Sughra Raza. Public Garden Water Feature, Boston. June 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Varun Gauri

Effective altruism is having a moment. Books in the field are getting prominent reviews, the Effective Altruism Global conference took place in Washington DC this past weekend, and the movement now has the backing of at least a couple tech billionaires. Not bad for a social movement that celebrates self-sacrifice.

The basic agenda of effective altruism (EA) is that people should a) give to charities; b) give to organizations and in ways that are the most effective, usually understood to be providing the most bang for the buck; c) give as much as they can, up to the point where they begin to sacrifice something of real moral importance.

Most people would agree that it’s good to give and silly to give to hopeless causes. But EA has a particular understanding of effectiveness: One should give to charities that save the most lives or reduce the most suffering, per dollar spent. The rationale for this argument is that the goal of giving (and perhaps of ethical action altogether) is to alleviate suffering and loss, irrespective of the identities of the sufferer and the donor. The goal of giving is not to make yourself feel good by supporting friends and family, your alma mater, a pet cause, or a cute child who happens to resemble your niece. The idea is to give with your head, not with your heart. Because needs are great in developing countries, and the cost of saving a life is so much lower, the upshot is that people should give mostly to organizations that effectively improve the lives of impoverished strangers in faraway places.

Most people would also agree that it’s good to give as much as you can. People praise saints and admire genuine philanthropists. EA, however, argues that everyone should give until they sacrifice something morally important. The reason you should give so much is that you, after all, are just another person, so you should compare the pain from spending marginally less on your own life (fewer dinners out, no luxury brands) to the benefit of spending more on the faraway impoverished stranger (averting episodes of life-threatening malaria, preventing blindness). Obviously, your own money is better spent elsewhere.

I don’t believe that any single theory has a monopoly on sound ethical reasoning. Following EA to its logical conclusions leads to some unsettling inferences. Suppose person A is extremely poor, severely disabled, very sick, and socially marginalized, so much so that charitable giving has little chance of enhancing or prolonging their life. Person B is not as poor, needs cataract surgery, and has access to (but can’t afford) health care. EA might argue that giving to charities promoting the life of person B is always preferable to giving to charities that target person A, given that person A’s quality of life can’t be improved. I’m uneasy with that conclusion because I think resources (and especially government programs) are valuable not only for the suffering they reduce; they are also a signal of respect, a recognition of human dignity, and a commitment to community and social inclusion.

In the mid to late 1990s, I was evaluating the World Bank’s HIV/AIDS programs in Brazil. In 1996, Brazil had begun to provide antiretroviral “cocktails” at a cost of more than $10,000 per patient per year. Many economists, writing at that time, were critical of the decision. They argued that HIV/AIDS spending should go almost entirely to prevention, rather than treatment, because, per dollar spent, one could avert more cases, and save more lives, with condom distribution than antiretroviral therapy.

Traveling across the country, I saw that access to treatment seemed to be making prevention efforts more effective —  when vulnerable individuals and activists experienced hope and dignity, which treatment signified for them, they became more engaged in their own lives, and put more effort into prevention programs both for themselves and on behalf of others. Access to treatment helped to crystallize the Brazilian HIV/AIDS and human rights movement. That movement would eventually play a critical role in lobbying for expanded domestic production of HIV/AIDS medications in Brazil. It also helped inspire the international effort to permit developing countries to circumvent international patent restrictions on the production of generic drugs. Not only Brazil but Thailand, South Africa, and India began producing low-cost AIDS treatments. As a result, the price of those antiretroviral therapy quickly fell to less than a few hundred dollars per patient per year, a price that facilitated HIV/AIDS treatment in places as resource-poor as Haiti and Rwanda.

I’m broadly sympathetic to EA. I believe in reducing charity for vanity projects, like named university buildings or concert halls, and more generally, in making charitable giving more effective. I also believe that people should give more to distant strangers, and that if they did so the world would be a better place. Still, I suspect my work experience in Brazil points to a blind spot in EA. In the long run, most people want help not from strangers but from friends. They not only seek the mitigation of their suffering but the security that it won’t return; they want a measure of social recognition and the guarantees that go with it. The logic of EA, and its accompanying cost-effectiveness calculations, seem most suited to remaining a stranger, not a friend, to the people one is trying to help.

At least one or two of the big EA donors are investing in politics. But a political campaign is not a social movement. Social movements, like the one around HIV/AIDS in Brazil, could help tackle some of the major structural barriers that disadvantage poor people in developing countries. Those include odious debt (the sovereign debt taken on by corrupt and odious leaders, which citizens are obligated to repay), tax havens in rich countries that allow local capital to escape taxation, intellectual property rules raising costs and limiting innovation in developing countries, and the arms trade, to name a few. Those are complex challenges that will not, I believe, be resolved without significant social transformation and a new species of solidarity, which is a kind of friendship.

by Brooks Riley

by Mike Bendzela

How would you account for the following weird experience? Do you have a handy explanation, or do you dismiss it outright?

When I was twelve, Dad used to drop me off in the twilight in front of the parish across town to serve Mass, usually a Wednesday before dawn, because that was the time new altar boys served their shifts.

“Pray for me,” Dad would say as I got out of the car, “and for your poor mother’s soul.” He parked the car far down the block and sat there in the dark waiting for me to return from Mass — swigging whisky, I now assume, from his paper bag all the while.

The time I spent with my fellow altar boy, Michael, was a refuge from the horrors of home. We got dressed together, laid out brass artifacts and towels and books together, lit candles together. The priest who had my dad excommunicated was more than kind to me, and groomed me for the priesthood with effusiveness and, I saw later, with the intent to elevate me above my fallen parents. I didn’t want to leave the sacristy; I didn’t want to go back to my dad’s car; I wanted to camp out there with Michael, forever. Perhaps he and I could both become priests and secretly live there in the rectory. I even passed this by Father Frank.

He looked at me with something like triumph and affection. “It is not outside the realm of possibility,” he said.

After Mass, I nearly flew back to the car.

Once I was inside, dad asked, “Did you pray for us?”

I stared blankly. In my excitement about moving into the church with Michael, I had forgotten all about my ritual prayer for my parents.

The back story was something I would only learn much later from an aunt: During a rough spot in their marriage, my mother had become pregnant by another man, and Dad decided she should have an abortion (then illegal in our state); he took her where she could get one, and she died of sepsis. My father was consequently forbidden from setting foot in the Catholic Church he was raised in, even though he was prostrate with grief and remorse. He could do nothing to assuage the pain, not even drink it away. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

The intermittent taps on the roof roused me from a deep sleep, and then I remembered the acorns. The acorns had begun dropping. It was the first week of September, the days were still warm, and the leaves were still green. The leaves wouldn’t turn colors and start falling for several weeks yet.

But somehow our oak trees knew it was time to drop their acorns, and all twelve of our oaks began releasing their hard brown nuts with the little caps. The racket came from our larger trees which had branches over the roof; while the chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, deer and other critters showed up to share the wealth before they bedded down for the winter.

It was acorn season. Acorn season starts at the same time as Pumpkin Pie Spice season does, but it lasts only as long as it takes for the trees to drop all of their nuts, about a week and a half. Pumpkin Pie Spice season, on the other hand, continues through Thanksgiving. Picture it. It’s early September, you are still wearing sandals and shorts, and winter is the last thing on your mind, when all of a sudden you pass a Starbucks and get a whiff of that alluring combination of nutmeg, allspice, ground cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, which, in true Proustian fashion, evokes pleasant memories of fall. Read more »

Flowers outside the Music School in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by David S. Greer

John Keats can be forgiven for overlooking the spiders in his ode “To Autumn”. Who can blame him for accentuating the positive, given the health issues that eventually overcame him, barely 25, in his rude room by the foot of the Spanish Steps?

My sometime island abode in the Salish Sea, the inland sea that touches Vancouver and Seattle and is home to the Canadian Gulf Islands and the American San Juans, is a long way from the Spanish Steps and a favorite haunt of spiders in autumn. Early on a late September morning on the cliff-edge path to Gowlland Point, dewdrops sparkle like diamonds in elaborate silken webs draped over long grasses with exquisite care. Spiders are to autumn as strawberries are to June. What’s not to like?

An older cabin in the woods is an invitation to wildlife invasion. Black-tailed deer content themselves with napping under the deck, and river otters make the quarter-mile trek from the ocean on rare occasions to investigate the crawl space as a potential den, but entering the interior of the cabin is the particular province of birds and bats (accidentally) and spiders (less so). Field mice would gladly join the parade, and have done so in the past, but for the time being are flummoxed by plugs of steel wool in every mouse-sized hole. Their tactical engineering squads are believed to be working on solutions every day. As for other invaders, live rescues are my preferred approach. Hummingbirds and wrens can be trapped in Tupperware containers, a sheet of cardboard slipped over the opening, and released outdoors. A juice glass will suffice for errant wasps and moths. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

The international academic conference circuit—for an amusing account of such circuits, one may read the British writer David Lodge’s novel Small World, which is second in his trilogy of campus novels, the first of which Changing Places is largely on Berkeley in the 1960’s—also brought me to some potentially hazardous situations. Once a reception given for us conference participants by the King of Spain indirectly helped me in what could have been a serious loss from a pickpocket in Madrid. The public reception hall was not far from the hotel where we were staying. I was walking there from the hotel with a fellow conference participant. I was busy explaining a particular point to her in conversation when I had a half-sense that two young women who brushed by seemed a bit too close, and I ignored that for a minute. The next minute I felt the inside of my jacket pocket and it was gone—a wallet containing not just money but a few important cards including credit cards (since then I have been careful not to put everything in the same wallet or pocket). So I excused myself from my companion and ran to a nearby policeman and told him about it. He brought out a whistle and made a signaling sound. Within 5 minutes another policeman from the opposite pavement came toward me with my wallet and asked me to check if everything was in place. Those two unlucky young women did not realize that as the King was to be there soon, the whole area was thick with plain-clothes policemen.

My conferences sometimes took place in cities where more violent robberies were quite frequent even in broad daylight. I remember the first day we were in our MacArthur network conference in Rio de Janeiro, at the lunch break we were told that the lunch would be in a restaurant just one block away. When we came out the building we saw that some giant commandos were guarding us all along the road as we were walking to the restaurant. I was told that this was part of the conference arrangement. I thought the organizers were over-doing it. But in the afternoon during the conference one woman in our group, who without telling anyone went to the store just next door to the hotel main gate, came back in tears saying that she was mugged. I faced a roughly similar situation in Nairobi and also in a couple of cities in South Africa; during the lunch break I thought I’d just go out for short walk around the big hotels where our conferences were, but the hotel guards would refuse to let us go out for the sake of our safety. I noted this situation might not be unrelated to the fact that in all those 3 countries, Brazil, Kenya and South Africa, the level of inequality is extremely high. Read more »