Effective Altruism: Charity Without Romance?

Suffering is perhaps the most defining characteristic of our world.

If you think otherwise (as I did in the not so recent past), then you are not considering the matter to its full depth. In fact, I think a pretty cohesive argument can be made that suffering is the defining characteristic of what it means to be human. It is important to note that suffering is by no means limited to the physical. In fact, I think one could even argue that quite the opposite is the case. However, that is a matter to be contemplated far beyond the reach of this little post within the vast sea of information that makes up this incredible thing we call the internet.

What I would like to share with you today is something that led me to re-think my take on matters of charity and “doing good”. The idea at stake is a rapidly expanding social movement by the title of Effective Altruism.

Let me attempt to pitch the idea as compactly as I am able.

The father of Effective Altruism goes by the name of Peter Singer and is perhaps the most influential moral philosopher of our time. Besides being the main feature in the above picture, he is also the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne.

Peter Singer is critical because the philosophical underpinnings of Effective Altruism stem from his 1971 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. His two premises, that (1) suffering and death are very bad, and that (2) if you can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything morally significant, then you ought, morally, do so, are the philosophical roots of Effective Altruism. It might be necessary to note that while suffering can certainly have instrumental value, it does not have intrinsic value, which is value in and of itself.

The ground-breaking difference between Effective Altruism and other approaches, however, is the radical emphasis on quantification of the “good” that is being done. This crucial quantification is possible thanks to the passionate, young Oxford Associate Professor of Philosophy, William MacAskill. He brought about the quantitative unit of Quality-adjusted-life-years (QALYs), which allows us to accurately measure and compare the “good” that is being done, or the “good” that could be done. (One QALY is equal to one year lived at one-hundred percent health.)

If you get a taste of Utilitarianism and Consequentialism, that taste is spot on, although not identical for various relatively small philosophical differences.

William MacAskill is perhaps the one leading figure of the Effective Altruism movement and has written extensively on his philosophy (no surprise there) while also founding successful organizations in “Giving What We Can” and “80,000 Hours." I encourage you to google MacAskill, his works, and his organizations if you are interested.

Now that we have a unit of measurement for the “good” that we can do, how do we decide what issues and causes have the highest priority?

MacAskill suggests that we judge an issue's level of priority based on (1) Scale, (2) Neglectedness, and (3) Tractability of the issues.

By scale he means the sum-total of suffering that can be prevented and the sum-total of happiness that can be created (Utilitarian approach). The larger the sum-total gain of QALYs that can be achieved through any given action, the higher the priority of that action ought to be.

Neglectedness serves as a determinant because according to MacAskill, the more neglected the issue or cause is, the more important it is to do something about it.

Tractability is the third determinant because whether there is an effective and efficient way to address the issue is crucial to determine its level of priority. Obviously, the more effectively and efficiently an issue can be addressed, the higher its priority.

According to the above framework, current high priority issues include farmed animal suffering, chronic global famine, disease, poverty, prison reform, and labor mobility. While it seems that many people would agree with the urgency of those issues, there is one category that seems very far-fetched. This category goes by the somewhat nerdy term of “X-Risks” (standing for existential risks). Without getting too deep into the reasoning of why this category might actually be the most urgent, the basic idea is that even though the chance of such an event happening is very small, if it does happen, nothing else will matter or have mattered because we and our world (with anything and everything in it) would be completely annihilated by the time it does happen. Especially the fear of an “intelligence explosion” causes some people to suffer sleepless nights. I am certainly not one of them, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts on “X-risks”.

Anyhow, after having tried my best to give you a compact yet sufficient idea of what Effective Altruism is, I would like to share some of my thoughts on the matter.

Charity Without Romance

While an argument about the underlying ethical and meta-ethical philosophies is far beyond the scope of this post, I would like to elaborate on why I titled this post “Charity Without Romance”.

I am sure many of you smirked at this word choice, given that I am playing on James M. Buchanan’s analysis of the political sphere as “Politics Without Romance” (the birthplace of Public Choice Theory).

I chose to title this post “Charity Without Romance” because that is essentially what Effective Altruism is to me. It is looking behind the scenes of charity and “doing good” to make rational choices about how to “do the most good we can” through quantifying the "good" that is being done and could be done.

While I love the idea of quantifying the effectiveness of charity and altruistic actions, it is so rational it almost hurts.

Let me give a very simple hypothetical example.

A person you had some emotional tie to died of cancer. You decided to save up $100 to donate to charity. Your first option is giving that $100 to an organization that provides funding for cancer research. We know that your $100 donation will save exactly one 50-year-old person’s life that would otherwise die of cancer. Let us assume the average life expectancy in that given country is 80 years. Thus, your $100 would result in an additional 30 QALYs. However, you also have a second option. Your second option is donating those $100 to an organization that fights global famine. We know that your $100 donation will save one 20-year-old person’s life that would otherwise starve. Let us assume the average life expectancy in that country is 60 years. Thus, your $100 would result in an additional 40 QALYs.

Given your emotional tie to a recent cancer victim, you would most likely choose to donate to the organization that funds cancer research. Who would blame you? After all, someone you were close with died from cancer!

According to an Effective Altruist, however, it would be wrong for you to donate to the cancer research and not to the fight against global famine.

You ought to donate your $100 to the charity that fights global famine, because that donation would “do more good” in quantitative terms (QALYs, that is).

From a consequentialist perspective this is the optimum. The outcome where the most “good” that can be done is being done.

But why is it that most of us would choose to donate to the cancer research?

Because we, as human beings, have a desire for meaning.

We desire to do something meaningful, not just something that will increase the sum-total of some weird unit of measurement that an Oxford Philosophy Professor came up with.

But does the approach of Effective Altruism really result in creating less meaning?

That depends on what aspect of charity you derive meaning from.

If satisfying your desire to feel meaning for yourself is greater than the desire to create meaning for the world and make a meaningful difference, then following the approach of effective altruism will make you feel like you created less meaning than if you followed your intuition. On a side note, it should go without saying that this would disqualify your actions from being altruistic.

Once you shift your focus to the “bigger picture”, however, and you desire to make a difference in the world more than you desire to feel meaning for yourself (actually being altruistic), then you will create more meaning through effective altruism than if you were to follow your intuition.

Thus, while it does seem to take the romance out of charity, this romance is one with no romantic partner to begin with (other than your ego).

I, for my part, certainly do not believe that to be a romance worth missing.

To no surprise, I seem to be in pretty good company.

Peter Singer, William MacAskill, Elon Musk, and Dustin Moskovitz all consider themselves Effective Altruists.

Effective Altruism is perhaps the most rapidly expanding social movement in the history of modern humanity.

But do you know what’s the coolest part about it?

It is one of the rare times that Philosophers have actually been able to make a difference.

It is one of the rare times that moral philosophy is actually being applied to transform the world that we live in for the better, or shall we say “to do the most good”?