Against Swooping In

When effective altruism proves to be less than effective, and also rife with political problems.

Sigh. For years, in my introduction to ethics courses as a philosophy professor at Cornell, I’ve taught Peter Singer’s famous argument to the conclusion that we, the presumptively affluent, are morally obligated to give away much more of our incomes to charity than we do customarily. Here’s the more committal form of the argument, as I present it in my …