The Poverty of Effective Altruism

As the first book to offer a sustained critique of the paradigm of Effective Altruism (EA), The Good it Promises, The Harm it Does constitutes a vital contribution to contemporary public philosophy. 

This collection of essays is particularly important considering the growth of EA’s influence. If nothing else, EA has certainly been effective at branding and self-promotion; since the movement’s founding over a decade ago by a group that includes several prominent utilitarian philosophers, it has quickly become a household name even among my non-academic acquaintances. Backed by the impressive pedigrees and institutional affiliations of its primary proponents, the name ‘Effective Altruism’ gives off the impression of a cause melding sure purpose and competent expertise. The importance of shining a critical light on EA may  not be immediately obvious to many; after all, a movement that brings moral philosophy out of the classroom and works to steer large amounts of money away from vanity projects toward more ‘effective’ ends surely seems like an uncontroversial good. What could be the harm in an organised effort to make charitable giving more efficient by applying rigorous philosophical reasoning and empirical analysis? 

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Indeed, in some ways this collection only scratches the surface, with much of the analysis focused specifically on the damage that EA is doing to the animal advocacy movement (though it gestures repeatedly and suggestively toward wider wrongs as well). This focus, too, might be surprising to some; as several of the book’s contributors acknowledge, EA has worked to highlight the importance of animal welfare to the broader world of large charitable donors and has thus brought ‘substantial new attention and funding’ to animal issues. This advocacy also appears consistent with EA’s utilitarian lineage; utilitarian thinkers from Bentham onward have tried to incorporate the interests of nonhuman animals into their moral theory, and indeed one of EA’s central thinkers is utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose book Animal Liberation remains an influential touchstone of the animal rights movement nearly 50 years after its initial publication. 

While it might seem counterintuitive to attack EA where it seems strongest (an Effective Altruist would probably argue that critical resources could be more efficiently allocated elsewhere), the book’s attention to the world of animal activism is in fact quite effective at pulling EA’s flaws into focus. This has much to do with the vibrant ecosystem of scholarship and activism upon which the collection is able to draw. The Good it Promises convenes a diverse group of authors from many walks of life whose personal involvement and investment in the shared enterprise of animal advocacy have brought them into EA’s orbit; activists and lawyers, philosophers and farmers, theologians and biologists all offer overlapping critiques of EA informed by their distinctive experiences and expertise. Although I will discuss some aspects of these critiques below, I will not try to reconstruct them in detail. Instead, I want to explore how this edited volume largely succeeds where many others fail, tying its wide range of viewpoints and concerns together to form a generally cohesive (and indeed devastating) argument. 

Specifically, I want to call attention to the way in which, by convening this plurality of perspectives on the collective project of more-than-human liberation, The Good it Promises throws the poverty of EA’s philosophy into sharp relief. In her incisive foreword Amia Srinivasan notes that, insofar as it engages with them at all, EA has viewed ‘the historically deep and ongoing movements for the rights of working-class people, nonhuman animals, people of colour, Indigenous people, women, incarcerated people, disabled people, and people living under colonial and authoritarian rule’ as ‘negative examples from which to prescind or correct, not political formations from which to learn…’ By contrast, The Good it Promises consciously centres ‘the voices of activists speaking from where they stand in interconnected social justice movements.’ For instance, we learn from contributors like food justice activist Brenda Sanders and animal sanctuary founder Kathy Stevens about how EA devalues and endangers funding of their work, the value and impact of which are immediately obvious to the reader. As such examples multiply, it becomes increasingly clear that the problem lies not with such projects but with EA’s narrow understanding of what is ‘effective’, itself structured by a worryingly complacent view of existing institutions. 

When so directly contrasted with the rich, multi-textured analyses and anecdotes that make up the The Good it Promises, the cloistered and myopic character of the EA worldview is made particularly palpable; the juxtaposition brings out the weirdness and implausibility of EA’s moral maths in a way that immediately calls out for explanation. Why would its proponents adopt such a narrow view of doing good, and why would others find it convincing? The book’s contributors probe this puzzle from several angles, and in composite their accounts tell a complex but compelling story. In one line of inquiry, several authors point out that EA’s proponents and adherents are largely upper-class, male, non-religious, and ‘mind-blowingly white’, and explore how this homogeneity informs and inflects EA’s allegedly objective and neutral calculations. For instance, Carol Adams catalogues the patriarchal assumptions that lurk behind EA’s rationalist methodology, while Christopher Sebastian explores how EA reduces ‘complex social issues to quantifiable measures that are mostly valuable in the eyes of normative Whiteness…’ These critiques are also effective at giving the lie to EA’s pretences of analytic rigour, which Sebastian condemns as ‘a veil of faux sophistication that is as unscientific as it is intellectually dishonest’. 

EA advocates have acknowledged the criticisms of their membership’s composition, and while some have insisted on the irrelevance of their group’s homogeneity, others have recognised it as a concern (certainly for optics, if nothing else) and have signalled efforts to diversify. Yet The Good it Promises gives us a number of reasons to be sceptical of such pledges; Sebastian, for instance, argues that the EA movement is not white simply ‘in terms of physical representation’ but that ‘Normative Whiteness is cooked into the ideological foundation…’ He points to how it inherently ‘entrenches power in the hands of donors and further reinforces a power imbalance’, an analysis that the experiences of the book’s activist authors repeatedly confirm. 

Further, several contributors make the case that this dismissive, aloof stance is a non-accidental characteristic of EA’s philosophical worldview. The editors note that EA ‘is part of a tradition that adopts a top-down approach to complex social problems, and that does not treat listening to people’s voices, such as those of participants in social movements, as a fundamental methodological precept’. Philosopher Alice Crary makes a particularly cogent case that this problem cannot be solved by ‘signalling toward diversity of ideas’ – for to actually accommodate many of those signalled toward would be ‘to reject EA in its current form as fatally flawed’. To demonstrate this, Crary connects the dots between EA’s radically rationalist moral epistemology – which characterises ideal moral reasoning as entirely dispassionate and impersonal, proceeding ‘from the point of view of the universe’ rather than situated moral agents – and its complacent tendency to ‘wrongly prioritise evaluation of the proximate effects of particular actions’ to the exclusion of any consideration of the possibility of, or need for, broader social transformation (a dynamic also powerfully highlighted by pattrice jones’s essay). Crary convincingly argues that EA’s top-down, corporate-friendly welfarism is ‘not a fixable methodological flaw’, and that EA must define effective action exclusively in this way because ‘it is only here that their image of the moral enterprise seems plausible’.

Here we also begin to see why this broadly implausible approach to ethics and, especially, to politics has nonetheless found popular purchase among the donor class. Crary argues that, by framing the problem in this way, EA deflects attention from the structural roots of human and animal suffering while simultaneously benefitting from ‘its embrace of those who “earn to give”, accumulating wealth in the economic arena that it leaves critically untouched.’ It is thus reasonable to conclude that EA is best understood not as a failed attempt to do good, but as an effective example of something else – ‘an ideology in the insidious sense, a system of belief and practice that covers up systemic injustices embedded in the fabric of existing capitalist societies…’ In other words, EA has found favour in philanthropic circles not because it is good philosophy, but because it is good for business; as Sebastian argues, ‘Far from changing the world, these groups work together to keep the world mostly as it is.’ A few of the book’s contributors hold out hope that EA acolytes could be persuaded to broaden their understanding of effective action; however, many seem to agree with John Sanbonmatsu that ‘The problem is not one of simple ignorance, but rather of a pervasive bad faith that impels the reified mind to obscure the truth of its own complicity in power and domination.’ Some readers might find this characterisation uncharitable; I found it unfortunately quite plausible. 

If this understanding of EA has merit, then we should not expect its preeminent intellectuals to correct their views in light of persuasive criticism, any more than we should expect its billionaire adherents to help abolish the system that generates their wealth. One might thus wonder who these arguments are for; as Srinivasan suggests, ‘There is every possibility…that Effective Altruists will ignore what these voices have to say…’ She argues that that would be a shame, but I think this book is not actually for them; rather, it seems better aimed at those who might otherwise be taken in by EA’s confident façade of dispassionate and objective moral evaluation. Even if The Good it Promises fails to trouble the placid ideological waters in which EA’s elite swim, by argument and example it will certainly help to show others what a pale imitation of moral guidance EA actually offers. And that is surely doing some good.  

Dan Boscov-Ellen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Dan’s background is in environmental philosophy and critical theory. His work focuses on theorising the political-theoretical and ethical entailments of environmental imperialism and capitalist ecocide. His recent articles on related topics have interrogated the universalising discourse of the Anthropocene; attempted to correct the capital-blindness and selective historical amnesia of many ethical accounts of responsibility for climate change; and analysed the ethics of climate migration with a focus on reparative climate justice in the context of colonial oppression and capitalist exploitation. He is currently working on a book, provisionally entitled Critical Climate Ethics: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis, in which he aims to build and expand upon these arguments.