Peter Singer address some of the criticism of the philosophy surrounding effective altruism in his book, The Most Good You Can Do. He writes that effective altruists are criticized from a parenting standpoint when they focus on the importance of the lives of every child and not just their own. This point of view for effective altruists expands beyond valuing all children within a neighborhood, community, or state as being truly equal, and looks at all children across the globe as being equal. It is a challenging idea because of the bias we accept in providing as much as possible for our children to ensure that they have every advantage possible in life. Part of our culture values the idea of being able to provide everything our children want, and we see being unable to meet their desires as a lack of success. This has created a mindset for many individuals where we should not sacrifice our children’s desires, even if that means we are going to try and bring the quality of life for other children to an equal level. However, for an effective altruist, all lives are equally important because all lives can face the same suffering and can also potentially produce the same good for the world. When it comes to the love an effective altruist would show his of her child, Singer writes,
“Critics of effective altruism often suggest … that there is something odd or unnatural about being moved by the “strictly intellectual” understanding that a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But … Loving your own child does not mean you have to be so dazzled by your love that you are unable to see that there is a point of view from which other children matter just as much as your own or that this perspective is unable to have an impact on the way you live.”
What Singer seems to be arguing is not that all effective altruists focus more on other children than they do their own children, or that they love their own children less than other parents love their children. Singer is suggesting that effective altruists have access to perspectives that many others never consider. Being able to see the world from additional perspectives may not change the way they feel toward their own child, but it may help to change the way they feel about children across the world who they will never see.