Effective Altruism
The Uncomfortable Math of Doing Good
If you could save a child's life for the price of a restaurant meal, and you chose the restaurant, what does that make you?
The Idea
Effective altruism begins with a deceptively simple premise: if we care about doing good, we should care about doing the *most* good we can with whatever resources we have. Peter Singer, the philosopher most associated with this idea, pointed out in 1972 that physical proximity shouldn't affect moral obligation — the child drowning in front of you and the child dying of a preventable disease on another continent are both dying, and both deaths are preventable. Distance is a fact of geography, not a fact of ethics. What makes this genuinely unsettling is that it doesn't stop at charity. It becomes a framework — sometimes a demanding one — for restructuring decisions. Which causes actually help the most people? Which interventions have strong evidence behind them? If two charities address the same problem but one is ten times more effective, isn't choosing the less effective one a kind of moral waste? The EA movement has done real, rigorous work on this: funding malaria nets, oral rehydration therapy, direct cash transfers to people in extreme poverty. These are verifiably high-impact. But the philosophy also carries tensions. It can crowd out the value of local commitment, personal relationships, and causes that resist easy measurement. And its more recent focus on speculative 'longtermism' — prioritising the welfare of billions of hypothetical future people over present suffering — has drawn serious criticism. The math may be clean. The moral landscape it maps onto is not.
In the World
In 2009, a hedge fund analyst named Matt Wage sat in Peter Singer's applied ethics class at Princeton. What he heard didn't make him want to quit finance — it made him realise he should stay. By taking a high-earning career on Wall Street rather than working directly for a nonprofit, he calculated he could donate enough each year to fund several full-time charity workers, effectively multiplying his impact many times over. He became one of the earliest prominent practitioners of 'earning to give,' a strategy that reframes a lucrative career not as a compromise with idealism but as a vehicle for it. Wage now donates a significant portion of his income — reportedly the majority — to highly effective causes identified by organisations like GiveWell, which evaluates charities using rigorous cost-per-life-saved metrics. His story spread partly because it inverted the expected narrative. We tend to imagine the moral life as one of sacrifice and simplicity. Wage's version looked, from the outside, like a successful career in finance. The sacrifice was invisible — but by EA's own metrics, enormous. This is also where the movement provokes genuine unease. If the logic holds, it doesn't just affect career choices — it affects how much you spend on yourself, on comfort, on things you love. Singer himself has said he donates around a third of his income. The movement he inspired contains people who find that figure far too modest.
Why It Matters
Most of us already give something — time, money, attention — to causes we care about. Effective altruism doesn't ask whether that impulse is good. It asks whether we've thought carefully about *where* that impulse points. You don't have to accept Singer's most demanding conclusions to find this useful. Even the milder version — 'I should probably check whether the charity I donate to actually works' — is genuinely clarifying. Evidence on charitable effectiveness varies wildly, and most donors never look at it. But the deeper provocation is philosophical: EA forces you to ask what you actually believe about the equal worth of lives. If you say you believe all human lives matter equally, EA simply holds you to that. The discomfort many people feel in response isn't necessarily a sign that the philosophy is wrong — it might be a sign that living consistently with our stated values is harder than we assumed. Carrying that tension honestly, rather than resolving it too quickly in either direction, might be the most useful thing this idea can offer.
A Question to Ponder
Is there a meaningful difference between choosing not to help when you easily could, and causing harm directly — and if so, what exactly is that difference?
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