Stephen Law

Giles Fraser gets a lot wrong here . Giles says effective altruism 'forces all human need to express itself on a single comparable scale because of the giver’s rather nerdish requirement that the world possess some sort of measurable order'. But surely the world does possess at least some sort of measurable order? The 'effective altruist' needn't suppose the right thing to do is always entirely measurable/rationally calculable. They need suppose only that in so far as we can calculate the most effective way to give, we should. What's wrong with that? Effective altruists can also easily shrug off Giles' supposed counter-examples. Effective altruism involves just a commitment to using charitable giving in the most effective way possible. That's not utilitarianism, and it's not a commitment to, in Giles' example, saving the cash rather than the child, for saving the child is not charitable giving. Giles raises a glass to...

Giles Fraser: "Why don’t humanists give value to humans?" Church Times , 24th October 2008. Humanists (and by that I mean secular humanists for now) would do much more to persuade me of their world-view if they took more seriously the idea that the human is of fundamental value. Instead, secular humanists are becoming increasingly cavalier with their central belief. They have become a bit like Christians who don’t believe in God. This leads me to ponder whether human life is really all that safe in the hands of humanists. Here, for instance, is a passage from the British Humanist Association’s website: “Religious people also often use phrases like 'the sanctity of life' to justify the view that life has intrinsic value and must not be destroyed. Humanists, too, see a special value in human life, but think that if an individual has decided on rational grounds that his life has lost its meaning and value, that evalu ation should be respected.” Oh, how nice: humanists th...