Book Review: All the Lives You Can Change

Is effective altruism for Christians?

Effective altruism is a social movement that’s about trying to do good as effectively as possible, with charity, career, and life projects broadly. If you go to a random local effective altruism event, most of the people there will be atheists, even in a country that’s mostly Christian. But this isn’t because of any deep conflict between Christian ideas and effective altruism. I’m in a Facebook group with a bunch of Christian philosophers, and about half of them are effective altruists in some form.

Similarly, Aron Wall who is among the most devout Christians I know, is an effective altruist and gives his money to the most effective charities he can find. My friend who runs the YouTube channel Apologetics Squared is another very religious Christian who supports effective altruism—he even made a video about how to maximally effectively spread the Gospel (hint: it’s not getting into theology arguments on the internet). Smart, philosophically-reflective Christians who take their faith seriously are effective altruists at astonishing rates.

Enter All the Lives You Can Change, released this week! It’s written by David Zhang, Dominic Roser, and J.D. Bauman. I met J.D. at an effective altruism event, and was immediately impressed by him—he seemed to radiate a kind of deep-rooted moral decency and conviction. I briefly met Dominic too at an EA for Christians event that they were generous enough to let me attend even though I’m not Christian. Incidentally, that event was where I learned from Dustin Crummett about shrimp welfare! The authors are all part of an organization called EA for Christians, about trying to promote effective altruism to Christians. This book is their attempt to popularize those core ideas.

JD holding up the book.

And note, these aren’t the kinds of wishy-washy Christians whose theology stops at “Jesus was nice to people, so you should be nice too.” No, these are people who actually take Christianity seriously, who reflect seriously on what Jesus would want them to do and try hard to do it. They think effective altruism should be a core part of the Christian life. The case that they lay out for this position is very compelling.

The book was a delight to read. I finished it in two days. Like most EA books, it contained a bunch of cool stories of people doing good effectively. Like most Christian books, it included a lot of quotations of scripture. I came away more convinced that Jesus would have been supportive of effective altruism. Many of his moral claims echoed core EA claims.

Critics of EA complain that asking you to give away 10% of your wealth is too demanding, despite leaving them still richer than almost everyone who has ever lived? Oh, that’s too demanding? Try getting nailed to a cross! The whole Christian story is that morality is sufficiently demanding that none of us live up to it very well! John the Baptist says:

Whoever has two shirts should share with the person who has none, and whoever has food should do the same.

Jesus went so far as to say “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Now, lots of Christians will interpret this passage to just be a highly specific command for that particular guy. This seems like cope. Really, the passage was included just as a specific message to that one guy which doesn’t apply more broadly? Does anyone find this kind of exegesis plausible in any other context? And don’t take it from me, here’s what Aquinas said on the matter:

Now, according to the natural order instituted by divine providence, material goods are provided for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore the division and appropriation of property, which proceeds from human law, must not hinder the satisfaction of man's necessity from such goods. Equally, whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: "The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless."

“Do I really have to care about effectiveness?” you ask! “Yes,” Jesus answers, “you’re supposed to love your neighbor as yourself.” When deciding what to do for your own benefit, you don’t just do random things, but what benefits you most. “Okay, but surely my neighbors are just the people nearby and not people far away, so I don’t have to give to the other side of the world?” “No,” Jesus answers, and tells a long parable to show just how wrong you are:

²⁵ On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

²⁶ “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

²⁷ He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’^[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

²⁸ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

²⁹ But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

³⁰ In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹ A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³² So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³ But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

³⁶ “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷ The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

As the authors note, this passage clearly indicates that your neighbor isn’t just the people nearby that you want to help. The Samaritans and the Israelites were mortal enemies. Your neighbor is the stranger, the foreigner, the people that your society isn’t motivated to help. The whole point of the parable is that your neighbor includes those that you’re not motivated to help.

“Okay,” you wonder, “maybe I should give away a bunch of my wealth, and care about foreigners. But do I really need to care that much about effectiveness?” In response, Jesus tells a bunch of parables that capture the importance of effectiveness. He recommends people be “shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” In other words, one is supposed to be careful and smart about doing good.

In Luke 12:6–7, Jesus asks “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” Insofar as God cares about every one of us individually, rather than seeing us as a homogenous mass, then the numbers of people we help really counts. As the authors put it:

A quote, often misattributed to Stalin, says the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. The first part is certainly true: Every death is a tragedy. It’s also true that it can feel like a million deaths are just a statistic. But our instincts do not always capture reality; in the eyes of God, a million deaths are not a statistic, but a million tragedies.

Or, as they say elsewhere “If every person matters, then surely the prevention of a million deaths matters a million times. For the 513,434th victim, it makes all the difference in the world whether those who have the power to prevent death focus on saving many or saving just a few.”

The authors touch on most of the EA book quick hits. They make sure to mention that you can save lives for thousands of dollars and do incredible amounts of good with your career. While we often wonder what we’d have done in the past, e.g. in Nazi Germany, if we could have saved many lives, we have similar opportunities in the world today to save hundreds of lives. It is a law of nature proved beyond eight sigma that any EA book must include the following chart—this one is no exception.

This chart shows across different interventions to improve learning just how much more effective some interventions are than others.

The book also recounts a number of moving stories. Corrie ten Boom was a religious Christian who worked hard to save as many Jews as possible during the holocaust at great personal risk. About 800 people were saved from torture or death because of her. Had she only cared about doing some good, rather than carefully optimized for doing as much of it as possible, hundreds of extra people would have been tortured and murdered by the Nazis.

The book also covers a lot of topics that are important to Christians but that you won’t find in standard EA books. It talks about how faith can make it easier to make sacrifices for the good and discusses God’s special concern for caring for the meek and vulnerable. It analyzes interventions to maximally effectively spread the Gospel, how those compare to other interventions, and how Christians should think about animal welfare and Longtermism. It really engages, in a deep way, with how Christians specifically should be EAs, not just trying to market standard EA to Christians.

I am not a Christian, though I am an effective altruist. I came away from the book with a deeper respect for Christianity and a deeper vision of how it coheres with doing good effectively. If you are a Christian—or even if you are not—I cannot recommend it enough. If nothing else, throughout the book, I was impressed by the degree to which a lot of what Jesus said seemed to make deep sense. For a book to achieve that, and be well written, and tell you how to do good with your life, and carefully address serious and difficult questions, is a stunning success.

Most of all, in the book, and in the movement of Christians for EA, I saw the making of a beautiful thing—a kind of Christianity that, theological objections aside, is stunningly virtuous, and decent, and good. This beautiful thing has been largely non-existent for senseless, sociological reasons. It’s high time that changes. Help get and promote the book not just because it’s an awesome book full of useful information and advice, but so this beautiful thing may emerge and grow, so that the poverty and death and suffering that is within our reach can be driven out, and a version of the Gospel faithful both to its central message and what is most important in the world can emerge more fully.