John Donvan
This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan. Hi, everybody. Warren Buffett, Melinda French Gates, Sam Bankman-Fried, these are just some of the present and in one case former billionaires who have pledged not to hold onto their wealth, but to give most or all of it away, a gesture that is aligned with the spirit of a movement known as Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism is a growing movement. It’s actually attracting many tech professionals and students at elite universities, people who are likely to make a lot of money, and they are committing to give it away under the rubric of Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism, which we will shorten from time to time as EA, EA at its core asks a very human question that we can all relate to, “How can I do the most good?”

Effective Altruism is gaining a lot of attention, both positive and negative, for how it is formulating answers to that question. The movement aims to quantify outcomes, and to use that information to guide decisions on how and where to give. It asks people to think through, rationally, the choices that they will be making. “Do I give $50 to help buy mosquito nets in a place plagued by malaria, or do I give that $50 to my beloved local community theater group to help them keep the lights on? Which is doing the most good? Do I do more good by training to be an elementary schoolteacher, where I can help hundreds of kids learn to read over the course of my career, or do I go to Wall Street and earn tens of millions and donate that money to pay the salaries of many, many schoolteachers, and help thousands of kids?” The Effective Altruism movement is confident that it is coming up with the answers to those questions and it is confident in its framework around doing the most good, that it makes sense practically and ethically.

But, it faces severe criticism. Criticized as being arrogant in its assumptions, damaging in its impact, and being morally corrupt, with its critics providing numerous reasons for making those accusations. So who makes the better case? That’s what we are taking on in this debate, with this question at its center: Does the Effective Altruism movement get giving right? It is time to meet our debaters. Answering yes to that question, I wanna welcome to the program Peter Singer, a foundational thinker in the Effective Altruism movement, and he is the author of a book called The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically. Peter is also a philosopher and professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Peter, welcome to Open to Debate. It’s great to have you on the program.

Peter Singer
Thank you. Good to be with you.

John Donvan
And again, the question is does the Effective Altruism movement get giving right? And answering no is Alice Crary. Alice is also a philosopher. She teaches at The New School, and she has been a sharp critic of Effective Altruism, has published articles criticizing the movement, and co-edited a book with this title: The Good It Promises, the Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism. Alice, welcome to Open to Debate.

Alice Crary
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

John Donvan
So, uh, let’s get to our first round, which are comprised of opening statements by each of you in turn. We wanna give you each a few minutes to tell us why you’re taking the position of yes or no. Peter, you are up first, and you are going to explain why Effective Altrui- Altruism gets giving right. Here’s your chance, please, to tell us why.

Peter Singer
Thank you. Firstly, of course, I don’t wanna argue that Effective Altruism never makes any mistakes. It’s, it’s a human institution. It consists of a very large number of different p- people with different views. There’s no particular central organization that everybody belongs to, no party card that Effective Altruists have, no creed they all subscribe to, so it’s, it’s a broad movement, and some people will get things wrong any, uh, you know, from time to time. But I wanna argue that the general ideas of Effective Altruism do get things right, and those general ideas are very simple. As you might guess from the name, Effective Altruism essentially has two components. The first component, and the most basic one, is altruism. That is, we ought to live so as to make the world a better place. We ought to live not only for ourselves, but one of our major goals in life should be to contribute to making the world better. We know that there are lots of problems we have in the world today. We have, for example, a very unequal world, in which there’s more than a billion people living very affluent lives in wealthy countries and there is something now like between 7 and 800 million people living in extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank, that is living less, on less than US $2.15 per day.

Peter Singer
Other Effective Altruists point to the enormous amount of suffering we inflict on factory farmed animals, and suggest that we really ought to be trying to stop this. It’s not bad, not only causes immense amounts of suffering for actually hundreds of billions of animals we confine each year, but it’s really bad for the environment. It’s really wasteful of food. It creates a risk of new pandemics. So that’s something they wanna work against. And some Effective Altruists wanna look at the further future. They wanna say how important it is that our species should survive, so they wanna reduce what they refer to as existential risk, that is the risk that we will become extinct. So, so those are goals. Those are altruistic goals, and the Effective Altruism movement encourages people to think about those goals and make them part of their own life.

Then there’s the effective part of it. Very often, when people, uh, do act altruistically, when they think about doing good for the world, they do it impulsively. They give because they’re asked to give. They give, perhaps, to examples that you gave, John, uh, they give to their local community theater to keep it going, because they know those people and they think it’s a nice thing to have a community theater. But they don’t really think, “Is this the best that I can do with my money? Is this really more important than,” for example, preventing children dying of malaria? Which is something we know we can do quite easily in malaria-prone regions, or helping, uh, people to get out of poverty, or repairing obstetric fistulas, uh, a condition that happens to women who give birth with no medical assistance, that effectively makes them incontinent and can ruin their lives, and can quite easily be repaired, educating girls. Uh, that’s another thing that can be much more cost effective than helping in your local community, and also more cost effective than maybe just giving impulsively to an organization that gave you a nice brochure with a smiling child on it.

So Effective Altruists say get some evidence. That’s the key point. Get some evidence that the charity you’re donating to, or if you’d like the career that you’re going to go into, will be an effective way of doing good, you won’t be wasting your resources, you won’t be getting poor value for what you donate. So Effective Altruists say just as you would do research before making a large purchase, a new phone, a car, or whatever, do some research. It’s easy to do. It’s online for you. And make sure that your altruism is effective.

John Donvan
Thank you very much, Peter. Um, now we have, uh, answering no to the question, which again is does the Effective Altruism movement get giving right, Alice Crary. Again, Alice is a philosopher who teaches at The New School, and Alice, this is your turn to tell us your reasons for arguing no in answer to the question.

Alice Crary
Thank you so much, John. Thank you, Peter. Look, Effective Altruism’s failures in my eyes are so great that it should be abandoned, and I know that sounds intense, so I wanna stress that I distinguish Peter, whom I respect, from Effective Altruism, even though he’s long agreed to speak on its behalf. Effective Altruism’s advocates are certainly right that our world contains desperate misery and injustice, and that people seeking to engage positively face really hard questions about how to do so, but we don’t get guidance from the troubled project.

Effective Altruism’s fans, you just heard Peter do this, describe it as a reason- and also evidence-based guide to doing good, but its notions of reason and evidence aren’t commonsensical. Effective Altruists appeal to randomized control trials or similar and recommending minimally costly programs they think can be shown, with the metrics of welfare economics, to have maximal benefits. That’s a highly technical program, not a transliteration of ordinary notions of reason and evidence.

What I wanna do is give a list of four concerns I have about Effective Altruism to discuss, so here they are. First, human lives are more complicated than Effective Altruists tell us. Before Effective Altruism existed, aid experts knew that relying on randomized trials or similar doesn’t guarantee aid interventions that work in real life. And as a S- philosopher at Stanford, Leif Wenar, has noted, some interventions that Effective Altruists long touted as doing the most good might be more harmful than beneficial.

Second, effective altruists mostly neglect or dismiss as ineffective the coordinated efforts of justice movements to change harmful social structures, but Effective Altruists lack the resources for that negative assessment, and in making it, they neglect the political roots of misery and injustice, and so fail to address the reproduction of misery and injustice.

Third, because Effective Altruism rarely recommends social change, it reinforces the status quo. This partly explains its success in attracting funds. It now directs the giving of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, records pledges in the tens of billions, and influences US politics. Like some other mega-philanthropies, it has an anti-democratic bent, spending vast sums and shaping policy with little accountability.

Effective Altruism started with an important public focus on extreme poverty and animal suffering. My fourth concern, which I believe Peter partly shares, is about how it lost this focus. Prominent Effective Altruists are now calling themselves longtermists, who contemplate the prospective wellbeing of trillions of humans they imagine living in the distant future, and conclude that combating risks to human extinctions, what they call x-risks, which Peter referred to, is so important. It’s a moral priority that might justify almost any means, however terrible. The reasoning is frightening as Philosopher Emile Torres has stressed. Now, longtermist funders are rushing to build artificial general intelligence while insisting that it’s a key risk, which leaves longtermists funding programs in AI safety to protect against their funders’ own AI systems.

That’s it. I have a positive agenda, but that can wait for our discussion.

John Donvan
Okay. Thank you very much, Alice, and thanks to both of you for your opening. We’re gonna come up to a break, but before we do, I’m just curious to check in with each of you. Having heard the other’s side, I’d like, I’d like to ask you, I’m gonna ask you both the same question. I’m gonna go to you first, Peter. I’m just looking for a very tight answer, something you could put on a billboard, that explains what you think Alice got most egregiously wrong in her argument or her, her counterargument to your opening.

Peter Singer
I think what Alice got wrong is that she doesn’t appreciate that EA is about evidence, and if people make criticisms, if Leif Wenar makes criticisms, we wanna look at the evidence for the claims that EA interventions do more harm than good, and if that evidence is there and convincing, of course EA will change. The whole aim is to do good. So, being open to the evidence is an essential trait of EA that some of its critics don’t seem to appreciate.

John Donvan
And Alice, I am not asking you to respond to that point. I’m asking you, again, to reflect on Peter’s opening and to ask you what was the most egregious part of his argument in your view.

Alice Crary
I think I would push Peter somewhat on the same topic that he just pushed me on, which is to say actually, evidence is relatively narrowly constrained, or, uh, specifically defined in the writings of most Effective Altruists so that it has to be evidence of things that can be aligned with the natural sciences, at least in the method of identifying them, and I would ask him whether he thinks the kind of flexibility he thinks Effective Altruism has can coexist with that restriction.

John Donvan
All right. So we’re gonna have a chance to get into all of that a we come back from our break, but we are gonna take a break first. I’m John Donvan. This is Open to Debate, and we will be right back. Welcome back to Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan, and we are taking on this question: Does the Effective Altruism movement get giving right? Our debaters are Peter Singer, a foundational thinker in the Effective Altruism movement, and Alice Crary, who’s a philosophy professor at The New School, and in their opening arguments, uh, the dividing lines roughly went this way.

Uh, Peter, uh, as a co-founder of the movement, explained, uh, its basic tenets, uh, which come down to the two words, effective and altruism. He started with altruism, uh, making the point that, uh, it’s just, it’s a, it’s a moral obligation to help others, especially when you have more than they do and when your giving can make an enormous impact on their lives. He focused, um, I would say primarily on the alleviation of suffering as one of the greatest forms of good, as he’s described suffering takes place in this world on a massive scale. Uh, he’s ta- also made reference not just to human suffering, but to the suffering of animals. He pointed out that part of the movement, and he did make the case that the movement is not a monolith, that there are different strands of it, and it’s, uh, there’s no central command, that one of the strands has begun to look at the future, and trying to make judgments now about how to do the best good in the future, because many, many, many more people, presumably, will be living after us than are in, alive in the world right now. And on the terms of effective, he just said basically, the fundamental point is let’s not become impulsive in how we give. Let’s check what the reasons are that we actually choose a charitable target. Um, let’s d- do it by using research and evidence.

Alice, pushing back, said she thinks the whole movement should be abandoned. It’s a very strong word, but that lives up to Alice’s track record on this issue. She’s a very, very strong opponent of it. Her argument is that while of course there is injustice in the world and while of course it’s a good thing for efforts to be made to address that injustice, that she, she challenges whether Effective Altruism really has any idea what it’s doing in terms of knowing, uh, what the outcomes are, are going to be, knowing what evidence is relevant, specifically saying that human life is too complicated to yield to metric analysis, that unintended consequences can result, and that in addition, the, uh, movement has a tendency to ignore social justice movements that wanna be, take a different approach and more fundamentally change the system, and that in fact, in some ways, in her view, the efforts of, uh, Effective Altruism actually reinforced the problematic status quo.

So, um, if any of you disagree with my (laughs) assessments of that, you can, you can bring that up in our discussion, but Peter, I wanna g- I wanna go to you first, uh, as Alice was the last to speak, and take on her challenge to you, that no matter how good your research is, human life is too complicated to yield to analysis that’s going to predict that X efforts will have Y result, and, and, uh, uh, also these things are open-ended. It doesn’t end on the day that the result is delivered, but then there’s, uh, uh, m- more and more and more consequences can come. So, I th- I think that’s a fundamental challenge to the, the m- the methodology, uh, and I just wanted to ask you to respond to it.

Peter Singer
Well, certainly human life is complicated, and no question about that. But, w- what is the alternative to trying to gather the best evidence we can about what will make things go better? And of course, you know, following them up as, as long as we can too, because you’re right. We need to consider the long-term consequences. But, uh, I don’t see an alternative, really. I mean, the, the alternative would be not, not to look at this evidence, um, and to just haphazardly use our resources to do good in ways that we have no reason for thinking will do good. Uh, I’d say much better to try something that looks plausible and to follow it, to test it. And this is what randomized control trials do, which Alice was critical of. Now, I’m not saying that randomized control trials are the only kind of evidence, um, but they are definitely useful evidence.

Uh, if for example, you want to reduce deaths f- child deaths from malaria, um, and you don’t have the resources to distribute bed nets everywhere, then why not look at the rates of infant death from malaria in a range of different villages, and distribute, uh, the bed nets randomly in h- let’s say half of those villages, and see how well they’re used, see to what extent the number of cases of malaria drop, see to what extent the cases of child deaths from malaria drop, compare that with the villages that didn’t have any nets. Um, sure, also look at misuse of nets, you know? Uh, that’s one of the things claimed, people use the bed nets for fishing nets, which may be not good, because they catch too many small fish, so look at how often that happens, consider how great the harm that causes is, and then come to a judgment as to whether you should or should not continue the program.

John Donvan
Uh, Alice, your response.

Alice Crary
Peter, I don’t think, understood exactly what I said. I was not critical of randomized control trials. I think they are thought of as something like the, um, gold standard for the kinds of humanitarian and development interventions that we’re talking about. The point is that having one in the hand doesn’t guarantee that when we turn to the real world that, that we’re gonna have an intervention that works. So this isn’t criticism of randomized control trials, but I am being critical of, for instance, the original organizations, uh, GiveWell, um, when they were first formed, um, in 2006, this is the first charity evaluator or charity grant giver associated with Effective Altruism, and it’s s- started by people who have no experience of development studies, and no experience with, um, implementation science, and so, what you see is an attempt to use the methods that… And they’re very frank about it if you read their blog today. They use the methods that they have, um, and have real trouble implementing them.

John Donvan
I, I just wanna bring it back to Peter. G- where, what I think I hear Alice saying, and this, so she didn’t use this word, but in a certain way, Effective Altruists are, are naïve… They’re very smart people and they know numbers, but they’re kind of naïve about how the real world works and how philanthropy works, and, and the-

Peter Singer
Well, but-

John Donvan
… and the complex-

Peter Singer
(laughs) Sorry, w- w- I mean, Ali- Alice said something like the randomized control trials may be all very well, but they don’t work in the real world. But, but the trial that I described with the bed nets and malaria, was not conducted by Effective Altruists. It was conducted by s- people who h- have experience in the world, and are running these trials in Africa, for example, or wherever the m- malaria is, is current, and the results that they’re getting are exactly results from the real world. It’s not… What the people at GiveWell are doing is they’re a- aggregating the research. They’re reading the journals, they’re looking at the peer-reviewed studies, and they’re saying, “Good. We have real evidence that this works, that this saves lives.” Other interventions which people carry out either may not save lives…

Peter Singer
There’s an example about, um, that Will MacAskill gives, of something called the PlayPump, where for a while, there was a big thing about, uh, in places that didn’t have water, uh, we would put in, instead of a normal hand pump, we would put in a kind of little merry-go-round pump, something that the kids could play on, and then the water would be pumped by the kids playing, and it would save people the work of pumping up the water from the well. But nobody had done any studies on how long kids would wanna play on this device, um, and in fact, after the novelty had worn off, kids stopped playing on it, and then the women, who were, whose job it was to get the water, had to push this thing around and ’round, which was much harder than on the PlayPump. So that’s an example of people having a kind of intuitive idea that sounds good, but not testing it, and, and that’s why the, the, the trials are actually much better, and much more reliable, as a good way of using your money.

Alice Crary
I, I’m pretty sure that’s not what I said. I mean, I did say I think that they’re the gold standard. But, but there are fields, like development studies and implementation studies, which are all about how you move from the, uh, the knowledge of the causal relationships that are revealed in those studies to actual implementation in the real world.

John Donvan
Al- A- A- Alice, if, if you’re correct that, um, these approaches, uh, don’t always produce understandably correct results, predictably correct results, verifiably good results, but it happens now and then, w- what’s the harm in the big picture the, t- to the degree that you are such a severe critic of Effective Altruism? What, what’s dangerous out there?

Alice Crary
Absolutely, so, so this isn’t… This really isn’t about, like, “Oh, everybody’s trying to do the same thing, and we shouldn’t have Effective Altruists trying to do it.” No, it was the idea that, that reason and evidence were supposed to be their guide in a way that distinguished them. They were supposed to be telling people, “Look, don’t listen to other charity advisors. Listen to us, ’cause we can tell you how to do the most good.” And, what’s happened, uh, is that I think there’s been a realization in some of the organizations that you need, actually, the experience that a lot of experienced philanthropists, people doing development studies, people in, in implementation science, public health officials, and so-forth, that they had. It could also be really harmful if you’re saying, “These and these and these things are effective. They work,” and y- if you’re not using the right metrics and you exclude a lot of important work that people are doing, because you don’t have the right tools to measure people who are trying to make systemic change in the world, social movements, people trying to change unjust laws, then, then it can be a problem.

John Donvan
So, uh, to a degree, are you… Is, is the f- is it the fact that the movement has gained so much traction, and the traction of s- frankly, so many powerful people?

Alice Crary
No, I wouldn’t put it like that, but, uh, one domain of action that, that I’ve worked in closely, and that Peter is also, is something like the founder of it, is animal advocacy, and there, the, the number of funds are so small that when a couple of funders started working with Effective Altruist, uh, related institutions, people who were, uh, sort of activist intellectuals who were doing advocacy which was not intended to make welfare adjustments within industrial animal agriculture, which was the main focus of most of the research and most of the activism, but were trying to actually change the system or change, uh, the way local agricultures are protected, or look at access to plant-based food that’s healthy in poor parts of major cities in the US.

John Donvan
Peter, if we could come back to you, and, and, and share with us the experience of Effective Altruism in addressing the issue of animal welfare, uh, where the primary concern has been, um, factory farming, and it’s im- it’s, it was really one of the motivating causes for the coming together of the movement in the first place.

Peter Singer
Yeah, absolutely, and I think, uh, uh, animal, treatment of animals is a good example of where Effective Altruism has put the focus in the right place, because if you look at charts that show, firstly, where does most of the money that is donated to help animals go, um, certainly until very recently, and I think Effective Altruism may have made some difference, but it’s still the case largely, the overwhelming majority of the money goes to dogs and cats, basically to shelter organizations that are helping dogs and cats, you know, stray animals, and I’m not saying that’s, that’s a bad thing to do. Um, and then, when we look at factory farming, it gets a tiny, tiny percentage of the funds that the public give to, uh, uh, protect animals. But, it’s overwhelmingly the vast majority of the animals on whom humans inflict suffering. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of animals each year, raised for food in confined, overcrowded conditions, where the only motivation is to produce the product as cheaply as possible.

Now, when animal charity evaluators were set up, which is, uh, really a- applying Effective Altruist thinking to the animal movement, animal charity evaluators started recommending organizations that have the biggest possible impact on animals for the dollar, and they were mostly organizations working, uh, against factory farming, but certainly, they were also, some of them, were working towards alternative plant-based foods, or even cultivated meat. So basically, they were just looking around and saying, “Where can we get better value for our dollar in donating?”

John Donvan
So Alice, see, I’d, I’d like to take that back to you, because I’m, I’m imagining that p- anybody out there who’s listening, who is, cares about animals is saying, “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”

Alice Crary
Yeah, absolutely. The values are all in the right place, and as someone who works in the area also, obviously, one was really happy to have, um, new funds being directed into animal advocacy, which is often neglected. But again, what we saw when this money came in, and the activist work that was funded, regarded as e- effective by Effective Altruists met their quantitative metrics, so you could show like, “Oh, we’re making cages a little bigger,” or, “We’re getting pledges from companies to go cage-free.” These were working with industry, and often, the pledges weren’t even met. And, uh, where we had activists who were doing work that was intended to change laws, and to, um, especially work with grassroots organizations in the Global South, it was often seen as ineffective and not funded, so it became a problem for more, um, justice-oriented and more transformation-oriented activists to actually have Effective Altruism come into this space, even though the values of, um, helping animals are there.

Peter Singer
Just firstly to say, uh, a recent study was made of which corporations, uh, how m- uh, what proportion of corporations have kept their commitments, their pledges to, for example, not use eggs from caged hens, or not use pig products from, uh, pigs who were kept in, uh, where the mother pigs were kept in individual stalls and they couldn’t turn around. And, and the rate was actually very high. It was over 90%, if I re- uh, recall correctly. Now, that’s not perfect, but, um, basically, those pledges are, are doing pretty well. Now, in terms of those other, what, um, Alice calls justice organizations working in the Global South to try to really change, transform agriculture, um, I don’t know very much about them. Uh, they sound like a great idea. If they are s- successful or if they have some prospect of success in changing agriculture, if we can show that, I’m sure the Effective Altruism movement will support it. Um, it’s all a matter of what works.

John Donvan
We haven’t said much in the conversation about the personalities involved, with the exception of Peter being a prominent personality, but a lot of controversy swirled around S- uh, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was, uh, really, really a strong advocate in his heyday, of Effective Altruism, and, and kind of was that model of somebody, as I mentioned in the beginning, “Can you go to Wall Street and make tens of millions of dollars to pay schoolteachers rather than become a schoolteacher?” And, and that’s, uh, a concept Peter called earning to give, and I wanted to ask you about that concept if, uh, if that is important to you, part of this conversation.

Peter Singer
Yes. I think the concept of earning to give got a lot of media attention when, uh, it was first floated by people like Will MacAskill, uh, because it was so controversial, and I think the answer is, um, it has worked sometimes. I, I know some people who’ve done that, and who have given very substantial amounts to effective causes, and probably have done more good than they could’ve done if, for example, they’d gone to be a teacher in an elementary school or maybe an individual aid worker. Um, but obviously, there are other cases where it’s blown up, and that you’ve mentioned the most spectacular case where it’s blown up, is Sam Bankman-Fried. Um, it’s… I, I don’t really know Sam. I make… I suggest people read Michael Lewis’s Book, Going Infinite, um, which is a sort of inside view. Um, and Michael Lewis’s view seems to be that Sam was incompetent rather than deliberately trying to defraud customers, but you know, as I say, obviously he’s been found guilty of fraud and he’s spending time in prison, and he did have a huge fortune, which sadly is not going to be going to Effective Altruism. Uh, so, so that’s, uh, clearly one example that’s gone wrong.

Maybe peo- Effective Altruists should be more cautious in talking about earning to give. Um, but I don’t think it’s, it’s the core of the movement. It’s one aspect of the movement, one idea for careers. And if you look at the website that, uh, most Effective Altruists would go to to get advice about careers, it’s called 80,000 Hours, um, you’ll see that it, it doesn’t really highlight earning to give. It’s one of the possibilities among a whole range of different careers that, where you can do good.

John Donvan
Well, a little bit of a tangent off your, those comments, back to you, Alice. In your book, you speak of, of the, of, of there being a moral corruption at the core of the movement, that there needs to be a challenge to capitalism per se, and that Effective Altruism and its participation by a lot of capitalists in a capitalist system, some of them, uh, as Peter says not all of them, maybe it’s an offshoot, trying to make as much possible through the capitalist system, are participating in the system that is causing some of the issues that the giving is supposed to alleviate. Do I have that r- right? Is that your critique?

Alice Crary
It’s a g- a good summary, and as Peter said, yeah. We’re in a world where I don’t think anyone who’s thinking about it is gonna deny that we have a disproportionate amount of wealth and resources, um, in the hands of rich people and, uh, in, in wealthy countries in the Global North, and, and a disproportionate number of people in poor countries and the Global South suffering, and Effective Altruist ideas that we roughly start from here and ask how do we address extreme poverty, not a bad question to be sure, but there’s no prior investigation of how the world arrived at its wealth distribution and whether that is an expression of grievous injustice. And you have, I think in the critics of Effective Altruism, a desire to ask that prior question, not because they’re backward-looking, but because they think unless we acknowledge multigenerational patterns of injustice that afflict our world, we won’t be able to move on towards a more just future that doesn’t just repeat the miseries of the past.

And yes, critics of Effective Altruism usually see the financial realm as part of this historical picture that needs to be seen as a site of sedimented injustices, but it does make… Uh, I, I don’t think anybody disparages the idea that, uh, somebody could thoughtfully give what they earned in a generic sense, but it makes it understandable that they would oppose making earning to give a plank in your social and political program. And not only that, if to put it slightly more colorfully and sharply, they would take issue with a tradition that places moral agency in the hands of the wealthy and seemingly encourages them to see themselves as saviors of the poor, showing up with kind of top-down solutions, in a manner that can seem to situate the global poor in the position of something like new colonial subjects.

John Donvan
Okay. We’re gonna take a break there, and when we come back, we’re gonna have some other voices join the conversation. People have been listening to the debate and have been doing their own thinking about this issue for some time, and they’re gonna come in with some questions. Our question is does the Effective Altruism movement get giving right? This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan, and we’ll be right back. Welcome back to Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan, where we’re taking on the question does the Effective Altruism movement get giving right? I’m joined by our debaters, Peter Singer, a foundational thinker in the Effective Altruism movement, and Alice Crary, philosopher and scholar, and I’d now like to introduce some of the people who have been, um, listening to the conversation, people who are involved in this issue, either directly or because they think about it, they write about it. I’d like to first welcome Uri Bram. Uri is the head of communications at GiveWell. GiveWell is an organization that researchers different charities and then kind of provides assessments on which are most effective. Uri, welcome to Open to Debate, and please come in with your question.

Uri Bram
Thank you. Um, I was obviously sorry to hear, uh, Professor Crary’s thoughts about our organization, and, um, would say that, you know, we certainly see ourselves as seeking, um, to find great programs and great interventions, um, and help donors do the most good that they can in a world of great uncertainty. I was just wondering whether the two speakers think that the issue here might be about perceived overconfidence, um, seeing Effective Altruists as being more confident than the evidence merits, uh, whereas Effective Altruists might see themselves as being more humble, and whether this difficulty of how to act in a world of uncertainty is part of the crux.

John Donvan
That’s a really interesting question. I’d like, uh, to take that to you first, Peter.

Peter Singer
Uh, I think that is part of the, uh, issue, yes. Um, how confident can we be? Um, and it’s possible that in the early days of Effective Altruism, too confident about some of the ideas that they were putting forward and, and how well they would work, how well they could be applied. You know, so that’s, that’s not unusual in, in new movements. Um, and then you learn, you learn how difficult it is to produce the kinds of changes that you want. Um, you have to think about perhaps taking more moderate paths, um, trying to be broader, trying to be more humble about what you know and don’t know. Uh, but I think movements can learn, and I think the Effective Altruism movement has been learning. One of the good things about it is that it’s been very open about its mistakes, rather unusually. There’ve been case where organizations that have recommended a particular program did follow-ups and found that the program was not working, and they acknowledged their mistake. So, I think that’s, that’s the right attitude, and I’m glad that, uh, the EA movement has fostered that attitude.

Alice Crary
I actually really appreciate the, the question from Uri, and I didn’t mean to suggest, um, any particular criticism of GiveWell, maybe it’s beginnings. Um, what I would say is that, that the overconfidence, I take it, um, that’s expressed in some of the, the original text declaring the tradition, is grounded in the idea that, uh, “We have reason-based and science-based methods that are superior to what other charities and, uh, philanthropic organizations are doing, and therefore that we can tell you how to do the most good, the best,” and so in a sense, ranking the way that, um, people approach philanthropy. And, so- in some organizations, including your own, I see, um, on blogs, on, uh, descriptions of changes of method, a kind of recognition that some of the earlier methods needed to be changed and adapted, and the only question I have is what’s left distinctive of the Effective Altruism movement?

John Donvan
Thanks very much, and Uri, thank you very much for your question. Um, I’d now like to bring in Kate Barron-Alicante. Kate, um, is the co-founder of Capital J Collective, and th- the collective is, uh, um, a consultancy on social change, financial strategies, um, and Kate herself has a background in wealth management and experience working with nonprofits, and international NGOs, including Oxfam. Kate, uh, thanks for joining the conversation, and what question do you have for our debaters?

Kate Barron-Alicante
Yeah, this has been a wonderful discussion. Thank you all so much. Um, John, in your intro, you mentioned, paraphrasing, that the Effecti- Effective Altruism is a movement of elites, from Silicon Valley tech money to elite universities, and we’re talking here about does, does EA, um, get giving right. And so my question is, um, who should be defining what is effective in addressing the injustices of suffering, um, and who should be giving evidence to whom? Should it be these elites of this movement, or should it be people who are expert at navigating the lived experience of suffering on the other side of these systems?

John Donvan
So, who decides? Who do we listen to? Um, can you take that on first, um, Peter, please?

Peter Singer
Right. Well, I think the answer, clearly, is, uh, the people who are getting the aid. Um, they’re the ones who should decide whether they’re better off with the assistance that they’re getting. Uh, and, but I think that’s what good organizations are doing, and that’s what Effective Altruism is encouraging people to do. It’s encouraging them to have those follow-ups, to have those trials, and if we don’t get positive responses, then Effective Altruists won’t wanna fund this kind of work. Alice had said before that, you know, i- if, how does, how does this distinguish Effective Altruism from what was there before? But if you look at what the field was like before Effective Altruism started, there wasn’t this kind of assessment of impact. There was no organization… Before GiveWell got going, there was no organization that actually looked at the impact and rated charities on the basis of what impact they were having on the ground. There was… So, I think Effective Altruism has done something very distinctive if you need to actually be seeing what impact you’re having on the people that you’re trying to help.

John Donvan
Alice, your answer to that question as well.

Alice Crary
Well, I started this conversation saying I distinguish Peter from Effective Altruism, and, and, and I think the things that Peter is saying are really, really reasonable, and, and sound, sound right. They just don’t strike me as what a- (laughs) Effective Altruism actually has been. I think from the perspective of people who were working in the field before Effective Altruism came along, um, you know, we did have fulfi- p- public health officials, people in development studies, people in implementation studies. Um, I was just reading (laughs) part of the blog on, um, GiveWell, which just says, by the two founders, “When Holden and I started GiveWell, neither of us had any experience in philanthropy.” And there, what you had was Effective Altruists using the, uh, the, you know, the whatever assessment tools they had learned in the seminar and taking them out and imposing them top-down on the world. That w- that’s the impression that’s been given.

John Donvan
Thank you very much for your question, Kate. I wanna now welcome Richard Yetter Chappell. Richard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Miami who writes about consequentialist ethics, and he has, uh, been writing about how to put it into practice at his website, which is called goodthoughts.blog. Richard, welcome to Open to Debate, and please come in with your question for our debaters.

Richard Yetter Chappell
Yeah, thank you very much. Um, so I’d like to ask both debaters what they view as the greatest moral risk of their advocacy on this topic. So for Peter Singer, if you were wrong about one thing relating to Effective Altruism, what possibility most keeps you up at night? For Alice Crary, are you at all concerned about possible effect of anti-effectiveness advocacy?

John Donvan
Thank you very much. Um, so, uh, thanks, Richard, and so, uh, Peter, the q- question, first to you, is what keeps you up at night in terms of something that Effective Altruism might get badly wrong.

Peter Singer
Well, I’ve had some debates over the years with my, uh, former Princeton colleague, Angus Deaton, who’s an economist, who’s done a lot of work on, on poverty, and he’s a critic of, of aid because he thinks that aid allows governments to get off the hook, to n- not provide the healthcare for their populations that they would if the aid weren’t there. And I sometimes, you know, worry that, that there, that there is some truth in this, um, that, uh, in fact, we need to somehow make m- governments more responsible. So, um, I suppose I’m, I’m asking h- uh, him and those who take that view to give me clearer evidence that by giving aid to people means the governments who would otherwise do this are instead not gonna do it, and I think it would take very strong evidence for me to say, “Oh, well, this could be having a, a bad side effect, so we should stop doing it.”

John Donvan
Thank you. And Richard, I just wanna make sure that I’m understanding your question. Is your question, could I phrase it that, you know, as, as you pour cold water on the Effective Altruism movement, that it could result in people losing faith in giving, and that could result in less giving? Do I have that fundamentally correct?

Richard Yetter Chappell
Roughly. And more specifically, it could reduce people’s efforts to give effectively.

John Donvan
Alice.

Alice Crary
So, my answer is, I, I can’t quite answer the question the way it’s asked, because it presupposes something I don’t agree with, which is I think the problem I have with the movement is that its notions of reason, evidence, and effectiveness are drawn too narrowly, and so y- you know, you’re, you’re using certain quantitative metrics that aren’t suitable for, uh, measuring the efforts of, say, a group of women in a particular country to change laws that dispossess them of their family’s possession after divorce or the death of a spouse, and so they live in extreme poverty. I don’t think Effective Altruism has the methods to describe, um, and capture the effectiveness of interventions like that. I see some of the organizations that we’ve been talking about struggling with it. But what I really wanna make is a bigger tent, um, and more far-thinking for, um, social justice work, uh, and grassroots advocacy to have r- have space.

John Donvan
We have one more questioner standing by, but I’m gonna hold off and insert a question that we’ve received through chat from the live audience that’s watching. This question was submitted by John Quain, who’s an ethical fellow at Mount Sinai. I’m just gonna read it verbatim, “EA is a purely utilitarian approach, and that ethical approach seems untenable. It does not allow for moonshots, for example.” Response?

Alice Crary
I mean, I think that, that Effective Altruists try to skirt around it, but they have, yeah, a quite constrained understanding of, um, uh, what we’re doing in trying to do good as maximizing a certain value that can be relatively abstractly identified, usually welfare. And, and that really limits what we can count as a positive social contribution. It’s about thinking about the people who aren’t just trying to address suffering now, but are trying to change the social structures that relentlessly repeat it. And when Effective Altruism seems to stop our ability to do that, th- then it can be a problem.

John Donvan
And Peter, same for y- uh, opportunity for you to respond.

Peter Singer
I just think it’s a mistake. I, I don’t think there’s anything in Effective Altruism that stops moonshots. In fact, one of the criticisms of Sam Bankman-Fried was that he was going for a moonshot. But you know, if, if you have high expected value, then even if there’s only a very low probability of achieving that, Effective Altruists will say, “Yes, might be worth going for. Um, I’ll have a try.” Some of them will, some of the- some of them will be more conservative. But there’s nothing in the general ideas of Effective Altruism that says don’t go for a big expected value at a low probability.

John Donvan
All right. Finally, I wanna welcome into our conversation, Lori Gruen. Lori is a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan and a scholar of feminist philosophy as well as animal studies and co-editor with Alice on the book that I, uh, mentioned, and that is The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism. Welcome, Lori, to Open to Debate. Please come in with your question.

Lori Gruen
Oh, thank you so much. Um, I have a question about evidence. So, I just wanna think about the way in which evidence gets overplayed in these discussions. One of the worries that I have, um, is that… and what Peter just said about moonshots is a great way of thinking about that. There’s no evidence ahead of time that the moonshot is gonna succeed, but you might need the money (laughs) or the funding to go for that moonshot. Um, and so there are a lot of people who want to do good, um, and there are a lot of ways of doing that, and evidence isn’t always available. It’s easy to say it after the fact, but it’s not easy to say it when you’re looking for funds to do moonshots or good work that hasn’t yet been done.

John Donvan
Thanks, Lori. Peter?

Peter Singer
Yeah, I mean, I agree it’s, it’s difficult, and that’s why many people will go for the proven things, where we have the randomized control trials that will give us high confidence that we’ll be saving some lives by, by a donation. Um, but you know, there, there is evidence as to what the chances might be of things succeeding. Uh, and I’m not supporting everything that Effective Altruists spend on, so, uh, I think we just have to do the best we can, try to find what the evidence is of probabilities, and see what’s, what’s the path forward that is likely to bring us, uh, the best results.

John Donvan
And Alice, do you wanna add a thought to that?

Alice Crary
Yeah, I appreciate the spirit of, uh, Lori’s question, and, uh, yeah, I, I, again, I, I think we have really good empirical evidence for those of us who look where grants are going in Effective Altruism, that things that may look like moonshots, or something similar anyway, attempts to change laws, social movements that really attempt to change public culture, about things like, say, fossil fuel use, that, that Effective Altruism isn’t paying attention to them, and, uh, you know, Fridays for Future. H- I don’t think I’ve seen any, uh, any suggestion that, uh, or the, you know, the protests at Standing Rock, that these kinds of efforts that seem so crucial to our future, are, are, uh, even on the radar of Effective Altruists.

John Donvan
All right. Thank you, Alice, and Lori, thank you for your question, and now is the point where we pivot once more to our th- third round, which is comprised of closing statements. Each of the debaters get up to two minutes to make their closing argument. Peter, you are up first. One more time, give us your last reason why you believe Effective Altruism is getting giving right.

Peter Singer
Well, thank you, and, uh, I wanna thank Alice for her contributions to this discussion, and all of the other questioners who’ve come in. I think it’s… I think it’s been useful, and I particularly welcome the fact that, uh, Alice is trying to suggest that Effective Altruism should be part of a broad tent, and that there’s more in the tent, but that’s much better than saying we don’t want Effective Altruism at all, and we want a completely separate tent that is gonna do something totally different. Because if it’s recognized that Effective Altruism has contributed to the movement, has s- s- helped us to find more effective ways of helping people, overcoming injustice, reducing suffering, whether humans or nonhuman animals, then, uh, was the case before, and, and I think that’s clear. I think if you, if you look at the kinds of discussions of, of charity beforehand, uh, it just wasn’t as focused on what are we doing and, and what’s the evidence, and what do we know, and what don’t we know? Um, so I think that that’s, that’s an important contribution, and yes, we, we can work together. We can, we can look at other ways of doing things.

Peter Singer
We… I accept that Effective Altruism should be open-minded about ways, for example, of overcoming structural injustice, but we need to have some indication as to what that might be. And, and when people say to, say to me, “Well, we need to overthrow the capitalist global economic order,” I wanna know how are we going to do that? I wanna know some evidence about how that’s possible, and I wanna also know what one is gonna replace it with that one can have reasonable confidence is going to produce a more just outcome. I’m not saying that there aren’t such systems. There are obvious deficiencies in the structures that we could improve, but we need some real ideas of how we are going to make that progress in order to see this as one of those moonshots that’s actually worth supporting and backing and researching and carrying out.

John Donvan
Thank you very much, Peter, and now, Alice, you get the last word in this debate. Uh, one more time, to make your case why the Effective Altruism does not, in fact, get giving right.

Alice Crary
It’s been interesting to talk to Peter, and I’m interested at the tack he took, and acknowledging that Effective Altruism should be a bigger tent, I think Effective Altruism’s appeal for, um, the people who founded it is it was that it had distinctive methods and it was the right and most rational way to go, so for me, the kind of big tent image that Peter’s been describing, which I can see in parts of his own work, I really mean to acknowledge that, um, is not Effective Altruism anymore. I would tell the history a little bit different. For me, it sounds like Effective Altruists mostly have learned from the w- sort of wide range of experts and professionals in, in the world who were already doing this work before they showed up on the scene and (laughs) uh, declared to everyone they could do it better. Um, but I hope, I, I hope we can move forward, um, in the way that we’ve described.

Alice Crary
And, I, I did wanna say something at the end here, just about why I’m talking about something I hope we can all stop talking about, which is just that I, like Peter, work with lots of students who wanna find ways to do good in the world, and we can’t avoid Effective Altruism. Its massive financial success and institutional presence makes students who are bright, um, turn to it, and I wanna be able to explain to my students and other idealistic people why Effective Altruism, at least in this narrow sense in which many people understand it and that corresponds to its original articulations, not in Peter’s work. He didn’t give the original articulations of it, but in the work of its founders. It’s superficially appealing, but it’s a wrong turn, and if the big tent includes (laughs) Effective Altruism, in any case, I wanna direct their attention to more meaningful projects.

John Donvan
Thank you very much, Alice, and that is a wrap on this debate. Um, I wanna thank our two debaters, Peter Singer and Alice Crary, um, for being willing to have the conversation in the first place, the way you conducted the conversation with civility, and even, I would say, a good deal of mutual respect. Really hit the target that we try to say is achievable here on our program, Open to Debate, so thank you both for taking part and for taking part in the way that you did.

Peter Singer
Thank you.

Alice Crary
Thank you so much, John.

John Donvan
I also wanna thank our four voices that joined the conversation, Uri, Kate, Richard, and Lori, for bringing in interesting questions and moving the conversation in an interesting direction. And finally, I wanna give a big thank you to you, our audience, for tuning into this episode of Open to Debate. I th- think you know that as a nonprofit, we are working to combat extreme polarization through what you just saw, civil debate, and that our work is made possible by listeners like you, and by the Rosenkranz Foundation, and by supporters of Open to Debate.

John Donvan
Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman. Our CEO is Clea Connor. Lia Matthow is our chief content officer. Elizabeth Kitzenberg is our chief advancement officer. This episode was produced by Alexis Pancrazi and Marlette Sandoval. Editorial and research by Gabriella Mayer and Andrew Foote. Andrew Lipson and Max Fulton provided production support. The Open to Debate team also includes Eric Gross, Gabrielle Iannucelli, Rachel Kemp, and Linda Lee. Damon Whittemore mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Alex Clement. And I’m your host, John Donvan. We’ll see you next time on Open to Debate.