The red herring of capitalism
One Wednesday evening after a Uni tute, I swung by a meeting of the Melbourne University ‘Effective Altruism Club’. What better way to wind down after a long day of classes than by celebrating Peter Singer’s second most famous ethical theory? I can’t name one.
For those unacquainted with the Peter Singer cult, effective altruism is a ruthlessly utilitarian view of charity that says that individuals must, with every economic choice they make, choose the option that eliminates the greatest possible amount of suffering in the world. Excess consumption of any kind is therefore morally equivalent to walking past a child drowning in a swimming pool. You could have given that money to a charity that feeds starving children, therefore you should have. You’ve walked past a child in need.
I went along to the meeting of MUEAC not because I agree with this idea, but because I was curious about what an ‘effective altruism club’ would actually get up to. Did they strut around campus chastising people for owning iPhones? Did they do their chastising in ascetic monk robes, having shunned the child-killing evils of consumerist fashion? Or was this whole thing, as I suspected, a total grift?
In the end, it wasn’t a grift, if only because that word would imply an overly generous level of sophistication. Without even a shred of awareness or irony, the committee discussed using club funds to purchase Effective Altruism branded hats, t-shirts and stickers, as well as Dominos pizza for their upcoming AGM. When I asked how much of their membership money they gave to charity, they looked at me blankly.
Not that I blame them for apparently having tuned out everything Singer has ever said. Because effective altruism, in its purest form, is an entirely unworkable moral framework.
Singer recognises that our society’s wealth is unfairly and unequally distributed. Our perpetually growing economies produce an extraordinary amount of output (more than we need in fact), yet hundreds of millions of people languish.
Singer has correctly identified the problem, but concocted an utterly strange solution. Rather than changing the rules of this unfair economic system, so that it distributes wealth more equally, he suggests we keep this system in place exactly as it is, and then hope that the beneficiaries of the system will take it upon themselves to redistribute their own wealth.
This is no strawman. This is genuinely what he believes (I’ve taken his first year philosophy course — trust me, it is!). Singer actually argues that going to work on Wall Street is a more moral decision than going to work for an NGO, because the salary of a stockbroker can fund a greater amount of private charity than a social worker’s.
If we were ever to attach anti-smoking style warnings to utilitarian philosophy, this argument would be front and centre. Philosophise every day, and this is what you could end up saying!
Because, astonishingly, working on Wall Street isn’t actually a compassionate choice. The world’s wealth is monopolised by capital owners like Singer’s idealistic stockbroker, and if we broke up that monopoly today, we could come close to ending poverty tomorrow. In America alone, net operating surplus (yields from capital after deducting employment costs) is around $5 trillion. Take public control of capital, and not a single American would have to go without food, shelter or healthcare. It’s as easy as that.
Not according to Peter Singer, though. Why solve poverty tomorrow, when we could just wait for a few million capitalists to stumble upon a copy of his book and decide to donate their salaries to Oxfam? That’s the sensible utilitarian solution, and he has thought experiments to prove it!
I’ll defer to Peter’s judgement when it comes to the trolley problem, but when it comes to issues of real material significance, I might look elsewhere, because stigmatising middle class earners buying iPhones while encouraging them to prop up systems of economic exploitation is, as far as solutions go, an absolute shocker.
Charity is a worthy pursuit, but the idea that the moral burden of economic inequality should be on individuals is a red herring. Solutions to poverty and material disadvantage need to be socialised — shared across the population, drawn from the pool of wealth we collectively produce. It’s not only the fairer solution, but it’s more practical, because it doesn’t rely on high-flying bond traders having sudden moral conversions.
Hell, it’s already been done before. Norway’s government owns 60% of the country’s wealth (more than 70% if you exclude owner-occupied properties), and as a result has some of the lowest levels of inequality in the world, and a poverty rate of just 0.5%.
And the strangest thing? Plenty of Norwegians own iPhones!
So you know what, MUEAC? Buy all the pizza you like.
Because there’s enough wealth to go around for everyone on earth to live a life of dignity, and for you to dine in style at your AGM, while wearing your Peter Singer branded caps.
