Larissa MacFarquhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…Everything has to become a calculation? Effective altruism is essentially a utilitarian doctrine. In principle, there are far fewer objections than there are in practice. In practice, I’ve talked to many, many effective altruists over the years that the movement has been in existence. It was more or less founded in 2009 by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord. In principle, if you say effective altruists don’t pay enough attention to politics, to governmental institutions, to human rights, to what people say they want, which is as often equality as material well-being, they will say, “Well, there’s nothing in our philosophy that rejects those things. We’re for well-being of whatever form it takes, and if you convince me that going into politics is a better thing to do than going into banking, I’d be happy to do that.” But in practice . . . They can, in principle, avoid the traps that in fact are preventing effective altruists from being as effective as they should be because in practice, it’s very difficult to resist a short-term surer bet in terms of doing good. If you can spend a small amount of money and buy deworming medicine that will cure a child of worms and enable him or her to go back to school, or if you can buy a bed net that will prevent a family from getting malaria — those are such obvious short-term immediate goods that it’s hard to resist them. It’s hard to take the gambles and take the risks of investing in less certain means of promoting welfare, like lobbying for political change, like investing in institutions that are obviously extremely important and, longer term, more important than immediate material gains. Do you agree with Steven Pinker that in the long run, we’re becoming more moral?…

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