Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century
philosophical and
social movement that advocates "using
evidence and
reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis".[1][2] People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, sometimes called effective altruists,[3] may choose careers based on the amount of good that they expect the career to achieve or donate to charities based on the goal of maximising positive impact. They may work on the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.[4]: 179–195
The movement developed during the 2000s, and the name effective altruism was coined in 2011. Philosophers influential to the movement include
Peter Singer,
Toby Ord, and
William MacAskill. What began as a set of evaluation techniques advocated by a diffuse coalition evolved into an identity.[5] With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism community and strong ties to the elite schools in the United States and Britain, effective altruism has become associated with
Silicon Valley and the technology industry, forming a tight subculture.[6]
The movement received mainstream attention and criticism with the
bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX as founder
Sam Bankman-Fried was a major funder of effective altruism causes prior to late 2022. Within the
Bay Area, the effective altruism movement received criticism for having a culture that has been described as sexually exploitative towards women.
Beginning in the latter half of the 2000s, several communities centered around altruist, rationalist, and
futurological concerns started to converge, such as:[7][8]
The evidence-based charity community centered around
GiveWell,[9] including
Open Philanthropy, which originally came out of GiveWell Labs but then became independent.[10][11]
An estimated $416 million was donated to effective charities identified by the movement in 2019,[17] representing a 37% annual growth rate since 2015.[18] Two of the largest donors in the effective altruism community,
Dustin Moskovitz, who had become wealthy through co-founding Facebook, and his wife
Cari Tuna, hope to donate most of their net worth of over $11 billion for effective altruist causes through the private foundation
Good Ventures.[10] Others influenced by effective altruism include Sam Bankman-Fried,[19] as well as professional poker players
Dan Smith[20] and
Liv Boeree.[20]Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian billionaire founder of Skype, is known for donating to some effective altruist causes.[21] Sam Bankman-Fried launched a philanthropic organization called the FTX Foundation in February 2021,[22] and it made contributions to a number of effective altruist organizations, but it was shut down in November 2022 when FTX collapsed.[23]
In 2018, American news website Vox launched its Future Perfect section, led by journalist
Dylan Matthews, which publishes articles and podcasts on "finding the best ways to do good".[28][29]
In 2023, Oxford University Press published the volume The Good it Promises, The Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, edited by
Carol J. Adams,
Alice Crary, and
Lori Gruen.[33]
Philosophy
Effective altruists focus on the many philosophical questions related to the most effective ways to benefit others.[34][35] Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to "why" and "how".[36] There is little consensus on the answers, and there are differences between effective altruists who believe that they should do the most good they possibly can with all of their resources[37] and those who only try do the most good they can within a defined budget.[35]: 15
According to MacAskill, the view of effective altruism as doing the most good one can within a defined budget can be compatible with a wide variety of views on
morality and
meta-ethics, as well as traditional religious teachings on altruism such as in
Christianity.[1][34] Effective altruism can also be in tension with religion where religion emphasizes spending resources on worship and evangelism instead of causes that do the most good.[1]
The Centre for Effective Altruism lists the following four principles that unite effective altruism: prioritization, impartial altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit.[42] To support people's ability to act altruistically on the basis of impartial reasoning, the effective altruism movement promotes values and actions such as a collaborative spirit, honesty, transparency, and publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income or other resources.[1]: 2
It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society.[44]: 231–232
Impartiality combined with seeking to do the most good leads to prioritizing benefits to those who are in a worse state, because anyone who happens to be worse off will benefit more from an improvement in their state, all other things being equal.[34][42]
Scope of moral consideration
One issue related to moral impartiality is the question of which beings are deserving of moral consideration. Some effective altruists consider the well-being of non-human animals in addition to humans, and advocate for animal welfare issues such as ending
factory farming.[45][46] Those who subscribe to longtermism include
future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing
existential risks.[13]: 165–178 [47]
Criticism of impartiality
The
drowning child analogy in Singer's essay provoked philosophical debate. In response to a version of Singer's drowning child analogy,[48] philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah in 2006 asked whether the most effective action of a man in an expensive suit, confronted with a drowning child, would not be to save the child and ruin his suit—but rather, sell the suit and donate the proceeds to charity.[49][50] Appiah believed that he "should save the drowning child and ruin my suit".[49] In a 2015 debate, when presented with a similar scenario of either saving a child from a burning building or saving a
Picasso painting to sell and donate the proceeds to charity, MacAskill responded that the effective altruist should save and sell the Picasso.[51] Psychologist Alan Jern called MacAskill's choice "unnatural, even distasteful, to many people", although Jern concluded that effective altruism raises questions "worth asking".[52] MacAskill later endorsed a "qualified definition of effective altruism" in which effective altruists try to do the most good "without violating constraints" such as any obligations that someone might have to help those nearby.[53]
William Schambra has criticized the impartial logic of effective altruism, arguing that benevolence arising from
reciprocity and face-to-face interactions is stronger and more prevalent than charity based on impartial, detached altruism.[54] Such community-based charitable giving, he wrote, is foundational to
civil society and, in turn,
democracy.[54]Larissa MacFarquhar said that people have diverse moral emotions, and she suggested that some effective altruists are not unemotional and detached but feel as much empathy for distant strangers as for people nearby.[55]Ross Douthat of The New York Times criticized the movement's "'telescopic philanthropy' aimed at distant populations" and envisioned "effective altruists sitting around in a San Francisco skyscraper calculating how to relieve suffering halfway around the world while the city decays beneath them", while he also praised the movement for providing "useful rebukes to the solipsism and anti-human pessimism that haunts the developed world today".[56]
Cause prioritization
A key component of effective altruism is "cause prioritization". Cause prioritization is based on the principle of cause neutrality, the idea that resources should be distributed to causes based on what will do the most good, irrespective of the identity of the beneficiary and the way in which they are helped.[34] By contrast, many non-profits emphasize effectiveness and evidence with respect to a single cause such as education or climate change.[54]
One tool that EA-based organizations may use to prioritize cause areas is the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework. Importance is the amount of value that would be created if a problem were solved, tractability is the fraction of a problem that would be solved if additional resources were devoted to it, and neglectedness is the quantity of resources already committed to a cause.[5]
The information required for cause prioritization may involve
data analysis, comparing possible outcomes with what would have happened under other conditions (
counterfactual reasoning), and identifying
uncertainty.[34][57] The difficulty of these tasks has led to the creation of organizations that specialize in researching the relative prioritization of causes.[34]
Criticism of cause prioritization
This practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another" was criticized by Ken Berger and Robert Penna of
Charity Navigator for being "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word" and "elitist".[58] William MacAskill responded to Berger and Penna, defending the rationale for comparing one beneficiary's interests against another and concluding that such comparison is difficult and sometimes impossible but often necessary.[59] MacAskill argued that the more pernicious form of elitism was that of donating to art galleries (and like institutions) instead of charity.[59] Ian David Moss suggested that the criticism of cause prioritization could be resolved by what he called "domain-specific effective altruism", which would encourage "that principles of effective altruism be followed within an area of philanthropic focus, such as a specific cause or geography" and could resolve the conflict between local and global perspectives for some donors.[60]
Cost-effectiveness
Some charities are considered to be far more effective than others, as charities may spend different amounts of money to achieve the same goal, and some charities may not achieve the goal at all.[61] Effective altruists seek to identify interventions that are highly cost-effective in
expectation. Many interventions have
uncertain benefits, and the expected value of one intervention can be higher than that of another if its benefits are larger, even if it has a smaller chance of succeeding.[27] One metric effective altruists use to choose between health interventions is the estimated number of
quality-adjusted life years (QALY) added per dollar.[5]
Some effective altruist organizations prefer
randomized controlled trials as a primary form of evidence,[27][62] as they are commonly considered the highest level of evidence in healthcare research.[63] Others have argued that requiring this stringent level of evidence unnecessarily narrows the focus to issues where the evidence can be developed.[64]Kelsey Piper argues that uncertainty is not a good reason for effective altruists to avoid acting on their best understanding of the world, because most interventions have mixed evidence regarding their effectiveness.[65]
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and others have warned about the "
measurement problem",[64][66] with issues such as medical research or government reform worked on "one grinding step at a time", and results being hard to measure with controlled experiments. Gobry also argues that such interventions risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement.[66] As effective altruism emphasizes a data-centric approach, critics say principles which do not lend themselves to quantification—justice, fairness, equality—get left in the sidelines.[5][27]
Counterfactual reasoning
Counterfactual reasoning involves considering the possible outcomes of alternative choices. It has been employed by effective altruists in a number of contexts, including career choice. Many people assume that the best way to help others is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services.[67] However, since there is a high supply of candidates for such positions, it makes sense to compare the amount of good one candidate does to how much good the next-best candidate would do. According to this reasoning, the marginal impact of a career is likely to be smaller than the gross impact.[68]
Differences from utilitarianism
Although EA aims for
maximizing like
utilitarianism, EA differs from utilitarianism in a few ways; for example, EA does not claim that people should always maximize the good
regardless of the means, and EA does not claim that the good is the sum total of
well-being.[53] Toby Ord has described utilitarians as "number-crunching", compared with most effective altruists whom he called "guided by conventional wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers".[69]
MacAskill has argued that one shouldn't be absolutely certain about which ethical view is correct, and that "when we are morally uncertain, we should act in a way that serves as a best compromise between different moral views".[32] He also wrote that even from a purely
consequentialist perspective, "naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct".[32]
Cause priorities
The principles and goals of effective altruism are wide enough to support furthering any cause that allows people to do the most good, while taking into account cause neutrality.[36] Many people in the effective altruism movement have prioritized global health and development, animal welfare, and mitigating risks that threaten the future of humanity.[62][10]
Global health and development
The alleviation of
global poverty and
neglected tropical diseases has been a focus of some of the earliest and most prominent organizations associated with effective altruism. Charity evaluator GiveWell was founded by
Holden Karnofsky and
Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 to address poverty,[70] where they believe additional donations to be the most impactful.[71] GiveWell's leading recommendations include:
malaria prevention charities
Against Malaria Foundation and
Malaria Consortium, deworming charities
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and Deworm the World Initiative, and
GiveDirectly for direct cash transfers to beneficiaries.[72][73] The organization The Life You Can Save, which originated from Singer's book of the same name,[74] works to alleviate global poverty by promoting evidence-backed charities, conducting philanthropy education, and changing the culture of giving in affluent countries.[75]
Animal welfare
Improving animal welfare has been a focus of many effective altruists.[76][77][78] Singer and
Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) have argued that effective altruists should prioritize changes to factory farming over pet welfare.[24] 60 billion land animals are
slaughtered and between 1 and 2.7 trillion individual fish are killed each year for human consumption.[79][80][81]
A number of non-profit organizations have been established that adopt an effective altruist approach toward animal welfare. ACE evaluates animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those tackling factory farming.[13]: 139 [82][83] Other animal initiatives affiliated with effective altruism include
Animal Ethics' and
Wild Animal Initiative's work on
wild animal suffering,[84][85] addressing farm animal suffering with
cultured meat,[86][87] and expanding the circle of concern so that people care more about all kinds of animals.[88][89][90]Faunalytics focuses on animal welfare research.[91] The
Sentience Institute is a
think tank founded to expand the moral circle to other species.[92]
Long-term future and global catastrophic risks
The ethical stance of
longtermism, emphasizing the importance of positively influencing the long-term future, developed closely in relation to effective altruism.[93][94] Longtermists have proposed that the welfare of future individuals is just as important as the welfare of currently existing individuals, as the prioritization of the former is coextensive with the wellness of the latter.[95] Toby Ord has stated that "the people of the future may be even more powerless to protect themselves from the risks we impose than the dispossessed of our own time".[96]: 8
Existential risks, such as dangers associated with
biotechnology and
advanced artificial intelligence, are often highlighted and the subject of active research.[94] Existential risks have such huge impacts that achieving a very small change in such a risk—say a 0.0001-percent reduction—"might be worth more than saving a billion people today", reported Gideon Lewis-Kraus in 2022, but he added that nobody in the EA community openly endorses such an extreme conclusion.[5]
Effective altruists pursue different approaches to doing good, such as donating to effective charitable organizations, using their career to make more money for donations or directly contributing their labor, and starting new non-profit or for-profit ventures.
Donation
Financial donation
Many effective altruists engage in charitable
donation. Some believe it is a moral duty to alleviate
suffering through donations if other possible uses of those funds do not offer comparable benefits to oneself.[44] Some lead a frugal lifestyle in order to donate more.[100]
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an organization whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their future income to the causes that they believe are the most effective. GWWC was founded in 2009 by Toby Ord, who lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the balance of his income.[101] In 2020, Ord said that people had donated over $100 million to date through the GWWC pledge.[102]
Founders Pledge is a similar initiative, founded out of the non-profit Founders Forum for Good, whereby entrepreneurs make a legally binding commitment to donate a percentage of their personal proceeds to charity in the event that they sell their business.[103][104] As of April 2023, nearly 1,800 entrepreneurs had pledged over $9 billion and nearly $900 million had been donated.[105]
Organ donation
EA has been used to argue that humans should
donate organs, whilst alive or after death, and some effective altruists do.[106]
Career choice
Effective altruists often consider using their career to do good,[107] both by direct service and indirectly through their consumption, investment, and donation decisions.[108] 80,000 Hours is an organization that conducts research and gives advice on which careers have the largest positive impact.[109][110]
Earning to give involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.[111]
Founding effective organizations
Some effective altruists start non-profit or for-profit organizations to implement
cost-effective ways of doing good. On the non-profit side, for example,
Michael Kremer and
Rachel Glennerster conducted
randomized controlled trials in Kenya to find out the best way to improve students' test scores. They tried new textbooks and flip charts, as well as smaller class sizes, but found that the only intervention that raised school attendance was treating intestinal worms in children. Based on their findings, they started the
Deworm the World Initiative.[27] From 2013 to August 2022, GiveWell designated Deworm the World (now run by nonprofit
Evidence Action) as a top charity based on their assessment that
mass deworming is "generally highly cost-effective";[112] however, there is substantial uncertainty about the benefits of mass deworming programs, with some studies finding long-term effects and others not.[65] The Happier Lives Institute conducts research on the effectiveness of
cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in developing countries;[113] Canopie develops an app that provides cognitive behavioural therapy to women who are expecting or postpartum;[114] Giving Green analyzes and ranks climate interventions for effectiveness;[115][116] the Fish Welfare Initiative works on improving animal welfare in fishing and aquaculture;[88] and the Lead Exposure Elimination Project works on reducing
lead poisoning in developing countries.[117]
Incremental versus systemic change
While much of the initial focus of effective altruism was on direct strategies such as health interventions and cash transfers, more
systematic social, economic, and political reforms have also attracted attention.[118] Mathew Snow in Jacobin wrote that effective altruism "implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place".[119] Philosopher
Amia Srinivasan criticized William MacAskill's Doing Good Better for a perceived lack of coverage of
global inequality and
oppression, while noting that effective altruism is in principle open to whichever means of doing good is most effective, including political advocacy aimed at systemic change.[120] Srinivasan said, "Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad church."[120]Judith Lichtenberg in The New Republic said that effective altruists "neglect the kind of structural and political change that is ultimately necessary".[121] An article in The Ecologist published in 2016 argued that effective altruism is an apolitical attempt to solve political problems, describing the concept as "pseudo-scientific".[122] The Ethiopian-American AI scientist
Timnit Gebru has condemned effective altruists "for acting as though their concerns are above structural issues as racism and colonialism", as Gideon Lewis-Kraus summarized her views in 2022.[5]
Philosophers such as Susan Dwyer, Joshua Stein, and
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have criticized effective altruism for furthering the disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals in domains that should be the responsibility of democratic governments and organizations.[123][124]
Arguments have been made that movements focused on systemic or institutional change are compatible with effective altruism.[125][126][127] Philosopher Elizabeth Ashford posits that people are obligated to both donate to effective aid charities and to
reform the structures that are responsible for poverty.[128] Open Philanthropy has given grants for progressive advocacy work in areas such as criminal justice,[10][129] economic stabilization,[10] and housing reform,[130][131] despite pegging the success of political reform as being "highly uncertain".[10]
Researchers in
psychology and related fields have identified psychological barriers to effective altruism that can cause people to choose less effective options when they engage in altruistic activities such as charitable giving.[132][133][134][135]
Controversies
Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried, the eventual founder of the
cryptocurrency exchangeFTX, had a seminal lunch with philosopher
William MacAskill in 2012 while he was an undergraduate at MIT in which MacAskill encouraged him to go earn money and donate it, rather than volunteering his time for causes.[6][136] Bankman-Fried went on to a career in investing and around 2019 became more publicly associated with the effective altruism movement,[137] announcing that his goal was to "donate as much as [he] can".[138] Bankman-Fried founded the FTX Future Fund, which brought on MacAskill as one of its advisers, and which made a $13.9 million grant to the
Centre for Effective Altruism where MacAskill holds a board role.[136]
After
the collapse of FTX in late 2022, the movement underwent additional public scrutiny.
Bankman-Fried's relationship with effective altruism has been called into question as a
public relations strategy,[139][6] while the movement's embrace of him proved damaging to its reputation.[136][140][141][142] Some journalists asked whether the effective altruist movement was "complicit" in FTX's collapse, because it was convenient for leaders to overlook specific warnings about Bankman-Fried's behavior or questionable ethics at the trading firm Alameda.[143][144]
However, several leaders of the effective altruism movement, including
William MacAskill and
Robert Wiblin, condemned FTX's actions.[145] MacAskill reemphasized that bringing about good consequences does not justify violating
rights or sacrificing
integrity.[146]
Misogyny
Critiques arose not only in relation to Bankman-Fried's role and his close association with William MacAskill, but also concerning issues of exclusion and
sexual harassment.[6][147][148][149] A 2023 Bloomberg article featured some members of the effective altruism community who alleged that the philosophy masked a culture of predatory behavior.[150] In a 2023 Time magazine article, seven women reported misconduct and controversy in the effective altruism movement. They accused men within the movement, typically in the
Bay Area, of using their power to groom younger women for
polyamorous sexual relationships.[147] The accusers argued that the majority male demographic and the polyamorous subculture combined to create an environment where sexual misconduct was tolerated, excused or rationalized away.[147] In response to the accusations, the
Centre for Effective Altruism told Time that some of the alleged perpetrators had already been banned from the organization and said it would investigate new claims.[147] The organization also argued that it is challenging to discern to what extent sexual misconduct issues were specific to the effective altruism community or reflective of broader societal
misogyny.[147]
Other criticism of the movement
While originally the movement leaders were associated with frugal lifestyles, the arrival of big donors, including Bankman-Fried, led to more spending and opulence, which seemed incongruous to the movement's espoused values.[143] In 2022, Effective Ventures Foundation purchased the estate of
Wytham Abbey for the purpose of running workshops.[5]
Other prominent people
Businessman
Elon Musk spoke at an effective altruism conference in 2015.[136] He described MacAskill's 2022 book What We Owe the Future as "a close match for my philosophy", but has not officially joined the movement.[136] An article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy argued that the record of Musk's substantive alignment with effective altruism was "choppy",[151] and
Bloomberg News noted that his 2021 charitable contributions showed "few obvious signs that effective altruism... impacted Musk’s giving."[152]
Actor
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has publicly stated he would like to bring the ideas of effective altruism to a broader audience.[5]
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has called effective altruism an "incredibly flawed movement" that shows "very weird emergent behavior".[153][further explanation needed] Effective altruist concerns about AI risk were present among the OpenAI board members who fired Altman in November 2023;[153][154] he has been reinstated as CEO and the Board membership has changed.[155][156]
^The quoted definition is endorsed by a number of organizations at:
"CEA's Guiding Principles". Centre For Effective Altruism. Retrieved December 3, 2021.
^The term effective altruists is used to refer to people who embrace effective altruism in many published sources such as
Oliver (2014),
Singer (2015), and
MacAskill (2017), though as
Pummer & MacAskill (2020) noted, calling people "effective altruists" minimally means that they are engaged in the project of "using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good", not that they are perfectly effective nor even that they necessarily participate in the effective altruism community.
^Matthews, Dylan (October 15, 2018).
"Future Perfect, explained". Vox.
Archived from the original on December 25, 2019. Retrieved December 8, 2018. Some topics that the Future Perfect series has covered include:
High-impact career choice: Matthews, Dylan (November 28, 2018a).
"How to pick a career that counts". Vox.
Archived from the original on December 24, 2019. Retrieved December 8, 2018.
^Singer (2015) expressed a clearly normative view: "Effective altruism is based on a very simple idea: we should do the most good we can. Obeying the usual rules about not stealing, cheating, hurting, and killing is not enough, or at least not enough for those of us who have the great good fortune to live in material comfort, who can feed, house, and clothe ourselves and our families and still have money or time to spare. Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can." (p. vii)
^
ab"What is effective altruism?". Centre for Effective Altruism.
Archived from the original on November 29, 2023. Retrieved November 30, 2023. These four principles were first called "values" and were added to the cited web page sometime between
July 27, 2022 and
August 2, 2022.
^Broad, Garrett M. (December 2018). "Effective animal advocacy: effective altruism, the social economy, and the animal protection movement". Agriculture and Human Values. 35 (4): 777–789.
doi:
10.1007/s10460-018-9873-5.
S2CID158634567.
^
abRubenstein, Jennifer (December 14, 2016).
"The Lessons of Effective Altruism". Ethics & International Affairs.
Archived from the original on August 27, 2018. Retrieved August 26, 2018.