Effective altruism is the poor man's Marx

The thought came back to me reading the Guardian's new interview with Peter Singer, 80 now and back in Melbourne, walking a reporter along Merri Creek and saying of capitalism: "We ought to try and improve it, patch it up, fill the gaps." It remains, he adds, the most productive economic system that has ever existed.

The last of Marx's theses on Feuerbach reads: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." By that test, Singer may be the most successful philosopher alive. Animal Liberation changed what millions of people eat; I read it in my first year of university and it was a revelation. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has probably moved more money to distant strangers than any other paper in the discipline. And he managed it without barricades. After the twentieth century's body count, that reads as wisdom.

But consider what a moral calculus can see. To compute the most good per dollar, you must hold the world still and optimize inside it. Malaria nets per dollar is a well-posed problem. Whether anyone should hold enough surplus to decide, philanthropically, who lives is not a question the arithmetic can even state. The drowning child made lifeguards of us all and never asked who owns the pond.

Hence its friends among the winners. Effective altruism offers the rich Marx's imperative with the Marxism removed: change the world, and leave untouched whatever made you the one changing it.

The giving still saves lives, and I would never talk anyone out of a bed net. I would even love for the calculus to work; doing good would become an engineering problem. But the good seems more complicated than what a spreadsheet can compare, and some of it only comes into view when we question the fundamentals nobody is pricing.

The interview: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/aug/15/peter-singer-capitalism-is-still-the-most-productive-economic-system-that-ever-existed