What Happened to Effective Altruism?

In 1971, the philosophy department at Oxford University was confronted with an unusual student. One of the few vegetarians on campus, Peter Singer staged alarming demonstrations with papier-mâché chickens on Cornmarket Street. He petitioned to write his term paper on Karl Marx (“not a real philosopher” in the faculty’s minds). He attended Radical Philosophy meetings, which set out to make philosophy more practical and less complacent, but grew impatient. He had more pressing concerns than splitting hairs on Althusser.