“The moral principle in both cases is the same: we ought to reduce the suffering of others so long as doing so does not require “sacrificing anything nearly as important.” In the drowning child case, your clothing and shoes aren’t nearly as important as a child’s life, and in the case of philanthropy, the monetary equivalent of that clothing and shoes isn’t nearly as important as saving a child’s life if you have the financial means.”
“The core problem is the bourgeois moral philosophy that the movement rests upon. Effective Altruists abstract from — and thereby exonerate — the social dynamics constitutive of capitalism. The result is a simultaneously flawed moral and structural analysis that aspires to fix the world’s most pressing problems on capital’s terms.”
“The irony of Effective Altruism is that it implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place. If we look at the institutions that make and allocate the resources others so desperately need, we must ask whether it is wrong to withhold those resources from others for the sake of payment and profit. Doing so not only seems morally reprehensible, it is morally reprehensible for precisely the same reason Effective Altruists argue it is wrong not to donate money to charities: it’s immoral to value some small sum of money (or what it might buy) over a human life or minimum standard of living.”
“Effective Altruism’s argument trades off an obvious moral truth without any mention of its direct tension with capitalist accumulation: as men and women with money and moral consciences, we can’t put a price on life, but as men and women participating in a system governed by the logic of capital, we must.”
“The absurd result is that Effective Altruism implores individuals to pay whatever price the market demands for basic necessities on moral grounds that cut against subjecting those necessities to capitalist market logic at all.”
“This is the primary disanalogy between saving Singer’s hypothetical drowning stranger and giving to charity. In the former, the cost to us is merely private opportunity cost, knowingly soiling our clothing and shoes by jumping into the water. In the latter, the cost to us is what capitalist institutions demand as a condition of granting what is needed for the rescue.”
“The drowning stranger analogy thus takes on a very different cast: the desperate child needs some life-preserving necessity (food, clean water, medical treatment, etc.) that capital undemocratically produces or possesses, and dictates the terms on which it’s distributed. Through those who personify it, capital fails any drowning stranger in at least three ways.”
“First, capital actually has what the imperiled stranger needs. Whereas most individuals generally only possess necessities for themselves and their families, institutions bound by the logic of capital accumulation collectively own virtually all the necessities that individuals must purchase in order to survive.”
“Second, capital creates “drowning strangers.” The inability of companies to profit from those with little or no purchasing power is the reason why so many poor people need altruists to save them.”
“Finally, everything mentioned above constrains a concerned non-capitalist’s ability to intervene. Aside from challenging the rule of capital, a non-capitalist’s only readily available option is donating to charity — thus subsidizing its profiting from basic necessities — or else ignoring those in need.”
“That subsidizing capital accumulation has become the only readily available way for most to act on compassion for others is perverse. Even if charity were extremely efficacious, which it is not, choosing between a modest sum of money and another human life is no choice at all. But it is one we are faced with because capitalists have already made their choice and shaped the world to suit it.”
“Through its stunted social vocabulary and myopic focus on after-the-fact moral dilemmas, it advances a deeply flawed conception of our most pressing problems, shifting what ought to be an indictment of capital onto anyone with a modicum of expendable income.”
“The problem, apparently, isn’t that capitalism’s institutionalization of immoral maxims ends up leaving billions in poverty and hundreds of millions in existential need of food, water, shelter, and basic medical care. Instead, the problem becomes that relatively affluent individuals haven’t bought those necessities from the capitalist class for the hundreds of millions that need them; the comparatively wealthy have been “living high and letting die” either out of ignorance of what their money could buy or out of weakness of will in the face of a consumerist society. The solution, then, is to raise awareness of what money can buy and create a “culture of giving.” But this misdirects the impetus to address these issues into little more than a critique of personal spending habits.”
“In arguing for their prescriptions, Effective Altruists often cite influential philosophers and religious figures expounding this principle. One of these is Mencius, the foremost interpreter of the Confucian tradition, who is said to have confronted King Hui of Liang and said: “there are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, ‘It is not owing to me; it is owing to the year.’ In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying ‘It was not I; it was the weapon?’””
“The principle implicit in this passage doesn’t just apply to those with a little expendable income — if it does at all. It applies more immediately to members of the capitalist class who, just like the king, make it their business to control what others need for life and a minimum standard of living. When people die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care, members of the capitalist class say, “it is not owing to me; it is owing to the market.””
“Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.”