EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

Whats Wrong With Effective Altruism?

Abstract: Effective altruism is a philosophy and a social movement that aims to

revolutionize the way in which we do philanthropy. It encourages individuals to do as
much good as possible, typically by contributing money to the best-performing aid and
development organizations. Surprisingly, this approach has met with considerable
resistance among aid practitioners. They argue that effective altruism is insensitive to justice
insofar as it overlooks the value of equality, urgency and rights. They also hold that the
movement suffers from methodological bias, which means that it takes materialistic,
individualistic and instrumental approach to doing good. Finally, they maintain that
effective altruists hold false empirical beliefs about the world, and that they reach mistaken
conclusions about how best to act for that reason. This paper weighs the force of each
objection in turn, and looks at responses to the challenge they pose.

The past ten years have seen the growth of a new social movement and
approach to philanthropy called effective altruism. Effective altruism encourages
individuals to make altruism a central part of their lives, and combines this with a
more specific commitment to do as much expected good as possible, typically by
contributing money to the best-performing aid and development organizations.
Effective altruists are also committed to the idea that scientific analysis and careful
reasoning can help us identify which course of action is best. To date, this movement
has had a number of important successes: it has led to the establishment of new
meta-charities which provide people with information about which charities have
the greatest overall impact, drawn attention to the vast differences that exist in terms
of how effective different programs are,1 created an incentive to demonstrate
effectiveness (by directing funds toward organizations that excel in this regard), and
drawn public attention to what is perhaps the most important moral message of our
time namely that individual people, living in high-income countries, have the
power to do an incredible amount of good if they only stop and think for a moment
about how best to achieve this aim. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that
effective altruism could turn out to have an even greater importance.

1Toby Ord, The moral imperative toward cost-effectiveness in global health, Center for Global
Development (2013).

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At present, private philanthropy in the United States exceeds $200bn per

year.2 This is significantly more than the total amount of global development aid
combined. Furthermore, while both private philanthropy and overseas aid are
affected by significant biases (when judged against the background assumption that
they should benefit those in most need), the distortions that affect private giving are
both more serious and less deeply entrenched than those that affect the distribution
of aid. These distortions are more serious because only a tiny percentage of the
money donated by individuals makes its way to the worlds poorest people, where it
would often do the most good.3 They are less entrenched because they often result
from a lack of information, or carelessness, rather than from the pursuit of
competing geopolitical aims. Taken together, these considerations suggest that there
is an important opportunity for moral leverage: if effective altruists can persuade
affluent people to give more or even just to give a bit more effectively then this
could have a powerful and transformative effect on the world in which we live.
Nonetheless, this approach has often been met with considerable resistance
among aid practitioners and activists who are committed to the cause of social
justice at a global level. Taken at face value, their reaction is surprising. After all,
both effective altruists and the humanitarian community share a commitment to
improving the lives of the worlds poorest people. I believe that it can be explained
both by the competitive dynamics that exist within the philanthropic sector and also
by deeper disagreements about value. On the one hand, the challenge made by
effective altruists, to show that their work has a positive impact, has ruffled the
feathers of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Most of these
organizations believe that they have a credible and long-standing track record
working to address extreme poverty. They also question the credentials of those
doing the evaluation. On the other hand, this community harbors deeper concerns
about the normative and methodological commitments of effective altruism. Given

2 Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do :How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living
Ethically (London: Yale University Press, 2015), p. viii.
3 The Centre for Global Prosperity calculates that U.S. citizens contributed $12 billion to organizations

working in the developing world in 2009. Around one-third of this money went to Sub-Saharan
Africa (Patricia Miller, The Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances 2011 (Centre for Global
Prosperity: The Hudson Institute, 2011), pp. 9, 12).

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the assumptions it makes, they worry that the movement may ultimately end up
diverting resources away from a number of important goals.
In order to make progress on this front, this paper looks at several criticisms
of effective altruism and asks whether this approach to philanthropy should be
abandoned or revised. To begin with, I look at the claim that effective altruism is
insensitive to considerations of justice. More specifically, critics suggest that it
overlooks the value of equality, discriminates against the worst-off, and violates
rights. The second section then considers objections to the methodology that
effective altruists use to identify worthy causes. It looks at the claim that effective
altruism is materialistic because it only registers goods that are easy to quantify,
individualistic because it ignores the value of collective goods, and instrumentalist
because it excludes processes from its evaluation of outcomes. The final section
examines certain factual and counterfactual assumptions that effective altruists make
about the world. These beliefs, about human psychology and the nature of progress,
inform their understanding of how long-term change is likely to come about. If they
are mistaken about this, their approach to doing good may not be effective after all.

Is Effective Altruism Unjust?

There are thick and thin versions of effective altruism. The thin version of the
doctrine holds that we should do the most good we can and that this involves
using a substantial amount of our spare resources to make the world a better place.4
It is compatible with a wide range of moral theories and remains non-committal
both about the nature of the good and about the individuals relationship to it. The
thick version of effective altruism makes a number of further assumptions. Firstly, it
has a largely welfarist understanding of value. On this view, good states of affairs
are those in which suffering is reduced and premature loss of life averted.5 Secondly,
it is broadly consequentialist maintaining that we should perform the action that

4Singer 2015 op. cit., p. vii.

5It is important to note that a large section of the effective altruist community is concerned with the
suffering of non-human animals. Due to limitations of space, this paper focuses on the way in which
the movement aims to promote human well-being. Ibid., p. 7.

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maximizes the sum of individual welfare at all times.6 As Holden Karnofsky writes,
its a way of thinking about morality that insists on the maximization of good
accomplished and not just satisficing of rules and guidelines.7 Thirdly, effective
altruism is committed to the methodological claim that through careful analysis of
existing evidence it is possible to provide sound general advice about how
individual people can do the most good. It takes, in the words of William MacAskill,
a scientific approach to doing good.8 This paper focuses on the thick version of
effective altruism. Not everyone who identifies with the movement shares each
individual belief, but, taken together, they capture much of what makes the
approach interesting and unique. They also explain many of the moral judgments
that effective altruists make.
Construed in this way, a major criticism of effective altruism is that it
overlooks considerations of justice, and therefore generates radically incomplete
conclusions about how best to act. According to this view, effective altruists do not
care about who benefits from an intervention, or in what way, only that the greatest
total gain in well-being is achieved. They therefore accord no value to equality in the
distribution of goods, to the idea that people with urgent claims may deserve special
attention, or to the idea that human beings are the bearers of moral rights that resist
aggregation. These arguments will be considered in turn.

i. Equality

Effective altruists recognize that equality is instrumentally important. They

are aware that an unequal distribution of resources can have negative consequences
which include resentment, domination and the erosion of public goods. They also
recognize that inequality generates important opportunities to do good. Given that
money tends to have declining marginal utility, there is good theoretical reason to
believe that more can be achieved by focusing on the global poor than by focusing

6 According to a recent survey of effective altruists 69 percent were consequentialists, 2% were

deontologists, and 5% were virtue ethicists (2014 survey of Effective Altruists: Results and Analysis
(2014), http://effectivealtruismhub.com/sites/effectivealtruismhub.com/files/survey/2014/results-
and-analysis.pdf)
7 http://blog.givewell.org/2013/08/13/effective-altruism/
8 William MacAskill, Doing Good Better (Manuscript Only, 2014), p. 16.

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on people who are already well-off. Given the extent of global inequality, Will
MacAskill calculates that those living in rich countries can reasonably expect to do
one hundred times more for someone who is living in extreme poverty than we could
for ourselves.9 Taken together, the desire to avoid pernicious externalities, and to
make resources go further, mean that effective altruists will often support policies
that are broadly egalitarian in outcome.
At the same time, most effective altruists do not accord any intrinsic value to
equality. As Peter Singer writes, they tend to view values like justice, freedom,
equality, and knowledge not as good in themselves but good because of the positive
effect they have on social welfare.10 This brings the approach into conflict with a
central belief many people have about justice: namely that it is bad (because it is
unjust or unfair) that some are worse off than others through no fault or choice of
their own.11 Indeed, many people believe that it would be unfair for a morally
arbitrary factor, like place of birth, to influence a persons life-chances even if this
state of affairs produced the greatest sum of overall well-being.
To illustrate how this disagreement plays out in practice, we can consider the
following example:

Two villages. There are two villages, each in a different country. Both stand in
need of assistance but they are unaware of each other and never interact. As a
donor, you must choose between financing one of two programs. The first
program allocates an equal amount of money to projects in each community
and achieves substantial overall benefit. The second program allocates all of
the money to one village and none to the other. By concentrating resources it
achieves a marginally greater gain in overall welfare than the first project.

In this case, the unequal distribution of resources would not lead one village to
resent or dominate the other, and there are no public goods that they collectively
maintain. Therefore, effective altruists have no reason to prefer the equitable
program to the one that brings about greatest overall welfare. However, those who

9 Ibid., p. 31.
10 Singer 2015 op. cit., p 146
11 Larry Temkin, Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 13.

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have an intuitive commitment to fairness will insist that there is a further reason to
prefer the first program, namely that it reduces the influence of morally arbitrary
factors on peoples lives. It is unfair for one community to receive all the benefit and
the other none at all, and this is particularly clear when there is only a marginal
difference in the welfare returns of each program.
Faced with this criticism, effective altruists may hold the line and insist that
equality has no independent weight. Their approach would then be insensitive to
one kind of justice consideration. Alternatively, they could amend their theory so
that it makes use of a distribution-sensitive conception of the overall good.12 By
giving equality some independent weight in ranking overall states of affairs
(perhaps of only very modest proportions), effective altruists could accommodate
the intuition that one outcome may be better than another because it is fairer.
Alternatively, effective altruists could use equality as a tie-breaker for cases where
welfare-based comparisons are indeterminate. Both approaches would go some way
toward satisfying common intuitions about distributive justice.

ii. Priority

We have already noted that the declining marginal utility of money creates a
general reason for effective altruists to focus on helping poor people. However, in
practice, the most cost-effective interventions are unlikely to be those that focus on
the poorest of the poor. This is because the ultra poor suffer from a composite of
afflictions. Among other things, they tend to lack important capabilities and skills, to
be victims of social marginalization and geographical remoteness, and to suffer from
chronic illness or disability.13 This makes them some of the hardest people to help.
Indeed, successful interventions need to be targeted and multidimensional both
factors that increase their cost. In addition to this, those who suffer from physical
disabilities are often less efficient at converting resources into welfare. This means

12 Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations

Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 12.
13 Akhter Ahmed, Ruth Vargas Hill, Lisa C. Smith, Tim Frankenberger, Kajal Gulati, Doris M.

Wiesmann, Wahidand Quabili, and Yohannes Yisehac, The World's Most Deprived: Characteristics and
Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger, 43 (International Food Policy Research Institute, 2007).

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that they will fair badly if our concern is only to achieve the largest overall gain in
welfare.
Nonetheless, many people believe that those at the bottom, who have least or
suffer most, should be prioritized because their level of need is the greatest. These
people endorse a priority principle, which holds that benefiting people matters more
the worse off they are in absolute terms.14 For some of those who ascribe to this
view, the idea that urgent claims should be met first is a basic component of
morality. For others, it stems from the need to justify state power: what matters for a
state to be legitimate is that its political and economic intuitions can be justified to
the worst-off people in society.15 If this condition is not met, then those at the bottom
have reason to prefer a different set of arrangements (that no one else has equal
reason to object to) and are being dominated if their voices are not heard.
To see how these considerations play out in practice we can consider the
following example:

Ultrapoverty. There are a large number of people living in extreme poverty.

Within this group, some people are worse-off than others. As a donor, you
must choose between financing one of two development interventions. The
first program focuses on those who will benefit the most. It targets literate
men in urban areas, and has considerable success in sustainably lifting them
out of poverty. The second program focuses on those who are most in need of
assistance. It works primarily with illiterate widows and disabled people who
live in rural areas. It also has some success in lifting these people out of
poverty but is less successful at raising overall welfare.

Effective altruists will favor projects that focus on smaller groups of people when
they achieve the largest gain in overall welfare, but in Ultrapoverty this is not the
case. Therefore, they will choose the program that supports literate men. When this
pattern of reasoning is iterated many times over, it leads to the systematic neglect of
those at the very bottom something that strikes many people as unjust.

14 Derek Parfit, Equality and Priority, Ratio 10, 3 (1997): p. 213.

15 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), revised edition, p. 75.

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In response to this problem, effective altruists may choose to hold the line and
reject priority weightings. They would then be insensitive to another kind of justice
consideration. Alternatively, they could endorse a defeasible priority principle that
would give the claims of the worst-off some priority over the claims of the better-off,
even if a higher total utility could be achieved by focusing on the latter group of
people.16 Another approach would be to use priority as a tie-breaking principle
(although this would not change the verdict for Ultrapoverty). Finally, effective
altruists could accept that different moral principles apply to different kinds of
agent. If they accept the argument about state legitimacy, then they might also
recognize that political institutions have special reason to accord priority to the
worst-off, while simultaneously denying that individuals and private foundations
need to be sensitive to distribution in this way.

iii. Rights

A right is a justified claim to some form of treatment by a person or

institution that resists simple aggregation in moral reasoning. The strongest moral
rights protect vital interests, functioning as trumps against the claim that a persons
basic needs can be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good. In this way, rights
build upon the notion that it is wrong to use an individual to achieve some outcome
in a way that does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a
separate person, that his is the only life he has.17
In a world riven with uncertainty the best way to promote total welfare is
often by respecting peoples rights. This is because attempts to achieve the greatest
good directly, by maximizing expected value, are notoriously unreliable. As a result,
it may be better for people and institutions to try and avoid imposing certain harms
on others altogether. Yet effective altruists tend to take a different approach,
something that is demonstrated by the following case:

16 Many large foundations, including the Gates Foundation, already use priority weightings of this
kind.
17 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 33.

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Sweatshop. The country you are working in has seen a rapid expansion of
dangerous and poorly regulated factory work in recent years. This trend has
helped lift a large number of people out of poverty but has also led to an
increase in workplace fatalities. As a donor, you are approached by a group of
NGOs who want to campaign for better working conditions. There is reason
to believe that they can persuade the government to introduce new legislation
if they have your financial backing. These laws would regulate the industry
but reduce the number of opportunities for employment in the country as a
whole.

Cast in these simple terms, I believe that most effective altruists would refuse to
support the campaign even if there were no other opportunities to do good.
Following the lead set out by MacAskill, they would argue that poor people are
better-off in a world where sweatshops exist than in world where this was not the
case, and that a policy of non-interference is to be preferred for that reason.18 But for
those who believe that human beings have rights, including a right to adequate
protection from dangerous working conditions, things are not quite so simple. This
is because the case for sweatshop labour rest upon a morally impermissible trade-
off: it improves the economic welfare of many by providing them with a source of
income, but only at the expense of harming those who are severely injured, maimed
and killed in workplace accidents. It is not fair, one might think, that these people
should pay the price simply to make others better off.19
According to some theorists, rights function as deontological constraints on
the way in which we may promote the good. It is always wrong to harm people by
violating their rights. Therefore, we should not tolerate sweatshop labour even when
it promotes the greater good overall. This idea that rights function as side-
constraints on moral action captures an important intuition about harming.
However, it fails to do justice to positive rights, and also encounters problems when
deontological constraints come into conflict with one another. A different approach,

18 On the question of sweatshops, MacAskill write that there is no question that they are good for the
poor (MacAskill, 2015, 146-150).
19 This may be true even if they choose this form of employment, either because a right to adequate

workplace protection cannot be forfeited or because the choice is made against a backdrop of acute
vulnerability.

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defended by Amartya Sen, views respect for rights as a component of the good that
is not reducible to the effect they have on individual welfare.20 In this regard, Sen
notes that we often say a situation was bad because so many rights were violated.21
By allowing rights to enter into our evaluation of states of affairs directly, we can
better accommodate the belief that human beings deserve to be treated in certain
ways.
By amending their theory so that it accords independent weight to rights,
effective altruists could incorporate this kind of justice consideration. They would
then recognize that a good outcome is one in which suffering is avoided, gains
distributed fairly, and rights respected. With these changes in place, effective
altruists might conclude that a state of affairs that combines employment
opportunities with rights violations contains less good than one in which neither
element is present. Alternatively, they could acknowledge that workers have rights,
but hold that the badness of rights violations is outweighed, in this case, by the large
welfare gains that accrue to other extremely poor people. Finally, effective altruists
could try and develop a rights-based defense of sweatshop labour. They might argue
that there is a conflict between the right to subsistence and workplace protection,
and that in this case the right to subsistence wins out. However, as Henry Shue has
argued persuasively, it is not enough that people contingently have enough to get by
in order for a right to subsistence to be fulfilled: they also need to be secure in their
possession of this good.22 This is something that unregulated sweatshop labour is
unlikely to provide.

Is Effective Altruism Blind?

We have already seen that effective altruists are committed to a scientific

approach to doing good. However, there is considerable disagreement about what
this means in practice. Effective altruists have traditionally tended to rely upon a
certain standard method in order to determine which causes and activities are

20 These rights are not absolute and can therefore feature in consequence-based analysis (Amartya
Sen, Rights and agency, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11, 1 (1982), pp. 15-16.)
21 Ibid., p. 13.
22 Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1996), second edition, p. 13.

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worthwhile. To begin with, they assess the scale of global problems by looking at
major reports and publications that document their impact on global well-being,
often using cost-effectiveness analysis. If a problem is serious enough to warrant
further investigation, they then look at whether there are proven interventions that
can help remedy the situation. Finally, if a cause is tractable, effective altruists ask
whether it is also neglected, something that helps determine whether new funds are
likely to make a difference. With this background analysis in place, they then audit
individual organizations that work in priority areas in order to determine who they
support.
The standard method has a number of advantages. In comparison with
intuitive judgment it is quite rigorous and generates a high degree of confidence in
the organizations that they recommend. It also allows effective altruists to process a
large volume of information in a systematic way. At the same time, it remains
vulnerable to certain forms of systematic bias and error. Importantly, those who use
this method must settle upon a metric and method for measuring and comparing
outcomes across different issue areas. Historically, effective altruists have tended to
rely on metrics borrowed from the field of public health, to prioritize evidence
garnered from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and to use cost-effectiveness
analysis to compare projects. These preferences have had a major impact on the
activities they recommend. Indeed, all but one of the top charities endorsed by
GiveWell and GWWC focus on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). They also make
the movement vulnerable to the charge that it suffers from a form of methodological
blindness.

i. Materialism

The claim that effective altruism is unduly materialistic takes a variety of

forms. One version of this critique holds that the movement suffers from
observational bias in terms of the causes that it recommends: effective altruists
prefer certain kinds of evidence when making claims about impact and this leads
them to overlook less tangible opportunities to do good. Another version of the
critique holds that it suffers from a form of quantification bias when conducting

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assessments: even if the movement values things other than subjective well-being at
the level of axiology, the metrics that it relies upon make this the only thing that
counts in practice. These criticisms will be considered in turn.
There are many areas in which we might hope to do good. These include
treating disease, protecting the environment, and campaigning for trade reform or
human rights. Given this range of options, it makes sense to look first at fields (like
public health) about which there is high-quality information: in these areas it will be
easier to distinguish very good from very bad interventions. Nonetheless, the
tendency to focus disproportionately upon what is known, or readily verifiable, can
lead to certain forms of bias. To begin with, those conducting the initial assessment
may become so deeply immersed in one area that they forget to look at those about
which less is known. More worryingly still, they may grow accustomed to standards
of proof that cannot be reproduced in other areas.
Critics suggest that this is true of effective altruism. In particular, they worry
that the premium effective altruists place on information garnered through RCTs
means that only a small range of activities can meet the burden of proof they use. Of
course, RCTs have important advantages. They have long been viewed as the gold
standard method of testing ideas in other sciences and are particularly useful
because they help isolate the impact of a project.23 Yet, as Singer himself notes, they
can be used only for certain kinds of interventions, in particular, those that can be
done on a small scale with hundreds or thousands of individuals or villages, from
which samples large enough to yield statistically significant results can be drawn.24
What they are not suited to is evaluating country-scale initiatives, international
advocacy programs, or projects that function over a longer time period. There is
independent reason to believe that these types of activity can be highly effective,
however, their impact cannot be demonstrated in these terms.25 As a result of this,
effective altruists may overlook their importance.
The second objection holds that the metrics which effective altruists use to
evaluate organizations or projects, have the effect of reducing all outcomes to their
impact on subjective well-being, even when they value other things like autonomy

23 MacAskill 2015 op. cit., p. 11.

24 Singer 2015 op. cit., p. 157.
25 In fact, some goods may not be amenable to this kind of quantification at all.

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or self-actualization in principle.26 Central to this line of argument is early reliance

by the movement on the notion of a Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY).
Healthcare professionals use this metric to compare the value of treating disease and
prolonging life, and the World Health Organization uses it to determine the cost-
effectiveness of different medical treatments. However, the tendency to rely upon it
also has a number of further consequences. Importantly, the DALY metric is an
indirect measure of subjective well-being: it draws upon the life-reports of people
living with disease in order to arrive at the conversion rates that make interpersonal
comparisons of well-being possible. Cost-effectiveness analysis that relies upon
DALYs therefore has the consequence of making this the only thing that matters in
practice.27
Recognizing the force of these objections, effective altruists have tended to
move away from metrics and methodological assumptions that place significant
restrictions upon what can be evaluated. GiveWell has recently distanced itself from
the DALY metric, reduced its reliance on cost-effectiveness analysis couched in these
terms, and expressed a preference for conclusions that are supported by multiple
different lines of analysis, as unrelated to one another as possible.28 Effective
altruists have also shown a degree of methodological dexterity when it comes to
evaluating the work done by advocacy organizations.29 Nonetheless, there is room
for further improvement in this area. To begin with, effective altruists need to be
clearer about the bounded nature of the information they provide. Often, the impact
of an intervention is unprovable rather than unproven given the methodological
assumptions they use. They also need to engage more fully with new metrics, such
as the Multidimensional Poverty Index, that help to evaluate outcomes in non-
welfarist terms.

ii. Individualism

26 http://blog.givewell.org/2013/04/04/deep-value-judgments-and-worldview-characteristics/
27 If we return to the example in the previous section, sweatshop workers may experience a loss of
autonomy despite receiving a higher salary. This loss resists quantification but could influence our
evaluation of the practice even absent consideration of rights.
28 http://blog.givewell.org/2011/11/04/some-considerations-against-more-investment-in-cost-

effectiveness-estimates/ and http://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-

value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/
29 Singer 2015 op. cit., pp. 158-164.

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NGOs working to address poverty often place great value on community

empowerment, and consider it an important goal of development. Yet, among the
charities that effective altruists recommend, organizations working to strengthen
local communities are conspicuously absent. Of course, it is possible that these
NGOs are not doing good work and that they would be better off focusing on
activities that have greater impact. An alternative explanation is that effective
altruists undervalue collective goods because of the methodological assumptions
they make. The fact that those who work closely with poor people, and know them
the best, believe that these things are important lends weight to the second thesis.
As we might imagine, effective altruists tend to value empowered
communities in an instrumental way: they recognize that people are more likely to
flourish in a social environment where they can pool resources, mobilize around the
collective interest, and overcome coordination problems. However, the tendency to
focus first and foremost on individual welfare gains, may also lead them to overlook
this kind of positive outcome in practice. Furthermore, collective goods may be
valuable in non-instrumental ways that effective altruists struggle to capture. For
example, democratic institutions may be intrinsically valuable because they help
constitute values like autonomy or self-respect for community members.30 If this is
the case, their absence cannot be easily compensated for in other ways.
The approach we take to collective goods has practical consequences. To see
that this is the case, consider:

Medicine. According to recent estimates condom distribution is a far more

effective way of minimizing the harm caused by HIV/AIDS than the
provision of anti-retrovirals (AVR). Whereas ARVs help people who already
have the virus, condoms help to prevent many more people from becoming
infected. As a donor, you must choose between funding one of two National
Action Plans. The first program allocates the entire sum of money to condom

30Indeed, many republican philosophers believe that people cannot be free, or accorded proper
respect, in communities that lack these characteristics (Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments
(London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 127-145; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of
Freedom and Government: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)).

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distribution. The second program allocates 90% to condom distribution and

10% to ARVs.

Assuming that the evidence in favor of condom distribution is reliable, most

effective altruists will favor the first plan. The fact that it will save the greatest
number of lives is a consideration that dominates proceedings.
However, most governments and populations would not support a strategy
that left people with HIV/AIDS untreated. This stance may be irrational.
Alternatively, they may conclude that it is better to live in a society where one can
hope to receive medical treatment if one is sick, than it is to live in one where the
largest numbers of people get treated overall.31 Hope may be valuable in this context
because it leads people to feel better about their lives or simply because hope is
feeling better about ones life. Hope is also an important resource for societies that
are undergoing serious hardship: it allows people to take collective action to tackle
problems they might otherwise fail address. For these reasons, we cannot move
immediately from information about the most cost effective intervention on a per
capita basis to reliable conclusions about the best overall policy or program.32

iii. Instrumentalism

The charge that effective altruism is instrumentalist holds that it fails to take
seriously the effect that political processes have on outcomes, and tends to favor
technocratic rather than democratic solutions to moral problems. Clearly, a
technocratic or data-driven approach to problem solving may sometimes be the
appropriate one to take. For example, it is unlikely that asking people to vote on the
most effective aid and development organizations would provide a reliable guide as
to their impact. At the same time, this approach makes effective altruism vulnerable
to certain forms of error.

31 Dan W. Brock and Daniel Wikler (2006). Ethical issues in resource allocation, research and new
product development, in Dean T. Jamison et al. (ed.), Disease Controls Priorities in Developing Countries
(International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank), p. 264.
32 Another explanation is that people endorse a version of the priority or equality principles

(discussed earlier on), and conclude that because it is worse to have HIV/AIDS than to have some
chance of contracting the disease, those who already have it deserve a chance to be treated.

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 EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

At the micro-level, critics note that advocates of technical approaches to

problem solving develop a tacit preference for organizations that deploy the same
kind of reasoning at a local level. They will tend to favor projects that focus on the
priorities of experts, and that can demonstrate their effectiveness in a way that is
easily understood by evaluators. What tends to be overlooked along the way is how
different processes influence outcomes and bear upon the good that is achieved. A
technical approach to evaluation can also lead to the artificial narrowing of horizons.
To see that this is the case, consider:

Participation. There are a group of villages that require help developing their
water and sanitation system in order to tackle the problem of waterborne
parasites. As a donor you face a choice between funding one of two projects.
The first project will hire national contractors to build the water and
sanitation system, something that they have done successfully in the past. The
second project works with members of the community to develop and build
new facilities. This approach has also worked in the past, but because
villagers lack expertise their systems tend to be less functional than the ones
built by experts.

In this case, simple cost-effectiveness analysis would lead us to conclude that the
first project is better, especially if we conduct our evaluation at the point of
completion. However, there are significant advantages to the second project that this
verdict overlooks.
Firstly, we might believe that it is valuable for people choose what path their
community takes, and to participate in realizing these goals, for reasons of
autonomy and self-esteem. After all, there is an important moral difference between
a receiving something as a gift and bringing it into existence through ones own
effort. The second approach also has important instrumental benefits given that the
resulting sanitation system is more likely to be valued by community members. It
may therefore endure better over time despite its weaker functionality. If this is the
case, the efficiency gain achieved by the first project is largely illusory. Finally, the
participatory approach may allow communities to develop new capacities and skills

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that can be deployed again in the future, creating a multiplier effect that may act as a
spur to long-term development. Yet this too will tend to be overlooked if evaluators
focus only on the technical problem of preventing waterborne disease. A more
comprehensive assessment of the two projects would take these additional
considerations into account.33
At the macro level, there is an analogous concern: namely, that the kind of
strategic philanthropy which effective altruists favor has the potential to undermine
the democratic process, particularly when it is directed overseas toward recipient
nations. Indeed, there is strong pro tanto reason to favour government leadership
when it comes to public services provision or addressing social needs. Politicians are
accountable to the electorate for the decisions they make and must to provide a
public justification of their policies for that reason. In contrast to this, private
philanthropy and the work of foundations is not subject to democratic control in any
direct way. Nor are they under any pressure to provide public justification for their
work. Decisions are usually based exclusively upon the comprehensive worldview
of the agent in question.
This approach is problematic when it reduces popular control over social
outcomes, or when it weakens existing political institutions by circumventing
standard mechanisms of accountability. Indeed, given the track record of many
international organizations working in the field of international development, this
danger is something that effective altruists should be particularly cognizant of.
Many of the most serious development failures have occurred at the hands of
experts who when freed from democratic oversight enacted programs based on
their own scientific understanding of poverty, which turned out to be sub-optimal
or even deeply harmful.34

Is Effective Altruism Effective?

33 In the words of Amartya Sen, they will focus on the comprehensive outcomes of projects rather
than their culmination outcomes. (The Idea of Justice (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 215.)
34 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in

Lesotho (New York: University of Minnesota Press); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-
politics, Modernity (London: University of California Press, 2002); William Easterly, A Tyranny of
Experts: Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

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 EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

Effective altruists aim to make choices and life-decisions that do the greatest
amount of overall good. This section asks how robust the advice they provide
actually is. To begin with, it looks at the question of impact by asking what would
happen if individual donors stopped giving. It then looks at a set of claims they
make about human psychology and motivation, which bear upon the extent to
which their conclusions generalize across the population. Finally, it looks at a set of
problems associated with the way in which effective altruists approach the
possibility of political reform and transformation.

i. Counterfactuals

Effective altruists note that in order for a persons action to have an impact on
the world it must be the case that her contribution would not have been made by
someone else if she had chosen to act differently. This type of counterfactual analysis
explains their preference for neglected causes. It also explains their claim that it is
usually better to choose a high-income career, and donate a sizable portion of your
income to an effective charity, than it is to work for a charity yourself. If you decide
not to work for the charity then someone else (who is similarly qualified) would
probably take your place and produce a similar outcome. However, if you turn
down the job in financial services, it is very unlikely that the person who replaces
you would donate money to the worlds best charities.35
Yet this observation leads to an interesting set of questions about the overall
impact of effective altruism. In particular, we should ask what would happen if
individual people who are affiliated with the movement stopped giving a portion of
their income to the top charities: would larger philanthropic organizations simply
step in and fill the gap? After all, many of these organizations only have limited
room for more funding. If this were to happen, then it follows that the impact of
donating to these charities is not in assisting people who would otherwise go
unassisted but rather in freeing up funds for large foundations that are already flush
with cash.

35 MacAskill 2015 op. cit., 90.

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 EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

To make progress on this front we need to consider another question, namely,

why have large donors not already fully funded the charities that effective altruists
recommend given that they could easily do so? There are three possible answers.
Firstly, large donors may not be concerned about promoting good outcomes in an
effective way. While this may be true of some aid agencies, it is not true across the
board. Secondly, large donors like the Gates Foundation may not believe that the
prioritization research conducted by organizations like GiveWell and GWWC is
correct. Given that they have a huge research budget, and many years of experience
working in this area, disagreement on this point would give us cause for concern.
Thirdly, large donors may hold back funds because they know that their failure to
do so would create problems for effective altruism as a social movement. By
crowding out the top charities large donors would place great strain on existing
meta-charities, leaving in place a demand for effective interventions that outstripped
their ability to reliably identify these things. They would also generate a precipitous
rise in the apparent cost of the most effective interventions, something that would
make it harder for effective altruists to claim that individuals are in a position to
significantly help people living in poverty and hence to recruit new supporters.
Importantly, there is evidence that the third explanation is correct at least
some of the time: GiveWell now has the ability to fully fund its top charities for the
next couple of years via GoodVentures and the Open Philanthropy Project, but has
chosen not to do so. This may be a sensible strategy. After all, if effective altruists can
persuade U.S. citizens to change their approach to giving en masse, they could
achieve progressive change on a scale that even the wealthiest foundations are not
now in a position to bring about.
Yet, this argument also has two consequences that effective altruists have
tended to overlook. Firstly, it undermines the claim that ordinary people are having
a great impact by giving to the charities they recommend. Their contribution is quite
different from the one that they think they are making: it consists largely in freeing
up money for foundations, and supporting a social movement that may do
considerable good in the long run. Secondly, this claim about what effective altruism
may achieve in the future is quite speculative. This is not to say that it is implausible,

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only that it cannot be tested or falsified in a rigorous way that effective altruists have
tended to prefer. They, too, appear to be acting on faith to some extent.

ii. Motivation and Rationality

Effective altruists aim to have greatest impact by changing the way in which
philanthropy is done at a societal level. Yet, their ability to achieve this outcome
depends upon the truth of assumptions they make about human psychology and the
nature of social change. These beliefs can be called into question. Indeed, concern
has been raised about the psychological feasibility of what they propose, and about
the central role effective altruists accord rationality in social life.
Starting with the specific advice that effective altruists provide, David Brooks
has argued that the decision to pursue a high-income career (so that one can donate
to good causes) may not be psychologically sustainable for most people in the long
run.36 He notes that what we do tends to change us, and that someone who starts out
with noble aspirations might abandon these concerns when surrounded by people
who value different things. Indeed, he or she might start out doing a great deal, but
still end up doing less for others over a complete lifetime than someone whose
work was more directly connected to good causes. Brooks also notes that this
strategy of earning-to-give could also impose serious (and perhaps unreasonable)
costs on a person if it means doing a job they dislike for the rest of their life.
Effective altruists have tended to respond to this criticism by highlighting the
case of certain individuals who have not changed their moral outlook when going
down this path and who find earning-to-give personally fulfilling.37 Yet, this only
shows is that it is possible for some people to follow this path successfully. Doing so
could still require an exceptional psychology, albeit one that some effective altruists
appear to possess. Importantly, those who are already committed to effective
altruism are a small and unusual group of people.38 We cannot look at their
behaviour and make reliable inferences about how likely it is that others could have

36 David Brooks, The Way to Produce a Person, The New York Times (3rd June, 2013).
37 Singer 2015 op. cit., p.46.
38 The most recent survey of effective altruists found that they tend to be disproportionately: male,

enrolled degree programs, located in urban areas, non-religious, and committed to consequentialist
moral views (Survey of Effective Altruists (2014), op. cit.).

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 EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

an impact in this way. The practical advice they provide may, therefore, have only a
very narrow field of application.
At a more general level, effective altruists also tend to ascribe to a particular
view about how moral progress is likely to occur. This understanding accords a
central place to reason and its ability to direct human behavior. Indeed, Singer
argues that an advantage of effective altruism is that it does not require the kind of
strong emotional empathy that people feel for identifiable individuals.39 If it did,
then this would be problematic because human beings generally find it hard to
empathize with large numbers of people. Therefore, effective altruism aims to bring
about change using rational argument: it sets out to refocus peoples attention on the
numbers that are involved, and to alert them to the way in which emotional
decision-making distorts their everyday judgment. The great hope of the movement
is that rational persuasion can eventually lead the public to embrace radically more
effective kinds of giving.
However, critics argue that this approach radically underestimates the
importance of moral sentiment and casts emotion in an unnecessarily adversarial
light. Crucially, it assumes that those of us who live in affluent countries already
care about others to a sufficient degree - perhaps even too much - and what we need
is rational direction. This may be true of those who self-identify as effective altruists.
However, it is not obviously true of the population as a whole. Many people do not
act altruistically at an international level because they struggle to connect with
distant others. More importantly, from the standpoint of effective altruism, many
people give to causes that are extremely ineffective because they do not care enough
about the outcome to acquire better quality information. Before these people sit down
and listen to what effective altruists have to say, they need to care enough to pay
attention. At this juncture, the appeal to emotion may be important. For several
millennia, philosophers have hoped that rational reflection can motivate moral
behaviour. But when it comes to persuading people to show concern for others in
practice, sentimental arguments may be the most powerful tool that we have.40

Singer 2015 op. cit., p.78

39

Rorty, Richard (1993). Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality, in Shute, Stephen and
40

Hurley, Susan (eds.), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures (New York: Basic Books).

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 EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

iii. Systemic Change

The final challenge to effective altruism examined in this paper starts by

noting that many of the changes that would do most good for people living in
extreme poverty are institutional or systemic in nature. According to recent
estimates, trade protectionism costs people living in the worlds poorest countries
around $100 billion per year, and illicit financial flows cost them a further $25 billion
per year.41 Trade reform and better financial regulation could, therefore, help to lift
millions of people out of poverty on a sustainable basis.42 In fact, the impact of these
changes would be so great that campaigning for them may be the best thing to do,
even when such efforts only have a small chance of success. Given their interest in
expected value, this is an argument that we would expect effective altruists to be
sensitive to. However, a number of critics claim that this is not the case in practice
and that the movement stands in the way of long-term systemic change.
A central concerns that arises in this context is that effective altruism tends to
be highly reactive in terms of what it supports. It has the fixed formal aim of doing
as much expected good as possible, but individual effective altruists often shift
focus in practice as the evidence-base changes, and as other people move to
address previously neglected areas. This characteristic sets effective altruism apart
from many of the most historically successful social movements.
Like effective altruism, abolitionism and the movement for civil rights, began
with small groups of supporters, who demonstrated a deep commitment to certain
moral goals.43 According to Finnemore and Sikkink, these groups functioned as
norm entrepreneurs. They undertook advocacy work, changed the moral frame of
reference, and challenged forms of public discourse that made these existing
arrangements seem legitimate.44 Over time, these groups succeeded by re-framing

41 Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-poor Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2010), p. 20; Dev Kar, Illicit Financial Flows from the Least Developed Countries: 1990-2008, United
Nations Development Programme Discussion Paper (2011), p. 5.
42 So too could other reforms like greater labour mobility.
43 Neta C. Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization and Humanitarian

Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor
Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
44 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,

International Organization, 52, 4 (1998), pp. 887-917.

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 EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (2015)

public debate in a way that forced policy-makers to respond. However, unlike

effective altruism, these movements were not reactive in posture. They took systemic
change as their goal, and succeeded largely by creating opportunities for action that
were not there before. Furthermore, these groups demonstrated remarkable
constancy of purpose persevering even when the odds of success appeared to turn
against them. Without this quality they may not have succeeded. Finally, these
groups tended to mobilize supporters by focusing on the injustice of existing
arrangements. In short, they recognized the power of the justice motive in ordinary
life.
When applied to the problem of global poverty, these insights suggest that
attempting to calculate expected value of different actions may not be the strategy
that leads to greatest success overall. Rather, advocates and campaigners might do
better to take just global institutions as their aim, and then reason backwards from
ultimate goals and aspirations to forms of appropriate action. At present, the
structure of the global economy means that the lives of affluent people are often
deeply enmeshed with the lives of those of the exploited, and that people living in
rich countries benefit disproportionately from an international regime that harms the
poor.45 Bearing this in mind, the historical record suggests that campaigners would
do well to develop a public discourse that draws attention to the unjust nature of
existing institutional arrangements and to provide an accurate understanding of
how these ills can be addressed.46 In this vein they could argue that is unfair that so
many human beings lack what they need to get by, unfair for the affluent to profit
off the backs of people living in poverty, and important that governments are held
accountable for this situation before major obstacles to poverty eradication can
addressed.
Against this backdrop, critics worry that by focusing on individual donors
and encouraging them to feel good about giving, effective altruism generates
support for the view that charity is the major moral issue, that giving is enough to
absolve one of political responsibility, and that philanthropy will solve the problem

45 Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
46
Holly Lawford-Smith, The motivation question: arguments from justice and from
humanity, British Journal of Political Science, 42, 3 (2012), pp. 661-678.

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of global poverty if only it can be done better. The focus on charitable giving is also
dangerous because it has been shown to provide tacit reinforcement to the idea that
there is a moral hierarchy that separates those that give from those who receive.47 A
major concern among progressive NGOs is that by lending weight to a psychological
frame which foregrounds the virtue of the giver, effective altruists make it less likely
that people living in affluent countries will question their own position or put
pressure on their governments to bring about much-needed change.48

Conclusion

Effective altruism is a young movement that is committed to certain claims

and ideals, the details of which are still being worked out. This paper has focused on
an account of effective altruism that is broadly welfarist, consequentialist and
scientific in its outlook. Understood in this way, I have shown that the approach
remains vulnerable to the claim that it overlooks the importance of justice and rights,
is rigoristic, and makes questionable assumptions about the world. Confronted with
these claims, effective altruists can respond in a number of ways.
Firstly, with regard to justice-based criticism, they may choose to hold the line
and deny that equality, urgency, or rights have independent moral weight. This
response would be problematic because it fails to recognize the possibility of moral
error and also distances the movement from many of those whom they hope to
persuade. For both reasons, it makes sense for effective altruism to embrace greater
pluralism about value. One way of doing so would be to conceive of good outcomes
not only as those in which suffering is reduced and death averted, but also as those
in which rights are respected and benefits distributed in a fair way. Another
approach would be to allow these factors to guide decision-making when the
outcome of welfare-based analysis is unreliable or indeterminate.
Secondly, by making public declarations about the effectiveness of different
organizations, effective altruists have taken on an important responsibility. To

47 Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk, Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public in Global
Poverty (London: Bond, 2011).
48 Martin Kirk, Beyond Charity: Helping NGOs Lead a Transformative New Public Discourse on

Global Poverty and Social Justice, Ethics & International Affairs, 26, 2 (2012), pp. 245-263.

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discharge it successfully, they must demonstrate that their approach is inclusive and
reliable enough to warrant confidence in the judgments they reach something that
will not be the case if certain fields of inquiry are excluded ex ante on methodological
grounds. It follows from this is that they must continue to embrace methodological
pluralism. Effective altruists should also be transparent about what they can and
cannot evaluate. Indeed, it only makes sense to call for demonstration of
effectiveness when there is an agreed upon method by which this can be done.
Finally, effective altruists needs to respond to a number of more specific
charges, such as the claim that many of the top charities they recommend do not
have room for more funding (given the interest of large philanthropic foundations).
The best response to this criticism would be to identify new high-impact
organizations that have very large capacity to absorb new funds.49 Aside from this
there are also questions about whether the approach to philanthropy, pioneered by
effective altruists, reliably leads people to do the greatest amount of good overall.
Historical precedent suggests that advocacy organizations which aim at systemic
change may have still greater impact over the long term. Given the existence of
reasonable disagreement about this matter, it would be a mistake for either side to
judge the other too harshly. They may adhere to different theories of change but
effective altruists and the humanitarian community would be better-off talking to
each other and identifying areas in which their strategic goals converge.

49GiveWell is optimistic that cash transfer schemes, overseen by organisations like GiveDirectly, will
be able to perform this function in the near future.

25