Some thoughts on Effective Altruism

Would you save a Picasso or a child from a burning building, and why?

Peter Singer giving a TED talk on Effective Altruism, image from ted.com, CC license.

Effective Altruism (EA), both the movement and the concept underlying it, has been around now for about one and a half decade and has generated plenty of both enthusiasm and criticism. So I thought it may be time to write about it, in order primarily to help myself get more clear on what the fuss is all about. I hope the following considerations will also be helpful to my readers and stimulate some thought and discussion.

At its core, EA is about “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.” [1] This is, very clearly, something that it’s hard to object to. I, for one, don’t want to reject evidence and act irrationally when it comes to deciding to which charities to donate and how much, for instance. The problems, if any, begin to take form when we dig a bit deeper.

For instance, in terms of its basic philosophy, EA is a combination of 19th century utilitarianism (though the idea has a much longer history) and the modern notion that privileged people in the developed world should devote resources to help the global poor. Again, I find it difficult to argue the second point, but utilitarianism? No thanks. Utilitarianism is one of the three major frameworks in modern moral philosophy, the other two being Kant-style deontology (i.e., duty based ethics) and Greco-Roman style virtue ethics. Since I embrace Stoicism as a philosophy of life, and Stoicism is a type of virtue ethics, I’m naturally skeptical of utilitarianism.

There are a number of issues that can be raised against the 19th century philosophy that began with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, but one that may make you pause is the so-called repugnant conclusion, a logical consequence of utilitarianism explained by British philosopher Derek Parfit: “For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive welfare which is better, other things being equal” [2]. In other words, consistently applying utilitarianism would result in a world in which everyone would be just above the level of misery [3]. You can see why this conclusion is referred to as “repugnant.”

[Derek Parfit, the philosopher who wrote about the “repugnant conclusion.” Image from Wikipedia, CC license]

Back to EA: historically, it started as a set of techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of a number of charities, but became an official movement with the establishment in 2011 of the Center for Effective Altruism, which has organized the Effective Altruism Global conferences since 2013. The movement currently counts about 7,000 people, mostly from Silicon Valley and a number of elite schools in the US and UK.

From the get go it has been a very odd mix of groups, ideas, and people. In terms of groups, EA includes evidence-based charities like GiveWell, organizations encouraging people to select high-earning careers so that they can give to charities, like 80,000 Hours, and nuts and semi-nuts like The Singularity Institute and the Less Wrong discussion forum.

A look at prominent members reveals another odd mix: philosophers like William MacAskill (Doing Good Better) and Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do), questionable thinkers like Nick Bostrom, despicable billionaires like Elon Musk, and—to crown it all—disgraced crypto-entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

From the public eye perspective, EA has been hit by a remarkable number of controversies, given how young it is. The gigantic fraud perpetrated by the just mentioned crypto-currencies mogul Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX certainly didn’t help. But there have also been accusations of a culture of sexual harassment grooming young women for polyamorous relationships. Of course, these issues point to the flaws of individuals or local cultures (like Silicon Valley’s), not to the value of the ideas underlying EA. Still, if you were not suspicious of the Catholic Church given systemic instances of child sexual you’d be a fool.

So let’s go back to the ideas. EA’s emphasis is on impartiality and considerations of global equity, which, again, at first sight sounds pretty unobjectionably good. As Peter Singer—a colleague who I highly respect, incidentally—put it: “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.” [4]