“The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically”
By Peter Singer
Yale University Press, 2015
211 pages, $25.00
Princeton University Professor Peter Singer gained fame as the author of “Animal Liberation,” as well as several books on charitable giving.
In this new book, Singer challenges readers to give more of their money to charity. He and his wife donate one-third of their combined income to charity, and their goal is to eventually give away half of what they earn.
The book is filled with ethical conundrums. Should graduates of wealthy colleges with huge endowments continue to send checks when their money could do more good addressing poverty in developing nations? And what about the vast sums of money some parents leave to their well-off children? Why not share part of that wealth with the desperately poor?
Singer poses a hypothetical. If you had $100,000 to give either to your local art museum or to a group seeking to restore vision to blind people in the developing world, what would you do? One obvious answer is to divide the money, with the percentages based on your values.
Effective altruism, Singer suggests, is a growing movement. More young people are taking high-paying jobs with the specific goal of giving much of their income to charity. One such donor is Jason Trigg, an MIT graduate who works in finance and gives half of his salary to the Against Malaria Foundation.
Not surprisingly, Singer devotes a chapter to animal suffering, arguing persuasively that people should give more attention to the plight of farm animals and less to cats and dogs. The number of abused pets is “dwarfed by the 9.1 billion animals annually raised and slaughtered for food in the United States.” Countless groups work to rescue pets, compared with a small number trying to protect farm animals. One option, Singer says, is to encourage more people to switch to a vegan diet and thereby reduce the need for factory farms.
If extreme giving makes people miserable, Singer says, they should cut back on their donations. But he also notes that spending and possessions are not the way to happiness, citing studies showing a link between charitable giving and happiness.
According to Singer, two-thirds of donors do no research before sending a check. He encourages potential givers to consult organizations that evaluate charities to determine which are the most effective in producing measurable results. He endorses GiveWell, which grants its highest rating to a handful of charities. One charity is GiveDirectly, which sends cash to poor people in Kenya and Uganda. The concept is relatively new and will require more study to determine if it truly is more effective to distribute money to needy families as opposed to food or clothing.
I wish that Singer had devoted more attention to the importance of family planning as one way to tackle extreme poverty.
That said, this is a thoughtful book. Readers likely will not embrace everything Singer says, but he forces us to think deeply about how we can do, in the words of the title, “the most good” with our charitable donations.
