This post is written for anyone already kind of into EA or thinking about EA comms, or who just wants to read my perspective on it. I have 3 thoughts on EA comms I want to get across. For what the specific deal is with EA I’d read the first part of my longer series on it here.

Promoting the ideas should not have to mean promoting any one specific community or individual associated with EA

I think of effective altruism in the same way that I do other big ideas that have influenced me, like specific ideas in philosophy or economics or science. I can talk your ear off about Hilary Putnam or Quine or markets, but I can’t guarantee at all that any one person or group of people who are into Putnam, Quine, or markets will be good to hang out with, professional, or safe. Similarly, while I’m obviously excited to promote EA ideas, I don’t want this to be read as endorsing any one person or org who happens to be into EA. It’s the same reason I’d like to be able to write a lot about why capitalism is so useful without having it read to also mean “And you should like and trust people who identify as capitalists!” I don’t actually believe that.

EA is in a weird place right now. The term is used to mean both the cluster of ideas and the “community” around it, and both are drawing scrutiny at the same time. I was personally involved in building up the EA network in Washington DC, so I’m intertwined with specific communities of people into EA. But even as someone that intertwined, I never meet someone into EA and immediately think “Ah, they must be a good person, I should trust them, and other people should too.” It’s the same experience as meeting a self-identified capitalist or physicalist. All that tells me is that I’ll have a lot to talk to them about on a very very specific topic. So in my writing, my goal isn’t to get my readers to vibe with any one person or org in EA either, but to get across the ideas I like and want to spread.

This all seems so straightforward that it shouldn’t need to be said, but I’m worried that a lot of people are hesitant to write explicitly about what’s been useful to them about EA ideas, because they’re rightly ambivalent about specific ways parts of the EA community have behaved, now or in the past, and they have an understandable fear that writing about the ideas means endorsing some or all of what’s actually been done in the name of those ideas.

I think a lot of us should do a lot more work to separate promoting the ideas from endorsing the people as much as possible. I see the specific people who happened to get into EA as somewhat incidental, and as a small slice of a potentially much larger group of people thinking with the basic mental tools the idea cluster provides. To be clear, there are a ton of people and orgs in the “community” who I’m very honored to be associate with, but also many I’m not at all. Any suggestion that by identifying with the ideas you’re also identifying with the specific people who hold them seems harmful to taking the ideas themselves seriously.

None of this is to say that anyone should feel obligated to promote EA ideas if they’ve been put off by the people involved. It’s only to say that if you’re considering communicating EA ideas that have been useful to you, you should know that you have zero obligation to defend or associate with any one of the people or orgs currently associated with EA (or even most of them). This is one of many reasons I’d personally like to drop the “community” framing of EA that I mentioned in this other post. I’ll go into that in a lot more detail in the next few.

I’m writing more posts in this series on how EA has influenced my thinking. If you, dear reader, have enjoyed “my thinking” in general, it’s difficult to get across just how many of the mental moves I’m making have their roots in the EA intellectual scene. I’m hoping the rest of the series will make that clearer. I see the brand of effective altruism as basically a useful bridge to these ideas, and I want to keep that bridge solid so that other people can get the specific value out of them that I did. What I’m not trying to do is argue that anyone else who’s crossed the bridge must be a great person you should trust with power and influence.

I do want to clear up a lot of misconceptions about us, about that bridge, and about the cluster of ideas it leads to. Most of all, I want to try to show why I and so many other people continue to be attracted to an idea that many have come to associate with simple-minded, one-dimensional utilitarian bullet-biting social games that no serious person could entertain. Underneath that surface-level impression there is in fact a very dynamic idea cluster that’s wildly different from the average person’s understanding of it. I think we could use a lot more well-rounded adults who are willing to try to write clearly about what that underlying idea cluster is actually like, who feel zero obligation to defend “the EA community,” and who know they can speak freely about any people or orgs they don’t like or agree with in it.

The good quadrant of EA comms

I think of a lot of effective altruist comms as existing in two of four quadrants:

If you can’t tell, I’m not a big fan of the bottom left quadrant. I really don’t think we need to write more books or blog posts about how we “just want to do good” and how EA is just about “doing the most good,” because it’s not. The value I personally get out of the idea cluster feels far removed from “doing the most good” in the abstract, because I realize how philosophically contentious that idea is.

The kind of thing critics mean when they talk about effective altruism isn’t the (still under-discussed) fact that you can compare charities to each other and some are wildly more effective than others. They specifically mean the glued-together cluster of ideas around ethics, philosophy of mind, evolution (for thinking about animals and AI), evolutionary psychology (for trying to understand why people, including people into EA, often fall short of their lofty moral language), markets and economics, history, and trying to get at truth in general that make up what both I and critics of EA see as the core of the idea. I think this idea cluster looks completely insane when you only look at its strange outputs (AGI might happen soon, we should probably donate way more abroad or to animals than we are, and a lot of people are getting these questions wrong), but compelling once you’ve seen the full picture and the reasons smart, well-rounded adults might be drawn to it.

I think there are a lot of great examples of this type of communication (the 80,000 Hours podcast and article series, Cold Takes, plenty of blog posts, etc.), but I consistently feel like I don’t have enough resources on these ideas that I can send to my own smart, well-rounded friends in their 30s to help them understand what I specifically see as so special about the idea cluster, despite seeing what I’d personally say if I had time so clearly. A lot of the best EA writing isn’t even labeled as EA, so people leave without making the connection. That’s why I’m taking a shot at writing the series I’d like to send those people. I’d basically like to contribute to the very top of the top left quadrant, and I think this is the main thing a lot of EA comms is missing right now.

To be blunt, I think it looks a little ridiculous at this moment to start skeptics off in the shallow end of the pool, guiding them with baby steps through “Well, suppose you wanted to do MORE good, where would you go next?” This is condescending to smart people. My goal in my own writing is to basically start way way way in the deep end, and just trust that people will follow me if I use clear, accessible language to get across what’s going on in that deep end and what’s interesting to me about it. I know a lot of other people who have been motivated by these ideas are also capable of this, but I’m worried they’re limiting their vision of EA comms to object-level “See look at this individual neat thing I did that’s broadly popular, AND I’m into effective altruism!” I’d personally really love to hear a few people who have done lots of interesting stuff go into much more depth about what the actual idea cluster has been like and done for them in a lot of specific detail, that could make their entire honest thinking about what they’re doing clear and compelling to someone who hadn’t bumped into EA before.

I’d like to fill more of that top left quadrant with what I’d want to say to a smart friend in their 30s about what’s actually up with the ideas popular in EA, and why the cluster is interesting to me. Right now I can see other people trying to do this, but I still find there’s a huge amount I’d want to say that isn’t being said. I personally know a lot of people I’d trust to do a good job walking any smart person I know through what’s up in the EA idea cluster, but they’re mostly too busy to write or otherwise communicate. I cannot tell you how much comms about EA ideas needs more hands on deck to preserve the bridge to these ideas that I think are so useful. (And remember, I’m talking about the ideas here. I’m really not asking you to defend every last part of “the community.”)

If you’re on the fence about trying to communicate what’s up in EA, I’d very strongly encourage you to try your best at writing something for the top left corner of that top left quadrant. Write something that would’ve been clear and useful and direct for your past self about what’s actually up at a high level, and where the most useful ideas are, without holding back disagreement or disapproval or anything else you actually think. You might be surprised at what you have to say.

I’d like a lot more people writing about what they actually think about EA ideas at this high level, that would fit in this top left quadrant, and less stuff that sounds like a sales pitch.

Building bridges to weird beliefs

A lot of people first stumble on EA ideas when they’re in their 20s, because so much of the package is oriented around careers. In your 20s, it’s easy to be attracted to ideas that make you stand out, that make you feel ascended beyond everyday people, and that you can use as a kind of conversational spell to signal to “normies” that you’re so above caring whether they think you’re weird. EA supplies these in bulk, and since it’s so appealing to people in their 20s, you often get people into EA flashing the weirdness in everyone else’s faces. I basically think this is a unique disaster. It destroys the very easy bridge we could build to everyday smart people, and treats those people as so stupid that they couldn’t possibly be worth reaching.

In my last year of teaching, I got the chance to teach a philosophy class (“Theory of Knowledge” in the IB curriculum, for those of you in the know). Toward the end of the year, after the IB tests were done, we had some free time, and I decided to present the drowning child thought experiment. I was averse to sharing anything about my life or ideology with my students, so they didn’t know anything about EA. But I found that over the course of the conversation, they kind of reinvented EA from first principles. At one point, one student said “Well obviously, everyone’s obligated to donate almost all of their money,” and then another said “No wait… what if you’re working on something so important that you need to stay comfortable enough to work on it?” That conversation was a microcosm of the history of good and terrible ideas in EA. Turns out these ideas are easy not only to communicate but to arrive at independently!

More recently, now that AI existential risk has gone mainstream, it’s become incredibly easy to have high-level conversations about basically anything related to AI with anyone I meet. This is a good time to build bridges!

I’m worried that a lot of people who are thinking about EA comms right now are basically thinking in terms of managing the “weird” beliefs that everyday people won’t get, or they think of their “weird” beliefs as something that they need to just accept most people will never think about, and instead just weather the storm of public criticism and remain unpopular. I’ve personally become an optimist on this, and think we’re living in a time when people are much, much more willing to entertain most if not all of the “weird” ideas that fall out of the EA ideological cluster, like the now apparently common view that AI could be radically, maybe dangerously, capable soon. I’d prefer people just try to write directly and clearly for a general audience to build bridges to our weird ideas, instead of treating them as landmines to be avoided in public comms.

Thinking about every conversation as full of landmines that “normies” won’t get is basically a recipe for condescending to your audience, and it’s very, very easy for most people to pick up on when they’re being condescended to. Instead of writing the most watered-down, PR-compliant, vague post that says absolutely nothing interesting or new, it might be good to just rip off the bandaid and try writing the way you’d write to a smart, skeptical friend. Way, way more people are like your smart, skeptical friends than you might think, and communicating with them well means thinking hard about actually building bridges to what you think.

• Basically everyone would like the world to be better in obvious ways, like fewer people dying early or living in poverty. But it’s very easy to get caught up in our own lives and problems.

• Sticking your neck out to say that something is badly wrong costs you something, and actually trying to fix it costs a lot more.

• So a lot of ongoing simple and obvious catastrophes go unaddressed, like deadly diseases in poor countries that can be easily prevented with cheap vitamin supplements, or the treatment of animals on factory farms, or the possibility that highly intelligent, capable machines could be uniquely dangerous, because they’re far away, or weird, or hard to fix from scratch, or because nobody gets much credit for working on them.

A lot of our sense of what we should work on, what’s most worthy of good hardworking people, comes from what the people around us admire and notice, which I talk about a lot in my last post on EA. That works fine for lots of big problems, but it also means urgent, terrible problems far away or outside the view of our normal social communities tend to lose out to much smaller ones close to home.

Effective altruism (EA) is basically an attempt to push back against this. It’s a cluster of ideas oriented around using our best evidence and careful reasoning to find the biggest problems that the rest of the world is neglecting and figure out how to actually help in the most quantifiably good way, plus the loose network of people trying to act on them. (If you’ve heard of it lately, it was probably as an insult in a political fight over AI).

Here’s the short version of the EA I’d like to defend:

• We should take the world’s worst problems seriously, even when they’re far away or strange or unpopular. It is terrible that hundreds of millions of people live in extreme poverty, factory farming is a clear ethical disaster, and the threat that we might lose control of society to AI systems vastly smarter than us needs to be taken more seriously. There are strong moral reasons to devote significant resources (money, time, organizing) to solving these problems, including at some personal cost.

• We ought to use numbers and explicit cost-benefit analysis where they work… Giving $10,000 to one charity means not giving it to another, so it’s important to compare charities that do similar things. Charities that provide anti-malarial bed nets save more lives per dollar than many other global health charities. Simply counting lives respects people’s basic dignity and freedom, because their personal choices or values don’t come into the equation for whether they deserve help.

• … but pluralism and respect for other people as free agents are foundational starting points we can’t override. We should among other things reject confident exchange rates between cause areas. We all live surrounded by free people with wildly different moral views, and society works because each of us makes compromises in our own ethics so that everyone can pursue their own vision of the good life. A totalizing utilitarianism ignores this background compromise. A corollary is that choosing which causes to prioritize can’t be reduced to utilitarian math.

• We should have a strong presumption toward helping others in ways they’re free to turn down (like bed nets, vitamins, and unconditional cash transfers). Utilitarian comparison works best as a way of choosing between interventions that expand people’s freedom and dignity, including their capacity for self-determination. We should also have a strong presumption against biting the bullet of any ethical system that would override people’s decisions about the course of their lives.

• Ordinary rules about honesty, money, power, and personal/professional boundaries still apply, no matter our perceived ability to rationally analyze our choices. Society’s rules are often good in themselves, and people are too fallible and too swayed by their social scenes and status to safely reason their way past them. No one should feel obligated to justify longstanding social rules and conventions around basic decency from first principles. They often exist for reasons much deeper than we can immediately grasp using reason.

• EA works best as a cluster of ideas and a loose professional network (a lot like the YIMBY movement) rather than a “community.” When one set of beliefs decides your job, funding, housing and friends, changing your mind or speaking up gets far too costly.

Part of the reason this cluster is so important to me is that it still often works magic and feels like one of the most intellectually vibrant and fruitful scenes in the world. Our work on factory farming is a good example of the good aspects of EA at its best. Taking it seriously is unpopular (many people don’t know how bad it is, or wave away the idea that animals can feel pain) and inconvenient (nobody wants to give up cheap meat), and EA treats it as one of the biggest problems in the world anyway.

Other things EA has managed to do:

• It has prevented a major war’s worth of deaths, mostly from malaria (GiveWell, a charity evaluator, estimates that the donations it has directed have saved more than 340,000 lives).

• It helped push the share of American egg-laying hens that are cage-free from under one in ten in 2015 to almost half today.

• It started building a whole professional field around the potentially massive risks from advanced AI most of a decade before ChatGPT came out. Some EA thinking about AI from years ago still feels shockingly fresh and relevant.

Because of its track record, and how compelling the EA intellectual scene has been, I’ve been publicly associated with and representing effective altruism for the past 5 years, and was a longtime follower of EA debates and ideas in the 10 years before that. It’s shaped my thinking in the same way my other core political and philosophical beliefs have.

Of course, effective altruist ideas have also led to a lot of harm. Sam Bankman-Fried, a major donor who linked himself closely to EA, defrauded depositors of billions of dollars. EA spaces have sometimes tended toward social and intellectual insularity. EA has taken a lot of criticism over the last few years, and while some of it has been in bad faith, some of it has been completely fair.

The same source of EA’s biggest successes is also the source of its biggest risks: if you step outside what the people around you take for granted, that is both how you identify gigantic, obvious problems no one else is working on, but it’s also how people convince themselves that the normal rules don’t apply to them anymore and how they become intellectually insular and isolated. The principles above are the version of EA I’m excited to defend, one that preserves the first and aims to be much better at avoiding the second. This view is rooted in my specific view of ethics and politics, that differs from totalizing utilitarianism, places much more emphasis on human choice and freedom, but still takes many of the trade-offs and choices EA pushes us to consider deeply seriously.

What I’m describing is somewhere between my favorite version of EA as it already exists and a new clear direction I’d like it to move in, learning from its successes and failures so far, and my views on both the value and limits of utilitarian thinking and comparisons. Plenty of people in EA already live by this version, and I’d like it to be easier to point to. This post is meant to plant a basic flag for my high-level principles. I’ve articulated my basic case for EA in much more detail in my last post on it. In future posts I’ll explore in much more detail how I think about EA, what I love about it, the specific version I want to represent, and where I’d like us to reform and change.

The effective altruist story of the world

The core story effective altruism tells about the world, which was already there in the drowning child thought experiment that a lot of the movement grew from, is that the ways we go about doing good, whether through our donations or our careers, are often strongly determined by what we believe will get us social status or otherwise help us get ahead. There’s good reason to think our higher-level thinking itself evolved to help us win social games, so when we set out to find “how to do good,” a lot of what we’re actually doing is picking up on subtle social vibes around different causes, trying to suss out what the “good” (often meaning high-status) people work on and believe in.

This is not inherently bad or useless. Status systems communicate a lot of useful information. Society often gives status to things because they really are useful, just not in ways that can be clearly articulated to every person affected by the push and pull of what we give status to. So social status behaves a lot like a market, with the behavior of billions of people together determining how much status different things get, without any central planner making the final decision. A lot of our inclination to do good is really an inclination to respond to these market incentives. And that’s good! It keeps society running, helps us live together, and often helps us respond to subtle human needs that can’t be clearly articulated through direct argument. When I say status is like a market, I mean both that markets are phenomenally efficient and that status isn’t always bad. The status we give our friends is not meaningless evolutionary noise, just like the money a local baker receives for a cupcake isn’t the full story of what happened in the act of making it.

But like any market, this one has deep failures and missed opportunities. Our sense of how to do good was built for the small bands of early humans we evolved in, who couldn’t meaningfully affect the world far away from them. We now live in a hyper-globalized world of over 8 billion people, and can affect almost any of them by donating to the right places. We also have unbelievable sci-fi control over the world, to the point that we could bathe the entire planet in nuclear fire if we wanted to. Among other things, we now farm hundreds of billions of animals every year. Despite our strong evolved intuition that the world will mostly stay the way it was when we grew up, the last 200 years have seen constant, previously unimaginable technological change, and the near future might bring new technologies that upend our safety at least as much as nuclear weapons did a mere 80 years ago. In this environment, our evolved intuitions around goodness and status are much blunter instruments than they used to be for figuring out where we could actually do the most good. To rely on them completely because they feel right and normal and good, and to never be willing to override what immediately feels virtuous or what your peers (or society more broadly) are encouraging you to do, seems at the very least like an unserious way of living, a way of not fully thinking through the situation we’re in. It seems like a form of playing pretend. EA is one of many ways I try to think more seriously about ethics and complicate my immediate sense of what’s good.

A metaphor I like for two types of thinking is serial vs. parallel processing. In serial processing, you follow logic from premises to conclusions, step by step. In parallel processing, you “vibe it out.” You pick up on subtle, inarticulable aspects of the world and respond to them. When you do a math or physics problem, you’re thinking serially. When you pick up on a social cue or sense you’re in danger, you’re thinking in parallel. Most of our thinking is actually an incredibly complex mix of both. Importantly, we didn’t really evolve to do consistent, thorough serial thinking without having it easily thrown off by the vibes of parallel processing. Thinking step by step is much more cognitively demanding. As Dennett says in Consciousness Explained:

Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us.

In the evolutionary environment, serial thinking about morality probably wasn’t very useful. Social cohesion was a matter of life and death, and relied on members of the group not randomly getting some idea in their heads that seemed logical and right but didn’t fit what the group needed from them. Our desire to look virtuous to our peers was heavily selected for, regardless of its effects on the wider world, which we had little ability to affect anyway. How would evolution even select for what “had good effects on the world” far beyond us?

Of course, our moral intuitions have also evolved alongside society. Modern people’s moral intuitions are wildly different from those of people thousands of years ago, and it’s not a coincidence that they now line up with a lot of very complex ways of behaving that happen to make a complex society function remarkably well. Our general respect for and good treatment of strangers, and the corresponding ability to trade with and benefit from people very different from us who live far away and well outside our immediate networks, is a relatively new and miraculous development in the history of humanity. But society has changed, and keeps changing, so much that even our newer moral intuitions often can’t tell apart the very different levels of impact we can have on the world. They’re still too blunt for our hyper-globalized, hyper-technological situation.

So to circle back to effective altruism, this is the core story it tells about the world:

Our thinking about ethics and about what we should do is often heavily structured around what will give us social status. This isn’t necessarily bad, because social status is like a complex market, which can both communicate a lot of useful information and incentivize a lot of pro-social behavior. But this market is likely to have gigantic failures, places where it drastically misjudges where we could do the most good, because our moral intuitions ultimately come from a very different situation, where we lived in small, close-knit bands in a world we mostly couldn’t affect, rather than in a world of 8 billion people where each of us can affect lives on the other side of the planet with a simple donation. While our moral intuitions and status systems have evolved to keep up with our changing situation, the world has changed so fast in the last few hundred years that there are likely massive gaps between our moral sense of what we can do and what we can actually do. There are lots of other serious belief systems and ways of investigating the world that have been phenomenally successful at finding truth (including what looks like moral truth), and we should defer to them (people into EA are quite deferential to scientific and philosophical consensus where it exists). But the new world we’re in is so strange and vast, and people are so averse to thinking step by step about doing good, that other moral market failures likely persist. We should try our best to find them, compare them, and act on the best ones.

Getting more concrete

It’s rare for people to actually try to think step by step about what they’re doing overall.

A lot of our core beliefs about ourselves and the world are surprisingly surface-level. One of the most humbling experiences is sitting down with a blank Google Doc and trying to type out a detailed explanation of some belief that’s important to you and guides a lot of your life, or what you’re ultimately trying to do with your career, or your life plan in general, or why you donate to the charities you do. Things you believed you “think about a lot” might turn out to be a few slogans you repeat in your head over and over while you’re at the grocery store. Our own minds are pretty opaque to us. We often think we’re doing deep, premise-to-conclusion serial thinking about the problems we care about, when in fact we’re just basking in the warm glow of status we get from turning simple slogans over in our heads. A lot of my own “serious thinking about economics” looks more like me offhandedly thinking “Markets communicate information. Hayek! I’m so smart” and feeling great about it while I wait in line at Trader Joe’s. My most popular post was basically a long meditation on how we do this when learning about the world, and how to avoid it.

This doesn’t make sense if you think of the world as a sequence of rational, thought-out decisions by actors carefully weighing every trade-off. It does make sense if you think of human society as mostly guided by markets for social status, where our behavior and thinking are strongly pulled toward whatever makes us feel we’re doing or believing the right thing, and careful serial thinking about what we’re doing is much more demanding and unpleasant. When we do think step by step, we regularly bump up against our own failures or lack of knowledge or seriousness, all things our brains are hard-wired to avoid.

But doing it also often yields a surprising amount of useful insight.

There are many ways of thinking serially about the world (my favorites being physics and analytic philosophy) that have been remarkably successful at overriding our longstanding moral and factual beliefs and getting us to better behavior or deeper moral truth. The specific goal of EA is to scout out the most important of these that are still left to find, the ones that seem robustly good after wrestling with all the reasons we have to be uncertain, and that merely require us to think step by step about how to live coherently with what we value in this new sci-fi world.

This is a good time to come back to the drowning child argument for giving much more to global charity. Here’s the argument as Peter Singer originally wrote it:

I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.

My next point is this: if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. By “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent. This principle seems almost as uncontroversial as the last one. It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and to promote what is good, and it requires this of us only when we can do it without sacrificing anything that is, from the moral point of view, comparably important. I could even, as far as the application of my argument to the Bengal emergency is concerned, qualify the point so as to make it: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.

I do not think I need to say much in defense of the refusal to take proximity and distance into account. The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. If we accept any principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality, or whatever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us (or we are far away from him). Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a better position to judge what needs to be done to help a person near to us than one far away, and perhaps also to provide the assistance we judge to be necessary. If this were the case, it would be a reason for helping those near to us first. This may once have been a justification for being more concerned with the poor in one’s town than with famine victims in India. Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation. From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a “global village” has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation. Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block. There would seem, therefore, to be no possible justification for discriminating on geographical grounds.

From Famine, Affluence, and Morality

This thought experiment is, among other things, a way to snap you awake into the hyper-globalized world we’re in, out of the still very strong moral illusion that we live in small hunter-gatherer bands and can only affect the people right in front of us. In reality, there are enormous numbers of invisible levers floating in front of each of us that we can pull at any time, each with some effect on other people’s lives, and some with unimaginably larger effects than others. These levers go undetected by the status games around us, and at times even by the more complex and nuanced ethical systems that have arisen to keep pace with modernity, because the world has just moved too fast for most people to intuitively sense how much real impact they can have now.

One of these levers is donating to specific malaria charities, which can reliably prevent one death from malaria for roughly every $5,000 donated.

This fact, that each of us could save a real person’s life for a meaningful but still small fraction of our annual income (the median American household makes $87,000 per year), seems at first like one interesting moral claim among many, but once you think through its implications, a lot of our behavior looks kind of absurd. For example, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has been an unimaginable catastrophe, with around 600,000 people killed since the war began. I don’t want to cheapen what’s happened, and to be clear, I’m not saying “the money spent on this war should have been donated to charity instead.” Instead, consider that the budget of the school district I taught in (Fairfax County, admittedly one of the largest in the country) is about $4 billion per year. 600,000 x $5,000 = $3 billion. So politicians in Fairfax County, Virginia could get together and say “Hey all, we’re going to double the taxes you pay into the school system for exactly one year, which will be a lot, and donate all of it to anti-malaria and similarly effective charities, but by doing this our one county will prevent an entire Ukraine war’s worth of deaths in a single year, just spread around the world.” If a single American county had the opportunity to prevent a major war’s worth of deaths with one policy change for one year, that would be major news! We wouldn’t treat it as one interesting decision among many. “Oh, this one random county could’ve prevented a whole war’s worth of deaths, but decided not to. They want to focus on infrastructure!” That would be pretty shocking.

And yet we all do have this collective opportunity, and it mostly goes undiscussed. When I bring it up, people often treat it as one interesting fact among many, go on with their days, and get morally fired up about things that don’t seem nearly as consequential, and that I don’t think even they would believe are nearly as consequential if they spent some time writing out how those things compare to malaria. But people often just never think to do these comparisons at all. If they took the time to seriously consider how they use their resources, I think they would often come to different conclusions. My claim here isn’t that malaria is the one big cause every smart person needs to care about, only that it’s evidence that many people won’t even take the first step in seeking out ethical market failures unless really pushed. Malaria looks like a cause that would get a lot, lot, lot more attention if people actually sat down and thought step by step about what they’re doing with their charitable donations. It wouldn’t fade into the background as one interesting problem among many. For a lot of people, donating to fight malaria would seem much more urgent than most other things they could donate to, for the same reason it would seem drastically important for a single county to prevent a major war if it could.

There are of course problems with this thought experiment. Malaria kills around 600,000 people every year, so that’s the very maximum malaria charities could possibly prevent. And malaria charities hit diminishing returns. It gets harder to prevent each additional death once the easier cases are covered, so the cost per life would rise well before we got anywhere near that many people saved in a year. But there are a lot of other ways to spend $5,000 that save or come close to saving a life (malaria is just one of the causes GiveWell directs money to). Once malaria crosses some cost threshold, you can divert money to the next cheapest way of saving a life, and a single county in Virginia can still prevent a major war’s worth of deaths in a year.

Individuals, and large groups of individuals, could make moves like this whenever they’d like, each preventing at least one unnecessary death per year by donating to the right places, and collectively preventing major wars’ worth of them. Yet it often doesn’t get talked about at all. When people first hear the basic argument for “effective” giving, that we should direct our donations wherever they save the most lives, their reaction is often “That’s so obvious, why would you even need a special name for that?” It may seem obvious, but almost no one does it, anywhere. Walk around where you live and, as you pass people or homes, ask yourself “What are the odds this person has actually sat down to work out where their donations would go the farthest in saving lives or otherwise doing good? Have they compared the options available to them?” For the vast majority of people I’ve spoken to, the answer seems to be no, even though a few hours spent comparing the options would probably let the same amount of money change vastly more real people’s lives. Why not? Why doesn’t this happen?

There are a lot of reasons, but it’s useful to keep in mind that most people aren’t invested in thinking step by step about their donations, rigorously following premises to conclusions without first sussing out how those conclusions fit into their social sense of what will make them seem important. Thinking step by step is often arduous, we didn’t evolve to do much of it, and we often don’t even do it when planning our own careers!

If you talk to people about donating to malaria bed nets, they’ll often quickly exit the act of thinking through the problem with you, and let their parallel-processing sense that “this isn’t actually one of the cool things to care about right now” take over. They’ll come up with strange justifications you know they wouldn’t later endorse. They’ll repeat simple slogans they haven’t thought much about. Some of my more left-wing friends have told me bed nets are bad because “we need systematic change” instead, but then don’t go on to criticize similar one-off donations to people in need when they’re local.

This doesn’t always happen, to be clear. People also give thoughtful answers about why it makes sense to donate elsewhere, or not to donate at all. I’m not saying that people’s beliefs about malaria nets are a sign they’re ideologically asleep. What does strike me is that so many people, who spend so much of their lives guided by specific modern moral systems, treat the fact that we could collectively prevent major wars’ worth of deaths about the same as any other random fact about the world, and won’t follow along with thinking through what it implies about how we should behave, or will come up with on-the-spot justifications for not donating to effective causes that they probably wouldn’t endorse with a little more thought. Again, this suggests there could be massive, simple ethical market failures created by our status systems that most big ideologies today miss, and that could be found by just applying serial thinking, of writing out a Google Doc of what we actually know about the options available to us. EA is about trying to find those market failures with serial thinking, and to work out which look most promising to work on and which a lot of different moral views converge on once the facts are in front of them (or in slogan form, “using reason and evidence to do the most good we can with our time and resources”).

Another key part of seeking out ethical market failures is that they should look reliably good from a lot of different ethical perspectives. The idea that you ought to prevent someone from dying of malaria when the cost to you is a few minutes of thinking carefully about your donations seems like a very strong reason to do it whether you’re a utilitarian or a deontologist, a Christian or a Muslim. This isn’t to say there’s some objective morality written into the universe that we believe we can find, only that we want to take actions that look good under a lot of different possible moral systems, and it’s surprisingly easy to use serial thinking to find actions that look “robustly” better than others, meaning clearly good across a wide range of ethical assumptions.

So to recap: the core of EA is the idea that simply applying step-by-step thinking to the ways you do good (which, again, is rare, because we mostly didn’t evolve to do it and are often socially incentivized against it) can yield new options that look so robustly better for our values that letting them fade into the background of everything else we do looks ridiculous, and that people should just take this step and do things like simple cost-benefit analysis of the charities they donate to. When we do, we often find that the best things we could do are hidden from us, can have thousands of times the impact we care about (like saving lives) compared to what we were doing before, and look surprisingly compelling from a lot of different basic moral perspectives. So, as just some guy in DC, I can reliably prevent someone from dying of malaria every year because I’m careful about comparing where to donate. If I weren’t, it’d be extremely easy for my charitable giving to never prevent a single death.

If you want a sense of how this serial thinking looks in practice, a good place to start is the 80,000 Hours problem profiles, which guide you step by step through what they see as the most important problems in the world to work on. Reading a lot of writing like this in the 2010s, which tried to walk rational people through the full comprehensive deal with complex global problems without relying on social passwords or going along with the coolest things to work on at the time, and which was one of the few places online that actually tried to put numbers on all these different interventions, had a big influence on how I write. I credit a lot of my own blog’s success to the style I picked up from the blogs I was lurking on back then.

The main cause areas of EA (global health, animal welfare, AI safety, biosecurity) grow out of this intuition. Each is based on a plausible idea that doesn’t get much social status, so it doesn’t get considered much, and that also has the potential to be massively, robustly important:

• People in rich countries like the United States can save the lives of people in poor countries with modest donations to the right charities, which often drastically outperform local charities in lives saved per dollar.

• Animals aren’t just automatons, and may have complex forms of happiness and suffering that matter morally.

• Humanity could last a very long time, so if we go extinct or civilization collapses, this seems like a uniquely large loss.

• AI might gain most of the economically relevant abilities of the human mind sometime this century, and the consequences could be insane. (This one has gone mainstream.)

Each of these is complicated, and brilliant people disagree with them. But there are also (especially for animals) very strong social biases against even considering them in the first place, which leaves open the possibility of a massive market failure. At best, a lot of people react with “Oh wow, neat idea” and keep these in their pockets as talking points to bring up every now and then. A big goal of effective altruist thinking is to not do that, to not collect neat ideas and fold them into your current status game, but to behave as if they’re really real, as if they reflect something actually happening in the world that ought to shake you into behaving at least somewhat differently, and to act the way your future or past self would want you to if you suddenly discovered you really lived in a world like this. To then reason through what else we can know and do about the problem, and try our best to act on it under uncertainty instead of letting it become another neat conversational move.

Behaving as if the world exists beyond our status games

I worked at a summer camp when I was a teenager. Once, a camper crossing a bridge suddenly gripped the railing and started breathing heavily. A counselor asked what was wrong, and the kid turned to him and said “This is all REAL.”

“What? Yeah.”

“No, really, like us being here right now, and the bridge, and the world. It’s all REAL.”

I think this is a relatively common experience. A lot of the time, the world can feel somewhat fake. We go through the motions of our lives and a lot of what we see starts to feel like a dream, or like some kind of rehearsal while we wait for the life where things are real to start. It can take effort to remember that the faces we pass every day have lives just as complex as ours, never mind that the rest of the world is actually happening too, with billions of people in it. Sometimes the sense that our lives are real, that this is all really happening, suddenly floods us, or comes to us gradually as we live more in line with what we actually think is valuable.

For a lot of people moved by the basic EA story of the world, I think a key shared intuition is that thinking step by step about how to do good is a way of letting the world beyond our status games actually reach us, of taking it seriously as really existing out there beyond our little games, and of trying our best to work out how to live most coherently with our values in a world far bigger than the part of it we can see. Of letting the full unimaginable complexity and depth of the world beyond our friends briefly flood us, and try to act and respond seriously after being so overwhelmed. To not laugh it off because it doesn’t perfectly align with the social status detectors in our brains, and instead to follow the real facts about it to whatever conclusions they support about how we ought to behave, to do the best we can with the actual state of the world beyond our little corner of it. To put numbers on things, to compare the costs of saving abstract people far away, is to treat those people as really existing, whether or not we ever hear the specific story that would make us feel for them. Someone just as real as a close friend could get to live out their life because of your decision to donate to a malaria charity.

Another motivation is to behave like adults, like how our past selves would have wanted adults to behave. The idea “you should carefully compare the charities you donate to to figure out which will have the best effect on the world” seems so obvious that you’d expect most adults to do it, and yet these “adults” mostly don’t exist. The world is reliably more nuanced, but also more goofy, than you immediately expect, and its full goofiness can often be revealed by just following a chain of thought like “are people actually taking the incredibly easy opportunities to impact the world in line with their values?”

I also find that a lot of people who are into effective altruism, myself included, have at some point felt burned by a moral flare-up we were part of. Things that gave us so much meaning, that seemed so important in the moment, that turned out to be a game we were playing with ourselves and the people around us, that wouldn’t have survived much serial thinking at all. They maybe wouldn’t have withstood even a single Google Doc page of clear premise-to-conclusion thinking about what we were trying to do. As you get older, you start to look out for what you won’t regret, for what will let you feel at home with yourself later on. There’s a deep appeal in using serial thinking not just to access the world, but to live coherently with what your past and future self would’ve hoped you’d do. To gain some distance from any one specific cause you care about, and to invest more of your emotions into the act of adjusting, over time, toward what you actually think is worthwhile. You want to live sincerely.

Over the past 10 years, the world has felt more and more prone to mass movements and moral panics. While EA has generated a lot of weird behavior itself, it has also in some ways been a useful ideological haven from the constant demands to get maximally fired up about the thing of the moment, which usually dissipates into nothing shortly after. Some people have developed strange defense mechanisms against being captured by these panics, leaning hard into nihilism or performative cruelty to show they won’t be mind-hacked. I think this gives way too much power to the sources of the mind-hacking, and I’d rather calmly and technocratically assess the claims from an emotional distance.

This worldview only goes so far

Obviously, this story is also incredibly dangerous. Any story that tells you that you can easily ascend beyond your local status games should be treated with extreme suspicion, because humans are much more social and status-oriented than this simple story implies, and what’s waiting for you beyond your immediate status games can be much worse. Those games exist in part to protect us from new and worse social dynamics that can warp our thinking, be exploited by charming sociopaths, or lead us to believe the normal ethical rules constraining everyday people don’t apply to us anymore. While I’ve loved, and been excited to represent, large parts of the network of people who identify with EA, it doesn’t surprise me at all that loose associations of people organized around the idea that we should investigate the ways we’re taught to do good and try to transcend them through reason have at times led to everything from stultifying groupthink to outright cataclysm. Nothing written into this worldview prevents people who believe it from committing horrible evil, or from being led astray by the strange, invisible new status systems that exist in these peripheral social spheres. Holding views that normal society doesn’t reward can itself turn into a status symbol, and into a status market of its own. EA at its worst can also fall into what Dan Williams calls “naive realism,” where we believe we’ve simply ascended to the brute ethical truth of the world and can easily perceive it.

So whenever I write about what I think is so special about effective altruism, I’m not going to hype up the community. I think the community has collectively saved at minimum tens of thousands of lives and done incredible good for animals, and I increasingly feel proud of a lot of our work in AI safety, but I also see horrible decisions continuing to be made that harm people into the idea, and the world more broadly.

I’ve always approached EA with a pretty heavy epistemic conservatism, and a wariness of abstract human reason. The piece of writing that had the single biggest effect on the way I think was Charles Sanders Peirce’s Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, which notes:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.

I can’t follow a lot of people in EA when their thinking gets too abstract. But I don’t think it’s possible to engage deeply with EA arguments and come away honestly dismissive of the idea that EA has stumbled on some profound ethical problems that deserve way more help than they’re getting, or of the more general point that there’s disturbingly little serial thinking in the world about how to do good (or even how to pick a career). One of my favorite ethics papers is Evan Williams’s “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe,” which lays out the case that, just given human history, we are very likely in the middle of unseen, gigantic moral catastrophes right now, exactly the kind we’re often stunned that past people lived alongside without trying to solve or even thinking about much. EA is one specific tool for finding these and trying to act on them, and it needs to be surrounded by a lot of outside moral and epistemic rules to keep you from drifting into the more dangerous dynamics of believing you’ve ascended above mere human social games. Here, my personal rules for not going ideologically crazy have come in handy.

It seems obvious to me that a central tragedy of the human condition is that two things are true at once: we are almost certainly living with and tolerating horrific ethical catastrophes that we would act on if we could see them clearly, and attempting to rise above our social situation to identify and solve those invisible catastrophes is itself unspeakably dangerous, carrying the threat of ideological extremism to the point of cults, groupthink, or a flattening of our intellectual and emotional engagement with the world. I think the only way to be morally serious is to try to occupy the emotionally difficult middle ground between these extremes, to allow ourselves to be deeply troubled by counterintuitive moral arguments, and to act on them when the evidence and reasoning are overwhelming, even if that violates our social sense of what the cool good people do. But also to stay intensely wary of, and somewhat apart from, the social and intellectual dynamics we land in when we follow these arguments.

I’ve seen effective altruism as an amazing and dangerous button to press. It scrambled my brain a bit and complicated most of the ethical narratives I used to take as given, and of all the clusters of ideas that could have done that to me, I feel especially proud of the decisions I’ve made as a result of this one, and of the balance I’ve struck with the story it tells. Among other things, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the success I’ve had with this blog without the tools for thinking I picked up from EA writing. Even my data center stuff came out of the basic observation that applying some simple serial thinking and math to a widely discussed problem (like whether it’s an environmental disaster to use ChatGPT) can, if done well, take you far past the public debate, because way more people are just vibing it out and repeating slogans than you might think.

More broadly, the donations I’ve made, the brilliant people I’ve helped get careers in DC policy areas that I still think are some of the most important in the world, and even some of how I try to talk to friends directly and serially instead of running on social autopilot, all trace clearly back to the ways the EA story of the world disrupted my background sense of status and importance. But I’m also happy I didn’t chase status within EA scenes in ways that would’ve warped my thinking and made me much more confident about AI, animals, or global health than is warranted. And I’ve seen disastrous decisions made in the name of EA, and emotionally stunting social dynamics among true believers, which have reinforced my own epistemic conservatism and my wariness of straying far from my otherwise pretty ordinary ethics. Right now this middle ground, where EA is one important idea but deathly serious idea among many, feels like the most authentic way I can use it. I can’t use it to structure my life or give me a deep sense of meaning, but I can tap into it for a few very broad stories about the world, and after wrestling with the arguments for a long time, occasionally see a massive problem coming a decade early. And I definitely can’t turn away from the basic arguments, go back to my cozy human-scale world, and pretend I never saw them.

My goal in writing more about EA is not to make anyone like us more as people, trust us with power, or put on a lightbulb shirt and show up to an EA conference. Instead, I’d like the aspects of EA that I think are so valuable, and that have shaped my thinking for the last 15 years, to be more available in the general intellectual buffet that smart people choose from to interpret the world. I’d like people to encounter, be challenged by, and use the very best mental tools I’ve personally pulled out of the sprawling intellectual ecosystem EA has spawned, without feeling that they need to give any status to the people (including me) who happened to get into this cluster of ideas in the first two decades of its existence. I think the EA cluster of ideas could have a much bigger positive effect if it were used by a much larger number of people. The specific scene that happened to get into these ideas early is mostly a coincidence, though it also carries deathly important lessons about both the promise and the danger of believing you can use reason and evidence to override the status games around you and do the most good.

I think it’s the opposite. If we want to be good egalitarians, we need to rigorously quantify what we do, and try our best to ignore the specific personalities and abilities of the people saved by charitable giving. Full opposition to quantification is inherently inegalitarian.

There’s a separate critique that adding up lives saved ignores systemic injustice. I agree that this is a big risk, but this post is about whether we ought to try to quantify at all, not the mistake of quantifying without knowing the full picture. I talk about systemic injustice at the end of this post.

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My claim in this post is simple. If you are committed to these two principles:

• Everyone should be treated as having equal worth to everyone else. Everyone is equally deserving of the most support and protection we can provide for them.

• Everyone has innate dignity and deservingness regardless of their particular personalities or abilities.1

Then you also need to consider the specific boring numbers involved in your ethical decisions and act on what the numbers say. This conclusion follows from those premises.

Here I’m using “egalitarianism” to only mean “treating people as equals.” I like Will Kymlicka’s definition of egalitarianism from Contemporary Political Philosophy: an Introduction:

A theory is egalitarian in this sense if it accepts that the interests of each member of the community matter, and matter equally. Put another way, egalitarian theories require that the government treat its citizens with equal consideration; each citizen is entitled to equal concern and respect. This more basic notion of equality is found in Nozick's libertarianism as much as in Marx's communism. While leftists believe that equality of income or wealth is a precondition for treating people as equals, those on the right believe that equal rights over one's labour and property are a precondition for treating people as equals. So the abstract idea of equality can be interpreted in various ways, without necessarily favoring equality in any particular area, be it income, wealth, opportunities, or liberties…. Not every political theory ever invented is egalitarian in this broad sense. But if a theory claimed that some people were not entitled to equal consideration from the government, if it claimed that certain kinds of people just do not matter as much as others, then most people in the modern world would reject that theory immediately.

Egalitarianism is an inherently mathematical outlook. It says that despite the particular facts about each person, everyone counts for the same value. Each person’s value equals each other person’s value.

To make my point, I’ll use an extreme thought experiment: the very special boy.

The very special boy

You’re a doctor who’s just received a new patient, let’s call him Bob. Bob was just in a terrible accident and is going to die if he doesn’t receive 4 different vital organs. As luck would have it, you have 1 of each vital organ available in the hospital, but you also have 4 other people who will each die if they don’t each receive a different one of the organs.

You can allow Bob to die, or allow 4 others to die and give all the organs to Bob.

You sit back and think about two values you hold dear:

• Everyone should be treated as having equal worth to everyone else. Everyone is equally deserving of the most support and protection we can provide for them.

• Everyone has innate dignity and deservingness regardless of their particular personalities or abilities.

Allowing the other 4 people to die would imply that Bob is 4 times as valuable as each of them. You couldn’t learn more details about Bob or the other people that would make saving Bob worth 4 times as much as the other people, because the details of people’s lives don’t take away from or add to their inherent dignity.

Suddenly, the head of the hospital comes in, and says he’s just learned something important: Bob isn’t just anyone, he’s a very special boy. He’s cool and interesting and with it. He has a neat vibe. More importantly, the other patients who are going to die are kind of boring and lame. One woman has never been much fun at parties. One of the other guys tried and failed to be an actor. While they would be missed, more people would miss Bob.

What would your reaction to this be?

I’m not religious, but I feel a sense of religious revulsion at this way of talking about people.

Why is this way of talking wrong? I claim it’s because it violates the two principles of egalitarianism. Whether someone’s interesting or boring to us personally should have no bearing on whether we save their lives. Our perception of their personalities, and their personal life choices, doesn’t affect their inherent human dignity.

Now imagine that this situation happens twice. There are now 2 Bobs in the hospital and 8 other patients. Does it now become okay to let the other patients die to save the 2 Bobs? It doesn’t seem like anything relevant has changed. Each person still has equal dignity, and the specifics of their lives don’t affect their inherent equal value.

Now imagine that there are only 2 other patients. Should we sacrifice 2 people to save Bob? Again, it violates the two principles of treating everyone equally and ignoring their specific personalities and decisions in assessing their inherent dignity.

So it seems like no matter what number we choose, saving fewer people because we find their personal life situations more interesting and engaging is a violation of the basic egalitarian principle that people matter equally, and matter independently of their personalities and life choices.

So we arrive at a third rule that followed from the first two:

• We have a strong obligation to save more lives rather than fewer, and to ignore our personal reactions to the specific personalities and decisions of any of the people involved.

I see failing to do this as basically the same as choosing to save Bob over the “less interesting” other patients. It’s not just a harmless alternative decision. It’s a brutal disregard of egalitarianism and an elevation of some people above others. It leaves me with the same religious sense of evil that the original Bob situation does.

If egalitarianism is correct, we should see allowing 4 people to die instead of 1 as being exactly identical to allowing 3 people to die instead of 0. If everyone has equal worth, these numbers need to matter in our decisions.

Numbers and dignity

Some people talk as if adding up numbers of lives saved robs people of dignity. It’s reducing people to “just numbers in a spreadsheet.”

This is completely backwards. The only way to fully respect human dignity is to respect it regardless of the specific life circumstances of the people you’re considering. No matter what people do with their lives, their fundamental human dignity remains the same, and it’s their fundamental dignity we need to consider when thinking about saving their lives. One way to think about this is to assign everyone in the world a “dignity score” of exactly 1. No one’s dignity score budges based on anything they do or the specifics of their lives. Therefore, when we’re considering the number of lives to save, and are choosing between 10 people or 2 people, nothing specific about the personalities or choices of anyone involved can change the fact that on one side there are “10 dignity points” and on the other there are “2 dignity points.” To say anything different implies that some people are inherently more valuable than others. Therefore, treating people as numbers in a spreadsheet is the only way to fully respect their inherent human dignity. Doing anything else implies that the dignity of different people can differ based on their specific decisions and circumstances. To ignore the spreadsheet is to ignore what the principle “everyone is equally deserving and has inherent dignity” is telling you about the situation.

Spreadsheets are an egalitarian’s best friend.

When people mean to criticize systemic injustice

Sometimes when people say that we can’t quantify numbers of lives saved, they’re not saying that we can’t claim that all people are equal. Instead, they’re saying that the underlying problems that are causing the deaths in the first place are not being addressed by what we’re doing, and merely adding up lives saved misses the deeper reasons why poverty exists. Another similar criticism could be that some people are victims of societal injustice, and deserve special treatment.

I think both are good points on their own. Egalitarianism doesn’t imply that we should allow people to steal and then treat them as perfectly equal after. The person who stole needs to give back the resources. In the same way, if people have been the victims of brutal systemic injustice, we need to make amends for that. Just reporting numbers without the details of the injustice masks an injustice that’s happened.

However, neither point tells us to never use numbers. Someone criticizing systemic injustice still believes the numbers matter; they just think the specific numbers I’m using don’t capture the full picture of what’s happening or what will continue to happen if we do nothing. If people want to say that a method of analyzing a problem is missing key details of how that problem came about, they can just say that directly without implying that we shouldn’t aim to be egalitarian.

This objection comes up less often than I expect. In conversations about this, I often find myself as the one arguing for donations to GiveWell, which primarily serves some of the poorest people in the world. The people I’m talking with are often arguing for donations to local American charities instead, and often charities that don’t even attempt to help poor people specifically. I’ve found that these people are the ones most likely to say “Oh isn’t trying to quantify the lives saved just Western technocratic reason?” The people with systemic critiques of the way the global economic system works are more likely to say “Just reporting the number of lives saved misses the reason these people are poor in the first place” and what follows is usually a really useful discussion for both of us.

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I’ll argue that this is wrong. Even with a perfect government, it would be extremely important to have a lot of private charity.

I’ll use these definitions:

• Perfect government: Up to the reader! This can be anything from liberal democracy to communism to libertarianism. I’m mainly writing with a left-wing audience in mind since that’s where I hear this criticism most often.

• Private charity: Individuals or small groups choosing to send their own resources to specific people and causes, without deferring at all to the political entity that governs them. Under this definition, private charity could still exist under a semi-communist government. You and a small group of like-minded people could decide to live below the means you’re given by your communist system, and send your additional resources somewhere else.

I see three reasons private charity will always be useful:

• It’s politically impossible for a government to spend enough to solve all problems. Citizens should be able to give more than what the government can tax. Even a perfect government would never be able to spend enough resources on its own to solve all the problems private charity can help with, like global poverty. Solving these problems would require taxing all its citizens until they were living in poverty and gutting most social services. Individuals should be able to privately donate more than what’s politically possible to tax. Their donations could always still save additional lives.

• Political minorities will always have reasonable disagreements with the majority (“the fact of reasonable pluralism”) and want to support causes the government doesn’t. Reasonable people will always develop significant disagreements about ethical questions. Political minorities would want to support causes the democratic majority doesn’t value.

• Many problems are not the result of background failures of government, so perfect government wouldn’t solve them. Many problems that could be helped with more resources sent from private charity will persist even if we achieve a perfect government system.

There’s a lot more to say about the value of “band-aid solutions,” and the debate about top-down charity vs. systematic change and mutual aid. I’ll talk more about that in a separate post. I know there’s a broader debate and I’m only avoiding it in this post to stay concise.

I won’t make claims about the average quality of private charity as it exists right now, which I think is often bad, though the best charities are extremely good. You can disagree. I’ll only be arguing that we shouldn’t reject private charity in principle and that it’s not literally always better for the government to address problems.

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How might private charity be bad?

I’ll try to paint a picture of what critics of private charity worry about:

Imagine all water is privatized and individually delivered to people in bottles. Obviously everyone would be better off if the government built a common pipe system. A rich person who makes money selling water doesn’t want the pipe system built. She doesn’t want to be taxed, or have her business undermined by a government service. She organizes a few other rich people with similar interests to start a water charity, where they give water to those who need it most. This serves two purposes: it stops a revolt from people who aren’t getting water, and makes the rich people (and the stupid private water system) seem heroic and good and natural to everyone else. For the small price of donating a little to charity, the rich people keep their wealth and power, and the problem persists.

This story seems compelling, and I’m sure that there are examples from history of private charity functioning this way. Maybe you believe that because of the way capitalism works right now, all private charity works this way. My goal will only be to convince you that in an ideal world, a lot of private charity would often be extremely helpful and wouldn’t hold back political progress.

3 reasons private charity would be important under a perfect government

It’s politically impossible for a government to spend enough to solve all problems. Citizens should be able to give more than what the government can tax.

Global Poverty

What would it mean for a government to completely replace private charity working on global poverty?

There are a lot of great government global aid programs (PEPFAR being maybe the best) that benefit from scale that individual charities can’t compete with. Couldn’t we just have the government take over all aid?

All our current spending on global aid is still allowing millions of people to die each year from easily preventable causes. Their deaths are each in some way the result of extreme poverty, because they can’t access the life-saving resources most Americans take for granted. We could send a lot more resources than we do to the poorest people in the world and still help a lot. I’ll add a line on the graph showing where global poverty is ended (this is arbitrary and the actual line would be much higher than this, I’m just making a simple visualization):

So if we replace all private charity with government spending, there’s still going to be a lot of room for additional private charity to do a ton of good.

The upper limit of how much good charity can do is extremely high, because so many people in the world are suffering and dying from causes that can be easily fixed by resources everyday citizens of wealthy countries like America can afford.

Why not just go all the way and have government replace all possible good private giving to the global poor?

My argument will be that even with a perfect government, this couldn’t happen, because its citizens wouldn’t allow it to spend enough to make private charity unnecessary. Even under an extremely generous and cosmopolitan communist government, the limit of the government’s giving would be below what would solve all global poverty, leaving room for citizens to send more of their own resources to the global poor if they chose.

You might say “Well MY perfect government would be so good and radically different from everything that came before that it would cross that purple line and distribute so much that global poverty would be solved.” I’m confident that this is wrong.

Solving global poverty immediately would require so much redistribution that it would be politically impossible

Global income inequality is incredibly stark.

Because the median American is so much richer than the average global citizen, there are a ton of ways money that seems trivial to us can be drastically useful if spent well in other countries. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that 5-8 million people die every year due to global poverty. Every $5000 donated to the most effective global aid charities, like the Against Malaria Foundation, probably permanently saves a person’s life. This implies that there’s still a ton of money we could send to global health charities that would do a lot of good. If we had already donated enough, it should be much harder to find cheap simple opportunities to save lives.

Right now there’s enough general economic value in the world for an average global income of about $22,500 (adjusted for purchasing power). If we were to completely equalize all incomes while somehow keeping economic output exactly as high as it is, everyone would make $22,500. The world has never been as wealthy, we’ve never had more to go around, and there’s only enough resources on Earth to give everyone $22,500 and no more.

“Solving” global poverty would mean more or less flattening global incomes. As long as anyone on Earth makes less than $20,000/year, in combined private income and government services, they are much more likely to die of simple preventable diseases and experience other major problems that could be helped by government redistribution or private charity.

So a government committed to completely “solving” global poverty without private charity would need to tell its citizens “We’re going to defund most or all government services, tax you down to living on $20,000 per year, and send all those resources we’re taking from you to the other side of the world to people you will never meet.” This seems politically impossible. Even after a successful communist revolution, it seems unlikely that everyone in formerly rich countries would immediately accept a life on $20,000 per year with almost no government services. There’s the whole separate problem of this completely blowing up our economic system and removing important incentives for people working different jobs, but we’re imagining a political utopia here so let’s just go wild.

Let’s say all global governments are completely committed to solving all global poverty by redistributing resources. They can’t do that immediately, it would be politically impossible to tax all citizens of wealthy countries down to $20,000. The only way to do this would be to redistribute some wealth, promote economic growth in poor countries, and wait for global incomes to steadily equalize.

This would take a long time.

In the meantime, millions of people would continue to die from extreme poverty.

Because the government would have already hit its limit of what it can spend, individual citizens could choose to sacrifice more of their resources to send even more aid. This would still save lives as long as globally raising everyone out of extreme poverty were ongoing. If this transition took years, there would be millions of people still dying from poverty that our perfect government couldn’t help. Private charity could save millions of lives, even in a world with perfect government.

Foreign aid is really unpopular

Public opinion in America right now is decidedly against significant foreign aid. A majority of Americans think we’re spending too much on foreign aid. Our spending is about $200 per American per year. The US GDP per capita is about $66,000 per year, so Americans believe that spending 0.3% of our per capita GDP on aid each year is too much.

We need to think seriously about what the political limits of government foreign aid are. I worry that even in a better system, they might still be low.

What causes global poverty? Does this matter much for the problem?

A common objection is that our political system causes global poverty in the first place. Maybe you believe that most global poverty is caused entirely by capitalist institutions extracting wealth from the global poor. In this story, donating to people in global poverty is kind of like donating to enslaved people to make their lives slightly more comfortable. It ignores the underlying brutal unjust system keeping them in poverty in the first place.

Even if you believe that our current political system causes global poverty, private charity would still be extremely important after we ended the system. The problems created by oppression don’t go away when oppression ends. If we’re extracting wealth from the global poor, they would still be poor immediately after the wealth extraction stopped. We would need a massive global reparations program to redress the harms. We’ve already seen that governments couldn’t immediately redistribute enough resources to fully raise the global poor completely out of poverty. This would leave a lot of room for individuals to privately choose to give to the global poor beyond what the government was able to tax as part of this program of reparations and rebuilding. Even here, private charity matters a lot.

My opinion is that global poverty is caused by a complex mix of past injustices like colonialism (one of the worst things that’s ever happened), some remaining extractive institutions in part propped up by rich countries or just leftover by colonialism, bad individual actors and groups in the governments of poor countries, the deep mysteriousness of economic growth itself (experts often drastically disagree on what causes growth), and the fact that poverty is the norm of human society and it’s wealth that’s novel.

Even though I disagree with people on the far left about the root causes of global poverty, I would still support massive reparations to countries for the harms of colonialism, and additional massive global aid programs purely because there’s so much low hanging fruit to help people in other countries. Both I and the far left run into the same problem of the government being limited in what it can give to the point that individuals giving more will still help a lot.

Regardless of what you think is the cause of global poverty, private giving will always be able to save millions of additional people over and above what a government can do on its own. Even in a perfectly governed world, millions of people would still die on the way to eliminating global poverty. Private charity is more than just a useful addition to government aid. It can save millions of people.

Research

Another area that could use almost infinite resources is scientific and social research. The government shouldn’t tax its citizens down to poverty wages and spend all those resources on research, but each additional dollar spent on good research would have high expected payout. A perfect government would still have to leave promising research unfunded, leaving room for private charity.

There might also be valuable research that majorities in democratic countries would vote against spending money on. For example, because I think animal welfare is such a massive problem, I’d like a lot more spending on alternative proteins and/or lab grown meat. This is very unpopular. Political majorities in my country don’t want the government to support it, so a perfect democratic government wouldn’t fund it. I’d like the option to privately use my own resources to support research I think is important when I disagree with the majority.

This is a place where private charity can be a useful tool for political minorities to pursue their values, which will be the theme of the next section.

Political minorities will always have reasonable disagreements with the majority (“the fact of reasonable pluralism”) and want to support causes the government doesn’t

Let’s say we’ve solved global poverty. Everyone has enough resources to avoid death from easily preventable causes.

Even in this world, we’d still need a lot of private charity.

A fundamental reality about the world that will be with us no matter what government we have is the “fact of reasonable pluralism.” Reasonable people will always come to drastically different conclusions about what the right thing to do is and where society should be spending its limited resources.

A clear case of a common values disagreement is how important it is to prevent animal suffering.

I think factory farming of animals is a catastrophic moral emergency. Most Americans don’t. The vast majority of Americans eat a lot of meat, get really angry when meat prices go up at all, and don’t donate anything to help farmed animals. If we had a perfect government that were democratic at all, it seems deeply unlikely that the government would ban bad factory farming practices on its own. Meat prices would go up too much, people would get mad and demand the government lower them. We might be able to change people‘s beliefs and behavior, but it would take a while, and a lot of effort. In the meantime, trillions of animals would be factory farmed and lead very bad lives.

The perfect government wouldn’t ever fix this problem as long as a majority of its citizens supported factory farming. What should I be allowed to do to convince my fellow citizens to change their minds?

Maybe I should just debate a lot. Some utopian visions involve everyone just using rational debate to sway the voting public into different opinions.

The modern animal welfare movement has already existed for hundreds of years. In that time, the problem of animal welfare has gotten drastically worse.

Public deliberation on its own seems to not be working. I’d like the option to do a lot more:

• If I were allowed to donate some of my personal resources to alternative proteins research, I and others who care about animals might speed along new and better foods people could eat instead of meat. This would help change my fellow citizens’ minds. They’d be much more likely to accept arguments about animal welfare if they had plant-based alternatives they liked just as much as meat.

• Doing public deliberation is in some way “private giving” in the sense that I’d be giving up my very limited time to argue for a specific cause. If I’m allowed to do that, I’d also like to be able to privately donate my resources to support other people who also want to influence public discourse about animals.

• Maybe I’d just like to donate to directly pay people to stop eating meat. This would be a peaceful way of making an ethical trade with my fellow citizens. They value the resources I’d give them more than eating meat, I’d value them not harming animals more than the resources I’d give them. We’d each be better off.

Each of these couldn’t be funded by the perfect government, because the democratic majority wouldn’t want it funded. Each is a clear case where private charity would be an extremely useful tool for me to use.

Even if you think all reasonable people agree in the case of animal ethics and I’m being silly, there are so many other ethical questions reasonable people will disagree about under a perfect government that we should expect private charity to always be a powerful tool for political minorities.

This could even extend to aesthetic values. I love dungeon synth. Many people don’t. I would like to be able to spend some of my resources to help dungeon synth artists make more music. A democratic government wouldn’t be interested in spending many resources on dungeon synth. Most people don’t like it. If I care enough about it that I’d like a lot more of it, I’d like to be allowed to use my own resources to promote that value. Just like we won’t come to a final agreement on all ethical questions, we won’t come to a final agreement on aesthetic questions. Once again, private charity is a useful tool for people in a minority to use.

Many problems are not the result of background failures of government, so perfect government wouldn’t solve them

People sometimes talk as if all major problems could be solved by a perfect political system. Maybe there are a lot of problems this is true for. Maybe poverty is actually just the result of extractive institutions. Maybe all prejudice and bad power dynamics and violence are the result of bad incentives imposed on people by the government. Maybe massive moral catastrophes like factory farming are the result of propaganda.

I’m probably not representing this view fairly. It seems silly when I type it out. Some people do seem to imply that if all the root causes of our problems were properly dealt with by our political system, we wouldn’t have any more problems for private giving to help fix.

This seems deeply incorrect.

Even if we assume humans are angels not predisposed at all to violence or bad behavior, there are still inherent aspects of the human condition that will lead to strife and difference:

• Reasonable people will always disagree over fundamental values.

• Our unbelievably limited knowledge of what’s true.

• The fact that the world just has very limited resources right now, and people don’t have much of an appetite for being taxed into poverty to distribute their very limited resources in ways that could actually help people the most.

A lot of problems are created by our political system, but not all of them are. For the ones that aren’t, perfect government won’t have comprehensive solutions. Private giving will often still be useful and good.

Conclusion

Each of these individually seems like an extremely strong reason for private charity to still exist in a world with perfect political systems. Private charity is not just a poor substitute for better political systems. Even if our systems were perfect, we’d still need a lot of private charity. The criticism that private charity is always and only a poor substitute for political action is, I think, clearly incorrect.

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