In response to Caviola, L., Schubert, S., & Greene, J. D. (2021). The psychology of (in)effective altruism.

I have issues with EA in general in fundamental ways, so much so that after reading this paper made me dig in more and write this 2000 word post out of sheer frustration with the pride in it. One thing that really stands out reading this paper is how much EA positions itself as offering an almost irrefutable logic: maximize your positive impact by supporting only the most “effective” causes, and anything less is, at best, an error and, at worst, a kind of moral failing. But I find myself pushing back on this framing, and this paper, perhaps unintentionally, provides ample ammunition for why EA’s core assumptions might not only be psychologically unrealistic but also normatively suspect. And while I can already hear the chorus of counterarguments (“but that isn’t real EA”), I hear “real nationalism/communism” has never been tried. 

For one, the entire concept of “effectiveness” is far less straightforward than the EA movement wants to admit. The paper acknowledges, for example, the serious epistemic obstacles: most people are skeptical that you can meaningfully compare the impact of a malaria net to, say, a local arts education program or mental health intervention. This skepticism is not just a cognitive bias; it reflects a real, unresolved debate about what counts as a “good” and how to measure the value of different outcomes. The cost-per-QALY approach that EA champions comes out of health economics and imports a lot of its own value-laden assumptions. In practice, this means that the “effectiveness” metric often boils down to what is most quantifiable, not necessarily what is most valuable, important, or just. There are profound issues with comparing across domains, especially when different forms of flourishing or suffering are involved. Even WELLBYs and similar attempts to aggregate “well-being” risk flattening important moral distinctions for the sake of tractability. It’s almost as if the Catholic Church doesn’t even exist, nor is there 2000 years of history asking these fundamental questions. Its epistemic arrogance is annoying.

At this point, an Effective Altruist would jump in with the standard retort: the sheer scale of preventable suffering in the world means we are morally obligated to send resources wherever they have the highest expected impact, full stop. Even if effectiveness is hard to quantify, the argument goes, we have a duty to try: anything else risks moral complacency, or worse, outright neglect of the most vulnerable for the sake of our own feelings or traditions. The pluralism and personal meaning I’m describing, they’d say, sounds nice, but it cannot justify leaving orders of magnitude of potential good on the table.

But this counter misses the real critique. The entire assumption that all “good” can be meaningfully aggregated, compared, and optimized is a claim, not a fact. While it is possible to measure and compare different kinds of benefits, such as the suffering averted by a malaria net versus the support offered to a local immigrant community or the preservation of an indigenous language, there is a profound difference between measurement that seeks to illuminate the layered nature of moral goods and measurement that aims to reduce everything to a single, maximizable scale. The belief that these values can always be collapsed into a common metric is deeply contestable and, I would argue, often reductionist. 

The Notre Dame example is especially telling. When the cathedral burned, the world witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of donations: not just from technocrats maximizing QALYs, but from millions moved by grief, awe, and a sense of shared loss. EA commentators often hold up the hundreds of millions raised for Notre Dame as a cautionary tale about “ineffective” giving: a classic case of wasted resources that could have saved thousands of lives if only donors had made more “rational” choices. But this stance reveals the real limitations of the EA worldview.

Notre Dame is not just a building. It is a symbol of continuity, memory, artistry, and collective identity for millions across generations. The act of donating to its restoration was, for many, a way to reaffirm belonging to a shared story, to participate in preserving the tangible and intangible heritage that gives life depth and connection. These are not trivial goods, nor are they easily substituted. If all resources are supposed to flow only to the most “cost-effective” causes, we risk a world stripped of the very things that make communities resilient and life meaningful.

To reduce the restoration of Notre Dame to an “inefficient allocation” is to ignore the ways in which beauty, tradition, and the preservation of cultural memory contribute to human flourishing. It is also to miss how collective acts of giving, whether for a cathedral, a local mural, or a community garden, foster the kind of social capital and mutual trust that undergird any just and vibrant society.

It is worth asking, too, what actually follows after saving a life. Life is a fundamental good, but what makes life worth living is never just the avoidance of death or disease. A meaningful life is built on opportunities for connection, culture, justice, belonging, and the pursuit of beauty. Sometimes, what matters most in moral life are precisely those things that resist simple aggregation: loyalty, tradition, community, and dignity. To focus only on what is easily counted risks missing the substance of what makes life, in any genuine sense, good. Acknowledging this complexity is not an excuse for ignoring impact; rather, it is a call to build frameworks that respect the full range of what we value, both what can and cannot be captured in consequentialist thought (which is why it is largely wrong as a philosophy).

The paper also points out that most donors’ reluctance to embrace EA’s calculus is not just ignorance or bias, but a function of the fact that charitable giving is fundamentally personal and expressive for most people. I think this is a valid and defensible position. Treating charity like investing ignores the complex, relational, and even identity-driven aspects of why people give. Sometimes, supporting your local library or a friend’s marathon for cancer research does more for community and social fabric than an extra dollar sent to the “top-rated” intervention in a distant country. The idea that this is “ineffective” in a pejorative sense is itself a highly contestable ethical claim, not a neutral fact.

Another common EA rebuttal is to accuse such thinking of parochialism or tribalism: an unwillingness to overcome intuition and do the most good possible, even if it feels less emotionally satisfying. And it’s true: there is something arbitrary about how human empathy works. But the fact that people are motivated by personal stories, community ties, and identity is not a flaw to be engineered away. The danger is that, in “rationalizing” giving, we lose the very motivations and social infrastructure that sustain any kind of generosity at scale. The “paradox of cold charity” is real: the more giving becomes an abstract calculation, the less people may feel moved to give at all.

Social signaling and moral motivation also deserve more critical scrutiny. The paper rightly notes that EA-style giving often garners less social reward than more traditional or local giving. But it might be worth asking whether the drive for quantifiable “effectiveness” is itself just another form of signaling: one that appeals more to technocrats or those who already feel culturally comfortable with abstraction and maximization. If so, EA risks becoming a kind of moral performance (which I already think it is, and why I think deontology is actually a better position: it matters why you do what you do), privileging a particular class of cognitive style and, frankly, a particular set of philosophical assumptions (utilitarianism, consequentialism, rationalism).

Of course, an EA would argue that these “personal” benefits can be preserved within an effectiveness framework: just make effective giving the new social norm, or build community around measurable impact. But this is aspirational at best; in practice, attempts to “make EA cool” have not closed the gap between abstraction and lived, relational forms of generosity. More fundamentally, the attempt to universalize a single metric or approach runs roughshod over the actual diversity of human moral psychology and the multiple, sometimes incommensurable, goods that real communities value.

So, while the paper identifies a host of motivational and epistemic obstacles to EA-style “effectiveness,” I would turn the critique around. Maybe these so-called obstacles are actually clues to the limitations of the EA approach itself. The resistance to optimizing may be rooted in legitimate skepticism about what we can measure, whose values get counted, and what it means to act morally in a world of deep pluralism and uncertainty. Perhaps what is needed is not just more nudging or better metrics, but a broader rethinking of what “doing good” actually means.

At the same time, I think the paper, and the broader EA literature, sometimes undersells what is actually good about charitable giving, even when it is not optimized for cost-effectiveness. There are social, psychological, and civic goods that come from the act of giving itself, especially when it is embedded in community or tied to identity and meaning. Supporting a local charity, contributing to an arts program, or helping a friend’s cause may not always be “maximally efficient,” but these forms of giving build social capital, trust, and shared narratives that are essential for any functioning society. They strengthen local networks, foster civic participation, and can even help cultivate empathy and solidarity in ways that large, impersonal global interventions might not.

Moreover, the diversity of causes that attract donors, whether driven by emotion, memory, or affiliation, may actually be a strength, not a weakness. This pluralism ensures that a broad spectrum of human needs and values are attended to, including those that may never make it onto a cost-effectiveness spreadsheet. In a world where many kinds of suffering and aspiration are incommensurable, maintaining space for varied and personal forms of generosity can safeguard against the tyranny of a single metric and keep the moral sphere open to competing visions of what is good.

A final EA rejoinder might be that, sure, all of this matters, but if we don’t prioritize lives saved, suffering alleviated, and the prevention of catastrophic risk, then all the local meaning in the world can’t outweigh the ethical imperative of maximizing good. But I’d argue this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. The challenge is to find a balance: to strive for greater impact and rationality in giving, yes, but not at the cost of erasing the moral and social pluralism that makes giving human in the first place.

In the end, I agree that striving for more impactful giving is valuable, but I also think the EA framework would benefit from more humility about the limits of calculation and a greater appreciation for the social, cultural, and psychological realities that shape why and how people give. The real challenge is not to replace one orthodoxy with another, but to balance measurable impact with the other goods, community, justice, meaning, that matter in a flourishing moral life.