Effective altruism

Philosophy

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.

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.

Effective altruists attempt to 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, wild animal suffering, and risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth.

Cost-effectiveness

When possible, effective altruists seek to identify charities that are highly cost-effective, meaning that they achieve a large benefit for a given amount of money. 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. The DALY is a key measure employed by the United Nations World Health Organization in such publications as its Global Burden of Disease. 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. Randomized controlled trials are considered to be a reliable form of scientific evidence in the hierarchy of evidence that influences healthcare policy and practice because randomized controlled trials reduce spurious causality and bias. Certain medical interventions, such as vaccination, are already backed by high-quality medical research, and so there is a lower burden of proof for charities doing these types of programs. The following academic groups do randomized controlled trials on other types of interventions as well: Poverty Action Lab and Innovations for Poverty Action.

Effective altruism 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. The health improvements of high impact projects can be 100 times more effective than low impact projects.

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. Peter Singer says:

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.

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, such as those raised in factory farms.

Comparative wealth

As formulated by Peter Singer, "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it". Anyone with an income of above $52,000 PPP is in the 1% richest people globally.

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. 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 choosing a conventional altruistic career may be smaller than it appears.

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. 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.

Career selection

Selection of one's career is an important determinant of the amount of good one does, both directly (through the services one provides to the world) and indirectly (through the ways one directs the money earned based on the career). 80,000 Hours seeks to provide career advice to people with effective altruist goals to help them maximize their positive impact, and claims that careers should be selected based both on the immediate impact (including impact through the job and by donating money earned) and building career capital (that can be used to do other things later).

Donation

Effective altruism encourages significant charitable donation. Advocacy focuses on increasing the amount that people donate or identifying nonprofits that best meet the criteria of effective altruism. Charity evaluator GiveWell focuses largely on the latter issue, by identifying the best giving opportunities and the extent of room for more funding available to them. Giving What We Can aims to address both aspects: its pledge encourages people to commit donating 10% of their income, and it recommends particular charities to which to donate.

Many effective altruists donate substantially more than is typical in their society. 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. This leads some of them to lead a frugal lifestyle in order to give more.

Other effective altruists seek to donate more by earning to give in high-paying careers such as technology and finance, a position 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. Some effective altruists acknowledge this possibility and aim to reduce the risk through online communities, public pledges, and donations through donor-advised funds. In The Week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argued that taking an "unethical" job is fundamentally immoral, no matter the reason.

Cause priorities

Effective altruism is in principle open to helping in whichever areas will do the most good. In practice, people in the effective altruist movement have prioritized the following four focus areas:

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 has argued that the value per unit money is greatest for international poverty alleviation and developing world health issues, and its leading recommendations have been in these domains (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, The Life You Can Save and other organizations also focus on global poverty alleviation to greater or lesser extents, as did Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save (the origin of the organization), which argued that people have a moral imperative to donate more because of the existence of extreme poverty. In the book, Singer argues that people should use charity evaluators to determine how to make their donations most effective. Peter Singer personally gives at least 33% of his income to a variety of cost-effective charities.

While much of the initial focus was on direct strategies such as health interventions, cash transfers, micropayments, and microloans, there has also been interest in more systematic social, economic, and political reform that would facilitate larger long-term poverty reduction.

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. The main organization in this area connected with effective altruism is Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE, formerly called Effective Animal Activism), which evaluates and compares various animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and transparency, particularly those that are tackling factory farming.

Philosopher Peter Singer quotes an activist estimate that over a hundred million chickens literally "suffer to death" each year in factory farms and argues that effective animal welfare altruists should prioritize factory farming over more overfunded popular causes such as pet welfare. Singer also argues that, if farms 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. Philosophically, the immense amount of wild animal suffering may be an additional moral concern for effective altruists.

Far future and global catastrophic risks

Some effective altruists believe that the far future is extremely important. Specifically they 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, an argument that has been highlighted in the work of two philosophers closely associated with the effective altruism movement:

In particular, the importance of addressing existential risks such as dangers associated with nanotechnology, biotechnology, the advanced artificial intelligence and global warming is often highlighted and the subject of active research. Some organizations that work actively on research and advocacy for improving the far 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. In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is focused on the more narrow mission of "ensur[ing] that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact."

Meta

Some effective altruists seek to have a large impact by enhancing the capacity of the effective altruist community itself. Common causes include outreach (increasing the number of people involved in effective altruism), movement enhancement (making effective altruist organizations more effective or capable), and cause research (doing research on which causes are the most effective.)

GiveWell

Charity evaluator GiveWell started in 2007. Its focus is on identifying the most promising causes and charities to donate to, and most of its recommendations have been in the area of developing world health and poverty alleviation. GiveWell is a part of the effective altruism movement. In September 2011, GiveWell announced GiveWell Labs for exploration of more speculative causes In August 2014, a name change to "Open Philanthropy Project" was announced. The Open Philanthropy Project would be a collaboration between GiveWell and Good Ventures, a philanthropic foundation founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna.

Giving What We Can

Giving What We Can (GWWC) is a community of people interested in maximizing the good they can do in the world through donations. Founded in November 2009 by moral philosopher Toby Ord, the organization's focus is on causes related to the alleviation of global poverty. Currently the vice president and co-founder of the organization is William MacAskill, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. Although GWWC does some in-house research evaluating causes and charities, it largely relies on research by other organizations such as GiveWell. The Giving What We Can pledge requires people to donate at least 10% of their income to the causes that they believe are the most effective. Giving What We Can is run by the charity the Centre for Effective Altruism.

Tony Ord, an ethicist at Oxford University, lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the remainder of his income to charity. He promotes consequentialist ethics and is concerned with global poverty and catastrophic risks.

80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours is an Oxford, UK-based organization that conducts research on careers with positive social impact and provides career advice. The group emphasizes that the positive impact of choosing a certain occupation should be measured by the amount of additional good that is done as a result of this choice, not by the amount of good directly done. It considers indirect ways of making a difference, such as earning a high salary in a conventional career and donating a portion of it, as well as direct ways, such as scientific research. 80,000 Hours is run by the charity the Centre for Effective Altruism. The name is taken from the 80,000 hours a healthy person will work in their career.

William MacAskill is the founder and president of 80,000 Hours. MacAskill has pledged to donate everything he earns above about $35,000 per year, adjusted using standard economic measures for inflation and cost of living, to the organizations that he believes will do the most good – his pledge means giving away 60 percent of his expected lifetime earnings.

Other organizations

A number of other charitable organizations have been associated with the effective altruism movement:

History as a social movement

The ideas behind effective altruism have been present in practical ethics, particularly consequentialist ethics, for a long time, and have been reflected in the writings of philosophers such as Peter Singer and Peter Unger. Some early ideas are included in Peter Singer's 1972 paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he argues 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.

However, the movement identifying with the name 'effective altruism' itself only came into being in the late 2000s. According to William MacAskill, the name "effective altruism" was settled upon in late 2011 when the "Centre for Effective Altruism" (CEA) was chosen as the name for an umbrella organisation that would cover both Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. This was a largely internal name, but those who had followed a similar approach increasingly converged upon the name. An effective altruism conference has been held every year since 2013, when Leverage Research initiated an Effective Altruism Summit.

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.

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". 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. 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".

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". However Joshua Kissel argues that anti-capitalist critiques of effective altruism are wrong insofar as they see any incompatibility in theory. He goes further and suggests that in practice effective altruists have reason to be more sympathetic to anti-capitalism and anti-capitalists have reason to be sympathetic to effective altruism.