Effective Altruism

[Starlight]

Many atheists seem to come to hold to some sort of version of utilitarianism (an understanding of morality where 'good' is defined as acting benevolently toward others with a goal of maximizing happiness, freedom, well-being etc). For many utilitarians the following question arises: What is the most good that I can do?

In other words, if I want to be "good" and live my life in a way that maximizes the good I do, and minimizes the evil, then how, logically, should I go about that? This seems to be a question that atheist millennials are increasingly asking. As the new atheistic generation grows up without the aid of a lifetime of church sermons to tell them what is right and wrong, they are looking for an understanding of how they should live their lives based on their own, utilitarian, morality. And the answer is not obvious. We live in a complex society and there are many different ways of trying to help others, 1000s of different charities that try to do so, so people can easily become overwhelmed and paralyzed by having too many choices and they have no idea of how to maximize the good that they do.

Peter Singer is the world's most prominent utilitarian moral philosopher (he first became known for pioneering the animal rights movement in the 70s with his book Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals), and he and a group of his students created the Effective Altruism movement to examine this question:

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determining the most effective ways to improve the world. Effective altruism encourages individuals to consider all causes and actions and to act in the way that brings about the greatest positive impact, based upon their values...
While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save and improve the most lives

Peter Singer has himself written a book about it, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015), which I am currently reading and enjoying. It builds on one of Singer's arguments in the 70s that modern Western society has a moral obligation to give much greater amounts of aid to the 3rd world than it currently does.

One of the major observations that effective altruists tend to make is: Money goes a lot further in the third world. It can cost $30,000 to train a guide dog to help one blind person here, while a $20 cataract surgery can restore sight to a blind person in a country that currently lacks such medicine. Likewise poor people in the Western world are pretty well-off by the standards of the 3rd world, and it takes an additional $100 or so a week to make much difference to the fortunes of a poor family here, while World Vision famously runs its $1 a day drive to provide a 3rd world child with what is needed for that cost.

So a possible answer that the effective altruism movement has identified to the question of how to do the most good, is the slightly counter-intuitive:
Earn as much money as you can in your job and career, spend as little on yourself as you reasonably can without sacrificing your own ability to earn more money or sacrificing your own happiness and motivation to earn and to give, and give as much as you possibly can to the most effective 3rd world charities, ideally 50%+ of your income if you can.
There are many other possible ways of doing the "most good" that the effective altruism movement has explored and analyzed, but the above seems to rank pretty highly in general, and will be the most applicable method of doing the most good for most of the people in the Western world. The Effective Altruism movement has also spawned a number of organisations that are dedicated to evaluating the effectiveness of different charities, so that people can try to get the "most bang for their buck" in terms of the goods being achieved for the money donated.

While nothing about the Effective Altruism movement prohibits Christians from participating, the moral impetus for this movement has come from atheists living out the utilitarian moral principles they hold. Maximizing people's earthly well-being is not something that historically Christians have tended to be all that interested in (Christians have various celebrated monks who lived in deserts, or up poles, or groups who practiced self-flagellation, or said that nothing much in this world matters in light of the world to come). While certainly some Christian groups such as the Salvation Army and World Vision have focused on earthly charity much more than average, most Christian groups have prioritized saving souls far above any earthly concerns. Charity donations in the US, one of the most openly Christian nations in the Western world, tend to go primarily to local churches (to pay pastors, building upkeep, and support any missionaries or local programs), to educational institutions (e.g. university alumni donations), and to support the Arts (theaters, museums, galleries, etc), and the US government's foreign aid budget is well below the OECD average at a mere 0.2% of national income.

The Effective Altruism movement seems to be quite a stark generation difference in people's approach to charitable giving, and seems to demonstrate a significant difference between the consequences of atheism and Christianity when it comes to charity that focuses on this-world needs in the here-and-now. Jesus' quote of "If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor" sounds much more like something a modern atheist who is an effective altruist might say than it sounds like something a modern evangelical Christian would say.

[Tassman]

Many atheists seem to come to hold to some sort of version of utilitarianism (an understanding of morality where 'good' is defined as acting benevolently toward others with a goal of maximizing happiness, freedom, well-being etc). For many utilitarians the following question arises: What is the most good that I can do?

In other words, if I want to be "good" and live my life in a way that maximizes the good I do, and minimizes the evil, then how, logically, should I go about that? This seems to be a question that atheist millennials are increasingly asking. As the new atheistic generation grows up without the aid of a lifetime of church sermons to tell them what is right and wrong, they are looking for an understanding of how they should live their lives based on their own, utilitarian, morality. And the answer is not obvious. We live in a complex society and there are many different ways of trying to help others, 1000s of different charities that try to do so, so people can easily become overwhelmed and paralyzed by having too many choices and they have no idea of how to maximize the good that they do.

Peter Singer is the world's most prominent utilitarian moral philosopher (he first became known for pioneering the animal rights movement in the 70s with his book Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals), and he and a group of his students created the Effective Altruism movement to examine this question:

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determining the most effective ways to improve the world. Effective altruism encourages individuals to consider all causes and actions and to act in the way that brings about the greatest positive impact, based upon their values...
While a substantial proportion of effective altruists have focused on the nonprofit sector, the philosophy of effective altruism applies more broadly to prioritizing the scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save and improve the most lives

Peter Singer has himself written a book about it, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015), which I am currently reading and enjoying. It builds on one of Singer's arguments in the 70s that modern Western society has a moral obligation to give much greater amounts of aid to the 3rd world than it currently does.

One of the major observations that effective altruists tend to make is: Money goes a lot further in the third world. It can cost $30,000 to train a guide dog to help one blind person here, while a $20 cataract surgery can restore sight to a blind person in a country that currently lacks such medicine. Likewise poor people in the Western world are pretty well-off by the standards of the 3rd world, and it takes an additional $100 or so a week to make much difference to the fortunes of a poor family here, while World Vision famously runs its $1 a day drive to provide a 3rd world child with what is needed for that cost.

So a possible answer that the effective altruism movement has identified to the question of how to do the most good, is the slightly counter-intuitive:
Earn as much money as you can in your job and career, spend as little on yourself as you reasonably can without sacrificing your own ability to earn more money or sacrificing your own happiness and motivation to earn and to give, and give as much as you possibly can to the most effective 3rd world charities, ideally 50%+ of your income if you can.
There are many other possible ways of doing the "most good" that the effective altruism movement has explored and analyzed, but the above seems to rank pretty highly in general, and will be the most applicable method of doing the most good for most of the people in the Western world. The Effective Altruism movement has also spawned a number of organisations that are dedicated to evaluating the effectiveness of different charities, so that people can try to get the "most bang for their buck" in terms of the goods being achieved for the money donated.

While nothing about the Effective Altruism movement prohibits Christians from participating, the moral impetus for this movement has come from atheists living out the utilitarian moral principles they hold. Maximizing people's earthly well-being is not something that historically Christians have tended to be all that interested in (Christians have various celebrated monks who lived in deserts, or up poles, or groups who practiced self-flagellation, or said that nothing much in this world matters in light of the world to come). While certainly some Christian groups such as the Salvation Army and World Vision have focused on earthly charity much more than average, most Christian groups have prioritized saving souls far above any earthly concerns. Charity donations in the US, one of the most openly Christian nations in the Western world, tend to go primarily to local churches (to pay pastors, building upkeep, and support any missionaries or local programs), to educational institutions (e.g. university alumni donations), and to support the Arts (theaters, museums, galleries, etc), and the US government's foreign aid budget is well below the OECD average at a mere 0.2% of national income.

The Effective Altruism movement seems to be quite a stark generation difference in people's approach to charitable giving, and seems to demonstrate a significant difference between the consequences of atheism and Christianity when it comes to charity that focuses on this-world needs in the here-and-now. Jesus' quote of "If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor" sounds much more like something a modern atheist who is an effective altruist might say than it sounds like something a modern evangelical Christian would say.

I suspect that you’ll get the argument from the ‘saved’ that without God one cannot do “good” because of Original Sin. This despite the fact that according to Phil Zuckerman, professor of secular studies at Pitzer College: "Those societies today that are the most religious — where faith in God is strong and religious participation is high — tend to have the highest violent crime rates, while those societies in which faith and church attendance are the weakest — the most secular societies — tend to have the lowest". This is reinforced by the fact that the "Christian" USA has the highest rates of incarceration in the world in absolute terms...not just per capita, and the greatest financial inequity.

[Meh Gerbil]

Go do that.

[Cow Poke]

I suspect that you’ll get the argument from the ‘saved’ that without God one cannot do “good” because of Original Sin.

Did your momma drop you on your head?

[Bisto]

IMO, that's a great initiative. Keep it up. As you say, as a Christian I may have somewhat different priorities -- e.g. when I get my own proper salary after I finish my studies, I certainly look forward to being able to contribute both to ministries I see as worth supporting and social causes that seem to me to be the best/most optimal, within my reach. I currently do mostly the former, but on a much smaller scale given my limited income as a kind-of-working student so far.

You may argue I'm being utilitarian-ly inefficient for giving resources to what you see as a pointless endeavor ("saving souls"), but that's really besides the point, isn't it? The Christian is too being utilitarian if they are consistent with your overall idea, just considering people's spiritual well-being along with the physical. Think Jesus, James, Paul -- all of whom obviously cared about both. We shall strive to imitate that. And may God bless you and guide you to His embrace and His love for the people you are working to help, towards the most integral of loves. If you love them for the people they are, how much more will you be able to love them for the souls they are?


ETA: if I may suggest it, even if you incur in some short-term inefficiency for it, it might be good if you also offer local help where you can see its results, in people you see, and whose improvement you can see, on a shorter and more easily visible term. This may give you the motivation to keep it going to the end, which you may have not done otherwise. It's like why you go for "Quick Wins" when improving a business process or similar -- because it motivates everyone to go through with the rest of the changes, whose effects might not be as immediate or obvious. If you were a machine, you wouldn't need this, but you are people, helping people; you might as well acknowledge the very concrete nature of it and grow from it.

[Starlight]

You may argue I'm being utilitarian-ly inefficient for giving resources to what you see as a pointless endeavor ("saving souls"), but that's really besides the point, isn't it? The Christian is too being utilitarian if they are consistent with your overall idea, just considering people's spiritual well-being along with the physical.

There's nothing to stop Christians being utilitarian in their morality. I held to utilitarianism when I was a Christian, for example, and concluded that Jesus and Paul in the NT with their "law vs spirit" talk are trying to express the thought that the OT was a rules-based "Do X, Don't do Y" divine-command morality and that such a moral framework was merely a temporary helpful teacher that ought to lead on to the NT moral ideal of loving others which is heart-based and not rules based and is thus utilitarian moral theory rather than divine-command moral theory.

A significant difference I've personally observed between US evangelicalism (which has a strong representation in this forum) and the international version of mainstream interdenominational evangelical Christianity I grew up with is the above difference. The interdenominational Christianity I am more familiar with focused strongly on character change in the heart of the Christian and thus on the fruits of the spirit - love, kindness, mercy, compassion, self-control etc, and thus implied / agreed with a very utilitarian morality of generalized benevolence toward others that is non-judgmental and tries to promote love and compassion. Whereas I've found that to a degree that repeatedly shocks me that US evangelicals do not seem to be strongly interested in that and instead hold strongly to a rule-based, judgmental, divine-command morality and very high on their to-do list is to hold up their official list of Dos and Don'ts and denounce anyone who isn't following that God-given list. The difference is quite stark, as the former primarily focuses on becoming a loving and kind and non-judgmental person while the latter primarily focuses on being judgmental and if you ask them "but what about being loving?" they literally answer with "the most loving thing I can do is call out people's sin to encourage them to repent". It's quite a jarring difference, and I trace it back to a significant difference in moral paradigm that is being embraced (it could be argued that Christians here are not strictly-speaking embracing utilitarianism and are still endorsing divine-command theory and are simply focusing on different biblical verses to US evangelicals, and are hence following the divine-commands to "love one another" and to bear the fruits of the spirit etc).


One thing that complicates matters greatly when you introduce your "saving souls" idea into the utilitarian paradigm is the question of how much weight does one place on saving souls versus on earthly goods? A common Christian answer in history seems to have been that saving souls has infinite value which means that any focus whatsoever on earthly goods is worth essentially zero by comparison and hence is a utilitarian evil if it takes any time or effort or resources at all away from the only thing that matters which is saving souls. This problem can be alleviated by teachings that diminish the urgency of saving souls (like suggesting everyone might be saved in the end), or that suggest salvation is about character change into being love-filled people rather than about 'faith' or inviting Jesus into your heart etc, though those sorts of Eastern Orthodox and/or liberal protestant teachings seem to be treated with great suspicion by most US evangelicals. Certainly most "social gospel" Christians seem to have tended to be more 'liberal' and significantly de-emphasized the value of 'saving souls'.

[seer]

The Effective Altruism movement seems to be quite a stark generation difference in people's approach to charitable giving, and seems to demonstrate a significant difference between the consequences of atheism and Christianity when it comes to charity that focuses on this-world needs in the here-and-now. Jesus' quote of "If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor" sounds much more like something a modern atheist who is an effective altruist might say than it sounds like something a modern evangelical Christian would say.

So you sold all your stuff and gave it to the poor? I find that most people spouting this sort of nonsense don't generally practice it... BTW Star, over the years I have done a lot of volunteer work in Soup Kitchens and Shelters and I don't remember any Atheists helping.

[Starlight]

Go do that.

Some people in the Effective Altruism movement have observed that an alternative to the baseline "morally good life" of...

Earn as much money as you can in your job and career, spend as little on yourself as you reasonably can without sacrificing your own ability to earn more money or sacrificing your own happiness and motivation to earn and to give, and give as much as you possibly can to the most effective 3rd world charities, ideally 50%+ of your income if you can.

...is: Encourage others to do likewise. Because, obviously, if you can successfully encourage 2 people to do the above, you have achieved twice as much good as if you had simply done the above yourself.

Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. But choosing a career as an "advocate" where one spends all ones time encouraging others to give, appears to logically be a very "morally good life" because it might potentially end up doing much more good than the above baseline. (And there are other variants - e.g. you could spend your life researching new ways of helping people, which might pay off a billion-fold if you happen to discover a cure for cancer, or a more effective way of helping people in the 3rd world, or some-such)

[Cow Poke]

So you sold all your stuff and gave it to the poor? I find that most people spouting this sort of nonsense don't generally practice it... BTW Star, over the years I have done a lot of volunteer work in Soup Kitchens and Shelters and I don't remember any Atheists helping.

That's because they're helping in the ATHEIST soup kitchens and hospital ships and rescue missions found here.

[Starlight]

So you sold all your stuff and gave it to the poor?

As it happens I am relatively young (in my 30s) and have accumulated very little stuff as yet to sell off and give away. I am, however, currently trying to be more minimalist in my life and get rid of about a third of the stuff I do have.

I find that most people spouting this sort of nonsense don't generally practice it...

Um, did you just call the literal words of Jesus "nonsense"? Aren't I the atheist here, isn't that supposed to be my job?

BTW Star, over the years I have done a lot of volunteer work in Soup Kitchens and Shelters and I don't remember any Atheists helping.

As I noted to Meh Gerbil in another thread, you don't have to go back many decades (to about the 70s or 80s would do it) before you see that the number of people writing "atheist" on their census forms drops below 1% of the population in many Western countries. And if you live in a more-Christian area of the US, then the number of atheists in your area is probably still really really low. So it's not surprising you don't see them magically appearing at charities in your area if they're not common in your area. It's also worth considering the extent to which the charities you've participated in have been done under the banner of a religious organisation and whether they recruited volunteers such as you through churches - obviously atheists are less likely to volunteer for charities they are not aware of or which are religious charities.

[Starlight]

That's because they're helping in the ATHEIST soup kitchens and hospital ships and rescue missions found here.

Some Christian soup kitchens seem to literally turn away atheists because the soup kitchen wants to deliver a gospel message along with food.

One atheist recounts their personal experience here:

I volunteered at a soup kitchen hosted by a nearby church. I was an atheist, but could still appreciate the good work they were doing and wanted to help. I soon learned the motivation behind the soup kitchen wasn't to help the hungry. My first day I was on serving duty and before the first person could get to me, another volunteer who was part of the church stopped him. This man was old and frail in tattered clothes, but still wore a smile.

The volunteer asked the man to "affirm your faith in God so you may be saved." The old man told him he didn't believe in any deity. The volunteer then took the old man aside and tried to convert him. The man politely asked to eat several times, but the volunteer kept refusing. "Your soul is far more important than your stomach."

At this point, I couldn't take it any longer. I left my post and brought the kindly old man a large bowl of soup. The volunteer TRIED TO STOP ME! I didn't let him and gave the man his soup.
This senior volunteer took me aside and scolded me... For feeding a hungry person! He told me that if I wasn't "on the same page" they didn't need my help.

[Starlight]

The current last post in the other top thread in this forum is strikingly relevant to this thread:

My indifference to the future of this creation has more to do with my concern over the eternal fate of my children and grandchildren. THAT is more important than anything else.

And when humans worship the creation rather than the Creator, as it states in Romans 1, then there is a downward progression into depravity, which is horribly prevalent on this planet and getting worse every day.

So, the message of Christ and Him crucified has to be paramount with a believer above all else. It's that simple.

It probably also explains why Mossrose and I do not see eye-to-eye, as her definition of "good" is pretty much my definition of "evil" and vice versa.

[Cow Poke]

One atheist recounts their personal experience...

I just love it when you provide absolutely indisputable empirical evidence!

[Cow Poke]

The volunteer asked the man to "affirm your faith in God so you may be saved."

What a steaming pile of horsie poo!

(But, it was a reddit post, so it MUST be true, eh?)

Star, you're such a lovable pantload!

[Starlight]

What a steaming pile of horsie poo!

(But, it was a reddit post, so it MUST be true, eh?)

Star, you're such a lovable pantload!

Joke's on you: You could have tried reading the other link that has a literal quote from Christians running a soup kitchen who explicitly said that they turned away atheist volunteers because they wanted to deliver a Christian message along with the food.