“Most criticism of effective altruism is character assassination. We lack empathy, we’re cold and calculating, we have no sense of personal virtue and see people as data points rather than as human beings. It’s much less often that I hear our critics say that we’re doing a poor job of improving or saving people’s lives.
Essentially, the more good we do, the worse we are as human beings. At some point, I’m tired of trying to convince these critics that they’re mistaken about us.
I simply want to respond, ‘Fine, keep looking down on us from your moral high ground. I’d rather be a bad person who does a tremendous amount of good than a good person who hasn’t given a single thought to the magnitude of his life’s impact on others.’”