The Beauty and the Costs of Extreme Altruism

By 

Samuel Moyn

"Moral extremists are sometimes seen as closet narcissists, MacFar­quhar observes, or as “codependent” with their beneficiaries in ways that border on pathology (she makes an illuminating parallel with alcoholism and the recovery from it). But she is especially taken with one criticism of extreme altruism, and skirts another almost entirely.

“If there is one place more than any other where do-gooders are set up as enemies of humanness,” MacFarquhar writes, “it is in fiction, particularly modern novels.” This is because novelists would rather portray the inevitability of human imperfection than embark on a quixotic attempt to end it, she argues. But novelists have often also written in defense of multiple commitments, justifying the plural and the messy against the monomania and rigor not just of moral extremists, but of an exclusively moral stance on life in general."