I think you make a reasonable case, but it is hard to fit your suggestion within the framework of effective altruism (EA). “Cause neutrality” is the term EAs use to describe a willingness to choose a charity based on how much good it does, and not based on a personal connection or passion for a cause. It is arguably the single biggest difference between EA and other approaches to charity.
Abandoning cause neutrality is also possibly very counterproductive. Take, for example, your desire to “acknowledge our privilege and our neighbors’ lack of it”. The extent of global income inequality is so great that the bottom 5% of Americans are in the top third of global income http://nyti.ms/2kxQRSz . So any charity serving Americans will be unlikely to reach anyone with lower than average privilege.
Another perspective is a classic example used in some EA literature. It compares the cost of a US charity training a guide dog for the blind ($40,000 per dog) and surgery to reverse blindness due to trachoma in the developing world ($20 per patient cured). This is a 2,000-fold difference in effectiveness. You mentioned the possibility that EA charities could move 0.33% of global donations. Well using the above example, if we spent only 0.33% of the $40,000 guide dog cost on trachoma surgery, we would spend $132 and cure more than 6 people. And the math doesn’t change much if we are donating to a super efficient charity that trains US guide dogs for only $30,000.
These numbers should be taken as only illustrative, but the fact remains that the choice of a cause is the most important choice a philanthropist makes. It is understandable that you and your wife would want to donate to causes that you are connected to—I donate to my high school. But these are probably not effective donations and, to me, seem more like birthday gifts we buy for friends.
I share the feeling that this is a burdensome truth. The way I approach it is to accept my shortcomings and try to make incremental improvements each year.
Chris, thanks for your response. I completely agree with you that cause neutrality is what sets EA apart, and at no point in the article do I suggest abandoning it. I see domain-specific EA as additive to and symbiotic with the cause-neutral variety; it’s not an either/or proposition.
As I stated in the article, “the error of effective altruists is to see all self-indulgences, even charitable donations within lower-priority cause areas, as entirely outside the scope of what matters to effective altruism.” I’d say that your suggestion that gifts to the arts or your high school are the equivalent of birthday gifts for friends is a prime example of this thinking. Are you saying it’s equally effective if your donations to your high school are used for financial aid for low-income students vs. if they are used to build a new gym to replace the old gym that was perfectly fine? Are you saying it’s equally effective if my donations to the arts are used for arts therapy programs for the elderly that have a strong evidence base behind them vs. if they are used to buy some piece of art that is going to sit in a museum’s storage archives, inaccessible to the public, for 98% of the time? If you don’t want to consider these kinds of donations “real” charity, that’s fine. But just because you place your high school or my arts donations in a different kind of bucket doesn’t make the consequences of those donations any less real.
I really like this idea, and agree, and have been working on something a bit like this. (Disclosure: I’m on a panel of The Life You Can Save, founded & chaired by Peter Singer.)
Having worked with donors for ~15 years, it’s clear to me - and understandable - that some donors get involved in a particular cause (and thereby philanthropy at all) because they are deeply and personally affected by that.
A pretty well-heeled uncle of mine, for example, got involved in dementia charities - virtually his first engagement with charities - aged about 85 after his wife developed & then died of dementia. Hard to chastise him for that.
It would / does seem to me odd and sometimes just rude to say to somebody like that that they shouldn’t give to dementia research but rather to bednets or whatever - in which they have no interest. Worse, possibly counterproductive, since it may deter them from giving at all.
In my experience, most people will give to the cause they’re most interested in. *Some* people will be moveable in terms of cause; others won’t. To my knowledge, we don’t yet have a way of distinguishing ahead of time who’s in which group.
Many foundations are legally restricted in which causes/ geographies they can support, so are certainly in the latter group.
Getting people to give well to, say, cancer or dementia isn’t a mad thing to do (in my view). We’re helping them to give better in whatever cause they want to give to.
I agree that we should strive for the best. But we should not let the best be the enemy of the good.
I think that’s exactly right, Caroline. Indeed, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that effective altruism has had the most success engaging people who are either in college or graduated in the past several years. As one ages, it’s typical to pick up more commitments and loyalties, whether to people, places, organizations, causes, etc., which then in turn shape giving choices.
Would love to hear more about your own work on this issue.
Through my effective altruist (EA) foundation http://www.givingforimpact.com (we fund behavioural experiments about heightening EA giving despite multiple psychological barriers humans have to EA thinking), I learned about early results from a behavioural experiment with donors that are highly relevant to this article.
The findings indicate that effective altruist (EA) donors are perceived as less moral than donors who choose charities based on empathy. There seems to be a reputational costs to becoming an EA giver. The way you present your article plays into this effect, especially by citing logically consistent but for newbies dispiriting philosophical arguments made by godfathers of the EA movement.
I’d encourage you, and others writing about EA, to stop playing into this effect.
Because when stripping your article from this, it seems you align greatly with core ideas of EA. In particular: 1) the idea that philanthropy can have a deep impact on our worlds’ biggest problems, and 2) the idea that considering cost-effectiveness in our philanthropic choices can heighten this impact.
Full blown EA-ers would add a third idea, namely 3) the idea that impact of philanthropy can be heightened even more if we are cause neutral, because the gaps in value for money between domains is often so great.
This 3rd idea departs from a deeply moral motivation of EA-ers. This is the belief that philanthropy should NOT be about optimising your own well-being (e.g., enjoying the ability to act on your passions for the arts), but about optimising the well-being of others. Now you cite research and personal experiences that indicate that philanthropic motivations would subside if they are not ‘allowed’ to be centred on the self.
Your article seems like a plea to our community to recognise selfish philanthropic motivations, in order for EA thinking to have an even greater effect.
The thing is that the EA movement has already recognised this. The http://founderspledge.com is an example of an EA organisation that applies cost-effectiveness principles within the domains that their pledgers are passionate about, without immediately pushing for idea number 3.
An EA team I am part of is working on a global evidence portal (you can see a beta version on http://www.givingforimpact.com/?page_id=57). The portal will be a ‘living’ library that includes all rigorous evidence on the effectiveness and costs of social programs, which aims to be a prime resource for using EA thinking in all social domains. A possible user would be http://www.impactmatters.org, another great example of applying EA ideas 1 and 2 by conducting impact audits of charities in all sorts of domains that include cost-effectiveness analyses.
The last example of an organisation that already does what you suggest is http://www.effectivegiving.nl (which I co-founded). We are a community of philanthropists and foundations that want to learn together how to maximise the good our unique resources can do for the world. All our members believe in the 1st (philanthropy can have a great impact) and 2nd (cost-effectiveness matters) idea from the start.
But what we find is that over time, almost everyone gradually starts to accept the 3rd idea. The mechanism seems to be that practicing philanthropic giving using idea 1 and 2 drives down the point with humans that philanthropy is not about your own wellbeing. This realisation in turn makes it much easier to accept the 3rd idea; that cause neutrality is important to achieve even more impact.
This does not mean that our community members do not spend money supporting the arts. However, many of them have accepted that their passion for the arts is much more about optimising their own wellbeing, and therefore have moved those expenditures out of their philanthropic budget. Only those who can make a convincing case to themselves that supporting specific arts organisations with their unique resources truly maximise their impact on the world, keep it in their philanthropic budgets.
Watching this ‘graduation’ from EA ideas 1 and 2 towards EA idea 3 is greatly comforting to me. It shows how people can overcome their own psychologically biases, that prevent us from making the swiftest possible progress in improving the world we live in.
Kellie, I was really glad to learn of your work and happy that we’ve begun to connect offline since you posted these comments. I’m excited to see what comes of it. For the benefit of others reading, I just want to note that Kellie makes a really great point about the work of the Founders Pledge to advise individual high net worth donors about their giving plans, regardless of their preferred causes or priorities. FP started out as an effective altruist organization and tries to incorporate EA principles into its advising, but will still work with constituents even if they don’t want to support global poverty, AI risk, animal welfare, or the effective altruist movement itself. I think that’s great, and is an example of exactly what I was recommending in the piece. Kellie’s comment is the first time that anyone has directed my attention to this aspect of Founders Pledge’s work, despite my having engaged with dozens of members of the effective altruist community over the past year about the ideas in this piece. I think that speaks to a lack of awareness within the community about FP’s donor advising services that I’d love to see rectified.
I do stand by my inclusion of the quotes from Singer and MacAskill at the beginning; those arguments were made in public fora (the quote from MacAskill, in fact, appeared in SSIR) in efforts that were ostensibly intended to bring more people into the movement. If those efforts were less effective than they could have been, as Kellie and I both seem to believe, I think it’s fair to hold Singer and MacAskill accountable for making them. Nevertheless, I hope that the piece might convince a few people who were turned off by those arguments in past years to give EA a second chance and consider the ways in which its principles might add depth to the work they’re already doing and the passions they already have.
COMMENTS
BY Christopher Corliss
ON February 17, 2017 02:09 PM
I think you make a reasonable case, but it is hard to fit your suggestion within the framework of effective altruism (EA). “Cause neutrality” is the term EAs use to describe a willingness to choose a charity based on how much good it does, and not based on a personal connection or passion for a cause. It is arguably the single biggest difference between EA and other approaches to charity.
Abandoning cause neutrality is also possibly very counterproductive. Take, for example, your desire to “acknowledge our privilege and our neighbors’ lack of it”. The extent of global income inequality is so great that the bottom 5% of Americans are in the top third of global income http://nyti.ms/2kxQRSz . So any charity serving Americans will be unlikely to reach anyone with lower than average privilege.
Another perspective is a classic example used in some EA literature. It compares the cost of a US charity training a guide dog for the blind ($40,000 per dog) and surgery to reverse blindness due to trachoma in the developing world ($20 per patient cured). This is a 2,000-fold difference in effectiveness. You mentioned the possibility that EA charities could move 0.33% of global donations. Well using the above example, if we spent only 0.33% of the $40,000 guide dog cost on trachoma surgery, we would spend $132 and cure more than 6 people. And the math doesn’t change much if we are donating to a super efficient charity that trains US guide dogs for only $30,000.
These numbers should be taken as only illustrative, but the fact remains that the choice of a cause is the most important choice a philanthropist makes. It is understandable that you and your wife would want to donate to causes that you are connected to—I donate to my high school. But these are probably not effective donations and, to me, seem more like birthday gifts we buy for friends.
I share the feeling that this is a burdensome truth. The way I approach it is to accept my shortcomings and try to make incremental improvements each year.
BY Ian David Moss
ON March 2, 2017 07:08 PM
Chris, thanks for your response. I completely agree with you that cause neutrality is what sets EA apart, and at no point in the article do I suggest abandoning it. I see domain-specific EA as additive to and symbiotic with the cause-neutral variety; it’s not an either/or proposition.
As I stated in the article, “the error of effective altruists is to see all self-indulgences, even charitable donations within lower-priority cause areas, as entirely outside the scope of what matters to effective altruism.” I’d say that your suggestion that gifts to the arts or your high school are the equivalent of birthday gifts for friends is a prime example of this thinking. Are you saying it’s equally effective if your donations to your high school are used for financial aid for low-income students vs. if they are used to build a new gym to replace the old gym that was perfectly fine? Are you saying it’s equally effective if my donations to the arts are used for arts therapy programs for the elderly that have a strong evidence base behind them vs. if they are used to buy some piece of art that is going to sit in a museum’s storage archives, inaccessible to the public, for 98% of the time? If you don’t want to consider these kinds of donations “real” charity, that’s fine. But just because you place your high school or my arts donations in a different kind of bucket doesn’t make the consequences of those donations any less real.
BY Caroline Fiennes
ON March 4, 2017 12:28 PM
I really like this idea, and agree, and have been working on something a bit like this. (Disclosure: I’m on a panel of The Life You Can Save, founded & chaired by Peter Singer.)
Having worked with donors for ~15 years, it’s clear to me - and understandable - that some donors get involved in a particular cause (and thereby philanthropy at all) because they are deeply and personally affected by that.
A pretty well-heeled uncle of mine, for example, got involved in dementia charities - virtually his first engagement with charities - aged about 85 after his wife developed & then died of dementia. Hard to chastise him for that.
It would / does seem to me odd and sometimes just rude to say to somebody like that that they shouldn’t give to dementia research but rather to bednets or whatever - in which they have no interest. Worse, possibly counterproductive, since it may deter them from giving at all.
In my experience, most people will give to the cause they’re most interested in. *Some* people will be moveable in terms of cause; others won’t. To my knowledge, we don’t yet have a way of distinguishing ahead of time who’s in which group.
Many foundations are legally restricted in which causes/ geographies they can support, so are certainly in the latter group.
Getting people to give well to, say, cancer or dementia isn’t a mad thing to do (in my view). We’re helping them to give better in whatever cause they want to give to.
I agree that we should strive for the best. But we should not let the best be the enemy of the good.
BY Ian David Moss
ON March 4, 2017 05:30 PM
I think that’s exactly right, Caroline. Indeed, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that effective altruism has had the most success engaging people who are either in college or graduated in the past several years. As one ages, it’s typical to pick up more commitments and loyalties, whether to people, places, organizations, causes, etc., which then in turn shape giving choices.
Would love to hear more about your own work on this issue.
BY Kellie Liket
ON March 12, 2017 05:49 AM
Through my effective altruist (EA) foundation http://www.givingforimpact.com (we fund behavioural experiments about heightening EA giving despite multiple psychological barriers humans have to EA thinking), I learned about early results from a behavioural experiment with donors that are highly relevant to this article.
The findings indicate that effective altruist (EA) donors are perceived as less moral than donors who choose charities based on empathy. There seems to be a reputational costs to becoming an EA giver. The way you present your article plays into this effect, especially by citing logically consistent but for newbies dispiriting philosophical arguments made by godfathers of the EA movement.
I’d encourage you, and others writing about EA, to stop playing into this effect.
Because when stripping your article from this, it seems you align greatly with core ideas of EA. In particular: 1) the idea that philanthropy can have a deep impact on our worlds’ biggest problems, and 2) the idea that considering cost-effectiveness in our philanthropic choices can heighten this impact.
Full blown EA-ers would add a third idea, namely 3) the idea that impact of philanthropy can be heightened even more if we are cause neutral, because the gaps in value for money between domains is often so great.
This 3rd idea departs from a deeply moral motivation of EA-ers. This is the belief that philanthropy should NOT be about optimising your own well-being (e.g., enjoying the ability to act on your passions for the arts), but about optimising the well-being of others. Now you cite research and personal experiences that indicate that philanthropic motivations would subside if they are not ‘allowed’ to be centred on the self.
Your article seems like a plea to our community to recognise selfish philanthropic motivations, in order for EA thinking to have an even greater effect.
The thing is that the EA movement has already recognised this. The http://founderspledge.com is an example of an EA organisation that applies cost-effectiveness principles within the domains that their pledgers are passionate about, without immediately pushing for idea number 3.
An EA team I am part of is working on a global evidence portal (you can see a beta version on http://www.givingforimpact.com/?page_id=57). The portal will be a ‘living’ library that includes all rigorous evidence on the effectiveness and costs of social programs, which aims to be a prime resource for using EA thinking in all social domains. A possible user would be http://www.impactmatters.org, another great example of applying EA ideas 1 and 2 by conducting impact audits of charities in all sorts of domains that include cost-effectiveness analyses.
The last example of an organisation that already does what you suggest is http://www.effectivegiving.nl (which I co-founded). We are a community of philanthropists and foundations that want to learn together how to maximise the good our unique resources can do for the world. All our members believe in the 1st (philanthropy can have a great impact) and 2nd (cost-effectiveness matters) idea from the start.
But what we find is that over time, almost everyone gradually starts to accept the 3rd idea. The mechanism seems to be that practicing philanthropic giving using idea 1 and 2 drives down the point with humans that philanthropy is not about your own wellbeing. This realisation in turn makes it much easier to accept the 3rd idea; that cause neutrality is important to achieve even more impact.
This does not mean that our community members do not spend money supporting the arts. However, many of them have accepted that their passion for the arts is much more about optimising their own wellbeing, and therefore have moved those expenditures out of their philanthropic budget. Only those who can make a convincing case to themselves that supporting specific arts organisations with their unique resources truly maximise their impact on the world, keep it in their philanthropic budgets.
Watching this ‘graduation’ from EA ideas 1 and 2 towards EA idea 3 is greatly comforting to me. It shows how people can overcome their own psychologically biases, that prevent us from making the swiftest possible progress in improving the world we live in.
BY Kellie Liket
ON March 19, 2017 07:34 AM
The link to Impact Matters is incorrect! It should be http://www.impactm.org/
BY Ian David Moss
ON April 15, 2017 01:05 PM
Kellie, I was really glad to learn of your work and happy that we’ve begun to connect offline since you posted these comments. I’m excited to see what comes of it. For the benefit of others reading, I just want to note that Kellie makes a really great point about the work of the Founders Pledge to advise individual high net worth donors about their giving plans, regardless of their preferred causes or priorities. FP started out as an effective altruist organization and tries to incorporate EA principles into its advising, but will still work with constituents even if they don’t want to support global poverty, AI risk, animal welfare, or the effective altruist movement itself. I think that’s great, and is an example of exactly what I was recommending in the piece. Kellie’s comment is the first time that anyone has directed my attention to this aspect of Founders Pledge’s work, despite my having engaged with dozens of members of the effective altruist community over the past year about the ideas in this piece. I think that speaks to a lack of awareness within the community about FP’s donor advising services that I’d love to see rectified.
I do stand by my inclusion of the quotes from Singer and MacAskill at the beginning; those arguments were made in public fora (the quote from MacAskill, in fact, appeared in SSIR) in efforts that were ostensibly intended to bring more people into the movement. If those efforts were less effective than they could have been, as Kellie and I both seem to believe, I think it’s fair to hold Singer and MacAskill accountable for making them. Nevertheless, I hope that the piece might convince a few people who were turned off by those arguments in past years to give EA a second chance and consider the ways in which its principles might add depth to the work they’re already doing and the passions they already have.