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Leif Wenar's Criticisms of Effective Altruism - Richard Pettigrew's Substack
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Mixed(2)Mixed quality. Some useful content but inconsistent editorial standards. Claims should be verified.
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A philosophical blog post engaging with EA critique; relevant to debates about evaluation methodology, accountability, and the ethics of top-down charitable interventions, with indirect relevance to AI safety funding and governance discussions.
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Importance: 28/100blog postcommentary
Summary
Richard Pettigrew responds to Leif Wenar's Wired magazine critique of effective altruism, distinguishing between Wenar's reasonable call for greater transparency about unintended harms and his more ambitious philosophical claim that EA is fundamentally flawed due to donors' lack of accountability to affected communities. Pettigrew accepts the transparency argument while scrutinizing the stronger accountability and power-transfer critique.
Key Points
- •Wenar criticizes GiveWell and similar evaluators for not disclosing unintended negative consequences, such as bed nets used as fishing nets or deaths linked to cash transfers.
- •Pettigrew agrees that charity evaluators should be more transparent and factor harms into cost-effectiveness analyses.
- •Wenar's deeper critique is that EA is structurally problematic because donors are not accountable to recipient communities and do not transfer decision-making power to them.
- •Pettigrew distinguishes the modest transparency critique (which he endorses) from the stronger philosophical critique (which he examines more skeptically).
- •The debate touches on broader questions of epistemic humility, paternalism, and the ethics of charitable giving in development contexts.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Giving What We Can | Organization | 62.0 |
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Leif Wenar's criticisms of effective altruism
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Richard Pettigrew Apr 03, 2024 20 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 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 conditional cash transfer programme. And yet, he claims, you will not find this information on the front page of the charity evaluator websites, and indeed these harms are sometimes not included in the calculations the evaluator carries out to support its list of recommendations.
What conclusion are we to draw from this? As far as I can tell, Wenar doesn’t think that, after taking these bad consequences into account, the charity evaluators would end up changing their recommendations. I don’t think he believes that these negative consequences, either those that have already happened or those we might reasonably anticipate in the future, would outweigh the good consequences of these charities’ activities. And so the natural conclusion is that it GiveWell should add more information about negative consequences to the upfront summaries they provide about each charity and their evaluation of it—as Wenar notes himself, they do in fact report these harms in their more detailed reports—and they should ensure that they always include these negative consequences in their calculations. I think Wenar anticipates that their rankings would remain unchanged, but they would now be more robustly justified and their justification would be more transparent. It’s hard to tell from Wenar’s article how often there are such omissions on the GiveWell site, but it seems true that ensuring this sort of robustness and transparency is a good thing to do—just as listing the
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