Amusing reflections on "Effective [sic] Altruuism"...

...at The Point.  A taste:

At some point, on one of our regular treks through the forest-bog of the slightly left-leaning  internet, we read about Effective Altruism. The idea, posed and propounded by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, is not complicated. A quick distillation might be “pics or it didn’t happen,” the same mantra that unites hundreds of tech startups and nonprofits under the sign of the datum. Singer’s is a popular utilitarianism, packaged for the Facebook age: Doing Good made easy, quantified, the returns maximized in visible and trackable ways. You should always push the fat guy in front of the train. That is, you should take that job at the branding firm and give between 10 and 70 percent of your $90,474 annual income to one of a handful of charities deemed most “efficient.”

Like lots of things on the internet, EA feels marketed right to our social group: young, educated, confused little guys, swimming the God’s-dead world in search of some half-decent values, able to imagine them actualized only in terms of a handful of career options and art hobbies. EA’s charm partly comes, I think, from its neatness in distilling our built-in morals, our technocratic wiring. Singer and his allies present a clean, simple, and familiar calculus, one that perfectly aligns with this default market pietism. In their painfully limpid prose, we see ourselves reflected: and these selves, to us, make sense.