Buying Good: Effective Altruism and the Moral Marketplace

This is another opinion piece, and therefore the usual disclaimers apply: it is neither intended to be academically rigorous nor philosophically exhaustive.

Due to a lack of definitional consensus, Effective Altruism obscures its potential for internal collective action. As a result, the movement is on track to see a resurgence of “effective giving” as its dominant framework for “doing good”.

Effective Altruism prioritises measurable impact by advancing rhetoric and policies that aim to influence individuals to use rational calculation, evidence-based decision-making, and personal moral commitments as primary vehicles for achieving good.

Consider this claim: the best way to do altruism is by donating a certain percentage of your personal wealth to charities, organisations and individual people that you believe are solving the most important issues. On this view, channelling substantial portions of one’s income toward charitable causes will achieve greater impact than through direct work in the nonprofit sector.

This was the prevailing stance during Effective Altruism’s formative years between 2010 and 2015. I won’t delve into the motivations behind this position here, nor will I assess it. What matters is that, within this context, the strategy of “earning to give” gained significant traction, championed most prominently by organisations such as 80,000 Hours.

The underlying reasoning is straightforward: if directing a substantial portion of one’s income toward highly effective charities yields more impact than working directly within the nonprofit sector (and one accepts that maximising impact is morally desirable) then one ought, by that reasoning, to pursue a high-earning career in order to give. So, in its early stages, the movement conveyed a distinct ethos. There was a kind of Wall Street meets mosquito nets vibe to the whole thing. However, as the movement matured, its strategic outlook evolved and became significantly more diversified.

Leaders and thinkers within the Effective Altruism community soon recognised several important limitations to the exclusive promotion of high-earning career paths. First, not all individuals possess the aptitude, interest, or opportunity to succeed in such roles. Second, many areas of direct engagement (such as AI safety research, policy advocacy, and global health operations) are critically important and often under-resourced. Third, a singular focus on financial contributions carries inherent risks, including ethical concerns and potential systemic harm stemming from involvement in controversial industries.

As a consequence, the movement’s emphasis shifted toward a more pluralistic model of impact. Effective Altruist organisations, like 80,000 Hours, now recommend that individuals pursue direct work when well-aligned with their skills and motivations, consider roles in research, policy, field operations, or organisational infrastructure at Effective Altruism-aligned institutions, and regard “earning to give” as a valuable strategy only when it represents a particularly strong personal fit. While some within the movement continue to follow the “earning to give” path, it no longer holds the central place it once did in Effective Altruism strategy.

That being said, external critics and casual observers often continue to characterise Effective Altruism as a movement dominated by tech-bros funnelling large donations into global interventions. While this portrayal captures a real subset of the Effective Altruism community, it significantly overstates the prevalence of the “earning to give” model. In reality, the prominence of this strategy in public discourse far exceeds its actual uptake within the movement’s broader and more diverse set of practices. 

And yet, here I am, a 22-year-old graduate armed with more conviction than credentials, to suggest to you, that it’s coming back.

One of the foundational issues with Effective Altruism lies in its refusal, or inability, to clearly define what “effective” actually means. The movement encourages individuals to use their own rationality to determine what counts as doing altruism effectively. Yet, such a determination necessarily demands a metric by which to assess effectiveness: one that, given its application in moral philosophy, inevitably involves normative judgments and, really, meta-ethical ones as well.

While this openness may seem, at first glance, empowering to the individual considering themselves an Effective Altruist (inviting personal moral reflection and demonstrating a kind of epistemic humility from the movement), in practice, it gives rise to a host of interpretive difficulties.

Is effectiveness to be measured in terms of quantifiable impact? Cost-efficiency? The intrinsic moral significance of particular beings or causes? Or perhaps something else entirely?

Key Effective Altruists like William MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky, and others have openly discussed that Effective Altruism is more of a question than an ideology. The question is: “How can we do the most good?” But how that’s defined (what counts as “good” and how we “do” that in an “effective” manner) is left deliberately open to individual interpretation.

When I attended the Effective Altruism Student Summit, debates over the meaning of “effective” were not just theoretical; they were literally written on the walls as ice-breaker topics.

This kind of conceptual ambiguity creates a porous framework where almost any cause or action can be rationalised as “effective”[1]. This definitional slack has facilitated a form of ideological drift within the movement.

Across books, podcasts, summits, and online forums, I’ve consistently observed that individuals who identify with Effective Altruism often articulate (whether explicitly or not) a shared aspiration to contribute to some conception of a better world, and to do this by forming policies based on evidence and reason. This broad commitment forms a kind of moral common ground. However, the vision of what that “better world” should look like, and the normative framework by which it ought to be pursued, varies significantly from person to person. As a result, the movement plays host to a proliferation of competing initiatives, each internally coherent but ideologically disparate.

I have observed the aftermath of the movement naturally fragmenting into a diverse array of cause areas, many of which are not only distinct but, at times, conceptually or ethically at odds with one another. A particularly striking example, which I’ve encountered firsthand and had the opportunity to discuss directly with members of the Effective Altruism community, is the campaign for shrimp welfare. Though supported by a kind of utilitarian calculous and substantial financial backing, responses to the cause have seen it as esoteric or even absurd, both within and beyond the Effective Altruism ecosystem. But shrimp are far from alone in their internal competition for attention and resources within Effective Altruism.

A cursory glance at the grant portfolios of GiveWell or Open Philanthropy reveals the extent to which Effective Altruism’s cause landscape has become almost entertainingly niche and remarkably varied. The mitigation of existential risks posed by hypothetical future superintelligent machines is an area that has received significant funding and institutional support from organisations like 80,000 Hours. Similarly, longtermism, which privileges the moral worth of future (and even post-human) lives over present-day people, has come to occupy a central place in Effective Altruism discourse. A kind of moral circle expansion has also become popular, extending ethical consideration to potential sentient artificial intelligences or even simulated beings. Other initiatives include efforts to reduce wild animal suffering and improve insect welfare. These priorities are not fringe within Effective Altruism; they often attract millions in funding.

It should come as no surprise that many of these cause areas have attracted criticism from outside the Effective Altruism community. Perhaps more surprising, is that similar concerns have been voiced from within. Several prominent Effective Altruist thinkers have expressed unease about the movement’s apparent drift away from its original focus on global poverty alleviation and public health (domains once considered the bedrock of Effective Altruism engagement).

While each of these causes may have internal coherence under Effective Altruism’s “do good” umbrella, their diversity (combined with the lack of consensus on what qualifies as “effective” or “good”) leads to an atomisation of effort. Instead of converging around shared political or structural goals, participants are pulled into cause-specific silos.

All the while, Effective Altruism exhibits a tendency to funnel resources into individual optimisation (through personal career choices and targeted donations), all based on this idea of rational decision-making and a refusal to define terms.

This dynamic gives rise to a kind of marketplace of causes, wherein individuals and organisations pitch charitable initiatives and campaigns in pursuit of attention and funding. Mirroring a kind of market logic, those causes deemed “most effective” according to specific metrics are rewarded with resources. 

This creates a scenario where people working under the same banner are not working together at all, but merely coexisting as investors in a fragmented moral economy. Sub-movements become commodified (campaigns to either fund or ignore) while internal participants are subtly lobbied to align their resources according to the interpretive faction they belong to regarding their definitions of “good” and “effectiveness”. In this way, competing value systems are monetised, and Effective Altruism begins to resemble a bidding ground for causes, a kind of moral stock exchange.

Of course, some level of disagreement is to be expected. Moral concern is deeply entangled with upbringing, cultural norms, and personal experience; ethical consensus is rare, particularly in a pluralistic space like Effective Altruism. But what stands out is how this lack of consensus plays out when the conversation turns to causes, specifically, which ones we find meaningful, which we want to support, and where we envision ourselves working. Very quickly, it becomes clear that everyone has their own internal hierarchy of cause prioritisation, often grounded in vastly different moral frameworks and intuitions.

Here’s the issue: when there is no shared understanding of the problem, coordinated collective action becomes nearly impossible.

As collective momentum breaks down, the logic of the market will quietly take its place. Causes will no longer be pursued because they build systemic solidarity but because they attract attention, funding, and donor interest by those within the movement. In this sense, Effective Altruism becomes a competition between campaigns and charities for support, like startups vying for investment. Since working for a cause alone doesn’t sustain its presence in the moral economy, financial support will once again become essential and thus prioritised. In this framework, giving money becomes the primary way to “do good” to keep causes alive and competing.

Ironically, Effective Altruism will circle back to what it once critiqued: charitable giving as the ultimate mode of altruism. Only now it’s dressed in rationalist language and framed as the inevitable result of individual optimisation. What gets lost is the possibility of collective transformation, of large-scale efforts to change structural conditions. Instead, “doing good” becomes an exercise in consumer choice, with “effective giving” reframed as a form of ethical consumption.

But is the return to “effective giving” inherently problematic? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’m deliberately withholding judgment on that question, and have taken care not to endorse or oppose it as a policy. What is important to emphasise, however, is that prominent figures within the Effective Altruism community itself have expressed scepticism about its viability. So, for the Effective Altruist, it should be a problem if we are anticipating its return. 

When will this happen? I can’t say. It may re-emerge imminently, or perhaps not at all. Should it fail to return, I suspect that will be because Effective Altruism has faced one of two outcomes: either it has gradually dissolved into a constellation of fragmented initiatives, or it has undergone a process of internal reform aimed at resolving the very tensions I’ve brought up. 

That said, we might think that there is one more scenario in which the return to “effective giving” doesn’t occur. I don’t find it likely, but it’s worth mentioning.

Imagine a situation in which the internal moral marketplace of Effective Altruism organically consolidates around a single cause (or a cluster of closely aligned causes) that essentially achieve a kind of moral monopoly. In such a scenario, competition for attention and resources would be drastically reduced, as the majority of participants would converge in their support for this dominant cause. Under these conditions, not only would collective action be possible, it would likely become the default. 

For instance, suppose that internal resource investment in shrimp welfare became so dominant that proponents of this cause achieved a kind of monopoly within the Effective Altruism community. In such a scenario, the need for “effective giving” as a competitive mechanism would significantly diminish, as the consolidation of support would naturally reduce cause-based competition and thereby facilitate collective action.

However, while an outcome like this is theoretically possible, it is highly improbable, at least if the Effective Altruism movement is to remain recognisably intact. 

For such consolidation to occur without undermining the broader movement, it would almost certainly have to be driven top-down. A bottom-up convergence would render the “Effective Altruism” branding largely superfluous, as individuals would be unified around a specific cause rather than a shared framework of inquiry. Yet, a top-down endorsement of any singular cause would require a degree of definitional clarity (and epistemic authority) that the movement has thus far explicitly resisted. In the absence of such decisive leadership and conceptual consensus, I maintain that this kind of moral monopoly is unlikely to materialise. For now, then, my assessment stands: the return of “effective giving” remains the more plausible trajectory.

What, then, is the solution? At this stage, I’m not entirely sure. I have yet to fully consider that question in depth. At the very least, introducing clear definitions would likely narrow the appeal of Effective Altruism, as some individuals would inevitably disagree with the chosen conceptual boundaries. This would, in turn, foster greater definitional consensus within the movement (albeit at the cost of reducing its size). Such internal coherence could lead to greater convergence around cause prioritisation, thereby diminishing the reliance on “effective giving” as a default strategy. 

Yet, this raises a deeper question: is the issue merely a matter of definitional clarity, or does it point to a more fundamental flaw within Effective Altruism itself (one that cannot be resolved through semantic refinement alone)? Possibly. Either way, the implications of keeping the moral market up and running are significant.

For now, however, I have sought to illustrate how the definitional ambiguity at the heart of Effective Altruism enables a form of ideological drift among its proponents. This conceptual flexibility, while seemingly inclusive, has contributed to the fragmentation of action within the movement, ultimately transforming Effective Altruism into a kind of moral marketplace. If these internal tensions remain unresolved, I anticipate a re-emergence of “effective giving” as the dominant mode of engagement within the community.

While my focus here has been on the internal implications for Effective Altruism as a movement, I have gestured toward its broader significance. Given Effective Altruism’s expanding role in global philanthropy and its considerable influence within the global economy, this atomised, market-driven approach carries important consequences beyond its own borders. A more detailed exploration of these external implications should follow in due course. Stay tuned and, once again, I hope to meet you there.

[1]I say “almost” because I’ve previously argued that Effective Altruism tends to privilege positions that align with what I’ve described as a machine-like conception of ethics. For a more detailed account, see my piece “Why People Think Effective Altruism is Utilitarianism”.