Wenar-MacAskill Philosophical Cagefight

A self-knockout in the first round?

About a year ago, Stanford professor Leif Wenar wrote a widely-shared WIRED article attacking effective altruism. (I was sad to see how uncritically this was received by many philosophers, who seemed simply delighted to have a new cudgel to hand.) At the time, I critiqued what I took to be its most significant rational shortcomings (promoting status quo bias in a way that is very predictably harmful, while bizarrely excoriating GiveWell for refraining from misleading their readers as he does).

Something I didn’t comment on at the time was Wenar’s rather vicious public attack on Will MacAskill as a philosopher. When one professional flings such public accusations of incompetence at another, it seemingly guarantees that one of the two must be incompetent. The interesting question, of course, is: which one?

“You come at the king, you best not miss.”

It may be a bit unseemly to air such professional “dirty laundry” in public, so I’m going to put my analysis of Wenar’s charges behind the paywall.