Do-gooders

Jeffrey Flynn

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2019, pp. 299-319 (Review)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0010

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729759

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
Do-gooders

Jeffrey Flynn

Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism,

Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help
Larissa MacFarquhar
Penguin Press, 2015. 320 pp.

Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of

Humanitarian INGOs
Jennifer Rubenstein
Oxford University Press, 2015. xiii  272 pp.

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is

Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
Peter Singer
Yale University Press, 2015. xiii  211 pp.

Anybody who tries to do good could be called a do-gooder. But we typically use the
term pejoratively, to refer to efforts that are somehow misguided—naı̈ve, meddling,
ineffective, or perhaps just plain annoying. We probably also reserve the label for those
who display an unwavering devotion to doing good. People with this single-
mindedness are the focus of Larissa MacFarquhar’s wonderful book Strangers
Drowning. She refers to her subjects as do-gooders, but not to disparage them; she
goes to great lengths to portray them sympathetically. But she does aim to capture the
deep ambivalence other people often feel about those whose commitment to doing
good is so zealous: “I don’t mean a part-time, normal do-gooder—someone who has
a worthy job, or volunteers at a charity, and returns to an ordinary family life in the
evenings. I mean a person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible. I mean a
person who’s drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean someone who pushes
himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems
reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy” (3). MacFar-
quhar provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of a variety of such “extreme
altruists.” These are people who not only go to greater lengths than most people do
to help others—some donate kidneys to strangers—but also have a hard time avoiding
the thought that they could be doing even more. The do-gooders she profiles “lack
that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds
to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on
knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though

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 not always) their joy is purchased with other people’s joy. And, remembering that,
they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility” (298–99). What
separates MacFarquhar’s subjects from others is the extent to which they cannot help
but weigh their devotion to what ordinary people value—friends and family, personal
aims and projects—against the needs of strangers (299).
The book opens with two philosophers, defenders of “effective altruism,” debating
whether one should save one’s own mother or two strangers drowning, if forced to
choose. One of the philosophers is a graduate student and the other a professor, Jeff
McMahan. MacFarquhar also writes about the most famous of the effective altruists,
the philosopher Peter Singer. His own recent book, The Most Good You Can Do, aims
to get everyone on board with the movement, which calls for getting people to do as
much good as they possibly can—particularly by taking a hard-headed look at the
most effective ways of doing so. In an interesting overlap Singer’s brief portraits of
effective altruists include some of MacFarquhar’s subjects. Between the two books,
there is quite a bit of material for getting to know the kind of people who commit
themselves to modes of altruism that go above and beyond ordinary moral expecta-
tions. Not all of MacFarquhar’s do-gooders are adherents of effective altruism, and
not all effective altruists are utilitarians like Singer. In fact, Singer wants effective
altruism to have a broad appeal and so portrays a variety of adherents who are pulled
in different directions on key points.
A third group of do-gooders appears, if only briefly, in MacFarquhar’s book:
professional humanitarians. She touches on the complicated reality of contemporary
foreign-aid work, relying mainly on the reflections of disaffected aid workers published
in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She begins with Tony Vaux’s dismay, as recorded in
The Selfish Altruist, over the many dubious motives he witnessed in his fellow aid
workers during twenty-seven years at Oxfam—people too focused on adventure or
their own heroism to see those they helped as anything more than hungry or wounded
bodies.1 Shifting from motives to effects, MacFarquhar turns to Michael Marin’s The
Road to Hell and Alex de Waal’s Famine Crimes to reveal the shortcomings of food
aid—how it often benefits farmers from donor countries while undercutting local
markets in recipient countries, or how it can undermine the accountability of local
governments to their own citizens.2 Both stress how unaccountable humanitarian
NGOs are and both note that they often display a lack of concern about actually
measuring their own effectiveness (a concern shared by effective altruists about all
would-be do-gooders). MacFarquhar concludes this discussion with David Rieff ’s A
Bed for the Night, which she uses to suggest that—despite the fact that humanitari-
anism often takes the form of a new mode of controlling targeted populations, and
although they are often condescending hypocrites—humanitarians are still “the best
of us” (166–68).3 This is a rather unsatisfying conclusion to this section of MacFar-
quhar’s otherwise brilliant book.
A more comprehensive treatment of the ethics—and politics—of humanitarian
aid work can be found in Jennifer Rubenstein’s excellent book Between Samaritans
and States. It has taken a while for moral and political theorists to notice and systemat-
ically engage with the actual practice of humanitarian assistance.4 Rubenstein is a

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political theorist who immersed herself in the practice, doing fieldwork with various
NGOs and bringing concepts and methods of political theory to bear on the practice.5
MacFarquhar, Singer, and Rubenstein’s quite different books cover a range of
ways human beings struggle with an imperative to “do good.” Both altruists and
humanitarians tend toward ameliorative rather than transformative change, leaving
them always open to the objection that they treat symptoms rather than underlying
causes of suffering. Of course, many do-gooders are painfully aware of their own
shortcomings—humanitarian practitioner-turned-theorist Hugo Slim refers to “ethics
creep” as the inescapable pull to go beyond saving individuals toward promoting
deeper change.6 But of the three books, only Rubenstein gives this problem the full
attention it deserves, as a challenge to translate the “crushing responsibility” (MacFar-
quhar, 299) many of us ought to feel into two kinds of action: direct action to help
suffering individuals and collective action aimed at systemic change. The latter, a task
for politics, is too often absent from the otherwise powerful moral vision that animates
much altruistic and humanitarian action.

Altruists and Humanitarians

In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx famously classified all sorts of do-gooders—
“philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class,
organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,
temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind”—as the
“part of the bourgeoisie” that wants to address “social grievances” only to “secure the
continued existence of bourgeois society.”7 MacFarquhar echoes this point when
referring to nineteenth-century developments, noting “many people quickly realized
that organized politics was a more effective vehicle for human progress than the full
hearts of the leisured bourgeois” (108). This is one of the few times she explicitly
comments on the tension between charity and politics, raising it in the context of
discussing the origins of the term “altruism.” Auguste Comte gets credit for coining
the term as a secular humanist alternative to theistic accounts of human goodness.
First used in print in 1852, it became quite popular in the latter half of the nineteenth
century after Herbert Spencer adopted it. It was the “term of choice,” writes MacFar-
quhar, “for those disturbed by poverty but frightened by radical solutions” and it “was
adopted by those who wished philanthropy to become more pragmatic and rational,
less hostage to sentiment,” not unlike the effective altruists of today (108).
By contrast, one of the founding texts of humanitarianism, Henry Dunant’s A
Memory for Solferino (1862), which appeared not long after Comte coined the term
“altruism,” was heavily steeped in moral sentiment, a mode of writing made possible
by the eighteenth-century transformation in moral sensibilities and culture often
referred to as the rise of the humanitarian sentiment. The text became a springboard
for the founding of the Red Cross and for a campaign to make war more humane.
Dunant’s goal, like altruism more generally, was criticized for not being radical
enough. Making war more humane only makes it more palatable and leads to more
war, Florence Nightingale famously objected; the proper aim is to abolish war.
In light of these nineteenth-century debates, it is tempting to distinguish three
camps and trace their lineages up to the present: the passionate heirs of Dunant, the

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 pragmatic heirs of Comte, and the radical heirs of Marx. This way of carving up the
terrain echoes perennial debates over whether reason or sentiment should be—or
actually is—the primary motive for ethical action, or whether focusing on individual
actions and motives neglects the importance of social structures and their history. But
the three camps are not so easily distinguished in practice. Many non-governmental
organizations today, though not heirs to Marx, embrace the aim of delivering emer-
gency aid while also focusing on changing larger structures.8 And when it comes to
reason versus passion, the heirs of Dunant—at least the professional
humanitarians—were long ago influenced by pragmatic rationalism. As in other fields,
with professionalization comes rationalization, with its focus on calculation,
measurement, and efficiency.9
If the effective altruists of today are the heirs of Comte, they do not simply pit
reason against the passions. MacFarquhar says of the graduate student debating
whether to save his own mother or two strangers that, although he at first seems
entirely rationalistic, “if he is questioned about his views on suffering, this word will
recall to his mind facts he has encountered in books about terrible things endured by
nameless human beings hundreds of years ago, or by prey animals in the wild, and
the horror of this remote information will overcome him to the point where he starts
to cry” (1–2). For his part, Singer distinguishes “emotional empathy”—which includes
feelings of compassion and the experience of personal distress in reaction to the pain
of others—from “cognitive empathy”—which includes the ability to take the
perspective of others and imaginatively attempt to inhabit their experiences. “We can
have cognitive empathy,” he argues, “with thousands of children, but it is very hard to
feel emotional empathy for so many people we cannot even identify as individuals”
(78). Effective altruism, he maintains, does not require a strong emotional response;
indeed, in most people such responses may distract from the kind of calculation
required to keep the proper aim—doing the most good—in view. But Singer also
draws on the nineteenth-century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick, who “does not say that
people who recognize the importance of acting for the good of the whole lack
emotional motivation; on the contrary, he thinks their recognition of the importance
of acting for the good of the whole brings about an emotional response within them”
(83).
Setting aside any strict dichotomy between rationalist altruists and sentimental
humanitarians, effective altruists do pose tough-minded questions to the contem-
porary heirs of Dunant, at least when humanitarian action is narrowly defined as
emergency aid: is donating to widely publicized emergencies really the most effective
way to do the most good with one’s extra money?10 Should one become a humani-
tarian aid worker to save lives or a wealthy banker who can fund hundreds of
humanitarian workers who then save far more lives?11 Doing a good thing here and
now (even devoting one’s own life to a caring profession) is not necessarily the same
thing as effectively bringing about the most good one possibly could.
In a highly critical review of Singer’s book, John Gray takes the comparison
between effective altruism and Comte too far, claiming that “if history is our guide
we can expect Singer’s movement for effective altruism to go the way of Comte’s
church of positivism, which has passed into history as an example of the follies of

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philosophy.”12 Whatever one thinks of effective altruism—which at its core is perhaps
nothing more than a results-driven approach to philanthropy—it hardly makes sense
to think of it as a mere folly of philosophy. Key parts of the “movement,” according
to Singer, are the initiatives by economists at the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, founded
to study which interventions against poverty are most effective, and GiveWell,
founded in 2006 to evaluate the effectiveness of charities.13 The movement does
include other philosophers like Toby Ord, but he is now best known for founding
Giving What We Can, which encourages people to make an online pledge to donate
10 percent of all future income to “charities that will make the biggest impact.”14 They
have attracted over three thousand members, most of whom appear not to be philoso-
phers.15 However one evaluates these endeavors, effective altruism does seem to be a
movement that goes well beyond philosophers. Viewing it as a mere “folly of
philosophy” also runs the risk of letting the movement off the hook in an important
way: like any movement, its politics—and the moral and political imaginaries it
promotes—must be scrutinized.

A Shared Moral Vision

If there is a gap between effective altruists and professional humanitarians today, it
was not there in one of the ur-texts of effective altruism: Singer’s 1972 essay “Famine,
Affluence, and Morality.”16 Written when he was twenty-five years old—with a
freshly-minted PhD in hand—and in the midst of an urgent humanitarian crisis, the
essay shows a number of striking parallels between the way it portrays saving distant
strangers (and continues to sustain effective altruism) and the ideals and practice of
humanitarianism.
Singer’s classic essay is one of the most widely read and discussed texts in applied
ethics, possibly in all of philosophy. MacFarquhar refers to it as “one of the best-
known arguments for the extreme morality of do-gooders” (62), noting its “profound
effect on many people—particularly those who,” like one altruist she profiles, “had
been searching for a moral direction, prompted by an uncomfortable sense that the
suffering of the world demanded of them a personal and painful response” (63). The
title image for Strangers Drowning is inspired by the famous analogy Singer introduces
in that essay: if you happened upon a small child drowning in a shallow pond, your
moral duty to wade in and save the child would surely override any considerations
about ruining expensive clothes. It would be morally egregious not to save the child.
Likewise, Singer argues, if there is a child dying very far away whom you could save
at relatively little cost to yourself—with, say, a $200 donation to UNICEF or
Oxfam—then you ought to do it. This simple conclusion re-iterates in a radical
direction: if you can afford to make another donation to save another life, you ought
to do it again, and then again, until giving further would cause more harm to you
than the benefit it would bring to others.17
As a utilitarian, Singer’s essay was clearly rooted in the Comtean world of rational
and calculated altruism. But it still had one foot in Dunant’s world, absent the pathos
but nonetheless stressing the urgent needs of suffering individuals. Indeed, the
opening lines of Singer’s essay appeal directly to a humanitarian crisis: “As I write this,
in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and

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 medical care.” That crisis, and the NGO response to it, was part of a transformation
in the world of humanitarian aid that had only just begun with the response by the
Western public and NGOs to the 1968 famine in the Biafra region of Nigeria.
Historians of humanitarianism have noted the many ways in which Biafra opened
a new chapter in humanitarian action.18 Newspapers and magazine covers dissem-
inated countless images of starving children in the summer of 1968. “A new icon of
Third World misery was born,” as historian Lasse Heerten puts it: “ ‘Biafran babies.’ ”19
Television, for the first time, made such images even more vivid. Addressing a
Hamburg rally in October 1968, Günter Grass spoke of the “genocide for all the world
to see . . . after dinner we watch how people starve and die in Biafra.”20 The steady
stream of images posed an urgent challenge to Western audiences: something must be
done. Many people answered the call by founding Biafra action groups to collect
donations and sponsor rallies to awaken public awareness in New York and numerous
European cities.21
Beyond the imagery and public rallies, the concrete response by Western NGOs
to the crisis in Biafra dramatically transformed their role and status. With UN and
other official aid entirely absent, new NGOs sprung up and existing NGOs took on
new roles in delivering massive amounts of aid in what became the largest airlift of
food and medical supplies since World War II.22 Former aid worker Alex de Waal
describes it as “an unsurpassed effort in terms of logistical achievement and sheer
physical courage.”23 The ICRC took on an uncharacteristic role as the lead agency in
the giant relief effort. Oxfam became operational in the field for only the second time
in its history and became heavily involved in the public awareness campaign on behalf
of Biafra.24
Singer’s essay was written within the context of—and clearly reflects—these
changing circumstance. Vivid portrayals of distant suffering were appearing in people’s
living rooms, and Western NGOs were often already on the ground trying to help. In
Singer’s argument, such NGOs become the embodiment of a potent fusion of new
technical capacities with a much older moral imperative to help one’s neighbor: “From
the moral point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made
an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation. Expert
observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently
stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as
effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block.”25 Echoing humanitarian
appeals that confront the viewer with a starving child, Singer’s pond analogy attempts
to forge a moral link between two isolated individuals—one who needs saving and
one in a position to save. NGOs are posited as a technical mechanism for extending
that moral connection across great distance—like a very long arm reaching out to pull
a drowning child from a pond on the other side of the world, they can fulfill a
humanitarian gesture initiated by our donations. In essence, this is an argument about
the capacity to carry out individual moral action at a distance.
This fusion of new technical capacities with a long-standing moral imperative was
also evident when a group of French doctors met in Paris in December 1971—like
Singer, the crisis in East Bengal was on their minds—to found Médicins Sans Fron-
tières (MSF). MSF emerged, writes anthropologist Peter Redfield, “at a moment when

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international air travel was becoming more readily available to Europe’s middle class,
when emergency medicine had emerged from a military specialty into civilian life, and
when relatively instantaneous transmission of images around the world was first
possible thanks to satellite technology.”26 The idea was to create a kind of “medical
strike force” that could quickly bring emergency medical care anywhere it was
needed.27 Over time, this initial emphasis on technical proficiency has become one of
the primary things MSF is known for as it has grown from a small group of volunteer
doctors to become one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world.28
In short, Singer and the founders of MSF appear to have been similarly struck by
the emerging horizon for humanitarian action that was empirically grounded in newly
available technical capacities and morally grounded in the idea that inaction in the
face of avoidable suffering is morally unacceptable.29 Another affinity was the stress
on the potency of individual action, particularly evident in the stance of Bernard
Kouchner, the most prominent of MSF’s founders. Drawing on Kouchner’s writings,
the historian Bertrand Taithe captures the early ethos of the organization this way:
“the individual can act and must act . . . individuals can change things by being there,
by intervening in other people’s tragedies.”30 Michael Barnett aptly describes the “new
style of politics” epitomized by Kouchner in terms of replacing the “old-style politics
of protest” many had been involved with in the 1960s with “direct action on behalf of
the victims of the world.”31 Redfield’s description of MSF’s ideals could apply, with
slight modification, to Singer’s own aims: “such a group of doctors could engage with
suffering wherever it might arise, bypassing political obstacles to stand with afflicted
populations worldwide.”32 It echoes a central tenet of Singer’s entire corpus, from the
early essay up to the present: “the presupposition that individual action can make a
difference.”33
Singer, like Kouchner and other former members of the French revolutionary Left
who joined MSF, was no stranger to the politics of protest. As an undergraduate in
Australia in the late 1960s, he had been involved in movements opposing the war in
Vietnam.34 In fact, Singer went on to Oxford in 1969 to write what was a rather
unorthodox philosophy dissertation at the time, on civil disobedience.35 Nonetheless,
his essay on famine was much more focused on the question of what an individual
must do once they become aware of distant suffering, particularly in light of the failure
of nation-states or other individuals to do what they ought to do. These moves by
Kouchner and Singer away from protest-politics toward individual action aligns with
a larger shift, toward moralized modes of action, captured by historians who trace the
rise of the human rights movement as a form of anti-politics in the 1970s.36
A shared moral vision animates both the ethical stance promoted by Singer’s pond
scenario and the actual work of many humanitarian organizations. If we distill the key
elements, what comes to the fore is the moral relation between an individual agent—a
potential donor or a humanitarian actor—and a suffering stranger. What recedes into
the background, potentially disappearing altogether, are connections grounded in
other social, political, historical, or economic relations. The agent stands at the center
of a field of possible action, imbued with the kind of moral clarity that only comes
when urgent action by an individual is required to stop an uncontroversial harm. This
brings out an epistemic feature of this picture. The certainty of direct action stands in

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 contrast to the uncertainties and endless potential obstacles of politics. The moral
urgency of the present takes over, while politics, which is complex and oriented toward
achieving broader gains in the future, takes a back seat.
A paradigmatic instance of this perspective was on view at the Live Aid concert in
July 1985. Viewed by 1.5 billion people around the world, it was simultaneously
broadcast from Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Bob
Geldof, the main organizer, had seen a BBC news piece in 1984 on famine in the
Korem camp in Ethiopia and decided to organize a benefit concert. As media theorist
Lilie Chouliaraki puts it,

No other instance best captures the moralization strategy of Live Aid than the
BBC news imagery of famine and death in Korem, projected on the Wembley and
JFK screens: “a close up baby—a tiny body but a large head, and its mouth open
in a silent cry . . . It is held close to its mother’s face. She shields it with the cloth
that drapes them both, drawing it to her, and looks down. The infant’s silent
anguish, eyes closed, mouth wide, screaming, continues.” The immediate impact
of this image was reflected in the significant increase in the donations rate
following the screening, yet its deeper impact lies in introducing the witnessing of
human suffering as the most important affective force of the concert.37

In fact, the concert ultimately raised between $100 and $500 million dollars for famine
relief.38 Unfortunately, it also led much of the public to view the famine more like a
natural disaster than the result of the Ethiopian government’s policy of forcible reset-
tlement and a tactic used against secessionist rebels.39 As in the case of the media-
driven event “Biafra,” in this case “Ethiopia” was constructed as a purely moral space,
mirroring Singer’s pond analogy, in which Western donors can effectively make a
humanitarian gesture.40
The idea of a moral space in which the humanitarian imperative can be fulfilled is
not just a construct of the imagination; it is a concrete part of humanitarian practice.
The term “humanitarian space” is used by humanitarian actors to refer to the need to
establish a space in which they can safely and effectively treat victims and save lives in
the midst of surrounding chaos and conflict. There is no single definition of this term,
but it has been suggested that it is intended to capture “the existence of a practical,
even physical, space within which humanitarian action—saving lives by providing
relief to victims of armed conflicts—can be undertaken.”41 As Michael Barnett
describes it, humanitarian space is a “space where ethics can operate in a world of
politics.”42 The basic idea was reflected in Dunant’s founding ideal: partisan soldiers
fighting for their nations, once wounded, are transformed into injured human beings
with no nationality.43 They exit the antagonistic arena of war and enter a moral space
in which human beings must respond humanely to other human being’s suffering.
The idea of humanitarian space, then, is a moralized space in which the humanitarian
can act directly on the moral imperative to respond to another human being in dire
need.
Of course, it has long been abundantly clear that, when it comes to emergency
relief, the idea that humanitarian space is as morally pristine as Singer’s pond is
illusory. Humanitarian organizations know all too well how humanitarian space is

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secured: getting and maintaining access to affected populations requires difficult nego-
tiations with state and local officials, warlords, and militias. In one of their famously
self-critical interrogations, Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed, MSF detailed the
many ways in which humanitarian space is politically constructed, which is not to say
that within that context, something resembling the pure moral gesture of saving a life
is not possible. But it is to say that constructing the space for such action is itself a
political endeavor that entails relations and negotiations with states and other powerful
actors. And operating within that space has political effects. As Hugo Slim aptly puts
it, “humanitarian action is the pursuit of certain goals within the context of other
people’s politics and is consequently carried out in the political sphere above all
others” (115; see also 113–14). Power is always being exercised within humanitarian
space, particularly over the beneficiaries. Whenever power is engaged with or exercised
as part of a mode of action—as it always is in organized attempts by NGOS to save
strangers—then a mode of action is at stake that is always also political and not simply
moral.
In light of the fact that the complexities of delivering humanitarian assistance are
well-known in the aid industry, what would an adequate philosophical account of
such complexity look like? Within the domain of the ethics of giving, one approach
is to accept the moral duty to alleviate the suffering of distant strangers as defended
by Singer while arguing that discharging that duty is no simple matter. For instance,
in an essay titled, “Poverty is no Pond,” philosopher Leif Wenar starts by formulating
what he calls “the Donor’s Question”: “How will each dollar I can give to aid, or each
hour I can devote to campaigning for aid, affect the long-term well-being of people
in other countries?”44 After an extensive review of the literature on NGO effectiveness,
he argues that Singer has ignored the possibility that sometimes NGOs do more harm
than good.45
An alternative to factoring complexity and uncertainty into the Donor’s Question
is to reframe the question entirely by placing it in a more political context. Saving
nearby strangers can be a direct fulfillment of a moral imperative, but organized
attempts to save lives, systematically and over time, cannot be characterized in purely
moral terms. As William Galston puts it, “individual rescue typically leaves everything
else as it was: throwing a rope to a drowning man typically does not require or produce
reorganizations of social relations and responsibilities outside of the rescuer–rescued
dyad.”46 How social relations are organized is the domain of the political. It gets into
questions of distributing resources, prevention, acceptable risk, and a whole range of
questions that go beyond the fulfillment of a moral imperative, which require taking
a political perspective.

Political Ethics for Humanitarian NGOs

Taking this perspective on humanitarian NGOs is a central aim of Jennifer Ruben-
stein’s recent book, Between Samaritans and States, which focuses on the activities of
“large-scale, mainstream, INGOs that are headquartered in wealthy Western coun-
tries, rely at least in part on donors for funds, provide humanitarian aid in addition
to whatever else they do, and are not strongly religious” (21). This group includes
what Michael Barnett calls the “gang of six”: CARE, Catholic Relief Services, MSF,

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 Save the Children, World Vision, and Oxfam. Although the bulk of Rubenstein’s
book addresses ethical dilemmas humanitarian actors face in their everyday operations,
she does touch on the Donor’s Question. She maintains that a humanitarian NGO
should not be viewed, as Singer originally did, as a kind of “do-gooding machine”:
insert money here, save a life over there (chap. 8). Rather, she suggests an analogy
with supporting the candidacy of a politician in a district other than your own. You
give them money because you support their platform, which is constituted by a mix
of moral positions, political ideals, and pragmatic strategies. You might withhold
support if you think a particular politician, despite sharing your position on key issues,
simply does not operate in ways you can condone. And if you do decide to give
support, perhaps based on past performance, you would still monitor their future
activity and may decide to stop supporting at some point. “The moral risk, ambiguity,
uncertainty, need for careful oversight, and concerns about illegitimate overstepping—
together with the hope of helping make a better world—that feature in our conception
of donating to a political candidate outside our own district should also characterize
our understanding of the political activity of donating to a humanitarian INGO” (20;
my emphasis). This analogy is fitting, as it situates moral principles within a larger
political framework that is appropriate given the nature and track record of organized
attempts at helping distant strangers. It integrates the ethics and politics of the
Donor’s Question into the analysis of the nature and scope of the ethical and political
responsibilities of humanitarian NGOs themselves.
It is those broader responsibilities, some of which are long-term and relate to larger
structures, that inform Rubenstein’s normative analysis throughout the book. For
instance, when she looks at ad campaigns directed at potential donors, she identifies
what she calls the “moral motivation tradeoff”: LiveAid-type imagery can effectively
motivate people to donate, but also has “negative discursive effects” in the way it
portrays individuals and countries receiving aid (185). Rubenstein proposes a range of
strategies for negotiating the tradeoff, including the use of “critical visual rhetoric”
(205). This two-step process, already practiced by some INGOs, uses images to grab
viewers’ attention before shifting to a more critical and nuanced discussion of the
issues with the aim of educating the viewer. This allows INGOs to raise necessary
funds while also taking responsibility for ways in which their campaigns affect the
larger discursive context in which images circulate, generating and sustaining a set of
shared understandings of various people, cultures, and regions, or the nature and
causes of famine and poverty.
The moral motivation tradeoff is one of four ethical predicaments Rubenstein
analyzes in the book, relying on what she calls a “cartographic approach” (3–8), which
means mapping the ethical and political terrain INGOs have to navigate in order to
be able to identify better and worse paths they might take. Much hangs, in this work,
on definitions and typologies. A central question is definitional: what kind of actors
are humanitarian INGOs? The answer, addressed in Chapters 2 and 3, is crucial to
conceptualizing and addressing the second core question: what types of ethical predic-
aments do humanitarian INGOs face? The four predicaments are laid out, one per
chapter, in Chapters 4 through 7. The guiding idea is that humanitarian INGOs are

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distinctive entities in ways that must be acknowledged. Clearly defining what they are
will help us determine what they should do.
As the book’s title indicates, and Rubenstein convincingly argues, these “non-
governmental” organizations engage in “governance” in ways that go beyond the
actions of individual Samaritans but also differ from state governments. More specifi-
cally, she identifies three key characteristics of such INGOs. First, they are “sometimes
somewhat governmental.” Not only do they participate directly in global governance
by trying to shape international institutions, they often serve the very same functions
as conventional governments by making influential decisions about the use of
resources, shaping the policies of domestic governments, and providing basic services.
Second, they are “highly political” in two key ways: their actions and advocacy often
have unintended, negative political effects, and they exercise “discursive power”—the
power to shape the meanings of important terms like “humanity,” “suffering,” and
“emergency” (71). Third, INGOs are often second-best actors. That is, in many situa-
tions there are other actors—domestic NGOs or government agencies—that should
be doing what the INGO is doing and could potentially be more effective and more
consistent with democratic and other norms.
These features apply variously in different situations, raising different ethical
requirements. For instance, when an INGO is clearly a second-best actor, they should
figure out ways to play a supporting role to local, best actors, or perhaps leave alto-
gether. Though ethically required, this can pose significant operational challenges to
an organization. The tension they have to manage is between their responsibility to
carry out governmental activities effectively versus backing off when possible. INGOs
have an obligation to avoid displacing first-best actors or preventing them from
emerging and succeeding (see, for instance, Rubenstein’s discussion of Haiti as a
“Republic of NGOs,” 59–60).
In other situations, where an INGO is the actor of last resort, they have a strong
responsibility to stay in order to avoid pulling the rug out from under people who
have come to rely on them. This can get tricky. Rubenstein focuses on “stay or go”
dilemmas that arise when staying would, in some way, contribute to a bad
outcome—like increasing violence—but leaving would upend everything on which a
vulnerable population has come to rely. Staying allows them to continue providing
aid with the moral cost of possibly contributing to injustice; going allows them to
avoid contributing to injustice, but at the cost of denying aid to innocent people in
need. A classic case is when it became clear to INGOs working in Rwandan refugee
camps in Zaire that ex-soldiers were using aid intended for civilians to help regroup
militarily. In this situation, MSF-France at least, decided it had to leave, justifying its
decision by stating that “far from participating in the resolution of the conflict, inter-
national aid perpetuates the situation and, worse still, prepares the crisis of tomorrow”
(qtd. on 107).
Like the best critical anthropology of humanitarianism, which starts with the
voices and critical reflections of practitioners themselves, Rubenstein starts with
concrete dilemmas faced by humanitarian organizations and adds a further layer of
analysis, informed by political theory, to the best reflective responses. For example,
she builds on MSF’s talk of an “ethics of refusal,” which they use to describe some of

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 the “political and expressive dimensions” of their work (154).47 Sometimes it is
embodied in a kind of public claim-making that puts pressure on other actors to step
up—when, for instance, they refuse to be a political pawn or when the organization
states that it “rejects the idea that poor people deserve third-rate medical care and
strives to provide high-quality care to patients,” or when they maintain a presence in
areas where it is costly for them to work in order to draw others’ attention to a
looming crisis (quoted on 154–55). In short, the ethics of refusal captures activities that
are part of generating solidarity and engaging in the kind of witnessing or speaking
out for which MSF is famous. Rubenstein is quite sympathetic with this approach—it
is central to the idea of attempting to save individuals while also promoting “structural
justice”—but highlights an ambiguity in its typical formulation: advocates of this
approach are not always clear about how to justify expensive projects that help a small
number of people (163). If they succeed in pressuring others to act, they can be quite
cost-effective, but if they fail is this distribution of scarce resources still justified?
Rubenstein maps out a modified version of this position based on a “more complete
map” that accounts for the key features of INGOs (conventional governance, global
governance, discursive power, and second-best status) (164): “The ‘ethics of resistance’
is my term for a type of political judgment that recognizes and seeks to navigate
among these different and sometimes conflicting sources of responsibility. It focuses
largely on overall consequences, but has an expansive understanding of what conse-
quences matter, and is attentive to the distortions that can result from efforts to
measure and commensurate them” (167). In this way, Rubenstein builds on MSF’s
current approach, faulting it mainly for working with an “incomplete map” (164).
This and other examples show how Rubenstein treats the practitioners she engages
in the book “as empirically well-informed political and moral theorists in their own
right, whose conceptual and normative arguments deserve respectful attention” (24).
But I still have to wonder if practitioners might have difficulty engaging the end result.
Even academics who read little in “analytical political theory” might find it a bit tough
to keep track of many of the subtle distinctions at stake, or to engage the practice at
this level of abstraction (as a colleague in anthropology once put it, normative analysis
like this “drains the blood from the phenomena”) (27). Rubenstein is keenly aware of
the challenge of making this kind of theory compelling, admitting that “some of these
arguments are rather dry” (27). But I am quite sympathetic with her ultimate aim.
“While I aim to show that important theoretical and ethical insights can be gleaned
from working ‘closer to the ground’ than is the norm in the field of political theory, I
also want to persuade anthropologists, journalists, and aid practitioners that there is
value in working at a somewhat higher level of abstraction than is their usual practice”
(3). Operating effectively at this intersection between theory and practice is no easy
task. Even if the end result is of more value to theorists than to practitioners, the book
sets a high standard for any future work aimed at bringing political theory to bear on
humanitarian practice. Aside from the reflections of former practitioners, there is not
much else out there in this vein.48
One significant exception is Hugo Slim’s recent book, Humanitarian Ethics, which
aims to have even more direct value to practitioners. Indeed, the cover of the book—
subtitled “A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster”—simulates a kind of

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field handbook.49 If Rubenstein’s book is squarely within the domain of applied
political theory, Slim’s is more in the domain of professional ethics. Slim has long
been the dominant figure in the area of humanitarian ethics. Like Rubenstein, he too
says he wants to focus on the political, but instead of starting there, as she does, his
political framing only comes out, rather clumsily, halfway through the book. Slim
ultimately deals with many of the same issues as Rubenstein, though less systemati-
cally, in a chapter on “persistent ethical problems” (Chapter 11). Before he gets there,
he surveys various ways of thinking about moral choices and moral responsibility
(Chapters 9 and 10). At times this feels like a long list of ethical vocabulary—“dirty
hands,” “tragic choices,” “slippery slopes”—but without the same systematic clarity
found in Rubenstein on the pros and cons of thinking about things one way rather
than another. Reading Slim is kind of like looking at the schematics for a complex
ethical machine without any real sense of how one might operate it.
If Slim’s engagement with normative thinking is disappointing, his engagement
with critical theory is downright distorting. He displays little taste for nuance when it
comes to the best critical work on humanitarianism, lumping together scholars like
Michel Agier, Didier Fassin, Craig Calhoun, and Laurence McFalls for summary
dismissal: “This kind of academic deconstruction by critical theorists is exceedingly
binary and overblown. It represents the dualistic anti-Western fantasy of some post-
modern thinkers and shows a tendency to discount the political power and brutality
in non-Western societies.”50 Missing the point of this work entirely, he combines
Fassin and Calhoun to construct an absurd straw man: “Humanitarian reason is . . .
credited with ‘imagining’ and ‘inventing’ emergencies in order that the wicked West
can take humanitarian control over large high-risk areas of the world. For these and
other critical theorists, therefore, humanitarian government and humanitarian aid are
extremely dangerous for the people cast as victims in these ‘imagined’ catastrophes.”51
Anyone who has read Fassin and Calhoun will know how off the mark this is.52
Ethnographic methods are in some ways uniquely suited for uncovering subtle, and
often not so subtle, ways in which power operates within humanitarian practice. Slim
himself stresses that humanitarianism is political, but too quickly dismisses work like
Agier’s, who aims to better understand precisely how “politics” is operative within
refugee camps and the ways in which “control and assistance are entangled.”53
Not that Slim is averse to all critique, but he says he prefers the “more nuanced
and less ideological” approach of Alex de Waal, who “sees a less malevolent and more
disorganized intent behind the recent emergence of humanitarian power.”54 This is
telling. It seems like Slim’s main objection to a wide range of critics is that they
portray the harms caused by the humanitarian system as part of an organized scheme
with dark intentions. There may be some theorists who view it this way, but Slim is
simply reading this subtext into texts in which it is clearly absent. Still, it is by no
means obvious how to combine the results of critical approaches with more normative
approaches to the ethics and politics of humanitarianism in a compelling and fruitful
way. For all Rubenstein’s talk of INGOs as governmental, she focuses primarily on
what she calls “conventional governance,” not “Foucauldian governance” (18, 71). But
Rubenstein is at least committed to systematic analysis of the political nature of
NGOs. A more comprehensive integration of normative analysis with the critical

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 insights garnered from the history and anthropology of humanitarian practice remains
to be written.
In the end, Slim is far more focused than Rubenstein on individual humanitarian
workers, and whether they are able to maintain an ethical connection to beneficiaries.
It is not surprising, then, that the core of his humanitarian ethics is a kind of virtue
ethics designed to guide “the ethical humanitarian worker.”55 But his virtue ethics is
rather under-developed; at times it seems that embodying “humanitarian virtues”
amounts to little more than being good at applying the core humanitarian principles
in practice.56 Surely Slim is correct that it makes a difference what motivations prac-
titioners have, and that it is better for them to view themselves as partners in helping
others rather than as heroic rescuers (though Rubenstein does a great job challenging
ideological appeals to “equal partnership” in Chapter 5). But he runs the risk of
making the behavior of individual humanitarians the whole game, implying at times
that the humanitarian system is merely the sum total of choices made by individual
actors.57 His ultimate focus on personal ethics ends up jettisoning the political almost
entirely. Rubenstein, by contrast, begins with a definitional question that raises the
issue of the political nature of humanitarian INGOs from the start. Moral questions,
though indispensable, get asked and answered only from within this already defined
political context, which demonstrates why starting points and frameworks are so
important. Similar framing problems plague the advocates of effective altruism insofar
as they, like Slim, make the political seem like an afterthought.

A Bed for the Night or Change the World?58

Not all MacFarquhar’s subjects are apolitical. While her book is mainly focused on
the tension between living an ordinary life and extreme devotion to the lives of
strangers, she does touch on the tension between helping strangers and changing struc-
tures. “Some people try to help one person at a time, and other people try to change
the whole world. There is a seductive intimacy in the first kind of work . . . The
second kind of work is more ambitious, and also cleaner, more abstract. But success
is distant and unlikely, so it’s helpful to have a taste for noble failure, and for the
camaraderie of the angry few” (15). The first full portrait of a do-gooder in the book
is Dorothy Granada, who travelled some of the well-trodden paths I have mentioned.
She started out as a nurse, doing the first kind of work, but eventually felt it was not
enough—the perennial pull of “ethics creep”—and so became an activist to protest
poverty and nuclear weapons (15). She ultimately tired of the peace movement too,
and of the kinds of people it attracted. Feeling the need to focus more on direct action
to affect individual lives, she moved to Nicaragua in the mid-1980s to live in an
encampment for refugees seeking protection from the fighting in the countryside.
Fellow activists in the peace movement challenged her much the way effective altruists
worry about doing the most good: “Anyone could be a nurse! How could she abandon
the higher calling of peace? How could she be so selfish?” (35–36).
Other do-gooders in the book were able to engage in both direct action and
politics. In a chapter on “The Most Oppressed of All,” we hear about Aaron Pitkin,
who is not only a vegan but, because he realized at a young age that ending factory
farming would alleviate an immense amount of suffering, also “works at a large

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animal-rights organization, and has been an extraordinarily effective chicken advocate,
helping to bring about a dramatic change in both laws and attitudes” (42). In a chapter
on “The Children of Strangers,” we hear about Sue Hoag and Hector Badea, who not
only adopted twenty kids after they had two of their own, but founded an adoption
agency; Sue has worked on foster-care and disability policy in Washington and does
speaking and trainings all over the country on adoption.
Those who explicitly embrace the mantle of effective altruism, on the other hand,
are quite often accused of not being sufficiently political. The objection typically
involves two distinguishable points. First, effective altruists are accused of narrowly
focusing on certain types of outcome: they address symptoms while ignoring under-
lying causes of suffering.59 As Lisa Herzog puts it, “this is the underlying assumption
of Singer and his colleagues: they take the institutional order as given, implicitly
denying that it can be transformed.”60 Second, in conjunction with this aversion to
proposals for more radical change, effective altruists are accused of being individual-
istic in how they portray potential agents of change, promoting an individualistic
ethical ideal at odds with the collective political action needed for any kind of struc-
tural or institutional change.61
These points raise thorny questions about the relation between ethics and
politics—not unlike the tensions Rubenstein highlights for humanitarian organiza-
tions themselves. In a recent defense of effective altruism, the philosopher Jeff
McMahan responds to such charges by arguing that “individuals must decide what to
do against the background of what others will in fact do . . . I am neither a community
nor a state. I can determine only what I will do.”62 It is not that McMahan thinks
institutional reform is not worth thinking about or aiming at. Rather, he seems to
think a division of labor is just fine, and is primarily responding to those who claim
effective altruism has an overly narrow view of what philosophers should do. His point
is that such critics fail to see that a wide range of different but related questions can
be addressed at the same time. “That some philosophers work to understand what our
individual duties might be against a background of malfunctioning institutions,”
McMahan writes, “does not free ‘the philosopher’ from trying also to understand
issues of global justice and institutional reform.”63
McMahan is right to insist that, as individuals, we cannot simply dispense with
the task of deciding what to do in an imperfect world, and that this should not be
viewed as necessarily opposed to other reflections on structures and institutions or
collective responsibility and political action. But it also cannot be denied that the
tenor of effective altruism—from the founding analogy of rescuing a child from a
pond to the omnipresent task of calculating how many lives you can save—is about
wedding technical proficiency with individual moral action. Of course nothing
requires it to stop there. MSF has long been guided by those same ideals while also
developing a politically oriented “ethics of refusal.” Their history of trial and error in
trying to achieve the right balance is simply an indication of the messy realities in any
attempt to do good here and now while also aiming at long term change.64 So
McMahan is right to say that effective altruism need not be opposed in principle to
political action aimed at structural change. But how have effective altruists tended to

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 relate to politics in practice? And what degree of political engagement can possibly be
incorporated into this framework, given its starting point and framing assumptions?
In fact, effective altruists are typically rather skeptical about the likelihood of
significant structural reform. Again, McMahan: “I can, of course, decide to concen-
trate my individual efforts on changing my state’s institutions, or indeed on trying to
change global economic institutions, though the probability of my making a difference
to the lives of badly off individuals may be substantially lower if I adopt this course
than if I undertake more direct action, unmediated by the state.”65 Echoing this point
about calculating probabilities, Singer typically takes a pragmatic view about what
may or may not work. On the one hand, he will stress that organizations like Oxfam
not only engage in emergency relief but also promote changes in the global economic
order.66 And he argues that we should be open-minded in the following sense: “If,
after investigating the causes of global poverty and considering what approach is most
likely to reduce it, you really believe that a more revolutionary change is needed, then
it would make sense to put your time, energy, and money into organizations
promoting that revolution in the global economic system. But this is a practical
question, and if there is little chance of achieving the kind of revolution you are
seeking, then you need to look around for a strategy with better prospects of actually
helping some poor people.”67 It is the latter point that always seems to get the most
emphasis. For example, Singer stresses that powerful advocacy campaigns often fail,
like the wave of activism in 2008 against the U.S. Farm Bill’s huge subsidies for
American agriculture. “Defeats like this suggest that our efforts are better spent else-
where, where we can be confident of making a difference.”68 And Singer often reserves
his most robust rhetoric for defending individual actions that have made a difference:
“Maybe it won’t change the structure of things. But until I’m shown how to do that,
I’ll settle for making some people better off . . .When we can’t make deep structural
changes, it is still better to help some people than to help none. When Oskar Schindler
protected Jews who would otherwise have been murdered, he had no impact on the
structure of the Nazi genocide, but he did what he could, and he was right to do so.”69
This really does seem to be Singer’s core message.
The problem with this approach, then, is less that institutions and structures,
along with the politics needed to change them, are entirely ignored. It is more a
problem with precisely how they get factored in. Rubenstein rightly insists that we
must resist the “myth of the do-gooding machine” (223). But effective altruism almost
unavoidably perpetuates the myth and sustains the ideal of perfecting the machine.
The machine is so seductive and all-encompassing that it subsumes politics, too, as
just another data point. Institutions and organizations either help or hinder one’s
individual aim. If they hinder my goal of doing the most good I can do, then I need to
find a more direct route that avoids them along with the messy uncertainties of
politics. So even if McMahan’s division of labor may be justifiable in principle, there
is still a tendency in many articulations of effective altruism for political and institu-
tional questions to be entirely subsumed under the question of individual action. It is
hard to see how, given such framing assumptions, it will not always prescribe the same
path: avoid the uncertainties of politics (unless, of course, a massive transformational

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movement that is likely to succeed arises, which is hard to imagine if we all avoid the
uncertainties of politics and keep our moral noses to the ground in doing good).
This is why Rubenstein’s reframing is so important. Her alternative analogy—that
donating to INGOs is like donating to a political candidate outside one’s district—
already includes the best elements of effective altruism—moral concern for suffering
strangers and hard-headed empirical analysis—but within a larger framework that
foregrounds our collective responsibility for the system under which we all live and
the injustices it perpetuates. While she is able to incorporate the best elements of
effective altruism into what I would call politically responsible altruism, it is not at all
clear that effective altruists can convincingly incorporate her insights into their frame-
work.
Even as today’s effective altruism develops more sophisticated empirical analyses,
the moral vision that animates it is still quite similar to the one in Singer’s founding
essay: the individual moral agent stands at the center with a world extending out as
one continuous humanitarian space—a space in which the individual can potentially
“do good.” Institutions are viewed in technical terms, much the same way Singer saw
them when originally thinking about NGOs, as better or worse mediators between
oneself and the good one can do. What gets reinforced rather than challenged, is a
view of ourselves as relatively powerless when it comes to changing systems in which
we find ourselves. The only power we are encouraged to embrace is the power of
individual actions to change the lives of other individuals. Theorists like Rubenstein,
on the other hand, always keep existing structures and power relations in view,
pointing to our collective responsibility for them. That too can feel like a “crushing
responsibility,” but the framing question is not, how can I live an ethical life and do
the most good, but rather how can we, together with others, take up the task of
changing all this.

NOTES

1. Tony Vaux, The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War (London: Earthscan Publica-
tions, 2001).
2. Michael Maren The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International
Charity (New York: The Free Press, 1997), and Alex De Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics & the
Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
3. David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2002).
4. One exception has been the work of Hugo Slim, Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the
Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), which I discuss briefly
below. See also Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin, On Complicity and Compromise (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013); Lisa Fuller, “Priority Setting in International Non-Governmental
Organizations: It Is Not as Easy as ABCD,” Journal of Global Ethics 8, no. 1 (2012): 5–17.
5. Rubenstein did nine months of fieldwork with the ICRC, MSF-France, MSF-Belgium,
MSF-Amsterdam, Oxfam-UK, and the International Rescue Committee in 2001–2002, along
with shadowing an IRC aid worker for two weeks in Northern Uganda. Between Samaritans and
States, 23.
6. Hugo Slim, cited in Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States, 22.

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 7. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 496.
8. See Singer’s account of Oxfam’s political advocacy in The Most Good You Can Do, 157–62;
and Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States, chap. 5 on INGO advocacy.
9. For an excellent account of humanitarian organizations grappling with such changes, see
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 215–17, 234–36.
10. See Chapter 4, “Why You Shouldn’t Donate to Disaster Relief: Question 3: Is this area
neglected?” in a book by one of the founders of the effective altruism movement: William
MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference (New York:
Gotham Books, 2015).
11. See Chapter 4, “Earning to Give,” in Singer, The Most Good You Can Do. This question is
posed in terms of what is the most good you can do with the eighty thousand hours of a typical
career. See the website for the organization founded by Benjamin Todd and William MacAskill,
www.80000hours.org, and Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career that Does Good
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016).
12. John Gray, “How & How Not to Be Good,” The New York Review of Books, May 21, 2015.
13. See Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, chap. 2, “A Movement Emerges.”
14. The Giving What We Can Pledge, accessed January 19, 2019, https://www.givingwhat
wecan.org/pledge/. See the profile of Toby Ord in Chapter 2 of Singer, and MacFarquhar’s
discussion of Giving What We Can (88–102).
15. Membership numbers as of July 24, 2017. Online communication with website authors,
July 26, 2017.
16. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3
(Spring 1972): 229–43. Recently reissued in book form, with a foreword by Bill and Melinda Gates:
Famine, Affluence, and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
17. The calculation of $200 comes from Peter Singer, “The Singer Solution to World
Poverty,” The New York Times Magazine (1999). Singer later admitted that calculating how much
to donate in order to save a life might be more complicated, and then further distinguished
between what he thinks one is actually morally required to give (to the point of marginal utility)
from what he thinks should be promoted in light of certain facts of human psychology. See Peter
Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House,
2009).
18. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 133. I also describe this historical period as the context for
properly understanding Singer’s essay and the impact it would have had on its very first readers,
in “Philosophers, Historians, and Suffering Strangers,” Moving the Social: Journal of Social History
and the History of Social Movements 57 (2017): 137–58. The following paragraphs draw on 155–56 of
that essay.
19. Lasse Heerten, “The Dystopia of Postcolonial Catastrophe: Self-Determination, the
Biafran War of Secession, and the 1970s Human Rights Movement,” in The Breakthrough: Human
Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2014), 19.
20. Günter Grass, “Völkermord vor aller Augen: Ein Appell an die Bundesregierung,” in: Die
Zeit, November 10,1968, 5, cited in Lasse Heerten: “ ‘A’ as in Auschwitz, ‘B’ as in Biafra: The
Nigerian Civil War, Visual Narratives of Genocide, and the Fragmented Universalization of the

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Holocaust,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 249–74, 262.
21. Konrad J. Kuhn, “Liberation Struggle and Humanitarian Aid: International Solidarity
Movements and the “Third World” in the 1960s,” in The Third World in the Global 1960s, ed.
Samantha Christiansen and Zachary Scarlett (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 71.
22. De Waal, Famine Crimes, 73.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 75.
25. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 232.
26. See Peter Redfield, “A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth
in a Medical Humanitarian Movement,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (February 2006): 6.
Redfield notes that they had the crisis in Bangladesh in mind, 6–7.
27. Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (University of
California Press, 2013), 55.
28. MSF’s total expenditures in 2012 were about $1.1 billion with a surplus of $176 million;
91 percent of revenue came from donations from individuals or private institutions. Thomas Weiss,
Humanitarian Business (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 106–07.
29. On this sense idea of inaction as complicity, see my “Philosophers, Historians, and
Suffering Strangers.”
30. Bertrand Taithe, “Reinventing (French) Universalism: Religion, Humanitarianism and the
‘French Doctors,’ ” Modern & Contemporary France 12, no. 2 (May 2004): 147–58, 149.
31. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 145.
32. Redfield, Life in Crisis, 38.
33. Dale Jamieson, “Singer and the Practical Ethics Movement,” in Singer and His Critics, ed.
Dale Jamieson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 7.
34. Peter Singer, Preface to Famine, Affluence, and Morality (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2016), xi.
35. It was later published as his first book, Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1973). Singer has also been quite active in the animal rights movement. As Jamieson tells us,
Singer’s activist approach to practical ethics has led him to “march, demonstrate, and sit in a cage
in a city square to publicize the plight of battery hens. He has been enjoined from publicly critic-
izing or demonstrating against a circus, and arrested for trying to photograph confined sows on a
pig farm partly owned by Australia’s prime minister. Twice he has stood as a candidate for the
Green Party in Australian federal elections.” Dale Jamieson, “Singer and the Practical Ethics
Movement,” 7.
36. For the shifts in the Anglo-American context, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human
Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), chap. 4; and Jan Eckel, “The Inter-
national League for the Rights of Man, Amnesty International, and the Changing Fate of Human
Rights Activism from the 1940s to through the 1970s,” Humanity 4, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 183–214,
esp. 200–01. For the shifts in the French context, see Moyn, The Last Utopia, 169–70, and Eleanor
Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism,
1954–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
37. Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism
(Polity, 2013), 122, quoting in part from Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices
of Aid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 107. Chouliaraki goes on to contrast

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 the Live Aid concert with the Live 8 concert in 2005 in order to note interesting shifts in the
“moralization strategy” and aesthetic and performative aspects of benefit concerts as a form of
“ceremonial humanitarianism.”
38. Dale Jamieson, “Duties to the Distant: Aid, Assistance, and Intervention in the Devel-
oping World,” The Journal of Ethics 9, no. 1–2 (March 2005): 151–70, 154.
39. Rieff, A Bed for the Night, 39–40.
40. See Jamieson’s account, in “Duties to the Distant,” of how Singer’s pond analogy mirrors
what Jamieson calls the “LiveAid Conception.”
41. Cynthia Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space? Trends and Prospects on
Security and Access,” The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, November 24, 2010, accessed January
19, 2019, https://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/863. For a critical, deconstructive account of humani-
tarian space, linking it to the logic of state sovereignty, see Kelly Oliver, Carceral Humanitarianism:
Logics of Refugee Detention (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
42. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 34.
43. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, Introduction to Humanitarianism and
Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16–17.
44. Leif Wenar, “Poverty Is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent,” in Giving Well: The Ethics
of Philanthropy, ed. Patricia Illingworth et al. (Oxford University Press, 2011).
45. Singer himself significantly expanded the range of moral and empirical considerations that
must be accounted for, while still maintaining his core argument, in The Life You Can Save.
46. William Galston, “Realism in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 9,
no. 4 (October 2010): 385–411.
47. The phrase is drawn from James Orbinski’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace prize for
MSF in 1999, in which he identifies “the refusal of all forms of problem solving through sacrifice
of the weak and vulnerable” as a “founding [principle] of humanitarian action” (quoted in Ruben-
stein, 154).
48. See fn 4.
49. Hugo Slim, Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
50. Ibid., 217.
51. Ibid.
52. Nor is it simply the views of those of whom he is critical that Slim misunderstands. He
tries to sympathetically draw on Rawls by applying the “difference principle” to particular cases in
the world of humanitarian action rather than to the basic structure of society (62–63, 239), but
this is not the proper way to use the principle.
53. Michel Agier, “Humanity as an Identity and Its Political Effects,” Humanity 1, no. 1 (Fall
2010): 29–45, 43.
54. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 218.
55. Ibid., 231.
56. Ibid., 242–43.
57. Ibid., 231.
58. The section title alludes to Bertolt Brecht’s “A Bed for the Night,” a poem that captures,
in a way analytical work often cannot, the powerful pull of individual direct action that won’t
change the world (“For a night the wind is kept from them / The snow meant for them falls on

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the roadway”) along with the enduring need to change the world, to “improve relations among
men” and “shorten the age of exploitation.”
59. Singer acknowledges and responds to this objection in Peter Singer, “From ‘Famine,
Affluence, and Morality,’ to Effective Altruism,” The Philosophers’ Magazine, no. 73 (2nd Quarter
2016): 60–61.
60. Lisa Herzog, “Can ‘Effective Altruism’ Really Change the World?” OpenDemocracy.net,
February 22, 2016, accessed January 19, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/
lisa-herzog/can-effective-altruism-really-change-world. See also the reply by Scott Weathers, “Can
‘Effective Altruism’ Change the World? It Already Has,” OpenDemocracy.net, February 29, 2016,
accessed January 19, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/scott-weathers/
can-effective-altruism-change-world-it-already-has.
61. See Joanna Scutts, “The Surefire Formula for Doing Good?,” In These Times, September
17, 2015. See also Amia Srinavasan’s review of MacAskill, Doing Good Better in “Stop the Robot
Apocalypse,” London Review of Books 37, no. 18 (September 24, 2015); and Samuel Moyn’s review
of MacFarquhar: “The Beauty and the Costs of Extreme Altruism,” The Nation, November 5,
2015.
62. Jeff McMahan, “Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism,” The Philosophers’
Magazine, no. 73 (2nd Quarter 2016): 92–99, 96–97.
63. Ibid., 97.
64. See Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis. For excellent analysis of an historical example, see the
discussion of debates among abolitionists on whether to purchase the freedom of individual slaves
or to focus solely on abolishing the system, in Margaret M. R. Kellow, “Hard Struggles of Doubt:
Abolitionists and the Problem of Slave Redemption,” in Humanitarianism and Suffering, 118–39.
65. McMahan, “Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism,” 97, my emphasis.
66. Singer, Life You Can Save, 36. Singer, “From ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality,’ ” 61.
67. Singer, Life You Can Save, 36.
68. Ibid., 114.
69. Peter Singer, “Achieving the Best Outcome: A Rejoinder,” Ethics & International Affairs
16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 128, a reply to Andrew Kuper, “More Than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alter-
natives to the ‘Singer Solution,’ ” Ethics & International Affairs 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 107–20.

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