The trouble with Effective Altruism

Mosquito nets. That’s where to put your charitable dollars if you want the biggest bang for the buck. According to some analyses, it costs just $5 to purchase an insecticidetreated bed net in the developing world. It’s a simple, cost-effective way to prevent malaria, which kills 627,000 people a year. That same $5 wouldn’t go as far donated to a big hospital in the United States, or even to a nonprofit that, say, buys uniforms so girls in Africa can attend secondary school. Money is a limited resource, so why wouldn’t you want to spend yours in the most direct, most helpful way possible?

This is the thinking behind Effective Altruism, a moral philosophy that has been gaining adherents for roughly the past decade. Unlike causes that tug at the heartstrings to make an appeal, EA looks only at the most efficient ways to improve the world, using a yardstick of quality-adjusted life years, or QALYs. It gives no weight to emotional or personal connections, looking coolly at three factors in deciding on a worthy cause: importance; tractability (that is, how much good can be done per effort expended); and neglectedness (because the improvement curve is steeper if it starts from near zero). It all makes perfect, rational sense. And that’s where it goes wrong.

Applying the bloodless efficiency of a spreadsheet to charity places a higher value on things that can be quantified. There’s something deeply reductive about assigning a dollar value to an act of kindness, much less to a human life. The EA approach sidesteps important moral issues, such as justice or tolerance, that cannot be solved by money alone. Many generous impulses — a smile, a sympathetic ear, respect — cost nothing. The movement of the heart is unmeasurable.

Sources from the Bible to human potential guru Adam Grant say that true generosity is giving without expecting anything in return, even a thank you. But the demands EA places on its causes to live up to its rigid standards is all about the return. As a moral philosophy, EA has a lot in common with consequentialism, which argues that actions should be judged based on their results, and utilitarianism, which promotes the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s a small step from both these doctrines to the conviction that the ends justify the means.

The EA movement started earnestly enough, with a loosely affiliated group of friends led by William MacAskill, at the time a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. MacAskill was influenced by the Australian utilitarian (and animal rights activist) Peter Singer. In 2011 MacAskill cofounded the Center for Effective Altruism, and initially those who signed on to its program simply pledged to donate 10 percent of their income to charity — the well-worn practice of tithing.

But the movement soon got tangled up in utilitarian conundrums: Wouldn’t it be most efficient to pursue a high-paying career at a hedge fund or oil company in order to maximize the amount of salary you could donate? Should you ignore the homeless person in your neighborhood if your donation could go further 8,000 miles away? Since many more people will be living in the future than the present, shouldn’t we focus more on protecting the next generations from existential threats (what EA calls “longtermism”) than the problems afflicting current ones? Are insects sentient beings?

The data-driven approach of EA attracted a certain kind of nerdy billionaire, like Elon Musk or (infamously) Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency trader who aimed to make as much money as possible so he could give it away and then bilked his investors and charities alike. (Bankman-Fried’s mother is a well-known academic whose work focuses on consequentialism.) It is popular on college campuses, among techno-utopians in Silicon Valley, and with futurists who dream about populating distant galaxies. Sometimes it looks more ComicCon than Andrew Carnegie.

It’s easy to mock some of the kookier EA ideas and forums. But the philosophy itself is flawed. Of course you don’t want to throw your money away on disreputable charities, or those that spend a huge percentage of their budgets on salaries or advertising, especially in this season of giving, when appeals from the thousand points of light can be blinding. And of course this is not an argument against the good that can be done with mosquito nets.

But trying to wrench the heart out of charitable giving is like taking the lyrics out of a love song. It’s incomplete, and ultimately ineffective.