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Leif Wenar's criticisms of effective altruism

richardpettigrew.substack.com · 2,858 words · saved by 1 readers

Last week, Leif Wenar, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, wrote a critique of effective altruism in Wired magazine. One of his complaints is that the charity evaluator websites, such as GiveWell, which sit at the heart of the movement’s efforts to encourage the world’s wealthy to donate a substantial proportion of their money and to donate it to those organizations that the available evidence suggests will do most good in expectation, do not explicitly advertise the unintended bad consequences of the activities undertaken by the charities they endorse; and, surely worse, they don’t include those consequences in their calculations of the charities’ benefits. Wenar writes that the bed nets treated with insecticide that are distributed by the Against Malaria Foundation have been used as fishing nets, resulting in over-fishing and a depletion of food supplies; and bandits have killed people who are guarding the money used by the charity New Initiatives to fund its conditiona

Leif Wenar's criticisms of effective altruism Richard Pettigrew Apr 03, 2024 22 11 1 Share Last week, Leif Wenar, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, wrote a critique of effective altruism in Wired magazine. One of his complaints is that the charity evaluator websites, such as GiveWell , which sit at the heart of the movement’s efforts to encourage the world’s wealthy to donate a substantial proportion of their money and to donate it to those organizations that the available evidence suggests will do most good in expectation, do not explicitly advertise the unintended bad consequ

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