I’m pretty much sold on the whole Effective Altruism venture, but I found the book quite disappointing. The chapters on arguments for greater charitable giving don’t go far beyond appeals to moral intuition, and Singer’s rebuttals to common counterarguments focus on arguments that seem particularly weak. I was expecting something a bit more robust from a professional moral philosopher.
There are some reasonable bits on foreign aid, development economics and establishing new cultural standards of charitable giving. The parts about loudly publicising one’s charitable giving has the same sort of tone and content as LW material on the subject. It clocks in at 176 pages excluding the endnotes, so it gains points for conciseness. I wouldn’t say it’s an especially sophisticated treatment of the subject, though, and you’re probably not missing much if you skip it. Read the Call of Soares or pretty much anything by Scott on practical solutions to abstruse utilitarian problems instead.
I finally got around to reading Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save.
I’m pretty much sold on the whole Effective Altruism venture, but I found the book quite disappointing. The chapters on arguments for greater charitable giving don’t go far beyond appeals to moral intuition, and Singer’s rebuttals to common counterarguments focus on arguments that seem particularly weak. I was expecting something a bit more robust from a professional moral philosopher.
There are some reasonable bits on foreign aid, development economics and establishing new cultural standards of charitable giving. The parts about loudly publicising one’s charitable giving has the same sort of tone and content as LW material on the subject. It clocks in at 176 pages excluding the endnotes, so it gains points for conciseness. I wouldn’t say it’s an especially sophisticated treatment of the subject, though, and you’re probably not missing much if you skip it. Read the Call of Soares or pretty much anything by Scott on practical solutions to abstruse utilitarian problems instead.