'Effective Altruism' has been touted by tech stars from Sam Bankman-Fried to Elon Musk. Here's how it started and how it's going after FTX's implosion.
Lakshmi Varanasi
- Effective altruism is a social movement that relies on evidence and reasoning to figure out the best ways to help others.
- Its supporters include major Silicon Valley tech personalities like Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Peter Thiel.
While he ran FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried lived beneath his billionaire means. He drove a Toyota Corolla, ate vegan food, and lived with several roommates — presumably due to his belief in a social movement called effective altruism.
Effective Altruism, or EA for short, stakes its claim in the idea that all lives are equally valuable and those with resources should allocate them to helping as many people as possible.
Over the past several years, it has found a strong footing in Silicon Valley, and claims tech tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel among its followers.
While EA also has its share of critics— who railed against its persistent focus on the future or its quiet acceptance of the status quo — the movement seemed to be growing. Over the course of 2021, EA-related foundations donated more than $600 million in publicly listed grants.
But then, FTX imploded. One of EA's most visible followers — who had once pledged to donate the majority of his wealth — has now been hit with eight criminal charges including wire fraud, money laundering, and violating campaign finance laws.
For many, it's brought the principles of effective altruism into question.
Here's a closer look at the ideas behind effective altruism and what philosophers and followers are saying in the aftermath:
EA broadly traces its roots to Peter Singer, a philosopher who is known for his radical ideas about morality.
Singer wrote that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparative moral importance, we ought to morally do it.” Even distance doesn’t matter.
Source: "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."
By Singer’s philosophy, if you see a child drowning in a pond you likely don’t think twice before jumping in to save them, but allowing another child to drown miles away is just as harmful.
Source: "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" by Peter Singer, 1972.
EA also was influenced by Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher who studied "existential risks" — outcomes that might "annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life" or "drastically curtail its potential."
Source: "Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards" by Nick Bostrom.
According to Bostrom, these include events like moderate global warming, global recessions, or even "stifling cultural or religious eras" like the "dark ages."
Since the 2010s, Scottish philosopher William MacAskill has largely been credited with leading the movement.
MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and he's also the author of books on effective altruism including 'Doing Good Better' and 'What We Owe The Future.'
Source: William MacAskill's personal website.
He co-founded the Center for Effective Altruism at Oxford, and a YCombinator backed nonprofit called 80,000 Hours, that claims to help people make a social impact with their career through research and advice. Since September 2022, both have been grouped under a broader parent organization called Effective Ventures.
Source: William MacAskill's personal website and blog post on Giving What We Can.
While MacAskill suggests that people should set out to do the most good that they can, he argues their actions should be based on empirical evidence and not subjective definitions. One way of measuring good is through quality-adjusted-life-years, or QALYS. One QALY is equivalent to a single year of life lived at 100% health.
Source: Doing Good Better by William MacAskill and Amia Srinivasan's review of the book, "Stop the Robot Apocalypse" in London Review of Books.
MacAskill estimated that contributing to the cause of removing intestinal parasites would be more cost-effective than contributing to a sight-saving eye operation in terms of QALYS.
Source: "The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism," in The New Yorker.
EA has also become associated with the idea of "earning to give." The idea is that a college graduate can save more lives by taking a job in finance or consulting and donating their earnings, as opposed to becoming a doctor and trying to help people in a developing country.
Source: The New Yorker
One of the more controversial ideas of EA is longtermism, which is the notion that people should be working toward improving the future of humanity. Weak longtermism applies to concerns about the near future, while strong longtermism applies to concerns about the distant future— thousands of years from now.
Source: "Effective altruism's most controversial idea" in Vox.
In an op-ed in the New York Times from August 2022, William MacAskill outlined longtermist concerns such as fossil fuel depletion, losing control over artificial intelligence systems, or the emergence of virulent, engineered viruses.
Source: "The Case for Longtermism" by William MacAskill in The New York Times.
There are a growing number of organizations dedicated to combating these threats, sometimes called “existential risks” or “x-risks” in light of Bostrom’s research. These include the Center for the Study of Existential Risk and Bostrom’s own Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
The movement also has birthed nonprofits like GiveDirectly and GiveWell.
Sam Bankman-Fried long positioned himself as a staunch follower of the movement, and even pledged to give away the majority of his wealth one day.
Peter Thiel gave the keynote address at the Effective Altruism Summit in 2013 and is a known funder of “x-risk” research.
Yet critics have railed against the way EA has developed over the years. In a review of MacAskill's book, 'Doing Good Better,' his colleague at Oxford, philosophy professor Amia Srinivasan wrote, "Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogenous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means."
In a later section, she wrote, "If effective altruism is simply in the business of getting us to be more effective when we try to help others, then it's hard to object to it. But in that case it's also hard to see what it's offering in the way of fresh moral insight, still less how it could be the last social movement we'll ever need."
Source: London Review of Books
Members of the Effective Altruism community— writing on the movement's official website — were concerned and shocked in the immediate aftermath of FTX's demise, according to The New Yorker.
In a post on the Effective Altruism forum from November 2022, Jack Lewars wrote:
"FTX's demise is understandably dominating EA discussion at the moment. Like everyone in the community, I'm primarily just really sad about the news. A lot of people have been hurt; and a lot of funding that could have been used to do a staggering amount of good is no longer available."
The author proceeded to outline potential reforms to the movement including recruiting more diversifying funding sources taking "optics" more seriously.
Sources: The New Yorker and Effective Altruism Forum
Then, Sam Bankman-Fried himself spoke about his relationship to ethics at large. Vox's Kelsey Piper asked Bankman-Fried, "the ethic's stuff— mostly a front?" to which Bankman-Fried initially responded, "yeah" followed by "I mean that's not *all* of it" and "but it's a lot."
In a later section Piper asked, "you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers." To which Bankman-Fried initially responded "ya" and "hehe" and "I had to be."
Source: Vox
In an interview with The Guardian in December 2022, the movement's forefather, Peter Singer, came to the defense of EA, but also acknowledged the harm the FTX controversy brought to the movement. He said, "I think in general, a lot more good has been done by earning-to-give than harm, at least up until the collapse of FTX, which has certainly caused a lot more harm than any other [example]."
He also said, "wise, effective altruists and utilitarians know that honesty is the best policy."
Source: The Guardian
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