“In all ages of speculation, one of the strongest obstacles to the reception of the doctrine that Utility or Happiness is the criterion of right and wrong, has been drawn from the idea of Justice.” This is from John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, in 1861, perhaps the most renowned exposition of the ethical theory that stands behind the contemporary movement that calls itself “effective altruism,” known widely as EA. Mill’s point is powerful and repercussive. I will return to the challenge that justice poses to utilitarianism presently. But first, what is effective altruism?
The two hubs of the movement are Oxford and Princeton. Oxford is home to the Centre for Effective Altruism, founded in 2012 by Toby Ord and William MacAskill, and Princeton is where Peter Singer, who provides the philosophical inspiration for EA, has taught for many years. Singer is EA’s most direct philosophical source, but it has deeper if less direct sources in the thought of the Victorian moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick and the contemporary moral philosopher Derek Parfit, who died a few years ago. Sidgwick gave utilitarianism a rigorous formulation as well as a philosophically sophisticated grounding. He showed that utilitarianism need not depend, as it did in Bentham and Mill, on an implausible naturalism that seeks to reduce ethics to an empirical science.