Thank you for this, Keir. I agree that some conclusions that EAs have come to are uncontroversial among non-utilitarians. And EAs have tried to appeal to non-utilitarians. Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment does not appeal to utilitarianism. Ord and MacAskill both (while making clear they are sympathetic to total utilitarianism) try to appeal to non-utilitarians too.
However, there are some important cause prioritisation questions that can’t really be answered without committing to some philosophical framework. It’s plausible that these questions do make a real, practical difference to what we individually prioritise. So, doing EA without philosophy seems a bit like trying to do politics without ideology. Many people may claim to be doing so, but they’re still ultimately harbouring philosophical assumptions.
You bring up the comparison between donating to the opera and donating to global health as one that non-utilitarians like Sen can deal with relatively easily. But Amartya Sen is still a consequentialist and it’s notable that his close colleague (and ideological soulmate) Martha Nussbaum has recently written about wild-animal suffering, a cause which utilitarians have been concerned about for some time. Consequentialists and pluralists (as long as they include some degree of consequentialism in their thinking) can still easily prioritise. It’s less clear that pure deontologists and virtue ethicists can, without ultimately appealing to consequences.
Finally, I don’t think there’s much philosophical difference between Bill Gates and Peter Singer. Gates wrote a blurb praising Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, and in his recent annual newsletter he said that his goal is to “give my wealth back to society in ways that do the most good for the most people”.
I agree that Gates has been heavily criticised too. This is probably because he’s a billionaire and because he’s involved himself so heavily in issues (such as the pandemic) which attract lots of attention. It might not be a coincidence, though, that there’s not much philosophical difference between Bill Gates and, say, Peter Singer. Gates wrote a blurb praising Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, and in his recent annual newsletter he said that his goal is to “give my wealth back to society in ways that do the most good for the most people”.