Larry Temkin
Being Good in a World of Need
Peter E Gordon
Migrants in the Profane
Janek Wasserman
The Marginal Revolutionaries
Michael Lewis
The Fifth Risk
Brooke Harrington
Capital without Borders
Jo Wolff
Ethics and Public Policy
Daniel Halliday
The Inheritance of Wealth:
Justice, equality, and the
right to bequeath
Martin Jay
Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory
Lesley Sherratt
Can Microfinance Work?
Boudewijn de Bruin
Ethics and the Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed
Nicholas Morris &
David Vines
Capital Failure: Rebuilding Trust in Financial Services
Looking at Warhol's Flowers
Jeremy Worman
Swimming With Diana Dors
Michael Ignatieff
Fire and Ashes: Success and
Failure in Politics
Jon Elster
Securities Against Misrule
Jesse Norman
Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet
Michael Sandel
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Hilary Mantel
Bring up the Bodies
Philip Coggan
Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order
Jeffrey Friedman &
Wladimir Kraus
Engineering the Financial Crisis: Systemic Risk and the Failure of Regulation
Jeremy Worman
Fragmented
Martin Gayford
Man with a Blue Scarf
Raghuram Rajan
Fault Lines
Jonathan Israel
A Revolution of the Mind
T. J. Clark
The Sight of Death
Beautiful Facts:
Recent Paintings by
Alison Turnbull
Jacqueline Novogratz
The Blue Sweater
Matthew Bishop &
Michael Green
Philanthrocapitalism
Camilla Howalt
James Griffin
On Human Rights
Ronald Cohen
The Second Bounce of the Ball
Edward Craig
The Mind of God and the Works of Man
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The Effective Altruism movement, which aims to make charitable giving as efficient and productive as possible, is more than a decade old. And while some of its luminaries now devote themselves to threats to human extinction, many members remain committed to doing the most good by supporting international aid organisations the impact of which is quantifiable. Donations to charities distributing anti-malarial bed-nets and de-worming kits are popular, and so too is the idea that we should seek highly remunerated employment to increase the quantum of our giving.
Larry Temkin advocates a pluralist conception of the good, setting him apart from the consequentialism that dominates most Effective Altruist thinking, but he shares their conviction that the well-off have a moral responsibility to help the poor. In his new book, Being Good in a World of Need, Temkin systematically unpicks the lazy thinking that characterises many campaigns "to save" those in need, and he warns against believing that the requirement to do something urgently overrides the requirement to understand carefully what things should be done.
In 1971, Peter Singer presented an argument that moral principles should take no account of proximity: just as we would save the life of a child drowning in front of our eyes, so too we should save the life of a child dying of starvation thousands of miles away. Drawing on the work of the economist Angus Deaton, Temkin subjects Singer's argument to detailed criticism, showing that spatial and temporal distance is practically significant to the moral evaluation of our actions. The less we understand the specific, local causes of need, the greater the chance that we do more harm than good, irrespective of our intentions. Temkin remains convinced that the well-off cannot ignore the moral demand to assist the needy, but he concludes that what we should do in response to that demand is far from obvious. His list of suggested actions, in the book's final chapter, consists mostly of knowledge transfer and the reform of political institutions and practices in the developed world.
Teju Cole has written of the banality of sentimentality – the idea that the world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm - and of contemporary Western philanthropy as the 'white savior industrial complex'. Temkin may be more restrained in his language, but the force of his criticism of the Effective Altruism movement should not be underestimated. Without a credible account of what it means to live a good life, we cannot have a credible account of the good we should try to do.
© Mark Hannam January 2022
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