And so defenses like this are silly.  Who, besides Ayn Rand, isn't in favor of improving the well-being of others?  The problem has to do with the way the EA folks interpret "effective," which guarantees that it will be both ineffective and very appealing to the capitalist media, which loves moral self-congratulation that is utterly unthreatening to capitalist relations of production and the ruling class.

I want to be clear:  those philosophers giving their money to charities are not acting wrongfully in my view.  They are acting wrongfully, however, in pretending that this is what one ought to do, that somehow the catastrophic harms that afflict large segments of humanity are in any meaningful way addressed by their charitable contributions.