Abstract
Effective altruism (EA) originated as a largely secular movement and remains so today. It aims to improve the world not just through ordinary deeds but through a “radical focus on impact” (p. 9). It asks not only how we do good but how can we do more good and do it impartially, considering how data analysis might improve things like delivery of humanitarian services. Religious ethicists have voiced significant skepticism about EA—and EA about religion for that matter—so this book provides a welcome conversation offered in a careful and sustained way. Contributors to this volume vary dramatically in their assessment of EA, but taken as a whole, the essays suggest that religious traditions should give EA a more careful look before rendering judgment.
Among the more appreciative arguments for EA, authors claim that it provides perspectives and insights that religious traditions lack—or at least don’t take seriously enough. Given most religious traditions emerged in worlds less globalized than ours, EA asks moral questions about what we owe people across the world or how we might harness the wealth of capitalist accumulation to substantially improve lives for strangers. EA furthermore presses religious traditions to ask what obligations we bear for those who live after us and for future environments and ecosystems. Dominic Roser is one of the most appreciative contributors. Not only does he argue for EA from a Christian perspective, he shows how deontology—an ethical perspective focused on duty and favored by many religious adherents—“can be less demanding than consequentialism,” which focuses on the outcomes of our actions (p. 56). EA shows how consequentialism can expect more from us than a deontology that merely finds comfort in following certain rules. In this regard, EA calls into question the notion of supererogation, the idea that some acts are above and beyond basic ethical duties and therefore considered commended but not required. In this regard, Anglican theologian Robert MacSwain provides a carefully formulated essay on whether sainthood fits within EA if supererogation is not a meaningful construct for its advocates. (MacSwain also shows how some saintly acts have little measurable impact, which can be part of what makes them saintly even if they do not exhibit the effectiveness valued by EA). Roser and others make a compelling case that Christianity and EA should give one another a second look.
Even so, the authors also provide significant critiques of EA. Many worry about EA’s lack of philosophical depth. EA looks to increase goodness and happiness without offering a conception of what constitutes goodness or happiness, for example. (This is a common critique of utilitarianism, the ethical system that many effective altruists follow.) Writing from a Buddhist perspective, Calvin Baker worries that “In getting the cosmology, ontology, or metaphysic wrong, we risk getting the ethics wrong” (p. 42). Drawing from Iris Murdoch, Mara-Daria Cojocaru suggests that EA could be useful for issues of public morality “where it is philosophically uncontroversial what the good is” (p. 99), but a fulsome moral life entails considerations of love in other arenas of life as well. Similarly, Markus Huppenbauer worries that EA lacks a rich conception of a good life: “if people instrumentalize themselves for the sake of a better world, they risk missing the meaning of life” (p. 235). MacSwain’s uneasiness about EA, meanwhile, is “less with its vision of the good and more with its vision of human nature” (p. 229). One of the most vivid critiques comes from Kathryn Muyskens, who worries that EA so concerns itself with the impact of charitable donations that it fails to address systematic injustices which sustain the harm charitable donations seek to redress.
The volume provides an excellent case study of religious ethicists engaging an emerging trend in ethics from a wide variety of standpoints. In this regard, it could be a useful text for an introductory ethics course, whether in a seminary or diocesan school. Ethics textbooks can be so general that they lack sustained engagement with a specific practical problem, and this book would serve as an excellent supplement in that regard. The book also shows scholars engaging EA on its strongest terms rather than through caricatured portraits of its public—and sometimes disgraced—proponents. If ethical traditions are viewed only from the perspective of whether they have disgraced proponents, few of our traditions would stand. Given the caricatured commentary on EA, this book is a reminder that if we want to understand the movement’s potential then we should look not to Sam Bankman-Fried or Nick Bostrom but to ethicist Peter Singer’s writing on global poverty, which has proven so generative for EA. After all, many of Jesus’ commandments in the Sermon on the Mount are surely supererogatory, and at least in that regard Christianity and EA share something in common.
