On November 21, 2018—Giving Tuesday, the post-Thanksgiving day to give back to the world—I woke up at 4:45 a.m. I planned to donate $10,000 to two charities that I knew were doing extraordinary good, and if I made my donation right at 5:00 a.m., I could take advantage of Facebook’s matching program. I’m not a morning person, and neither are most of my roommates—we usually sleep in until our two-year-old wakes us. But this morning I wasn’t the only one up early.
I live with fellow effective altruists—like-minded people who’ve chosen to build our lives, in big as well as small ways, around doing as much good in the world as we can. I live with so many roommates because it lets us save money to donate. Effective altruism also guides our choice of careers. I left a job in technology to write about social issues such as global poverty, emerging technologies, and factory farming for the US news site Vox. Some of my fellow effective altruists are software engineers or stock traders, earning six-figure salaries, which enable them to donate to causes they care about. Others work in academia or at nonprofits on research questions. Effective altruism is a simple philosophy: we should dedicate at least some of our resources to making the world a better place, and we should ensure those resources get put to the best uses they can. It’s a simple claim, but one that has transformed my life.
You can think about life philosophies in terms of two questions: What does this life philosophy answer for you? And what does it ask of you? I want to discuss effective altruism by answering these two essential questions.
Effective altruism appeals to me because it has the most compelling answers to the big questions: What should we do with our lives? Does anything matter in the long run? What should we strive for? How do we know if we’re doing well enough? It also appeals to me because of what it asks of me. I think a lot of people want to aspire to something real, meaningful, complex, and challenging. The question at the heart of effective altruism is: Where are the problems in the world today where my effort can make the biggest difference?
I talk to a lot of people who worry that their life is kind of middling—adequate but a bit disappointing, a bit short of what they expected. They invariably feel that unless they were capable of pulling innocent people out of burning buildings (or the equivalent), they wouldn’t feel as if they were making a worthwhile and meaningful difference in the world. If they saw a direct connection between their work or their funding of vital research, they would feel differently. What they frequently don’t realize is that these are not silly or unrealistic things to aspire to—they’re achievable for all of us. We all have the option of saving the lives of several children every year who will go on to live full, healthy, and promising lives. We may be able to achieve even more good. Effective altruism asks that we set our sights at least that high. In return, it offers the opportunity to get impressive results with your time, your money, and your energy—to leave the world a much better place and to grow into a stronger, more capable, and better-informed person in the course of doing so.
So how do you do the most good in the world? That turns out to be a complex and demanding question. Effective altruism doesn’t prescribe one answer or one way of getting to an answer, but there are certain principles that are core to the effective altruist approach. The first is that effective altruism is outcome-oriented. Effective altruism is interested in evaluating our choices by looking at their effects on the world. It’s not enough to believe that a cause is important or a project is worthy—effective altruism is about identifying goals and evaluating the things you do by whether you’re achieving results.
Most thinking about charity isn’t outcome-oriented. We often think about whether a cause is worthy, or whether the recipients are deserving, or whether we will be ennobled or rewarded by offering assistance. Effective altruism asks a different question: What are the results? I find this satisfying—and important—because I firmly believe that ethics is about making the world not only a better place but the best that we can possibly make it. We need to judge ourselves on the basis of whether our contributions are making the world better.
The ethical philosophical tradition that effective altruism has the most in common with is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, proposed in the eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham, argued that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” so actions can be judged by how much happiness they create in the world. Bentham took this simple philosophy a long way. He concluded that slavery was a moral evil, when philosophers of his time defended it. He called for the abolition of the death penalty and opposed corporal punishment for children (an outlandish view at the time). He supported equal rights for women and even supported gay rights. By being outcome-oriented, Bentham got many things correct that his time period got wrong.
Not all effective altruists are utilitarians. Doing good in the world is an emphasis in many different ethical systems. But the philosophy that produces effective altruism is one that owes a great deal to Bentham and his intellectual heritage. Bentham laid the philosophical groundwork for not just utilitarianism but also other consequentialist moral systems—moral systems that hold that we should decide what’s right and wrong by looking at what has the best effects in the real world, for varying definitions of “best.” Effective altruism does not demand that you adopt a consequentialist moral philosophy in general. But it takes a consequentialist approach to altruism. When we’re trying to do good, we should be judging ourselves by our results.
Effective altruism is also cause-impartial. Effective altruism asks us to generalize our impulse to do good. We may start out wanting to do good because we see a starving child, are grateful our own children are not hungry, and want to feed other children. Now, if someone saw a starving child and said, “I want to help, but only that one specific child,” that would be a concerning failure to generalize the impulse. We should feel satisfied with a donation that feeds starving children, even if it is not the specific one in the photograph. We recognize that no child should starve.
When I see a starving child, I want to help. When I see a sick child, I want to help. When I see a crying child standing in the rubble of a war-torn city, I want to help. I should be open to the possibility that I can best help by providing food, or best help by providing vaccinations, or best help by pushing for better policy that prevents the next war. The important thing is that effective altruism asks us to pursue the question “How do I do as much good as possible?” wherever it leads us, which might mean we end up working on something quite different than the place where we started.
One nonprofit that attracts a lot of donations from effective altruists is the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes insecticide-treated bed nets to affected communities. Malaria kills more than one million people every year, most of them children under the age of five. The Against Malaria Foundation is consistently rated by GiveWell (a nonprofit that recommends charities based on how much good they can accomplish with every dollar donated) as one of the most cost-effective charities in the realm of global health. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Rob Mather, the organization’s CEO, about how he founded AMF. Amazingly, he started out by organizing swimming marathons to raise money for burn victims, after having seen a burn victim on the news and wanting to help. The swim fund-raisers were a success and left him wondering how many other people he could help. He eventually targeted one of the world’s biggest killers of children and founded a highly cost-effective charity.
It can be intimidating to ask a question as big as “Where can I do the most good?” knowing you might have to make a major transition from helping local burn victims to providing bed nets on a global scale. But the world is big and complicated, and we shouldn’t expect that the first causes we hear about, or the ones we have personal experience with, are also the places where we have the most leverage to do good. Cause-impartiality is critical for effectively getting results.
In addition, the effective altruist’s approach to doing good is universalist. Effective altruists don’t value some lives more than others because of skin tone or country of origin. If a charitable intervention in Bangladesh does more good than one in the United States, we’ll work in Bangladesh. Many people who start working to improve the world prefer to work on problems close to them. And there are some good, practical reasons to do that—it can be easier to verify the results, you might have specialized local knowledge, or you are less likely to unintentionally cause harm—which is often a problem with ill-conceived overseas charitable interventions.
But focusing exclusively on problems close to home can be myopic, too. People who live in the poorest parts of the world are typically much cheaper to help than people who live nearby. While it costs a lot of money to house a homeless person permanently in the developed world, cash transfers distributed by organizations like GiveDirectly in Kenya and Uganda can help whole families build a permanent home—with money left over for food, education, and livestock—for about a thousand dollars. When people are living on less than a dollar a day, money goes a lot further.
Effective altruism values all people equally, wherever they live. Effective altruism also encourages us to value future humans—making the world a better place for people who haven’t yet been born. Those effective altruists who believe that animals experience pain and suffering will typically value the animals on factory farms as much as cats or dogs and believe that pain and suffering is an important moral priority, regardless of whether the being experiencing it is human.
A final core principle of effective altruism is that it is maximizing. This is best explained by comparing it to a perhaps oversimplified picture of “commonsense ethics,” the moral principles we widely agree on as a society. Much of commonsense ethics are about clearing a bar for acceptable moral conduct. If you cheat, that’s below the bar. If you donate to charity, that’s above the bar. If you’re worse than the bar, you should feel guilty about being such a terrible person; if you’re above the bar, you’re doing fine.
Effective altruism approaches this with a different emphasis. One of the most popular books about effective altruism is The Most Good You Can Do by the Princeton bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer. The title is telling. Effective altruism asks us to consider how to do the most good that we possibly can. When we have several options, we should consider which one is the best use of our resources, and we should do that. We might be uncertain. But “Is this good?” isn’t the right question; we should try to ask “What is best?”
I’ve seen people struggle to grapple with this aspect of effective altruism in a few different ways. One is to be overwhelmed by guilt. If commonsense morality is about where we set the bar, effective altruism can come across as setting the bar impossibly high—as a claim that you’re a bad person if you’re doing any less than the best.
I tend to feel that the better approach is to dismantle the bar. There’s no life you can live such that everyone in the world will acknowledge you are worthy as a person. And hopefully your friends and loved ones will encourage you in growing kinder, better, and more capable, even if you’re already “good enough.” “Where’s the bar?” is a question that many people have a lot of anxiety around, but it’s not a good guide to your ethical decision-making. As far as is possible, it’s often healthier to replace that question entirely with a new one: “With whatever resources I’ve chosen to dedicate to improving the world, am I directing those resources as intelligently as I can?”
But that mind-set doesn’t work for everybody. One thing I’ve found in the effective altruist movement is that, while we’re united by a shared commitment to making the world a better place, we vary tremendously in how we relate to effective altruism—as a moral obligation, or as a compelling opportunity to do something real in a world where we often feel paralyzed and useless? For a lot of people, it’s more actionable, constructive, and reassuring to know in advance what the expectations are for effective altruists.
In that spirit, Giving What We Can, an effective altruist organization, invites people to pledge 10 percent of their income—for the rest of their lives—to effective charities. I took the Giving What We Can pledge, and so have most of my friends. Donating 10 percent of your income isn’t easy, particularly if you haven’t planned a budget or if you run into unexpected expenses. I don’t recommend it to young people in the first few years of their careers—building up your savings should be a higher priority. But I do think it’s good for people to aspire to, and I think it’s good to budget, save, and plan so that you can get to a place where you are able to donate 10 percent of your income. If you find the idea of a “maximizing” philosophy overwhelming, unappealing, or exhausting, the pledge can be a good way to make your effective altruist commitments concrete and bounded—and, hopefully, less paralyzing.
But while effective altruism can be construed very narrowly, limited to a philosophy you dust off once a year to make donation decisions, I’ve personally found that effective altruism affects my life in a much broader, pervasive, and daily way.
One of the most powerful things I’ve learned through involvement with effective altruism is the ability to research, evaluate, and weigh important and complex issues. Ten years ago, if I had wondered which policies did the most to reduce gun violence, or whether a new climate policy was a good idea, I’d have felt paralyzed—stuck reading opposing research with different viewpoints, with no way of evaluating which conclusions were true. Effective altruism has nurtured my conviction that important questions like these do have a right answer and that we can and should be prepared to do research until we have a clearer picture of what’s going on. It gets easier with practice to identify the most important pieces of a question—the one or two sub-questions that will be most decisive to the overall answer. I’ve become aware of how eager researchers are to see their work do good in the world and how willing they are to respond to questions and clarify complex issues.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve grown more able to think about problems that are important to me. Effective altruism invites us to investigate large personal, epistemological, and moral questions about our self-worth and our place in the world that many of us were led to believe would be forever confusing, perhaps unanswerable. What are we supposed to be doing? Don’t we have obligations to the poor? How do you make the world a better place? It teaches the skill of answering those questions by consistently applying the same core principles, leaning on research, and working with others who share the same concerns. All of this is essential if you want to answer the large moral questions effective altruism addresses. But it’s also a valuable skill in other parts of life. Centering your life around an important question can make you better at answering any question in a systematic, principled way that gets you to the right answer even when it’s surprising or counterintuitive. It can help you remember that even difficult questions can often be usefully approached and that even questions no one else seems to care about can matter immensely. That’s a skill I am grateful for every day.
The habit of asking “Which of these is most impactful, and how do I focus my effort there?” pays dividends in one’s personal life as well as in one’s donations. I use this pattern of thinking to notice what I should spend my time on—I try to spend it in ways that produce concrete results in my happiness, my relationships, and my ambitions.
It is possible, of course, to take a habit like this too far or to be overwhelmed by trying to use these new tools and approaches in every aspect of everyday life. So do not start with such an all-in approach. Yet as a result of taking effective altruism seriously as a life philosophy, you are likely to find yourself applying the skills you’ve learned to tackle other things of importance to you.
I’ve laid out what makes the effective altruist approach to thinking about charity unique and distinctive, and the ways in which adopting these habits of thought can guide you in other important domains as well. But fundamentally, I believe that the way to seriously undertake effective altruism as a belief system is to first learn about some ways effective altruists have tried to answer our core question: What’s the best way to do good in the world?
There is lots of research into different programs to address poverty, from training programs to vaccination programs to religious education. If you start reading, the evidence for any given program starts to look muddled. Some studies may find impressive results; others, however, might suggest that certain programs don’t work at all. And then there is the even more basic question of whether charity is even the right way to try to make the world a better place. What about lobbying instead for better government policy, or working on the basic research that has enabled modern medicine? What about combating climate change?
It is not surprising that many people I talk to seem to despair of doing good with their money. They’ve heard stories about donations to well-meaning charitable programs that went to waste. They often feel ill-equipped to even start to answer a question as big as “What’s the most valuable thing I can do?” I’m going to attempt to address those questions here, but I want to emphasize that I think the most important thing effective altruism offers, as a life philosophy, is not necessarily a simple and straightforward answer. Rather, effective altruism offers a healthier way to embrace the question. Effective altruism says that this question is important enough to build your life around—and of course any question important enough to build your life around is going to be hard.
But I want to avoid implying that, because the question is complex, no one can do any better than chance. We have a tendency to see that something is hard and conclude that ten minutes of effort won’t make us much better at it—but ten minutes spent thinking about how to donate your money will allow you to make vastly better donation decisions than if you didn’t think about it. Ten minutes and 10 percent of your income, if you’re a person living in a rich country, will let you save several lives, every year.
If you’re intrigued by effective altruism, there are four easily actionable things I’d like you to take away as a starting point. First, I highly recommend the book Doing Good Better by Oxford philosophy professor Will MacAskill. The book applies effective altruist principles to questions like fair trade, the ethical implications of high-earning careers, and how to ensure your donations do good. While this is a brief introduction to what effective altruism means and what it’s like to live it, MacAskill’s book will teach you a lot about how to do good with it.
Second, the charity evaluator GiveWell looks at interventions to tackle poverty and global health. When they launched ten years ago, their focus was quite broad—they looked at schools and health-care programs in the United States as well as programs in poor countries. What they found, consistently, was that the most promising programs to save lives, improve health outcomes, and increase income and consumption were all happening in poor countries. Today they recommend charities that work on cash transfers, deworming children with parasites, malaria prevention and treatment, and vitamin A supplementation. Sometimes the best way to understand a problem is to read about someone else’s attempts to solve it, and GiveWell’s work to identify the most cost-effective interventions in global health is exemplary.
I don’t just recommend reading about GiveWell because it helps you do more good. As I discussed previously, one of the most valuable things I’ve received from effective altruism is a better understanding of how to answer hard questions. That’s not just a skill set that helps you identify the best ways to do good—it also equips you to reason more carefully about everything else that you care about.
Third, I want to introduce a framework effective altruists use to identify promising causes. I think it’s a framework applicable to far more questions than just the question “How do we do as much good as we can?” but it’s easiest to explore there. It has three elements: neglectedness, tractability, and impact.
Impact is the most straightforward of these: How much good would we do by solving this problem? Heart disease kills vastly more people than malaria, so if you could invent a magic cure to one but not the other, you’d save more lives by curing heart disease. A nuclear war might cause the extinction of life on Earth, so preventing that would be tremendously impactful.
Tractability asks: How easy is it to make progress on this? For example, preventing nuclear wars might be the highest-impact thing around, but I don’t know of any action I can take, day to day, that reduces its risk—so it doesn’t score well on tractability. For a way of doing good to be promising, there needs to be a reasonable chance that spending your time and effort on it will make the world a better place. The war in Syria and accompanying humanitarian crisis is agonizing—but for most of us, there isn’t a tractable avenue to resolving it.
Neglectedness is perhaps the most complicated of the considerations. Effective altruism is a small movement right now. Effective altruists are making decisions about only a small fraction of the resources spent on causes like global health (though in other areas, like animal welfare, effective altruists influence a much larger share of the resources available). Often, that means our effort is best spent on problems that get insufficient attention and discussion elsewhere. Climate change is a terrifying problem, but it’s also one that thousands of scientists and millions of people are working on. So it’s a good idea to check whether there’s a neglected climate problem—one that’s getting insufficient resources relative to its importance—before deciding to join the millions of others at work on a well-served problem. If a problem is underserved, it will often be more cost-effective to work on it.
Thinking about impact, tractability, and neglectedness will help you figure out where to prioritize your effort and energy and will help make sense of the projects other effective altruists are working on. Many effective altruists work on improving the welfare of farmed animals, because the impact is enormous—more than 50 billion animals raised for food every year1—and the problem is both tractable and neglected. Companies are typically willing to make animal welfare improvements when consumers demand it—but very few people have demanded it, as they mostly don’t know much about the conditions on these farms.
Other effective altruists work on managing the development and deployment of advanced artificial intelligence. Experts in the field have estimated that the introduction of AI will be one of the most impactful events in our history—catastrophic if it goes wrong, and transformative if it goes well. There are a lot of understudied questions about AI, so additional time and money can improve our understanding of the problem—that’s tractability. And, despite the significance of the issue, right now there are very few researchers working on AI safety and AI policy full time—which makes the issue neglected.
This framework, then, helps guide you in evaluating big questions and noticing when a cause might be one where there will be high-impact opportunities to do good.
Finally, I strongly recommend connecting with other people—not only other effective altruists but knowledge producers and researchers in relevant academic fields, from development economics to welfare biology to philosophy. Anyone can make the world a better place in a strategic, smart, and thoughtful way. However, you’ll benefit greatly from being connected with the researchers who are working full time on these questions. As a reporter, it is part of my job to talk with development economists about the interventions they find most promising and the ongoing efforts to take promising results from a pilot program and produce a cost-effective, large-scale program that is robust enough to be scaled. At its best, effective altruism is deeply integrated with the research communities trying to answer the questions we care about. Doing good in the world is complicated, and we need answers to be backed by evidence, clear reasoning, expertise, and a careful commitment to results.
As I said earlier, I think a philosophy of life can be evaluated by asking what it offers to you and what it demands of you. For effective altruism, these are very closely intertwined. You’re asked to sacrifice to do good, but in return you get real and important results, as well as a life filled with meaning and purpose. You’re asked to spend a lot of time thinking about complicated, intimidating questions, but you will learn how to approach hard questions and come away with a clearer picture of the world. I’ve found learning about effective altruism to be humbling. It leaves me with an awareness of how complicated the world is and how much diligence we need to exercise to get the results we want from our actions. It also leaves me with a deep appreciation for all of the knowledge that has already been generated. Medical researchers have developed vaccinations and eradicated diseases. Geneticists have engineered better crops and vastly improved agricultural yields. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty by economic growth.
These gains are fragile. Dangerous mistakes or unintended consequences in the next few decades might undo them. But humanity is capable of achieving a great deal—and I want to ensure that my piece of that does as much good as it can. So I get up early, once a year, to donate 10 percent of my income wherever I believe it will do the most good. Next year I’d be honored to have you join me.
Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring. Eleven volumes. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843. Bentham is an inspiring writer because he got so much right—from slavery to gay rights to women’s rights to sexual liberation—in a time when almost no one was considering these issues. He’s best read with an eye to these questions: What would it take to be right about the issues of tomorrow, today? What approaches to reasoning and moral logic was Bentham putting into practice? There’s a lot here even for people who don’t end up agreeing with utilitarianism in either Bentham’s or subsequent formulations.
MacAskill, William. Doing Good Better. New York: Avery, 2015. Will MacAskill is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford and one of the philosophers who founded effective altruism. His book explores how we can do good in the world and what we learn from a serious look at the question. He covers effective altruist topics from global health to civilizational risks. It’s a great place to start for understanding the ideas effective altruists talk about.
Singer, Peter. The Life You Can Save. New York: Random House, 2009. Peter Singer laid the foundations of effective altruism with one challenging thought experiment: Are you obliged to ruin your nice suit to rescue a drowning child? From there, he builds up to questions of moral responsibility to distant people, the case for giving much more to charity than most people do, and practical advice on how to end global poverty.
1 Alex Thornton, “This is how many animals we eat each year,” World Economic Forum, February 8, 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this-is-how-many-animals-we-eat-each-year/.