Effective Altruism

Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, called , often choose careers based on the amount of good that the career achieves while donating to charities based on maximising impact. The movement developed during the 2000s, and the name was coined in 2011. Prominent philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. Several books and many articles about the movement have since been published, and the Effective Altruism Global conference has been held since 2013. As of 2022, several billion dollars have been committed to effective altruist causes.

Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over the long-term future. Effective altruism emphasizes impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. This has broad applications to the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.

History

Beginning in the late 2000s, several communities centered around rationalist, futurological and altruist concerns started to converge, such as:

* The Singularity Institute (now MIRI) for studying the safety of artificial intelligence and the ''LessWrong'' discussion forum
* The evidence-based charity community centered around GiveWell, including Open Philanthropy which originally came out of GiveWell Labs but then became independent
* The community around pledging and career selection for effective giving, centered around the Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours organisations

In 2011, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to incorporate into an umbrella organization and held a vote for their new name; the "Centre for Effective Altruism" was selected. The "Effective Altruists" Facebook group was set-up in November 2012. The Effective Altruism Global conference has been held since 2013. As the movement formed, it attracted individuals who were not part of a specific community, but who had been following the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer's work on applied ethics, particularly " Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), '' Animal Liberation'' (1975), and ''The Life You Can Save'' (2009). Singer himself used the term in 2013, in a TED talk titled "The Why and How of Effective Altruism".

Singer published '' The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically'' in 2015. In the same year, the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill published '' Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference''. In 2018, American news website '' Vox'' launched its ''Future Perfect'' section, led by journalist Dylan Matthews, which publishes articles and podcasts on "Finding the best ways to do good", including topics such as effective philanthropy, high-impact career choice, poverty reduction through women's empowerment, improving children's learning efficiently through improving environmental health, animal welfare improvements, and ways to reduce global catastrophic risks. In the same year, 80,000 Hours identified economist Yew-Kwang Ng as anticipating many of the ideas of effective altruism in his research on welfare economics and moral philosophy.

In 2019, Oxford University Press published the volume ''Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues'', edited by Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer. In 2020, the Australian moral philosopher Toby Ord published '' The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity'', while MacAskill published ''What We Owe the Future'' in 2022.

Controversies

In 2019, investor and entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, became associated with the effective altruism movement, announcing that his goal was to "donate as much as ecan". After the company's collapse in late 2022, Bankman-Fried's relationship with effective altruism has been called into question as a public relations strategy, while the movement's embrace of him proved damaging to its reputation. Some commentators stated that EA's endorsement of ends–means reasoning and longtermism motivated the leaders of FTX to engage in risky and unethical behavior. However, several leaders of the EA movement, including William MacAskill and Robert Wiblin, condemned FTX's actions. MacAskill emphasized that bringing about good consequences does not justify violating rights or sacrificing integrity.

Philosophy

Effective altruists focus on the many philosophical questions related to the most effective ways to benefit others. Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to "why" and "how". There is little consensus on the answers, and there are differences between effective altruists who believe that they should do the most good they possibly can with all of their resources and those who only try do the most good they can within a defined budget.

The view of effective altruism as doing the most good one can within a defined budget can be compatible with a wide variety of views on morality and meta-ethics, as well as traditional religious teachings on altruism such as in Christianity. Effective altruism can also be in tension with religion where religion emphasizes spending resources on worship and evangelism instead of causes that do the most good.

Other than Peter Singer and William MacAskill, philosophers associated with effective altruism include Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves, and Derek Parfit.

Impartiality

EA emphasizes impartial reasoning in that everyone's well-being counts equally. Singer, in his 1972 essay " Famine, Affluence, and Morality",On the influence of Singer's essay " Famine, Affluence, and Morality" see, for example: , , and Singer's arguments for impartiality were later repeated in other books by him (such as , ). wrote:

It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society. The essay was republished in book form in 2016 with a new preface and two extra essays by Singer:

An important consideration for moral impartiality is the question of which beings are deserving of moral consideration. Some effective altruists consider the well-being of non-human animals in addition to humans, and advocate for animal welfare issues such as ending factory farming. Those who subscribe to longtermism include future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing existential risks.

William Schambra has criticized the impartial logic of effective altruism, arguing that benevolence arising from reciprocity and face-to-face interactions is stronger and more prevalent than charity based on impartial, detached altruism. Such community-based charitable giving, he writes, is foundational to civil society.

Cause prioritization

A key component of effective altruism is "cause prioritization". Cause prioritization is based on the principle of cause ''neutrality'', the idea that resources should be distributed to causes based on what will do the most good, irrespective of the identity of the beneficiary and the way in which they are helped. By contrast, many non-profits emphasize effectiveness and evidence with respect to a single cause such as education or climate change.

EA-based organizations prioritize cause areas by following the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework. Importance is the amount of value that would be created if a problem were solved, tractability is the fraction of a problem that would be solved if additional resources were devoted to it, and neglectedness is the quantity of resources already committed to a cause.

The information required for cause prioritization may involve data analysis, comparing possible outcomes with what would have happened under other conditions ( counterfactual reasoning), and identifying uncertainty. The difficulty of these tasks has led to the creation of organizations that specialize in researching the relative prioritization of causes.

This practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another" has been criticized by Ken Berger and Robert Penna of Charity Navigator for being "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word". William MacAskill responded to Berger and Penna, defending the rationale for comparing one beneficiary's interests against another and concluding that such comparison is difficult and sometimes impossible but often necessary.

Cost-effectiveness

Some charities are considered to be far more effective than others, as charities may spend different amounts of money to achieve the same goal, and some charities may not achieve the goal at all. Effective altruists seek to identify interventions that are highly cost-effective in expectation. Many interventions have uncertain benefits, and the expected value of one intervention can be higher than that of another if its benefits are larger, even if it has a smaller chance of succeeding. Non-profits which undertake health interventions are selected based on their impact as measured by lives extended per dollar, quality-adjusted life years (QALY) added per dollar, or disability-adjusted life years (DALY) reduced per dollar.

Some effective altruist organizations prefer randomized controlled trials as a primary form of evidence, as they are commonly considered the highest level of evidence in healthcare research. Others have argued that requiring this stringent level of evidence unnecessarily narrows the focus to issues where the evidence can be developed. Kelsey Piper argues that uncertainty is not a good reason for effective altruists to avoid acting on their best understanding of the world, because most interventions have mixed evidence regarding their effectiveness. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and others have warned about the "measurement problem", with issues such as medical research or government reform worked on "one grinding step at a time", and results being hard to measure with controlled experiments. Gobry also argues that such interventions risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement.

Counterfactual reasoning

Counterfactual reasoning involves considering the possible outcomes of alternative choices. It has been employed by effective altruists in a number of contexts, including career choice. Many people assume that the best way to help others is through direct methods, such as working for a charity or providing social services. However, since there is a high supply of candidates for such positions, it makes sense to compare the amount of good one candidate does to how much good the next-best candidate would do. According to this reasoning, the marginal impact of a career is likely to be smaller than the gross impact.

Cause priorities

The principles and goals of effective altruism are wide enough to support furthering any cause that allows people to do the most good, while taking into account cause neutrality. Many people in the effective altruism movement have prioritized global health and development, animal welfare, and mitigating risks that threaten the future of humanity.

Global health and development

The alleviation of global poverty

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases