Effective altruism

Effective altruism asks a simple question and tries to answer it rigorously: how can I do the most good with the time and money I have? It answers with evidence, cost-effectiveness and comparisons across causes, and it asks people to act on the answers.

A short history

The movement drew on Peter Singer’s 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” which argued that distance makes no moral difference to the duty to help. GiveWell began as research by a group of friends working in finance, and in 2007 two of them left their jobs to run it full time. Giving What We Can was launched in November 2009 by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, working with Will MacAskill, around a pledge to give 10 percent of income. 80,000 Hours, which advises people on high-impact careers, soft-launched in 2011.

The name came late. When Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours needed an umbrella organization, their directors held a vote, and on 5 December 2011 “Centre for Effective Altruism” won. GiveWell’s research arm, GiveWell Labs, grew into the Open Philanthropy Project, later known as Open Philanthropy, which renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.

Ideas and priorities

The movement’s tools include scale, neglectedness and tractability, cost-effectiveness analysis, counterfactual reasoning and expected value. Its priorities have widened from global health and poverty. 80,000 Hours’ problem list includes risks from advanced artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics among its priorities, alongside factory farming and global health.

In November 2022 the cryptocurrency exchange FTX went bankrupt. Its founder had been a prominent backer of the movement, and the leaders of the FTX Future Fund resigned, warning that many committed grants would not be paid. The collapse prompted a period of public self-examination among the movement’s leaders.

Critiques

Philosophers and activists have pressed several objections. Iason Gabriel grouped them under three headings: that the movement neglects justice, including equality, urgency and rights; that its methods are biased toward what can be measured; and that it is poorly placed to bring about systemic change. Amia Srinivasan argued that it works within the existing order rather than asking what produces global misery. Gabriel’s paper also sets out the responses to each objection, and the debate continues. See systemic change.

Charitology and effective altruism

Charitology shares the movement’s rigor: its insistence on evidence, counterfactuals, honest uncertainty and comparisons across causes. Charitology makes explicit editorial commitments to eight frameworks (welfare, rights, justice, care, faith and tradition, future generations, all life and flourishing), and reports where they agree and part. Effective altruism also contains debates about moral uncertainty and values; it is not one uniform moral theory. And its subject is the charity system itself: the signals, channels, incentives and feedback that decide where all generosity goes, read through the symptom and source lens. Charitology does not judge the movement or the people in it. It treats effective altruism as a tradition to learn from, and as one lens among several. The Single Lens condition is a warning against using any one lens alone.