than donating to charity was immoral. Dr. Singer created a radical philosophy, which has been toned down by effective altruism to avoid asking too much of people and allow the status quo to continue (7-8).
• The solutions provided by the modelling of effective altruism are pretty good, but they do not provide radical new answers to most problems and instead tend to follow commonsense. On murkier issues they become even less useful, providing answers that raise the question of why a model is even needed (6).
• The major different solution raised in the work of effective altruists is a focus on 'existential risks', those disasters which could doom our species as a whole. Calculus demands that these risks take more priority than almost anything else. Weirdly, fear of artificial intelligence ranks very highly on these lists, and often dominates fears and funding more than actual issues like global warming (6-7).
• There are some elements of the calculus of utilitarianism and effective altruism which seem like they are asking too much, namely the calls in Mr. MacAskill's book to stop donating to local causes like soup kitchens or animal shelters when the money can be spent much better elsewhere. Taking a true utilitarian stance, these donations could even be considered immoral (8).
• In the mind of Mr. MacAskill and other utilitiarians personal connections are arbitrary and should not contribute to final decisions. This logic of triage charity, extended to one's entire life through effective altruism, severely disempowers the individual. This also absolves individuals of all guilt or responsibility outside of the calculus (9-10).