Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that uses evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. Effective altruism encourages individuals to consider all causes and actions and to act in the way that brings about the greatest positive impact, based upon their values. It is the broad, evidence-based approach that distinguishes effective altruism from traditional altruism or charity.
While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people, or otherwise have the biggest benefit.[4] People associated with the movement include philosopher Peter Singer,[5] Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz,[6] Cari Tuna,[7] Oxford-based researchers William MacAskill[8] and Toby Ord,[9] and professional poker player Liv Boeree.[10][11]
Philosophy
Peter Singer is a prominent advocate of effective altruism.
Effective altruism differs from other philanthropic practices because of its emphasis on quantitatively comparing charitable causes and interventions with the goal of maximizing certain moral values. In this way it is similar to consequentialism, which some leaders of the movement explicitly endorse.[12] The views of the philosopher Peter Singer in particular helped give rise to the effective altruist movement.[13] Singer's book The Life You Can Save argued for the basic philosophy of effective giving, claiming that people have a moral imperative to donate more because of the existence of extreme poverty. In the book, Singer argued that people should use charity evaluators to determine how to make their donations most effective. Singer personally gives a third of his income to charity.[14]
Cause prioritization
Although there is a growing emphasis on effectiveness and evidence among nonprofits, this is usually done with a single cause in mind, such as education or climate change. Effective altruists, however, seek to compare the relative importance of different causes, a concept that is usually referred to as cause neutrality.Effective altruists choose the highest priority causes based on whether activities in each cause area could efficiently advance broad goals, such as increasing human or animal welfare. They then focus their attention on interventions in high priority areas. Several organizations are performing cause prioritization research.
Some priorities of effective altruists include poverty in the developing world, the suffering of animals in factory farms, and risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth.
Cost-effectiveness
Effective altruist organizations claim that some charities are far more effective than others, either because some do not achieve their goals or because of variability in the cost of achieving those goals. When possible, they seek to identify charities that are highly cost-effective, meaning that they achieve a large benefit for a given amount of money.[8] For example, they select health interventions on the basis of their impact as measured by lives saved per dollar, quality-adjusted life years (QALY) saved per dollar, or disability-adjusted life years (DALY) averted per dollar. This measure of disease burden is expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death.Effective altruism organizations use randomized controlled trials as a primary form of evidence,[8][23] as they are often considered to be at the highest level of strong evidence in healthcare research.[24] They also make philanthropic recommendations for charities on the basis of their current funding need rather than merely by evaluating the value of the work itself.[25][26]
Impartiality
Effective altruists reject the view that some lives are intrinsically more valuable than others. For example, they believe that a person in a developing country has equal value to a person in one's own community.[13] In the 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality', Peter Singer wrote:It makes no 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. Previously ..., this may hardly have been feasible, but it is quite feasible now. From the moral point of view, the prevention of the starvation of millions of people outside our society must be considered at least as pressing as the upholding of property norms within our society.[27]In addition, many effective altruists think that future generations have equal moral value to currently existing people, so they focus on reducing existential risks to humanity. Others believe that the interests of non-human animals should be accorded the same moral weight as similar interests of humans and work to prevent the suffering of animals,[23] such as those raised in factory farms.[28]
Counterfactual reasoning
Effective altruists argue that counterfactual reasoning is important to determine which course of action maximizes positive impact. Many people assume that the best way to help people is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services,[29][30] but since charities and social-service providers usually can find people willing to work for them, effective altruists compare the amount of good somebody does in a conventional altruistic career to how much good would have been done had the next-best candidate been hired for the position. According to this reasoning, the impact of a career may be smaller than it appears.[31]Room for more funding
Effective altruists avoid donating to organizations that have no "room for more funding" - those that face bottlenecks other than money which prevent them from spending the funds they have already accumulated or are expected to receive.[32] For example, a medical charity might not be able to hire enough doctors or nurses to distribute the medical supplies it is capable of purchasing, or it might already be serving all of the potential patients in its market. There are many other organizations which do have room for more funding, so giving to one of those instead would produce real-world improvements.Behavior
Donation
Effective altruism encourages significant charitable donation. Some believe it is a moral duty to alleviate suffering through donations if the purchases that one forgoes to donate do not cause comparable suffering to oneself,[27] leading some of them to lead a frugal lifestyle in order to give substantially more than is typical in their society.[33] Advocacy focuses on increasing the amount that people donate or identifying nonprofits that best meet the criteria of effective altruism.Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an organization which hosts a community of individuals who have pledged to donate at least 10% of their income for the remainder of their working lives to the causes that they believe are the most effective. GWWC was founded in November 2009 by Toby Ord, a moral philosopher at Oxford University, who lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the remainder of his income to charity.[34] As of 2018, more than 3,200 individuals have taken the pledge.[35][36]
The Founders Pledge is a similar system run by the nonprofit Founders Forum for Good where startup founders make a legally binding commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity in the event that they sell their business.[37][38][39] By May 2016, one year after launch, 430 entrepreneurs had pledged, for an estimated total value of $134 million based on the founders' equity and the companies' valuation.[40]
Career selection
Effective altruists argue that selection of one's career is an important determinant of the amount of good one does,[16] both directly (through the services one provides to the world) and indirectly (through the ways one directs the money earned based on the career).[41]80,000 Hours is an Oxford, UK-based organization in the effective altruism movement that writes articles and conducts one-on-one coaching to help people find careers with a positive social impact.[42] It considers indirect methods of altruistic employment, such as earning a high salary in a conventional career and donating a portion of it, as well as direct practices, such as scientific research. It was co-founded by William MacAskill,[43] who is also its current president.[44]
The earning to give strategy has been proposed as a possible strategy for effective altruists. This strategy involves choosing to work in high-paying careers with the explicit goal of donating large sums of money to charity.[45] Benjamin Todd and William MacAskill have argued that the marginal impact of one's potentially unethical actions in such a lucrative career would be small since someone else would have done them regardless, while the impact of donations would be large.[41]
This is a practice which has attracted controversy. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, criticized effective altruists who adopt the strategy. He wrote that most people who work in finance and other high-paying industries value money for selfish reasons and that being surrounded by these people will cause effective altruists to become less altruistic.[46] Some effective altruists acknowledge this possibility and aim to reduce the risk through online communities, public pledges, and donations through donor-advised funds.[47] In The Week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argued that taking an "unethical" job is fundamentally immoral, no matter the reason.[48]
Cause priorities
Effective altruism aspires to be cause-neutral, meaning it is in principle open to helping in whichever areas will do the most good.Global poverty alleviation
Global poverty alleviation 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 and is currently a part of the effective altruism movement.[52][53] GiveWell has argued that the value of donations is greatest for international poverty alleviation and developing world health issues,[54][22] and its leading recommendations have been in these domains[55][56] (Against Malaria Foundation, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, Deworm the World Initiative, and (earlier) VillageReach in global health, and GiveDirectly for direct unconditional cash transfers).
Giving What We Can is focused on causes related to the alleviation of global poverty[57] and does in-house research evaluating causes and charities, but largely relies on research by other organizations such as GiveWell.[58]
The organization The Life You Can Save, which originated from the book by the same name, also focuses on global poverty.[59]
While much of the initial focus of effective altruism was on direct strategies such as health interventions and cash transfers, there has also been interest in more systematic social, economic, and political reform that would facilitate larger long-term poverty reduction.[60] In September 2011, GiveWell announced GiveWell Labs,[61] which was later renamed as the "Open Philanthropy Project", for exploration of more speculative causes such as policy reform. It is a collaboration between GiveWell and Good Ventures, a philanthropic foundation founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna.[62][63][64]
Animal welfare
Many effective altruists believe that reducing animal suffering should be a major priority and that, at the current margin, there are cost-effective ways of accomplishing this.[65] Peter Singer quotes estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the British organization Fishcount according to which 60 billion land animals are slaughtered and between 1 and 2.7 trillion individual fish are killed each year for human consumption.[66][67][68] He argues that effective animal welfare altruists should prioritize factory farming over more overfunded popular causes such as pet welfare.[14] Singer also argues that, if farm animals such as chickens are assigned even a modicum of consciousness, efforts to reduce factory farming (for example, by reducing global meat consumption) could be an even more underfunded and cost-effective way of reducing current global suffering than human poverty reduction.[69] Philosophically, wild animal suffering may be an additional moral concern for effective altruists.[70]Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE, formerly called Effective Animal Activism) is an organization connected with the movement that evaluates and compares various animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those that are tackling factory farming.[71][72] Faunalytics (formerly the Humane Research Council) is an organization loosely affiliated with the movement that conducts independent research on important animal welfare topics, provides resources for advocates and donors, and works with animal protection organizations to evaluate their work.
Long term future and global catastrophic risks
Focusing on the long-term future, some effective altruists believe that the total value of any meaningful metric (wealth, potential for suffering, potential for happiness, etc.) summed up over future generations, far exceeds the value for people living today.[2][73][74] In particular, the importance of addressing existential risks such as dangers associated with biotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence is often highlighted and the subject of active research.Some organizations that work actively on research and advocacy for improving the long term future, and have connections with the effective altruist movement, are the Future of Humanity Institute, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and Future of Life Institute.[75] In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is focused on the more narrow mission of aligning advanced artificial intelligence.[76][77]
History as a social movement
The ideas behind effective altruism, such as consequentialism, have been present in practical ethics for a long time and have been reflected in the writings of philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham,[78] Peter Singer,[13] and Peter Unger. A basic argument for altruism was defined in Singer's 1972 paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he argued that people have an obligation to help those in need:If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it.[27]However, the movement identifying with the name 'effective altruism' itself only came into being in the late 2000s.[79]
Effective altruism conferences have been held since 2013.[28][80] In 2015, Peter Singer published The Most Good You Can Do, a book on effective altruism. The book describes the philosophy and social movement of effective altruism and argues in favor of it.[14] In the same year William MacAskill published his book Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference which helped to further popularize the movement.[81][82][83] MacAskill also created Giving What We Can and 80,000 hours, both of which are part of the Centre for Effective Altruism.[78]
The Internet forum LessWrong also played a role in the development of the effective altruism movement.[84]
Criticism
David Brooks has questioned whether children in distant countries should be treated as having equal moral value to nearby children. He claims that morality should be "internally ennobling".[46] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry warns about the "measurement problem", stating in some areas, such as medical research, or helping to reform third-world governance "one grinding step at a time", are hard to measure with controlled cost-effectiveness experiments and risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement.[48] In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Ken Berger and Robert Penna of Charity Navigator condemned effective altruism's practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another", calling this "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word".[85]In Jacobin magazine, Mathew Snow argues 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".[86] Joshua Kissel has replied that anti-capitalism is compatible with effective altruism in theory, while adding that effective altruists and anti-capitalists have reason to be more sympathetic to each other.[49]
