Can you really save the world by giving to charity?
The Effective Altruism movement and its utilitarian discontents
The front page of the news this morning is, yet again, another Trump-related arrest. This time it’s Roger Stone.
Things pushed to the back of the paper? The Yemeni children who are starving because of our government’s policy toward Iran; the children forcibly separated from their families on our southern border, who are still being treated appallingly; our own citizens’ being duped into a downward spiral of opioid addition due to one of our “greatest” philanthropic families’ false claims about OxyContin, which they make.
Let’s face it, the world could be a better place. But what can we, the little people, do to actually make an impact? Is holding the door open for my annoying colleague enough?
Enter effective altruism!
Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement led foremost by the Princeton-based philosopher Peter Singer, famous for his advocacy on animal welfare. Effective altruism attempts to help us all make the world a better place by using data and analysis in order to work out how to help others as much as possible. They’ve figured out not only which worldly causes are the most pressing, but which jobs we should take to have the most impact, the charities that make the most difference, and more generally, how to give of yourself most effectively.
I have to admit, it’s pretty cool stuff. I’ll finally find out where my birthday money donation will have the most impact in the world, and whether or not engaging with philosophy on the daily is a worthwhile endeavor. (Apparently, it’s not. And since it’s not, what I should do instead.)
There’s something really nice and easy about an approach like this.
So…why don’t more billionaires millionaires regular people listen to effective altruism’s advice, give just a fraction their money to the most pressing causes, and be done with it? Don’t more people want to do good? Have they just not heard about effective altruism?
And that, my friends, leads me to a few of my issues with good ol’ EA.
First, there’s a philosophical one, which questions effective altruism’s utilitarian foundations and whether the goal of steering people into and away from specific jobs, charities, and actions is even the right thing to do.
Second, there’s an empirical macroeconomic argument. While it’s not exactly in direct opposition to effective altruism’s basic assumptions, it does undermine them significantly.
Third, effective altruism specifies some of the “most impactful” things you can do to give of yourself — meaning that have the most bang for your buck, basically. But what if we look at another way to make the world a better place…maybe through a Kantian lens?
So let’s start with the utilitarian problem.
To a utilitarian, the best good is the one that provides the greatest happiness to the greatest number. As an extreme example, this means that if you can save a drowning child in front of you but are wearing a very-difficult-to-unclasp watch that costs $5000 that would perish in the water, the utilitarian would say you should not save the drowning child in front of you, but instead go back to town, sell the still-functioning watch to a pawn shop, send the money to a highly effective charity, and save three children elsewhere. Saving three is better than saving one, right? Of course: it will create more happiness for more people.
Except…well, no.
Because of its obvious utilitarian underpinnings, effective altruism unfortunately has similar fault lines. It overlooks everyday, immediate issues for only the “most pressing” ones facing the world, and calls most of what we all do “low-impact” and therefore unworthy of our time, money, and attention. An effective altruist might say, for instance, that instead of cleaning up your local park on Saturday morning, you should work overtime at your high-paying job and send the money to a bio-risk reduction organization. It would “have more impact”. Or, instead of becoming an English teacher at an average school in an average town, you should make a career of distributing leaflets to reduce meat consumption and lobbying against factory farming.
While I agree that the suffering caused to the animals is immense and horrible, we need English teachers, too. And nurses and astronomers and architects, and volunteers to clean up our local parks, and citizens to attend protests against corrupt government actions. It simply seems foolish to present the picture that we should all be focused on just the top five or even 10 “most pressing” causes. While I think in reality the EA movement doesn’t expect everyone to quit their jobs and hand out leaflets on the corner, their language suggests that because they have “figured out” which are the most impactful issues, we should drop everything and only work towards those things.
But part of what the EA movement is about is that we should do the better thing if it has little cost to ourselves, and that’s precisely the evidence that’s missing from their message. We simply don’t really know if diverting our attention from what we’re doing now — be it teaching English, or cleaning up our parks — in order to focus on their high-impact causes won’t also have a high cost. What would the world look like if we didn’t know how to communicate effectively or our parks became trash dumping grounds? No bueno indeedo!
The next issue with effective altruism is the economic one. One of the most important things the EA movement says we can do is give money to the right places. Like my working overtime example above, it even advocates that for those of us who don’t feel compelled to work directly in a high-impact area, we should go into high-paying professions and give our dollars away to, say, an aid group fighting poverty in the underdeveloped world.
But esteemed economist Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate on consumption, poverty, and welfare, says that whatever the good intentions of aid charities are, they’re likely not actually doing the high-impact good they think they’re doing. In other words, things just aren’t what they seem.
It’s not because the organizations don’t mean well. It’s because economically and empirically, the effects of their work may actually make the aid recipients worse off by taking a short- rather than long-term view; or because the research has been misinterpreted, such as with correlation being mistaken for causation; or because it’s just wrong to assume that what may be working in one area of the world to fight poverty will definitely work in another, which seems to happen often with aid groups.
As an example, some randomized controlled trials say that de-worming children in Kenya may help improve children’s school performance. An aid group might see this and apply the solution to children in Myanmar. But would de-worming also improve school performance in Egypt? How about England? Likely not. And so Deaton’s point is that there’s a line somewhere — and it’s not just a line between “first world” and “third world”, or even how big the problem of worms is in these populations. Maybe Myanmar does have a worm problem, but they might have an even bigger malaria problem, or a much higher gender-unequal society, or an extreme dearth of teachers. So de-worming isn’t a one-size fits all poverty solution, and that makes it only possibly effective where expensive studies have been done (like in that specific area in Kenya), and then that means that…well, maybe it’s not as highly effective as everyone thinks.
And to take it further, Deaton continues that there’s actually conflicting research on whether de-worming even works in Kenya! Hmm. Take note, effective altruists: faulty assumptions will lead to faulty recommendations. So claiming to use evidence-based research to make recommendations doesn’t mean it’s a foolproof method.
So, what if we change the goal and assumptions slightly? What would Kant say about making the world a better place — what is our duty when it comes to doing good? It certainly wouldn’t be about maximizing happiness for the greatest number at the expense of things that produce a “lesser” amount of good, as a utilitarian would champion. Instead of the focus being on numbers and quantifiable data — in other words, the “most” — it might be about doing things that ensure we treat each other with dignity and respect, and that everything we do could be universalizable and without contradiction. It would ensure we treat one another, and by extension animals and earth, as ends, and not merely as a means means for our own benefit.
Onora O’Neill, one of the most eminent Kantian philosophers, in her essay “Kantian Approaches to Some Famine Problems” says that “the Kantian picture of beneficence is less mathematically structured than the utilitarian one. It judges beneficence by its overall contribution to the prospects for human autonomy and not by the quantity of happiness expected to result.”[1] Interestingly, this may not only amend which causes are seen as top priority and most impactful, but also how we should go about remedying these issues.
While our biosecurity is certainly a concern, and AI will impact future generations much more greatly than it affects us today, a Kantian might instead value human freedom in today’s world more. That means ending things like trafficking, coercion, and war, which still affect millions daily; working on sustainability across multiple fields like agriculture, the environment, health care, and governmental and business practices; and increasing opportunities with things like better education, health care, and responsible investments.
While there could be an argument that like the effective altruists, Kantian do-gooders might rank our priorities based on what actions best fulfill the categorical imperative, the opposite argument could also be made: that in order to fulfill the categorical imperative best, we must allow individuals the freedom to decide their own moral priorities, and therefore not rank them at all. After all, one of the most important versions of the categorical imperative is that we must treat others as ends in themselves and never merely as a means; we must respect the fact that each of us is a rational, autonomous being, able to make our own decisions. Ranking assumes a calculable answer, when really, our problems are all interrelated, just as we humans are.
O’Neill also reminds us that for Kant, justice is a “perfect” duty and beneficence, or doing good, is an “imperfect” duty. What that means is not that we have less of a duty to do good. It simply means that unlike our duty to justice, doing good is a boundless choice, and so we must be selective about it. We cannot do it all, and so we must choose. But again, that choice is ours, as autonomous, rational beings. And I personally like living in a world where some people choose to clean up the local park on Saturday mornings.
My final takeaway is this:
Effective altruism is important, maybe more so for drawing our attention to the fact that we could do more good without great cost to ourselves, than for its recommendations on what issues to focus on and how exactly to focus on them. Though that’s valuable too, especially for those of us simply looking for more information and options.
But if your simple “do good” upgrade is to volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving for a couple hours, then don’t waver about it because it might be lower impact than developing a cure for cancer. Just do it. If you can tutor 3rd graders in math at your local library every week, by all means, please do. If you decide to make a career out of engineering driverless cars or developing truly clean energy, then do that.
Because the best good you can do is the good that you want to do, that you keep doing, and that inspires others around you and those in the future to do. Who knows: one day the technology from those driverless cars will save hundreds of people stranded in a climate change-related natural disaster.
And that’s pretty darn good.
[1] O’Neill, Onora. “Kantian Approaches to Some Famine Problems”. In Ethical Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edition, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, pp. 510–520. UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. p. 516.
Danielle Mund is an art historian by training and moral philosopher by nature. She writes from Puerto Rico, sometimes holed up in a cool dark room and sometimes beachside at the Ritz.
