Effective Altruism

Effective altruism (EA) is built on a deceptively simple question: how can we do the most good with our limited resources? Peter Singer's "drowning child" argument provides the basic moral intuition: if we walked past a pond where a child was drowning, most of us would consider ourselves morally obligated to rescue the child, even if it meant ruining our clothes. Singer argues that the same logic applies to global suffering: if we can prevent deaths from malaria or malnutrition with a relatively small donation, failing to do so is morally equivalent to not rescuing the child. This extension of local moral intuition to the global scale is the philosophical foundation of the movement.

William MacAskill, one of the movement's co-founders, argued that good intentions are not enough — good evidence and good reasoning are also needed. Organizations like GiveWell rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of charitable interventions, comparing cost per life saved or per DALY (disability-adjusted life year) averted. 80,000 Hours advises on career paths with the greatest social impact. Psychological research reveals systematic biases in charitable giving: scope insensitivity means people fail to scale their emotional response proportionally to the number of affected individuals; the identifiable victim effect causes us to respond more intensely to a specific individual than to abstract statistics. EA attempts to correct these biases by applying rational thinking to philanthropy.

The connection with the rationalist community runs deep. Many EA members come from the LessWrong/CFAR ecosystem and share the emphasis on Bayesian thinking, existential risk analysis, and expected-value-based decision-making. The "earning to give" concept — choosing a lucrative career with the aim of donating a significant fraction of one's income — generated debate both within and outside the movement. From a psychological perspective, EA raises fascinating questions about altruism, prosocial motivation, and the limits of rationality applied to ethics. Compassion fatigue and the psychological burden on adherents — the feeling of guilt for never doing enough — are real risks that the movement has begun to address.

Criticism of EA is substantial and deserves serious consideration. Some philosophers argue that the approach is elitist, privileging a Western and technocratic perspective. The neglect of systemic change — focusing on concrete interventions rather than addressing the structural causes of poverty and injustice — is another recurrent critique. Paul Bloom, in his book Against Empathy, paradoxically argues for rational compassion over emotional empathy — a position that connects with both EA and the psychological debate about the nature of empathy. The collapse of FTX in 2022 and its connections to the EA community generated a reputational crisis that forced the movement into deep reflection on integrity and the risks of a purely consequentialist ethic.