In 1971, the philosophy department at Oxford University was confronted with an unusual student. One of the few vegetarians on campus, Peter Singer staged alarming demonstrations with papier-mâché chickens on Cornmarket Street. He petitioned to write his term paper on Karl Marx (“not a real philosopher” in the faculty’s minds). He attended Radical Philosophy meetings, which set out to make philosophy more practical and less complacent, but grew impatient. He had more pressing concerns than splitting hairs on Althusser.
Singer was preoccupied by great suffering around the world—the plight of the persecuted, of refugees, and of victims of famine—and by his peers’ relative indifference to it. This was the landscape that inspired his famous thought experiment. Put simply, it asks if you were to walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond and the only cost to saving them is your clothes get wet, should you jump in? The question itself is not challenging, but Singer used it to make the radical claim that Westerners turn a blind eye to the drowning child each day we refuse to address global suffering. “If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant,” Singer argues, “we ought, morally, to do it.”
This is the idea behind effective altruism, the philosophical movement centered around maximizing the impact of our resources for the greatest good. Inspired by Singer, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched Giving What We Can in 2009, which encouraged members to pledge 10 percent of their incomes to charity. Since then, numerous organizations have sprung up to help Silicon Valley billionaires and broke college students alike find the most cost-effective ways to improve the world.
Effective altruists have often taken extreme measures to show their commitment: A couple adopts 20 neglected children at the expense of their other children’s needs; a man stops doing the dishes so he can spend more time serving others (and he donates so generously that he ends up dumpster diving for his own food). Over its relatively short lifespan, E.A. has been touched by scandal. Before Sam Bankman-Fried was
convicted of stealing $8 billion from his customers in 2024, his strategy for doing good was amassing a cryptocurrency fortune, which he pledged to donate to causes such as pandemic preparedness and artificial intelligence safety. Effective altruism has been co-opted by techno-fascists and has developed offshoots that include pronatalists and cults.
How did the movement stray so far? I spoke with philosopher David Edmonds, author of Death in a Shallow Pond, about the origins of effective altruism, the thought experiment that inspired it, and how it has transformed beyond its original aim. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kate Mabus: How did effective altruism transform from a group of Oxford philosophers experimenting with their personal finances into the highly coordinated and much-dissected movement it is today?
David Edmonds: I don’t know whether it’s shifted that dramatically in culture. When I think of the two organizers, I would say Toby Ord was the more stereotypical academic of the two, whereas Will MacAskill always had activist instincts. So right from the beginning, the whole point was that they wanted to change the world for the better. It’s obviously open to debate to what extent they’ve done so, but that certainly was their ambition. To do that, they had to build a movement, and that involved building organizations. The first one was called Giving What We Can, and that encouraged people to give 10 percent of their salary away to good causes. There was another organization called 80,000 Hours designed to advise people on what they should do with their work life. If you are interested in doing the most good that you can, it may not be just the money that you can help out with. It may be how you devote your time. A number of other organizations sprang up under the effective altruism umbrella. So, right from the beginning, they were quite ambitious in what they wanted to achieve. That was about 15 years ago now, and it’s become a slicker operation with various major bumps along the road.
K.M.: Why is Peter Singer important for understanding the intellectual underpinnings of effective altruism?
D.E.: He’s absolutely fundamental. Effective altruism kicks off about four decades or so after Peter Singer writes a famous article called “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” He has this thought experiment where you are to imagine that you are walking past a shallow pond and there’s a child who’s drowning. There’s nobody else around, and you are about to save the child when you notice that you are wearing your most expensive shoes. Peter Singer asks, “Should you worry about that?” And everybody says, “That’s a ridiculous question. Of course what you should do is save the child.” Then Peter Singer makes this very contentious claim that those of us in the affluent West with spare resources are effectively walking past a shallow pond every day of our lives.
Most of us think that if somebody is in danger just around the corner from us, that should have greater moral weight for us than if somebody is in trouble on the other side of the world. In the past, there was nothing we could do about people in another country. Peter Singer says that’s just an evolutionary hangover, a moral error. The lives of people on the other side of the world are no less important than the lives of people just around the corner from us.
Ord and MacAskill read this famous article, written way back in 1971 when Singer was wondering what our obligations are to people in Bangladesh who were going through a terrible civil war, and they found it totally compelling. Effective altruism was born.
K.M.: In the book, you apply utilitarianism to a number of thought experiments, which often leads to unsatisfactory conclusions. Would it not be better to simply follow our ethical intuition?
D.E.: Opinions differ on this. There are plenty of people who are effective altruists who aren’t utilitarian and think that actually what we should do is devote a small part of our life to maximizing good, but for the rest of our time, we should be free to pursue other projects. Utilitarians, like Peter Singer, believe that what you should do is maximize well-being, minimize pain, and that is the ultimate arbiter of all actions. This can seem very demanding because every day there are things in the world to worry about and you must be committed to doing what you can to alleviate those problems instead of, say, looking after your family. There are obviously good evolutionary reasons why you would want to focus on your kids but, if you’re utilitarian, in effect, your children’s lives are no more important than other children’s lives.
K.M.: A paradox of effective altruism is that by seeking to overcome individual bias through rationalism, its solutions sometimes ignore the structural bias that shapes our world. Is this possible to reconcile?
D.E.: The institutional critique of effective altruism is that Peter Singer’s solution to global poverty is very individualistic, essentially leaves power as it is, and doesn’t deal with the root cause of any of these problems. The real problems are structural. They are to do with the way societies are organized, power imbalances, things like corruption and the lack of accountability for politicians. Donating money like the effective altruists encourage is just sticking a plaster over the wound. It’s not actually tackling the causes of the injury. The effective altruists have various responses to that, but I think the most compelling one is this. They would say, “Well, what we believe is we should do the most good. If you can convince us that working for structural change—for example, lobbying politicians or supporting organizations trying to root out corruption—is the most effective use of our resources, then we have no ideological commitment to donating through charities.” So it’s not a difference about ideology or morality, it’s a practical and empirical difference about what they think is the most effective way of bringing about change.
K.M.: In its early days, the movement seemed to be quite apolitical in its mission. Now it is increasingly impossible to keep philanthropy separate from politics. How might effective altruism change in response to this new political landscape?
D.E.: You are right that politics has become increasingly polarized. I’m not an expert on why that’s happened, but I think it’s happened in the United States to a greater extent than in any other Western democracy. The implications for E.A. are entirely pragmatic ones. Their ultimate aim is not to get any particular party in power. Their ultimate aim is obviously the distribution of resources in a way that effectively improves people’s lives. Insofar as alignment with any particular political party undermines that objective, they would obviously do well to disengage from party politics. Already they’re not overtly party political. Surveys of those who’ve signed up to effective altruism show they tend to be, as you might expect, on the progressive side, but vary from being very centrist to moderately progressive … in European terms, which might be very left-wing [in] American terms. They’re not of one political persuasion, and they will probably want to remove themselves from the arena of politics just because it is so polarized. If you are associated with one side or the other, you alienate 50 percent of the American population.
K.M.: The movement has been blighted by some major scandals in recent years. At one point in the book, you ask if these bad actors are a bug or a feature. Which is it?
D.E.: I think it’s a bit of both. There has been a problem in that effective altruism began as a movement entirely focused on development and then evolved into various other areas. A couple of other areas that got very seriously interested included animal rights, but also what’s called long-termism, which is worrying about the future of the planet and existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, AI, or being hit by comets. When it made that shift, it began to attract a lot of Silicon Valley types, who may not have been so dedicated to the development part of the effective altruism program. I don’t know how strongly to put this … they may have had instincts which didn’t chime with the instincts of the initial crew who were thinking about those in desperate poverty and in need of inoculations and money for food and so on.
Part of it was a feature: It attracted a whole bunch of people whose values were not totally aligned with the original values. But part of it is also a bug: I wouldn’t exaggerate the role of people like Sam Bankman-Fried. He’d been one of the richest donors to effective altruism, and it turned out he’d been committing fraud. That was obviously terrible P.R. for effective altruism, not least because Will MacAskill encouraged Sam Bankman-Fried to go into commerce rather than work for a charity. He’d been part of this 80,000 Hours movement, as it were. I think they’re recovering. They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals. I sort of hope and trust that going forward, there won’t be the same kind of catastrophes emerging; famous last words.