Imagine an apartment building, ablaze, with a family of six trapped inside. One unit over, there is also a painting worth $20,000 belonging to an art museum. There is only enough time to save one—which would you choose?

This thought experiment was proposed in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article by William MacAskill, founder of Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism to illustrate the logic behind his view of charity (MacAskill). Presumably, few people would prioritize the painting—yet, when it comes to donations, donors often make the opposite choice. According to the charity assessor GiveWell, vitamin A supplementation in the developing world has a cost effectiveness of $3,000 per life saved (6 ⅔ lives for each $20,000 painting). However, instead of donors targeting highly effective causes like this, they often prioritize other causes with radically smaller returns on investment: the Metropolitan Opera received $200 million in donations in 2021. The organizations founded by MacAskill are part of a movement that has emerged to change that. Occasionally, adherents take the philosophy behind the movement too far; still, effective altruism (EA) is the best way to determine the ideal methods and degree of donations.

The plurality of donations in the United States go to religious organizations, followed by education and human services; worldwide, 59% donations remain in the country of their donor (Charity Choices; Double the Donation). Effective altruists have very different priorities, which are chosen based on the maximization of total good per dollar spent. The first is global health and development. On a per dollar basis, it is relatively cheap to improve lives in the developing world. The marginal benefit of malaria prevention is enormous compared to nearly any other cause. The charity GiveDirectly, which transfers money directly to people in East Africa, is a non-paternalistic example of an effective development charity, and has been able to reduce poverty and improve health outcomes (though not as effectively as other health interventions). Almost all effective altruists are also longtermists, meaning that they do not or barely discount future lives as compared to current ones, making economic growth and higher living standards in growing countries a top priority.

The second priority for the movement is animal welfare. Peter Singer, one of the most influential philosophers in the EA community, is also widely credited as having sparked the animal rights movement by writing Animal Liberation in 1975, and the philosophy of that movement is obvious in contemporary EA. The basic principle states that even if animal lives are discounted compared to human ones, the extraordinary pain inflicted upon billions of animals in factory farms significantly decreases world wellbeing. Thus, though animal welfare is difficult to advance directly (political donations are unwieldy, expensive, and often useless), animal rights are a high priority for effective altruists.

The third priority for adherents is catastrophic risk. Global events like pandemics may be unlikely in a given year, but when they do occur, they can cause colossal damage—damage that could be mitigated if people had taken their risks more seriously. Bill Gates, a subscriber to EA, warned of the need for pandemic preparations in a prescient 2014 TED talk. In the same vein, climate change, nuclear war, and rogue AIs are frequent targets of EA activism and donations.

In addition to prescribing where effective donations should go, MacAskill’s Giving What We Can (GWWC) foundation also gives a baseline for how much donors in the developed world should give. Standards of living in the developed world are significantly higher than those in the developing world—this is why most EA donations go abroad. GWWC recognizes that fact, and so suggests that members donate 10% (or 1% for students and the unemployed) of their incomes to effective charities annually, similar to tithes common in many faiths. For most citizens of the developed world, 10% is not prohibitively expensive, yet it is enough to create meaningful change: 10% of the median individual U.S. income of $44,225 is enough to buy nearly 900 malaria nets (GiveWell). More devout adherents, including MacAskill himself, take “The Further Pledge” and donate all of their incomes above a set baseline. The U.S. is by far the most charitable country in the world (calculated as dollars donated as a percentage of GDP), but even the two thirds of households that donate only average 6% of their income donated annually—certainly not an insignificant sum, but one that could be increased without meaningfully changing living standards for many households (Philanthropy Roundtable).

Despite the clarity it brings to philanthropy, the effective altruism movement does have its faults. Adherents can become irrationally committed to utilitarianism, even in areas where societal values demand deontological justice. For example, the infamous rationalist blogger Scott Alexander once wrote that

Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. (Alexander)

Alexander’s characterization relies on the assumption that systemic racism has no trickle-down effects on people’s lives beyond police murders, which is patently false. Still, even if his math were to check out, few would believe that de-racializing liberalism (as Charles Mills put it) is an inefficient use of resources, even if it were not cost-effective on a per dollar basis. Pursuing utility-maximizing schemes with no regard for human or civil rights can even lead to scenarios that are worse, utilitywise, than those that acknowledged rights in the first place. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon certainly did not increase global utility.

While effective altruism may not have much to say about issues of rights and justice, it is still the best framework with which to analyze philanthropy. Though it is difficult to qualitatively compare different causes, focusing on helping people and animals directly in cost-effective ways is a strong baseline, and the movement’s encouragement of ambitious donations is necessary for lasting, positive change. Intuitively, people understand that picking expensive art over human lives is wrong; donors should put that intuition into practice and prioritize effective charities.

Sources:

Alexander, Scott. “Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable.” Slate Star Codex, 19 Dec. 2014, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/. 

Charity Choices. “How Much Is given? by Whom? for What?” Charity Choices, 2016, https://www.charitychoices.com/page/how-much-given-whom-what. 

Double the Donation. “Nonprofit Fundraising Statistics [Updated for 2022].” Double the Donation, 13 Jan. 2022, https://doublethedonation.com/tips/matching-grant-resources/nonprofit-fundraising-statistics/. 

Gates, Bill. “Bill Gates: The Next Outbreak? We're Not Ready.” TED, YouTube, 3 Apr. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI. 

GiveWell. “How We Produce Impact Estimates.” GiveWell, Nov. 2021, https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates#Impact_metrics_for_GiveWells_top_charities. 

Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War against the Media.” The New Yorker, 9 July 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-star-codex-and-silicon-valleys-war-against-the-media. 

MacAskill, William. “What Charity Navigator Gets Wrong about Effective Altruism.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 3 Dec. 2013, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/what_charity_navigator_gets_wrong_about_effective_altruism#bio-footer. 

Philanthropy Roundtable. “Statistics on U.S. Generosity.” Philanthropy Roundtable, 15 Feb. 2022, https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/resource/statistics-on-u-s-generosity/. 

Yglesias, Matthew. In Defense of Interesting Writing on Controversial Topics, Slow Boring, 14 Feb. 2021, https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex?s=r.