Effective altruism


Effective altruism is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis".
People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers, with the goal of maximising positive impact. The movement has spurred the creation of research centers, advisory organizations, and charities, which collectively have donated several hundred million dollars.
A defining feature of effective altruism is impartiality, specifically the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular [|cause priorities] within effective altruism include global health and development, social and economic inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival or flourishing of humanity over the long-term future. Only a small portion of all charities are affiliated with effective altruism, except in niche areas such as farmed-animal welfare, AI safety, and biosecurity.
The movement developed during the 2000s, and the name was coined in 2011. Philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. Effective altruism is most popular within the anglosphere, with concentrations at elite universities in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as in and around the technology industry in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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.

History

Beginning in the latter half of the 2000s, several communities centered around altruist, rationalist, and futurological concerns started to converge, such as:
In 2011, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to incorporate into an umbrella organization and held a vote for their new name; the "Centre for Effective Altruism" was selected. The Effective Altruism Global conference has been held since 2013. As the movement formed, it attracted individuals who were not part of a specific community, but who had been following the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer's work on applied ethics, particularly "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", Animal Liberation, and The Life You Can Save. Singer himself used the term in 2013, in a TED talk titled "The Why and How of Effective Altruism".

Notable philanthropists

An estimated $416 million was donated to effective charities identified by the movement in 2019, representing a 37% annual growth rate since 2015. 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 and are major funders of Open Philanthropy. Others influenced by effective altruism include Sam Bankman-Fried, and professional poker players Dan Smith and Liv Boeree. Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian billionaire founder of Skype, is known for donating to some effective altruist causes. Sam Bankman-Fried launched a philanthropic organization called the FTX Foundation in February 2021, and it made contributions to a number of effective altruist organizations, but it was shut down in November 2022 when FTX collapsed.

Notable publications and media

A number of books and articles related to effective altruism have been published that have codified, criticized, and brought more attention to the movement. In 2015, philosopher Peter Singer published The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically. The same year, the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill published Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. B.V.E. Hyde describes these two books as "the bibles of effective altruism".
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".
In 2019, Oxford University Press published the volume Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, edited by Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer.
More recent books have emphasized concerns for future generations. In 2020, the Australian moral philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, while MacAskill published What We Owe the Future in 2022.
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.

Philosophy

Effective altruists focus on the many philosophical questions related to the most effective ways to benefit others. Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to "why" and "how". There is not a consensus on the answers, and there are also differences between effective altruists who believe that they should do the most good they possibly can with all of their resources and those who only try do the most good they can within a defined budget.
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. 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.
Other than Peter Singer and William MacAskill, philosophers associated with effective altruism include Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves, and Derek Parfit. Economist Yew-Kwang Ng conducted similar research in welfare economics and moral philosophy.
The Centre for Effective Altruism lists the following four principles that unite effective altruism: prioritization, impartial altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit. 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.

Impartiality

Effective altruism aims to emphasize impartial reasoning in that everyone's well-being counts equally. Singer, in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", wrote:
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.

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.

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. 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.

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, 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. Appiah believed that he "should save the drowning child and ruin my suit". 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. Psychologist Alan Jern called MacAskill's choice "unnatural, even distasteful, to many people", although Jern concluded that effective altruism raises questions "worth asking". 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.
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. Such community-based charitable giving, he wrote, is foundational to civil society and, in turn, democracy. 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. Richard Pettigrew concurred that many effective altruists "feel more profound dismay at the suffering of people unknown to them than many people feel", and he argued that impartiality in EA need not be dispassionate and "is not obviously in tension with much in care ethics" as some philosophers have argued. 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".