by Rachel Robison-Greene
When people think about what it is to live a successful life, they often think about finding a good job that pays a respectable salary, meeting and making a commitment to a life partner, having children, buying a house, and affording the luxuries that financial success makes possible. Some view success as a zero-sum game; I can only have more if you have less. Success, on this model, is not just keeping up with, but surpassing the Joneses. The Effective Altruism movement has encouraged people to think about success differently. Instead of measuring it by the wealth one accrues, we should instead measure the success of a person’s life by looking at how much good they do.
The Effective Altruist (EA) movement was motivated in no small part by Peter Singer’s 1971 paper, Famine, Affluence, and Morality in which he argues that each of us ought to be doing very much more for the global poor than we are currently doing. The premises of his argument remain true today—most of us do not give a substantial amount of our income to the world’s most impactful charities.
Since its inception in the early 2000’s, the EA movement has energized young people searching for a source of meaning in their lives. To many, it was clear that a life spent in pursuit of a larger and larger bank account balance would always be full of things but lacking in substance. It was equally clear that some problems cause more suffering than others, suffering matters, and that the most meaningful life would involve eradicating as much suffering as possible.
In the intervening years, EA has graduated from college classrooms to Silicon Valley and the pages of top newspapers. If money is needed to solve the globe’s most serious problems, converting top earners to the movement is a promising strategy. In 2023, billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. News coverage surrounding the issue revealed that Bankman-Fried was an Effective Altruist and gave large amounts of money to charity.
Since this news became widely known, attitudes toward EA have shifted, even in academic departments. In April of this year, The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University closed down. The Institute was started in 2005 to explore solutions to problems that pose existential risks to human beings and to identify, in the spirit of EA, how we can go about ending or preventing harms caused by poverty, climate change, wars, pandemics, and the rise of AI, among others.
To many, the Bankman-Fried scandal suggested that, at best, there was something deficient about Effective Altruism and, at worst, that there might actually be something nefarious about it. If EA advocates had such insight into what people are obligated to do, how could a prominent member of the movement do this?
One response is simply to say that we ought not to judge a movement by just one of its members. We should look to the arguments for the position and evaluate those rather than looking to the character of just one notorious adherent. Others might say that, though Bankman-Fried’s actions don’t disprove arguments in favor of EA outright, they might provide evidence that one or more of the premises in support of it might be false. The culprit might be the movement’s seeming reliance on utilitarianism as its underlying moral theory. The case of Bankman-Fried might serve as a powerful motivator for a pluralistic attitude toward both ethics and meaning in life.
First, the case of Bankman-Fried demonstrates that a person can do good things (in this case, donating lots of money to charity) without being a good person. Being a good person might require the cultivation of virtue, which is, in part, to develop strong and reliable dispositions to behave in certain ways in particular situations. EA doesn’t emphasize development of virtue; the good that you do is measured externally by what you’ve done, not by who you are. This doesn’t mean that EA members don’t care about having good characters, it’s just that their theory about what it is to do good doesn’t require them to have them.
Second, EA doesn’t require that we form any particular attachment to the sentient beings we are helping when we donate. There is no call for us to care about the people or animals we help. Doing good needn’t be an act of love, kindness, empathy, or compassion. Determining what constitutes the most good you can do doesn’t involve consulting your feelings, it involves making calculations. In fact, advocates of EA are often concerned about the level of bias that emotions bring to decision-making when it comes to donation.
Relatedly, the EA movement stifles the momentum of small, local charities. The idea that there is an objective answer to the question “how can I do the most good?” directs money in very particular directions. Ethical decision making becomes a very individualistic matter—one has only to look to a website to determine the charities that are best and direct one’s resources there. This has the potential to impact community projects and initiatives. It undermines the idea that ethical behavior is a social activity and that deciding what is best and working toward it requires diverse perspectives and many hands. The compassion, empathy, and love that one develops in caring communities sustains a continued motivation to do care work in the future.
When we think very individualistically about how to do good, we are likely to be subject to confirmation bias. The EA community is dominantly white and male. Many of the problems they identify as most pressing are occurring in regions populated by people of color. One advantage of working out problems in communities with diverse membership is that such environments provide alternative perspectives on both facts and values.
I’ve attempted to make a case that our decision-making suffers when we base our moral decisions on consequences alone. It may also be the case that our sense in meaning in life suffers when we think only about doing good for others. Effective Altruism encourages us to think about moral values, but there are other values in a human life. How should they factor into our thinking about meaning and the good life?
Civic minded people who want to remain well-informed face a common contemporary problem: when they open the news apps on their phones, they are bombarded with things to be worried about. Reports of book bans, attacks on institutions of higher learning, voter suppression tactics, and targeted strategies to benefit politically from racism and xenophobia cause people to fear the rise of fascism. News concerning emerging technology gives rise to concerns that we are entering a technological dystopia. The threats posed by climate change always loom large.
One is left wondering: is it possible for such a civic minded person, concerned with the wellbeing of others and the events of the day, to view the world with wonder? Will the energy and compassion that led them to do the most good they can do eventually be crushed under the weight of the totality of the world’s misery?
What’s more, ethical norms are not the only norms in life. Can such a civic-minded person grant themselves the permission to ignore the many problems in the world, at least for a time, and focus on the beauty of a sunset or the love and company of friends? Can such a person engage in these activities because they are intrinsically valuable and contribute to meaning in life?
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