Effective Altruism and Political Theory’s Audience

Critics have attacked effective altruism in a range of ways, including in terms familiar from criticisms of utilitarianism and consequentialism more broadly, particularly those connected with Bernard Williams. This paper develops and builds on those critiques. It first substantiates them, showing how they connects to a range of longstanding and as yet unresolved philosophical yet empirically grounded worries about consequentialism. It then moves on to explore how that critique can be connected to a series of worries about the arrogance and impossibility of the perspective on which effective altruism relies, again linking this to parts of Williams’ critique of utilitarianism. His attacks on it for being willing to efface itself, to operate as an esoteric morality, point to a disinterest in and disrespect for ordinary people trying not just to live, but also to make sense of, their lives (2011 [1985], p. 120ff). The third and final section connects that critique to other concerns Williams expressed about the standpoints implicit in much contemporary political philosophy, that they address "Supreme Court justices" or "founding fathers". These positions may not be exclusionary and authoritarian in quite the same way as the perspective effective altruism grants itself, but they still help themselves to the idea "that the others are not there" in ways that blind them to central features of political life (2005, p. 58).