Tearing apart the libertarian billionaire idea of “effective altruism”

The Effective Altruism movement, championed by secular thinkers like neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris and moral philosopher Peter Singer, aims at getting the most bang for your buck when doing charity. Picking up garbage on the beach for an hour might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside—but wouldn’t it be better to use that hour, for example, to work at your corporate law job or to trade cryptocurrency? With the money you earn in that hour, you could pay dozens of people to clean up the same beach. Even better, you could donate that money to the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes mosquito nets that could save lives directly.

The logic is certainly compelling: make as much money as you can to do as much good as you can in this life. But a fundamental flaw of effective altruism is that it says nothing about the way that money is earned in the first place.

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Trust us: The problem with crypto-billionaires and effective altruism (continues at OnlySky)