Charitable giving – a backbone of the arts – may be under threat from a new trend towards ‘effective altruism’, demanding that any donations impact on the world’s biggest problems.
In an interview in the Financial Times, Bill Gates equated donating to a museum with blinding people. Seriously. He was referencing the ethicist Peter Singer, whose work has fostered the “effective altruism” movement: Gates asked why anyone would donate money to build a new museum wing rather than to prevent illnesses that can lead to blindness. “The moral equivalent is, we’re going to take 1 percent of the people who visit this [museum] and blind them,” he said. “Are they willing, because it has the new wing, to take that risk? Hmm, maybe this blinding thing is slightly barbaric.”
Effective altruism is absolutely rooted in a laudable commitment to making a maximum impact on the world’s most pressing problems, and Americans have generally not paid enough attention to the crushing human catastrophes in the Third World — public health, poverty, refugees. However, if taken to extremes, effective altruism has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the arts... Keep reading on The Washington Post
In an interview in the Financial Times, Bill Gates equated donating to a museum with blinding people. Seriously. He was referencing the ethicist Peter Singer, whose work has fostered the “effective altruism” movement: Gates asked why anyone would donate money to build a new museum wing rather than to prevent illnesses that can lead to blindness. “The moral equivalent is, we’re going to take 1 percent of the people who visit this [museum] and blind them,” he said. “Are they willing, because it has the new wing, to take that risk? Hmm, maybe this blinding thing is slightly barbaric.”
Effective altruism is absolutely rooted in a laudable commitment to making a maximum impact on the world’s most pressing problems, and Americans have generally not paid enough attention to the crushing human catastrophes in the Third World — public health, poverty, refugees. However, if taken to extremes, effective altruism has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the arts... Keep reading on The Washington Post