Effective Altruism FAQ

An introduction and response to misconceptions

Introduction

Effective altruism is a topic that, more than virtually any other, engenders quite significant misconceptions. Most of the objections to effective altruism involve conflating its modest thesis with other more substantial theses and arguing against those. But despite the core claims of EA being modest, they’re of vital importance. For this reason, I thought I’d write a brief explainer, providing answers to common questions about/objections to effective altruism.

What is effective altruism about?

There are two different components of effective altruism. The first is that we should strive to make the world a better place effectively. Rather than just having our career choice and charitable donations be informed by the things that appeal emotionally to us, we should use evidence and data to figure out which things do the most good. Then, the second is an actually existing social movement trying to put those ideas into practice.

Here’s a striking fact: if you give a few thousand dollars to charity, you can save someone’s life. If you give to the best charities, you can save lives for less than the cost of a cheap car. Given this, it seems really important to give to these charities, rather than whichever charity simply floats your fancy. Ultimately, giving to the most effective charities is a matter of life and death. The best charities are often literally thousands of times better than the average charity.

Imagine that people simply invested in wherever sounded nice to them, without looking at expected returns. Then imagine that some investment portfolios had literally thousands of times the expected return of others. It would be a good idea to invest effectively rather than at random. But unfortunately, most people approach charity the way the people in our imagined world approach investment. They don’t look much into effectiveness, and as a result, miss out on the opportunity to do huge amounts of good.

There might even be higher impact opportunities than giving to the effective charities that are helping people. We normally think that it’s wrong to mistreat animals, but unfortunately, billions of animals languish in horrendous conditions on factory farms. The best charities helping animals can prevent, on average, many animals from living their life in a cage per dollar. That’s very high impact! If you could free a dog permanently from a tiny cage where it couldn’t turn around for only a dollar, that wouldbe an incredible opportunity. The best charities are even more effective than that.

And effective altruism’s efforts are working. In total, since its inception, it’s saved about 50,000 lives a year, and given 5 million people access to clean water, treated 25 million cases of chronic parasites, and much more. When it comes to its efforts to help animals, hundreds of millions fewer animals languish in cages because of the actions of effective altruists. This is pretty impressive given how small the movement is.

It’s not just about charity. Effective altruists often change their career path, because some careers have the potential to do far more good than others. If you want a really good career guide for careers that make the world a better place, I’d encourage you to check out the 80,000 hours website, which is all about which careers are most effective and well-suited for particular individuals.

This all sounds trivial and obvious

When lots of people hear about effective altruism, they think that it’s trivial. Surely everyone giving to charity is trying to do good. So what makes EA distinct?

It’s true that when people give to charity, they usually want to do good. But they don’t look very much into effectiveness. Less than .2% of total charitable spending goes to the most effective charities; most of the time people give to causes that are emotionally salient but not the most effective.

Consider an analogy: imagine starting a movement to encourage people not to drive while drunk, in a society where lots of people drive drunk. There’s a sense in which it’s trivial that people shouldn’t drive drunk. However, despite that, lots of people do it. People can recognize in the abstract that something is a good idea, and still not do it. Effective altruism is not merely about abstractly endorsing that charity should be effective, but actually putting the principle of caring about effectiveness into practice.

If you think the idea is trivial that charity should be done effectively, then you should look into the charities that are most effective. EA has a whole community of people trying to figure out how to make the world better as effectively as they can.

Does effective altruism require being a utilitarian?

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that says that the action you have most reason to take is whichever maximizes aggregate well-being. It’s pretty controversial and counterintuitive; it implies, for instance, that if you could kill one person to save five, and there’d be no other downsides, you should do so. Now, I’m personally sympathetic to utilitarianism, but if effective altruism required accepting utilitarianism, then it would be very controversial.

Here’s the good news: it doesn’t. To think that people should try to do good effectively, you definitely don’t have to think that every action is right so long as it increases aggregate well-being. To think you should give to charities preventing kids from getting malaria, or making it so that chickens don’t have to languish for their whole life in a cage, you don’t have to think anything controversial about moral philosophy. You just have to think that helping people is really important, and we should help more rather than less! But that’s common sense.

Most of these help people in other countries. But don’t we have a special duty to help those nearer to us?

A common objection to effective altruism is that most of the most effective charities are helping people in other countries. But why should we help out people in other countries, when there are people nearer by that are struggling? In response to this, let me note four things.

First, we’re talking about charitable donations here, not other kinds of spending. So maybe taking care of your loved ones should be the first priority, but if you’ve done that and have money left over to give to charity, you should give it effectively.

Second, if you buy this reasoning, you should try to give effectively to local charities. Don’t just give to whichever charity sounds nice—do some research into the most effective local charities.

Third, global charities tend to be way more effective than local charities. They’re often hundreds or thousands of times more effective. While it’s very hard to significantly help people in rich countries, it’s pretty easy to help people in poor countries. If you give people living on a dollar a day a few hundred dollars, you’ve just doubled their yearly income. And while there are charities that do that, even those aren’t the most effective.

So maybe you have some extra duties to people nearer to you. But it’s hard to believe the extra duties are so strong as to outweigh the far greater benefit of giving to charities helping people in distant lands. It’s much easier to save the life of a far-away person than to help a local person get permanent housing—but saving someone’s life is obviously much more important than giving permanent housing to a local.

Here’s an analogy, inspired by a famous thought experiment from Peter Singer. Imagine that you’re about to give some money to a local charity, when you see a drowning child. You can wade into the pond and save them, but you’d be unable to give to the local charity; the money that you’d donate is very deep in your pockets, and you wouldn’t be able to get it out in time, and thus it would be ruined by being waterlogged. Here it seems like you should save the child.

But now imagine that rather than the child being near, they’re far away. If you wade into the pond, you can press a button that will pull them out of the pond where they are, far away. Once again, it seems like you should wade into the pond. But then it must be more valuable to save a far-away child’s life than to give to a local charity.

Fourth and finally, the idea that we have special duties of immense magnitude to those nearer to us has come under criticism from many philosophers. Surely our duty to save a person’s life doesn’t decrease simply as they get further away. And it doesn’t seem like the fact that they’re our countrymen is itself relevant, because then it would be more important to help a person after they’ve immigrated here than before they have. But this is weird; your duty to help a person shouldn’t vary through time.

Thus, special obligations to local people over the far-away are doubtful. Even if they are real, they’re not of sufficient magnitude to make it worth giving locally.

Some effective altruist organizations are helping animals. But shouldn’t we help humans first?

Here’s another worry you might have: okay, maybe I should give effectively, but why give to organizations helping animals. There are humans struggling—shouldn’t we help them first?

First of all, if you buy this, then just do that! I think animal charities are very high impact, but if you don’t, giving to effective charities helping humans is still unbelievably effective. While this may be an argument against one thing that some EAs advocate, even if you accept it, principles of effective altruism should still have major impacts on your life, and especially your giving. The effective altruist community as a whole gives more money to charities helping humans than to charities helping animals.

Second, the reason to give to charities helping animals is that they’re ridiculously effective. Per dollar you spend, some high impact charities—and these aren’t even the best—prevent somewhere between 3 and 10 years of animals languishing in cages. Already, this seems like a pretty good deal—if you could spend around 30 cents to prevent a chicken from languishing in a cage, that would be money well spent.

In contrast, the best charities helping humans only add an extra 0.00994 years per dollar. This means that if we go by the lowest estimates, for every day the best human charities add to human lives, the best animal charities keep chickens out of a cage for almost an entire year. But being locked in a cage for a year is worse than losing a day of life—so the animal charities are probably more effective.

Third, while we tend to think humans are orders of magnitude more important than animals, many philosophers have challenged this assumption. Animals, in factory farms, endure extreme and frequent pain. If a human was in this much pain, that would be terrible. But what about animals is supposed to make their pain not a big deal?

Sure, animals aren’t very smart. But there are some mentally disabled humans with roughly the cognitive capacities of animals. Surely their pain is still really bad. Animals are a different species, but why in the world would one’s species affect how bad it is for one to be in extreme agony.

For this reason, you should give significant weight to the interests of animals. And if you do that, then charities helping animals are a very good bet!

What about earning to give?

One thing that effective altruists have sometimes advocated is called earning to give. This involves getting a job that pays a lot so that you can give lots of money to charity. For example, if you become a high frequency trader who earns 400,000 dollars a year, and give half of it to effective charities, you’ll save a whopping 40 lives a year!

Note that to be an effective altruist, you don’t have to endorse earning to give. It’s something that various EA organizations have proposed as a good idea for some people, but it’s not some major part of the movement. Only a small percentage of EAs earn to give. It’s an idea that sounds funny, so it got widely reported on by the popular press, but it’s really a fairly minor part of EA.

In addition, EAs who recommend earning to give don’t suggest taking immoral jobs. In fact, everyone who has recommended it has been clear that you shouldn’t do evil things to get money and donate it. No one—and I seriously mean no one—is suggesting that you should become a mafia boss so that you can donate the money.

But if you can take a job that pays well, and as a result save dozens of lives a year, earning to give seems like something you should consider. Saving lives is good! Given that high paying jobs can save a lot of lives if you give away your earnings, for many people, this is an attractive option.

What about Sam Bankman Fried?

Sam Bankman Fried was a billionaire inspired by the ideas of effective altruism, who ran a crypto firm. Unfortunately, Fried engaged in billions of dollars of fraud, causing people to lose huge amounts of money. This was really, really bad.

Still, I don’t think this threatens the core idea of effective altruism. The Red Cross is a good thing. If a person gave a ton of money to the Red Cross by engaging in fraud, this wouldn’t affect whether the Red Cross is good. It would just mean, well, you shouldn’t do fraud. Whether you should give to effective charities doesn’t depend on whether other people have acted immorally in so that they could give to effective charities.

And while the Sam Bankman Fried affair was bad—really bad—I think people sometimes infer from this that EA has, since its inception, been a force for harm in the world. This is dead wrong. Remember, EA has saved about 50,000 people a year, helped hundreds of millions of animals, and prevented millions of people from getting all manner of unpleasant diseases. SBF’s fraud doesn’t compare to this ocean of good, equivalent, in lives saved, to preventing around 17 9/11s per year! A 9/11 every month would be a much bigger deal than the SBF fraud—that’s about equal to the amount of death effective altruists have averted.

Does effective altruism say that you should give away all your wealth? Is it communist?

Recently, Marc Andreessen claimed that effective altruism suffers from “the moral rot at the heart of EA, utilitarianism, and communism.” This rot is, essentially, that it says you must live exclusively for others. You cannot spend anything on yourself, you must give all your money away, and live in a tiny cottage eating bland, cheap foods.

But effective altruism doesn’t say that. If it did, that would be pretty weird, as no EAs do that. A few people give away all their wealth above around 30,000 dollars, but this is not expected of everyone, or followed by more than a few. Effective altruism is just about the idea that doing good effectively is really important, and it should be at least one important life project. It doesn’t require holding that this should be the only thing you do. EA orgs tend to recommend giving away 10%; while more is better, this is a reasonable baseline at which effective giving is a major part of what you do, but doesn’t dominate your life.

Imagine that a person suggests we should start eating more healthfully as a society. This doesn’t require saying one should never enjoy food, or that healthy eating should be the sole focus of a person’s life. All it requires saying is that eating healthy is a good thing and people should do more of it.

You don’t have to choose between living solely for others and living solely for yourself. You can help others greatly while also living a happy life. This is what pretty much all EAs do.

Isn’t the desirability of international aid controversial?

People often criticize foreign aid programs. Angus Deaton, William Easterley, and Dambiso Moyo have all criticized ambitious government aid programs. People often think that this imperils the desirability of effective altruism. But it doesn’t.

First of all, even if you think this objection succeeds, you should just give your money to charities helping animals, for instance, or some other effective program that doesn’t provide international aid.

Second, while some kinds of foreign aid are controversial—e.g. various bits of major systemic reform—others are uncontroversial. Each of the critics I’ve listed—and these are the most highly cited aid critics—specifically endorses the kind of aid programs provided by effective altruists. Rather than focusing on ambitiously transforming other countries, they focus on more limited things, like making sure that kids have bednets that ward off mosquitos, so that they don’t get malaria. That’s pretty uncontroversial! The standard criticisms of aid simply don’t apply.

Third, the effective altruist organizations do thousands of hours of research before recommending charities. They’re not guessing when they say a charity is effective. They’ll have analyzed randomized control trials, which control for potential downsides. RCT’s look at comparable areas, some of which received the aid, and the others of which didn’t, and look at which were on average improved more. Thus, downsides of aid are explicitly priced in by effectiveness estimates.

Is this just an excuse to make billionaires feel better?

Oftentimes, people say that effective altruism is just an excuse to make billionaires feel better. I think this is one of the most confused criticisms. Effective altruism recommends a course of action, rather than some way of feeling. It simply has nothing to say about whether billionaires should feel guilty.

Instead, it recommends billionaires give their money away. Most billionaires don’t. Thus, taking EA seriously would result in the judgment that most billionaires are acting wrongly! If anything, then, this criticism is opposite of the truth. You don’t make a person feel better by suggesting they ought to give away 10 billion dollars.

What about Longtermism?

One idea that many effective altruists are excited about is called Longtermism. Longtermism suggests that many of the highest impact actions improve the far future. For instance, if the world ended tomorrow, that wouldn’t just kill everyone alive now—it would permanently prevent the potentially millions of future years from having anything of value. It would destroy not just the present, but the future.

People often find this idea counterintuitive. This is treated as an argument against EA. But I don’t think this is convincing.

First, if you don’t buy Longtermism, then don’t be a Longtermist. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Whether Longtermism is true has no bearing on whether, say, it’s good to give to the against malaria foundation.

Second, the things Longtermists support are mostly common sense. For instance, one thing Longtermists are working on is trying to prevent bioweapons from causing massive destruction. Seems like a good idea! Crucially, as Shulman and Thornley have argued, reasonable cost benefit analyses make Longtermists’ actions high impact, even if Longtermism is false.

Third, I just find Longtermism really plausible. Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if future value was annihilated by an existential catastrophe. That seems worth working on! And there are numerous arguments in the philosophical literature supporting Longtermism.

What about systemic reform?

The last relatively common criticism of effective altruism is that EAs don’t focus enough on systemic reform. The argument goes that EAs are busy getting kids malaria nets, when they should be focused on changing the system that makes kids need malaria nets in the first place.

EAs aren’t opposed, in principle, to systemic reform. As discussed earlier, EAs have pushed for various laws that make it so that chickens don’t have to languish in a cage for their entire lives. They’ve also been instrumental in reforming foreign aid so that it’s more effective.

What EAs look for, before endorsing systemic reform, is genuine evidence of effectiveness. For this reason, EAs tend to think that, say, advocating for communism is unlikely to be very effective. We’re not having communism any time soon, even if it is a good idea (I don’t think it is, of course).

But if there’s some proposed high-impact systemic reform, nothing in the principles of EA are opposed to working on it. And EA orgs would most likely be in principle willing to support it. But critics have never been able to propose a reform that really is higher impact than the effective charities recommended by Givewell.

Conclusion

Here, I haven’t addressed everything people say about effective altruism, but I’ve addressed most of the main topics. In short, I think most of the objections result from misunderstandings, and the ones that don’t are just bad arguments. What makes effective altruism so hard to argue against is that it’s something that’s obviously good but almost no one does.

Because almost no one does it, talking about it is important. It’s not some mere triviality. However, the principles behind it are utterly uncontroversial. You don’t have to believe any contentious ethical claims to think it’s important to help others, and helping more is better than helping less. While there are real debates about exactly which charities are the most effective, every plausible view holds that there are some really effective charities, and giving to them is very important. For this reason, I hope this giving season you give to some of the really effective charities and consider taking a high impact career. Let’s make the world better together!