Effective altruism suggests that you should give money in the most efficient way - e.g. to maximize lives saved per dollar spent. Local projects should not get special prioritization, and effective altruists should consider taking a high-earning career so that they can increase the amount of their charitable donations.
In this note, I outline three arguments against these ideas:
This leads to the following conclusions:
Suppose your aim is to maximize lives saved per dollar spent. The problem is that this calculation is not easy.
Consider two charities. Charity A distributes mosquito nets, helping to prevent malaria. Charity B supports children's theater in Chicago. By a lives-per-dollar calculation, A appears to be the clear winner — it is unlikely that B will save any lives directly. But suppose now that B inspires a child, and changes the course of her life. She grows up to become a great President and saves millions of lives by her wise and humane policies. Obviously this is unlikely, but what probability should we assign this in our calculations?
As a general point, donations in higher-cost areas may have less direct efficiency, but potentially higher indirect impact, as they can lead to bigger swings in income and lives saved downstream.
Is this a real difficulty? As evidence, different effective altruists have come to different answers on the question of which charities are most efficient, with some focusing on more existential threats to humanity like AGI. We can also look at this contest itself, which offers $100K to people to come up with critiques of EA. Presumably the FTX Future Fund feels this is a better use of money than projects it has not funded, but it would be difficult to come up with a formal model for this.
What should we do in this situation? We can realize that charitable donations have uncertain benefits, similarly to investments. As such, it makes sense to have a portfolio of these investments - some will have more certain returns, like mosquito nets, and some will be much more speculative, like the arts. In the investment analogy, the mosquito nets are like bonds, with a predictable and steady return, while the arts are like a speculative startup with possibility of huge gains.
This critique is a refinement of EA rather than a direct attack. It recognizes that it is hard to estimate charitable efficiency, but does not attack the idea itself. An effective altruist can still make useful distinctions among charities — they can make judgements as to where benefits are too speculative or small to be worthwhile.
Imagine that you are walking around your town, and you see someone accidentally drop some trash.
You: "Excuse me. You dropped your coffee cup. Could you pick it up?"
Them: "Sorry, no."
You: "Why not?"
Them: "I dropped it in an awkward place, so it would take me a while to get to it."
You: "So what?"
Them: "Well, I'm on my way to pick up some trash in the next city that's a lot easier to reach. So picking up this particular piece of trash would really lower my trash picked up to effort spent ratio. As an effective trash picker upper, I aim to pick up trash most efficiently, and this piece doesn't meet my cutoff."
How would you feel about this? You would likely be annoyed and think that this is a simple case — they did something to make a mess, and should fix it.
Similarly, when we live somewhere, we inevitably affect it and the people who live there. These effects may be good (your support may help keep a local cafe afloat), or bad (your car contributes to pollution and congestion). We should try to minimize the negative effects and treat them seriously. Similarly, we get some benefits from being members of a community, which suggests an obligation to give back in some way. These are arguments for giving locally, even if it is less efficient than other global options.
Suppose you meet an eccentric billionaire who offers you a deal. She will give you 100 million dollars, on condition that you kill somebody who has annoyed her. There is no risk to you, and nobody else will trace it to you or the billionaire — it will look like an unfortunate accident.
One EA-like argument would be to accept this deal — you might kill one person, but with 100 million dollars you could surely save at least 100 lives, making a net gain of 99.
Many if not most people would reject this reasoning, even if they could not fully say why. This moral intuition suggests a general principle — you have a special responsibility for your decisions and actions, and that it is not as simple as adding up costs and benefits. So too with career — doing good with money you earn from a job is good, but it cannot counter any harm the job might do in a debits-and-credits accounting sense. This means that you should not take a job killing people for eccentric billionaires, or, more generally, that you should think carefully about the effects of your professional work. Perhaps doing good directly via your career also has some value, besides the psychological benefits.
In this note I've raised three critiques of EA and suggested some alternatives. If you are an effective altruist, and any of these resonate with you, then you can make some small changes — give some money locally, and consider spreading your charitable donations. If you're choosing a career, then realize that the direct effects of your work are important, and that it's perfectly morally acceptable to take a lower-paying job even if that means you give away less.
Effective altruism is a philosophy that aims to help people, so following it will generally give good results. But other approaches can also be useful.
