Five answers to the question "what is effective altruism?"
Note: this essay was originally written on request for an introduction to effective altruism for The Philosopher’s Magazine. I love philosophers, and relished the idea of getting to introduce (more of) them to effective altruism, which I think is really morally important and which has enriched my life a lot besides.
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Like so many things philosophers are interested in, effective altruism is hard to define. People even disagree about what kind of thing it is: is effective altruism a question, a research programme, a set of beliefs, a community of people with a particular culture, or a practical project?
This is a philosopher's magazine, and I am no longer a philosopher. I left the field after grad school to work at an effective altruism-inspired nonprofit. So I will leave the conceptual analysis to the pros.
What I can do is tell you that each of the above five proposed answers do capture important elements of 'effective altruism' as I have experienced it. Here, I will do my best to describe these elements.
Effective altruism, the question
As a question, effective altruism is: How can we do the most good, with the resources available to us?
The above is the fully general version of the more specific question that animated the founders of one of the earliest effective altruism organizations, Givewell, in the mid-aughts. From Givewell's website:
> GiveWell started with a simple question: Where should I donate?
> As a group of eight friends, employed in the finance industry and researching these questions in our spare time, we discovered that finding the best giving opportunities isn't a part-time job. The issues charities address—from fighting disease in Africa to improving education in the U.S.—are extremely complex, and useful information about what different charities do and whether it works is rarely publicly available.
They wanted to know where donating would go the farthest to help people in poverty, so they started an organization to answer it.
But the core of the question naturally generalizes beyond donating. After all, most people do not have a lot of money to give away, and we all have other ways to contribute as well – especially time.
Hence a popular blog post from 2014 articulated the question of effective altruism this way:
> How can I do the most good, with the resources available to me?
The distinctive thought behind this question is that in doing good, scope matters – i.e. that it's at least a lot better (and plausibly 100x better) to prevent 10,000 birds dying in an oil spill than 100 (all else equal, of course). People interested in effective altruism often think that most people underappreciate how big these differences can be – and the importance of taking the action that does more good when we can.
Finally, we can replace the "I" with a "we", as the number of people interested in the question – and in coordinating around an answer – has grown.
Effective altruism, the research programme
As a research programme, effective altruism is the huge number of questions we want answers to in order to improve our answer to the overarching question, how can we do the most good, given the resources available to us?
For example, if we start answering the question by saying that tackling climate change is one of the most promising ways to do as much good as we can, we still need to know: what is the best way to help mitigate climate change? Is it promoting clean energy through political advocacy, or is it working as engineers on carbon capture and storage, or is it something else?
(Of course we want to do all of these, but given limited resources, it's useful to know: how should we divide our efforts among them?)
If you think we should promote clean energy through political advocacy, what exact organisations should we support to do so? This example shows the branching nature of these questions. There are many other promising research topics in fields as diverse as economics, biology, statistics, and philosophy.
Progress is being made, meanwhile, in research organisations like Givewell, in think tanks like the Future of Humanity Institute, in academic institutions like the Global Priorities Institute, and informally on blogs and forums.
Effective altruism, the set (or sets) of beliefs
As a set of beliefs, effective altruism has especially unclear boundaries – there are some beliefs that most people who use the label "effective altruist" or "member of the effective altruism community" share, and some that are relatively common among them but very far from universal.
We can call them characteristic beliefs, though there may be no particular beliefs that are universal or required. Some of them are philosophical, some empirical.
Here I list a selection of beliefs that seem particularly central to me:
Impartiality: that all equally intense suffering and happiness matters equally, including that of animals, future beings, and conscious artificial beings, if they ever exist.
Idealism: that it's at least not impossible to improve the world for its creatures, and worth trying.
Prioritization: that choosing the right actions is important because some opportunities to do good are a lot more effective than others.
Learning: that research and careful reasoning can be helpful in figuring out what they are.
There is another characteristic belief worth mentioning and elaborating on a bit more here: that 'cause neutrality' – or, what might be a better term, 'cause flexibility' – is very important.
We as human beings sometimes become attached to specific causes they want to work on, even if doing so isn't the best way to make the world a better place, given their limited resources. This is reflected in common language around "finding your cause" or "your passion", often something personally important to or resonant with you.
But people interested in effective altruism point out that doing as much good as you can seems like it requires flexibility in what more specific goals – what cause – you pursue. If the best way you can make the world a better place is to clean up an oil-slicked beach, you should do that. If it's to create a pathogen-general vaccine programme, you should do that. And if it changes, your focus should too.
Of course, it's not easy to balance the ideal of this kind of flexibility with the value of focus, of gaining deep understanding, and of motivation. How to balance those things? This is another item for the research programme, and an issue with which effective altruists often grapple in their careers.
This commitment to cause neutrality has led different people in the effective altruism community to focus on different causes, because they answer the question of which causes afford the greatest opportunity for doing good differently. Some of the most common tentative answers are: that we can do the most good by focusing on helping farmed animals, because there are so many of them and they suffer so terribly at humanity's hands; that we can do the most good focusing on helping people in poor countries, because our dollars and efforts can go so much further there than they can in rich countries; and that we can help the most by focusing on future generations, because there could be so many, and how their lives go depends so much on how we conduct ourselves now.
A keen reader might notice that these common answers of where we should focus our efforts reflect some of the commitments mentioned above: scope sensitivity – the idea that helping a lot more individuals is a lot better, and impartiality – the conviction that all equally intense suffering and happiness matters equally. In each case part of the argument for focusing on that particular cause is that the beneficiaries are many, and that their welfare is seldom considered on equal footing with that of others. Often we can make the biggest difference to those whom our society has not yet thought to even try to take care of.
Effective altruism, the community
As a community, effective altruism is the set of people who self-consciously work together to do as much good as they can.
Communities have cultures, norms, features. For the effective altruism community, these are shaped by the personalities of people who share an interest in the question how can we do the most good – and in acting on the answers, as well as the aim and focus of the community on making the world better.
It's probably not productive to try to describe the effective altruism community in detail. If you want to know what it's like, get to know the people who are involved!
That said, I want to mention a few things I particularly like about the effective altruism community, and which I think are illustrative of why many people, including myself, find it valuable.
People tend to value transparency and clarity in reasoning and writing. (Much like analytic philosophy!)
People talk explicitly about striving for 'good epistemics': they value cogent argumentation and make genuine efforts to resist groupthink and dogmatism. (Indeed, this is a good time to mention that many people involved in effective altruism would probably dispute my answers to the question 'what is effective altruism' – there is no settled or 'official' answer to the question.)
There is a tolerance for radical ideas – in part because people share a sense that common sense or the usual way of doing things can lead us seriously morally astray (after all, the vanguard of all moral movements – feminism, antislavery, environmentalism – were considered radical at the time).
There is a strong sense that our actions can really matter, and that doing good is not a game. Of course, this leads many people to worry about philosophical issues like whether a moral theory can be too demanding, or the possibility that we are radically wrong in our moral beliefs ("moral uncertainty"). I think this is a healthy symptom of taking trying to live well seriously.
Comradery – members of the effective altruism community are, in my experience, unusually supportive of one another in their lives and work, because they feel like a team.
Effective altruism, the practical project
As a practical project, effective altruism is about actually doing the most good we can. Members of the effective altruism community are coordinated around hundreds of projects, large and small, that they hope will make the world better. Often this involves implementing ideas that are being turned up by the research programme. Some examples: identifying and funding the best charities that work on clean energy advocacy; reducing the spread of malaria in countries that lack basic medical resources using insecticide-treated bednets; and making policy recommendations to reduce catastrophic risks.
As these examples make clear, the practical project and the research programme of effective altruism are not crisply seperable. Ultimately, most people involved in effective altruism research the questions of how to do the most good because they want us to actually do it – and they think getting better answers to the question is essential for acting effectively. For example, in the case of the policy recommendation, a lot of work had to go into thinking about which risks to prioritize as well as when policy recommendations are effective – not to mention what the recommendation should be.
Of course, we don't have complete answers to the questions of how to do the most good, and likely never will. But it seems to many people – myself included – that in order to do the most good, we should simultaneously support the research project and act on our best guesses while we try to gather more answers. What ratio of effort should go into further research and acting on our best guesses? Add that to the list of questions that make up the research programme.
Despite these blurry boundaries, the practical project of effective altruism is essential. It makes good on the animating impulse to actually help the world, and represents why many people get involved in effective altruism in the first place.
I myself am mostly an "executor" – I don't do a lot of original research myself; instead I help others do good research or act on the findings of previous work. As a member of the effective altruism community who's curious about the question how can we do the most good, given the resources available to us?, but even more inspired by the idea of putting good (if uncertain!) answers into practice, I find it satisfying to play this part. For me effective altruism combines a sense of humility – the recognition that it's really not easy to know how to help others most effectively – with the audacity and idealism required to give it an honest-to-goodness shot.
Addendum: a few months after writing this, an essay was published on the effective altruism forum, Altruism as a central purpose by Joey Sovoie. This could represent yet another answer to the question “what is effective altruism” — a guiding purpose around which some people orient their lives. The essay also mentions yet another potential answer — that effective altruism is an ‘approach’ to doing good. I think there’s truth in both these answers, and recommend the essay highly.
