Effective Altruism Isn’t Utilitarianism

I wrote this for a general audience who isn't very familiar with effective altruism.

This is a cross post from my blog post.

One of the most common things I hear when I say that I’m an effective altruist is that you can’t support effective altruism if you’re not a utilitarian because effective altruism and utilitarianism are exactly the same.

This view is mistaken, and, in this post, I want to explain why.

So, just to define our terms:

Effective altruism (EA) is a group of people united by the common goal of using a significant portion of their personal resources towards doing good in an impartial and cost-effective way. Over the past two decades, it’s been responsible for saving over 300,000 people’s lives. And, it’s led over 10,000 people to pledge 10% of their income to effective charities for life.

Utilitarianism, on the other hand, is the view that, whenever one is choosing what action to take, one always ought to take the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number.

As you can see, just from these definitions, effective altruism and utilitarianism differ a lot.

For one, anyone who thinks it’s important to help people who are far away and who cares about cost-effectiveness can be an EA. This is why, when a group of Christians released a book in support of effective altruism, EAs responded very positively. It’s also why many of the movement’s prominent figures, such as William MacAskill, Toby Ord, and Holden Karnofsky all don’t identify as utilitarians.

I know some readers will point out that most EAs are utilitarians, but it’s worth still keeping in mind that 30% aren’t.

For two, EA is far less demanding than utilitarianism. EA merely suggests that you should use some significant portion of your resources to do good. In contrast, utilitarianism suggests that you should use as many of your resources as you possibly can in the long-run, and that you should be willing to endure virtually any amount of suffering in order to produce the most good.

In this way, EA is a much more mild view. The vast majority of EAs don’t think that you should work yourself into misery or donate so much that you can barely support yourself. Instead, they think that you should try to take seriously the extent to which you can improve the lives of others and that, if possible, you should try to use some of your resources to do so.

For three, EA allows for a much wider range of values than utilitarianism. Utilitarians seek to maximize human welfare, and they’re willing to do so at the cost of all other values such as justice, equality, and environmentalism. In contrast, EAs are supportive of a wide range of notions of what’s good, and they’re unwilling to do good if it comes at the cost of their other values. As such, if someone is interested in reducing gender equality or preserving the environment in a cost-effective way, they would still be considered an EA.

In my view, a lot of people are quick to dismiss EA because it reminds them of utilitarianism, but, in a lot of ways, the two views are very different.

If you’re freaked out by the fact that five million children die from preventable deaths each year and you think that we, as individuals, should at least do something about it, you probably have a lot more in common with EAs than you would think.