Effective Altruism Is about Getting Rich with a Clean Conscience
For someone who claims to read a lot it&#x27;s odd that he would use a passage from an unrelated source to describe the motivation for EA. Why not just read some of the direct sources and their motivations? The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer is quite short and accessible. Maybe it&#x27;s easier to attack straw men...<p>Having read Singer, I&#x27;d say that the motivation is to take the sense of &quot;doing good in the world&quot; and apply reason to it. There&#x27;s a kid drowning in a pond in front of you and there&#x27;s a kid drowning on the other side of the world. Why do we act differently, Singer asks? From there he goes on to build an ethical case that it&#x27;s our _obligation_ to give significantly more to charity.<p>I don&#x27;t recall Singer ever advocating for earning ever more money, nor certainly doing so at the expense of others. And I&#x27;m fairly certain Singer would strongly object to deferring giving to some uncertain future point.<p>Setting aside this article, where&#x27;s all the hate for giving to charity coming from? Guilty consciences? Shouldn&#x27;t we as a society celebrate and encourage giving? It seems the alternative more often then not is to accumulate.