Excellent article — thanks for sharing; I’m in almost full agreement with Wenar.
What is very interesting about effective altruism from a philosophical perspective is that it shows what consistent utilitarianism looks like when it is followed out to its logical conclusions; and this in turn shows, above all, how utilitarianism rests on an untenable picture of agency and responsibility. You almost have to have a begrudging respect for EAs being willing to accept the radical implications that so many utilitarians have historically shied away from, instead devoting an enormous amount of time to showing how in fact utilitarianism simply supports common-sense morality.
Of course, as Wenar points out with several examples, many EAs themselves have been far from consistent in their behaviour. Above all, this seems to me to show how EA basically promotes an impossible picture of how to live a human life. And while several leading EAs seem like rather unsavoury characters, to put it mildly, Wenar is also correct that a lot of the younger rank-and-file do genuinely possess highly admirable motives; they are just very misguided in the outlet they have chosen for them. As usual, Bernard Williams put it best:
The important issues that utilitarianism raises should be discussed in contexts more rewarding than that of utilitarianism itself.
