Effective altruists focus on the many philosophical questions related to the most effective ways to benefit others. Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to "why" and "how". There is not a consensus on the answers, and there are also differences between effective altruists who believe that they should do the most good they possibly can with all of their resources and those who only try do the most good they can within a defined budget.
Toby Ord,
Hilary Greaves, and
Derek Parfit. Economist
Yew-Kwang Ng conducted similar research in
welfare economics and
moral philosophy. The Centre for Effective Altruism lists the following four principles that unite effective altruism: prioritization, impartial altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit. To support people's ability to act altruistically on the basis of impartial reasoning, the effective altruism movement promotes values and actions such as a collaborative spirit, honesty, transparency, and publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income or other resources. Singer, in his 1972 essay "
Famine, Affluence, and Morality", wrote: It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away ... The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society. Impartiality combined with seeking to do the most good leads to prioritizing benefits to those who are in a worse state, because anyone who happens to be worse off will benefit more from an improvement in their state, all other things being equal. Those who subscribe to
longtermism include
future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future, for example by reducing
existential risks.
Criticism of impartiality The
drowning child analogy in Singer's essay provoked philosophical debate. In response to a version of Singer's drowning child analogy, philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah in 2006 asked whether the most effective action of a man in an expensive suit, confronted with a drowning child, would not be to save the child and ruin his suit—but rather, sell the suit and donate the proceeds to charity. Appiah believed that he "should save the drowning child and ruin my suit". Psychologist Alan Jern called MacAskill's choice "unnatural, even distasteful, to many people", although Jern concluded that effective altruism raises questions "worth asking". MacAskill later endorsed a "qualified definition of effective altruism" in which effective altruists try to do the most good "without violating constraints" such as any obligations that someone might have to help those nearby. William Schambra has criticized the impartial logic of effective altruism, arguing that benevolence arising from
reciprocity and face-to-face interactions is stronger and more prevalent than charity based on impartial, detached altruism.
Larissa MacFarquhar said that people have diverse moral emotions, and she suggested that some effective altruists are not unemotional and detached but feel as much empathy for distant strangers as for people nearby. Richard Pettigrew concurred that many effective altruists "feel more profound dismay at the suffering of people unknown to them than many people feel", and he argued that impartiality in EA need not be dispassionate and "is not obviously in tension with much in
care ethics" as some philosophers have argued.
Cause prioritization A key component of effective altruism is "cause prioritization". Cause prioritization is based on the principle of cause
neutrality, the idea that resources should be distributed to causes based on what will do the most good, irrespective of the identity of the beneficiary and the way in which they are helped. The information required for cause prioritization may involve
data analysis, comparing possible outcomes with what would have happened under other conditions (
counterfactual reasoning), and identifying
uncertainty. The difficulty of these tasks has led to the creation of organizations that specialize in researching the relative prioritization of causes. William MacAskill responded to Berger and Penna, defending the rationale for comparing one beneficiary's interests against another and concluding that such comparison is difficult and sometimes impossible but often necessary. MacAskill argued that the more pernicious form of elitism was that of donating to art galleries (and like institutions) instead of charity.
Cost-effectiveness Some charities are considered to be far more effective than others, as charities may spend different amounts of money to achieve the same goal, and some charities may not achieve the goal at all. Effective altruists seek to identify interventions that are highly cost-effective in
expectation. Many interventions have
uncertain benefits, and the expected value of one intervention can be higher than that of another if its benefits are larger, even if it has a smaller chance of succeeding. as they are commonly considered the highest level of evidence in healthcare research. Others have argued that requiring this stringent level of evidence unnecessarily narrows the focus to issues where the evidence can be developed.
Kelsey Piper argues that uncertainty is not a good reason for effective altruists to avoid acting on their best understanding of the world, because most interventions have mixed evidence regarding their effectiveness. with issues such as medical research or government reform worked on "one grinding step at a time", and results being hard to measure with controlled experiments. Gobry also argues that such interventions risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement. However, since there is a high supply of candidates for such positions, it makes sense to compare the amount of good one candidate does to how much good the next-best candidate would do. According to this reasoning, the marginal impact of a career is likely to be smaller than the gross impact.
Differences from utilitarianism Although EA aims for
maximizing like
utilitarianism, EA differs from utilitarianism in a few ways; for example, EA does not claim that people should always maximize the good
regardless of the means, and EA does not claim that the good is the sum total of
well-being. Other philosophers have argued that EA still retains some core ethical commitments that are essential and distinctive to utilitarianism, such as the principle of impartiality,
welfarism and good-maximization. MacAskill has argued that one should not be absolutely certain about which ethical view is correct, and that "when we are morally uncertain, we should act in a way that serves as a best compromise between different moral views". ==Cause priorities==