Note: This is cross-posted from my Substack.
They seem similar at first. Christians are nothing if not do-gooders; effective altruists doubly so. Both movements are proselytizing, enthusiastic, and love Scholastic (ahem… analytic) reasoning.
As a person who bestrides both these groups, though, I find the two ideologies deeply at odds.[1] This may seem obvious—effective altruists are utilitarians, (most) Christians are deontologists—but the most important difference lies in the characteristic Christians and effective altruists seem to share: the desire to spend their lives doing good. The two philosophies, I’d like to suggest, have fundamentally different visions of vocation.
Take, first, Catholic Christianity. The most fundamental decision any Catholic makes is whether he or she will have a family or enter religious orders.[2] This decision organizes one’s life, determining the locus of one’s efforts. If one works, one works neither for glory nor for altruism, but to support one’s family. If one is a religious, fulfilling one’s priestly duties is the most important aspect of one’s life. Utilitarian effects are good, yes, but they are good only insofar as they compose and advance one’s priestly duties. Saints often do great good for a great number of people, but they are good priests, nuns, and laypeople first.
Effective altruism’s vocational philosophy, in contrast, is deeply utilitarian. Websites like 80,000 hours are dedicated—not to questions of family or God—but to how one can do the most good with one’s career. This is defensible (I wouldn’t necessarily want a website mediating my relationship with God or with my family), but many of my effective altruist friends deliberately reject questions of their own individual vocation. I’ve heard versions of “I can’t have a child; I need to throw myself into my career working on existential risk” too many times to count.
There are, of course, ways in which utilitarianism and a family life can be reconciled. I’ve heard some version of the following argument from many of my EA friends: I have a certain drive to have a spouse/child/dog; I will feel sad if I don’t have a spouse/child/dog; Being sad about my lack of a spouse/child/dog will lead me to be less efficient at my Very Impactful Job; therefore having a spouse/child/dog will help me be very impactful in the long run. This account, I think, is in line with the critique offered above: one’s own vocational call is construed as a means of supporting an impactful career, the real purpose of one’s life.
I should note that the effective altruists I know make these sorts of arguments half-heartedly. There is still some (admirable!) part of them which wishes they were living in a group house, eating soylent and earning to give. But they also recognize that their spouse/child/dog speaks to some deep part of their soul, some longing that their ideology does not sufficiently account for. Some will even admit that they cannot fully account for their decision to prioritize their own personal life in some particular way.
This is important for obvious reasons—different conceptions of vocation are a pretty fundamental disagreement—but I think it also reveals deeper differences in the epistemological frameworks of Christianity and effective altruism.
Take, for example, the Christian who has chosen to have a family. It is a difficult task: your child might rebel; your spouse might ask for a divorce; disease and disaster and heartbreak could ruin everything, leaving you and your loved ones bereft and broken. Christians should be at peace with all this happening—Job is the proper text to consult—but the fact that this type of disaster occurs within the span of a normal human life should make us cautious about measuring our impact on the world as a whole. The family, after all, is the institution we have the most control over—we pick our spouses, control the environment in which our children are raised.[3] If it is difficult to nurture, how much more so the world?[4]
Effective altruists, in contrast, are much more epistemically confident. Decisions about improving people’s lives, though difficult to make, are nevertheless makeable: removing lead from turmeric in India, for example, should be a no-brainer. Normal charity upends lives and wastes money, but hard work and smart organization can overcome the difficulties inherent to the practice.
I’m not quite sure, however, whether EA charity is different in kind. The negative consequences of its charitable endeavors are harder to see (that’s why they’re called effective altruists!) but they might be just as unintended. Does providing bed nets for malaria undermine local state capacity? Could improving conditions in rural villages hamper the urbanization needed for industrial growth? Could the money spent on global health be better employed combating AI risk, nuclear proliferation, democratic backsliding, etc., etc.?[5] Counterfactuals are necessarily speculative, but they reveal the uncertainty which underlies all actions.
The point of this essay is not to convince effective altruists to stop removing lead from turmeric. That is important work; Christians ought to be more concerned with the ways their charitable efforts are misguided. What I am trying to suggest is that effective altruists should have a little more epistemic humility. Acting in this world—a world made up of billions of broken, unpredictable families—is difficult.
From this humility, effective altruists might find the space to consider their vocation on non-utilitarian grounds. If, for example, there’s a 10% chance that their charitable efforts are doing nothing and a 5% chance that they’re actively counterproductive, other sorts of actions—like having a family—might become more important.
EA’s peculiar vocational stance might, in part, be because effective altruism is a young movement. When one is in one’s early twenties, one isn’t (really) thinking about one’s family. As the movement ages, though, I hope it will become more amenable to family life. Several of my effective altruist friends are older; some of them even have children. To a man, all of them note that growing older has led them to become more interested in having a family.
The future of the EA movement isn’t certain; it would be surer, I think, if its leaders put a much greater stress on the non-utilitarian aspects of vocational discernment. This would imply a deep epistemological shift, but the important things—its charitable acts, its emphasis on reason—would remain the same. I want the future leaders of the EA movement to be family men and women. (Or consecrated religious—but beggars can’t be choosers.)
I am a Catholic with many EA friends. The framing of this article is Catholic, but I think the critique applies from most denominational viewpoints.
Yes, I realize that there are some degrees of variance here. One can be a consecrated virgin or a member of a third order.
Admittedly, we do not pick our parents. We also do not pick half of the genetic composition of our children. In grappling with them, we grapple with ourselves—this is perhaps what makes raising a family so difficult.
One could draw out the consequences of this: helping one’s community will be easier than helping one’s nation, helping one’s nation will be easier than helping the world, etc. I’m not quite sure how far I’d be willing to endorse this principle, but it does have a long (and newly infamous) tradition in Christian thought.
The disagreements within the EA movement about this are perhaps more similar to their own disagreements with normal charity than they might think.
