I cannot really speak to how good or honest Will’s public-facing stuff about practical charity evaluation is, and I find WWOTF a bit shallow outside of the really good chapter on population ethics where Will actually has domain expertise. But the claim that Will is hilariously incompetent as a philosopher is, frankly, garbage. As is the argument for it that Will once defined altruism in a non-standard way. Will regularly publishes in leading academic philosophy journals. He became the UK equivalent of a tenured prof super young at one of the world’s best universities. Also, frankly, many years ago I actually discussed technical philosophy with Will once or twice, and, like most Oxford graduate students in philosophy, he knows what he’s doing.
I am still somewhat worried that Wenar has genuinely good criticism of GiveWell, but that part of the article was somewhat of a mark against it’s credibility to me even if all the other bad things it says about Will are true. (Note: I’m not conceding they are true.)
Questions designed to trip him up or teach him a lesson are emotionally tempting, but don’t seem very useful to me. Better to ask him how he thinks practical stuff can be improved, or what he thinks particularly big mistakes of GiveWell or other EA orgs were in terms of funding decisions, not broad philosophy (we’ve all heard standard objections to consequentialism before.) I suspect he won’t have any good suggestions, on the latter, but you never know.