Crosspost of my blog.
(I think this is an important article, so I’d appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it—thanks! Standard offer goes, if you take the pledge in response to this article, you get a lifetime paid subscription to this blog).
If I could convince my readers to do just one thing, it would be taking the Giving What We Can pledge. It’s a pledge to give away 10% of your earnings to effective charities, though you can give less if you want. You can also wait to give until you have a more significant income even if you sign the pledge. If you take the pledge and earn the income of the average American, you can save about a hundred lives over the course of your lifetime, and you can improve the conditions for hundreds of thousands of animals. And, of course, if you give to the shrimp, you can plausibly benefit hundreds of millions of them!
I’ve taken the pledge and think there are very strong moral reasons to do so. Money donated to effective charities does staggeringly large amounts of good! You personally can do as much good for the world as Ted Bundy did evil. You can save many people’s lives. I want to stress—this is a thing you can do right now, or later today, or tomorrow, and if you do it, many fewer people will die horribly. You can be the reason why hundreds of parents don’t have to bury a child, and hundreds of children get to live to an old age, when they otherwise wouldn’t have made it to their fifth birthday.
I think a lot of the reason people don’t take the pledge is that they just don’t want to give away a sizeable portion of their wealth. But some people have principled objections to taking the pledge. Most of the objections are easily addressed, so I thought I’d explain why I don’t think there are any good in-principle objections to giving away a bunch of money to effective charities.
A first worry people have is that requiring them to take the pledge is too demanding. Just as you can’t be expected to give your life for a stranger, can you really be expected to give away 10% of your earnings purely for altruistic reasons? Can morality demand so much?
I think it can. First of all, I don’t actually think taking the pledge will make you less happy. Those who are more charitable tend to be happier, even controlling for other things. Knowing that your life is meaningful, that you are making a difference to the lives of countless others, that you better the world with every dollar you earn, makes your life happier. Those who spend their dollars saving other people’s lives are more fulfilled than those who spend their dollars on watches, cars, and fancy vacations.
But also, I think morality does sometimes require you to make sacrifices for the sake of others. Other people matter! If you can spare them from a horrible and lethal fate for just a few thousand dollars, this seems like a good thing to do. The median American is vastly richer than almost anyone who ever lived—and almost at the top 1% of global wealth. We currently live like kings in the Middle Ages. Demanding that we abstain from luxuries of the sort that most of history couldn’t dream of to prevent many children from dying and many animals from being tortured doesn’t seem like a big ask.
Most importantly, you can think that taking the pledge is a good idea even if it’s not a moral requirement. Calling your mother is a nice thing to do. It’s not a moral obligation, but you should still do it if you haven’t recently. Even if you’re not obligated to give away money to effective charities, it’s still a really amazing opportunity to make the world a lot better.
It’s one thing to think morality doesn’t demand you give away all your wealth. That’s perfectly reasonable. But I think it’s clear that if donating can do huge amounts of good, then morality at least demands serious donations. It demands that one makes helping others effectively a non-trivial part of their life.
Imagine looking at this from the perspective of an animal on a factory farm or a child in a foreign country. These people know suffering of a sort that most of us can scarcely imagine. Does it really seem so demanding to ask us to make comparatively small sacrifices for their sake? Probably every single dollar we give away to effective animal charities prevents more suffering than all our lifetime donations will cost us. Certainly if we had the perspective of those helped by our donations, rather than exclusively our own, taking the pledge would seem like a no-brainer. Why does morality demand that they give up their lives, when the alternative is us abstaining from a nice vacation or an upgraded car?
Another objection: how do we know these charities are working? We’ve all heard about scam charities that pretend to do good but don’t really. Can we really trust these charities?
This is a reasonable concern to have, but fortunately there are very effective charities that have been extensively vetted. High quality randomized control trials—the gold standard in scientific evidence—have been carried out by experts, analyzing the effectiveness of charities. GiveWell has done extensive research to identify the most effective charities. So while you should be skeptical if you hear about a random charity from your friend crackhead Bob who fell for eleven crypto-scams last year alone, GiveWell charities can be trusted. Similar points apply to charities helping animals, which have also been carefully vetted by Animal Charity Evaluators.
Another concern: perhaps donating to effective charities that save lives will produce overpopulation. This will hold the nations they affect back economically and socially. Now, it is true that donating to life-saving charities likely raises the population somewhat, but I don’t think this means that they’ll hold the affected nations back.
First of all, being stricken by horrendous diseases tends to hold nations back economically. This effect seems vastly more significant than the negative economic impact of a slightly larger population, particularly because it’s not clear whether a larger population will develop more slowly or more quickly. America is better-off economically than we were in the 1800s, when the population was lower and disease was a greater burden.
Second, it looks like effective charities tend to lower the fertility rate somewhat but this effect is counterbalanced by the lives saved. But things go much better in society if fewer people are born and die, rather than if more people both are born and die. Vast amounts of resources are wasted if people die shortly after birth.
Third, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities. Give to charities that make people’s lives better—e.g. by curing blindness—or that help animals on factory farms. If you end up concluding that charities saving lives are bad, then just give elsewhere! It would be shocking, and suspiciously convenient, if every single charity on the planet did more harm than good!
Fourth, I find this idea pretty intuitively repugnant. Imagine that you could save an African child drowning in a pond. This line of reasoning would seem to imply that doing so would be actively bad because of the impact on overpopulation. This kind of reasoning is not something we’d normally take seriously. Suspiciously, it only crops up when people are justifying not giving away their money. Hmm…
Another concern: shouldn’t we donate locally? Why should we help people overseas when those around us are suffering?
The answer is that it’s much easier to help people overseas. Most of the people who have fallen through the cracks in wealthy country are hard to help. It’s hard to help a homeless person who is on the streets. In contrast, saving lives overseas is cheap and easy—it costs just around 5,000 dollars to save someone’s life. Plausibly, therefore, giving overseas does tens or hundreds of times more good than donating locally. So unless people in your city matter hundreds of times more than people overseas, it’s probably better to donate overseas.
I also find the idea pretty weird that we have extremely strong obligations to the people around us rather than far away. If you could save someone drowning in a pond, would it matter how far away they were? Would it matter if they were an American citizen? If people in your country matter more than people in another country, then people start mattering way more after they fly in a plane and fill out paperwork to become a citizen. But that’s very unintuitive. The reasons to save your life shouldn’t change because you signed some paperwork! In fact, holding that we have strong duties to our countrymen that don’t apply to foreigners often implies we should perform actions that harm one person and benefit no one!
But even if you buy this argument, then just donate to local effective charities! You should still take the pledge, but just donate differently—maybe splitting your donations globally and locally.
A final concern: aren’t scholars unsure if foreign aid works? Aren’t there lots of smart people who think foreign aid backfires? If so, shouldn’t we be skeptical about efforts to provide foreign aid?
It’s true that some kinds of foreign aid are controversial among scholars. Some people think that economic development aid entraps countries and leaves them in poverty. But crucially, none of the kinds of foreign aid promoted by GiveWell are controversial. Among scholars, there is no serious debate about whether, say, anti-malarial bednets are good. The most prominent critics of foreign aid support these kinds of programs. High quality studies have been done on them and have confirmed their efficacy. There is not serious room for doubt.
And, once again, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities, like the charities that prevent animals from languishing in a cage for ten years per dollar they raise. Or give to the organizations working to prevent the extinction of life on Earth.
In my view, there are not any decisive objections to taking the Giving What We Can pledge. Doing so is likely to make you happier and to make the world a lot better. I would encourage you, whatever stage you are at your career, whether or not you generally feel aligned with effective altruism, think about making this decision. It is very likely the best thing you will ever do, and because of it, plausibly hundreds fewer people will die and/or hundreds of thousands fewer animals will suffer horrors beyond comprehension.
