Are Effective Altruists Saints? (Part 1)

by Robert MacSwain, edited by Vesa Hautala.

These posts are based on a presentation titled “Sainthood and Effective Altruism” given by Dr. MacSwain (institutional information here) in an EA for Christians guest speaker event. The presentation was based on his essay, “Are Effective Altruists Saints? Effective Altruism, Moral Sainthood, and Human Holiness”, published in Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue, edited by Roser, Riedener, and Huppenbauer (Nomos, 2022).

There are at least three common ways to talk about saints. The first is the official religious definition, mostly associated with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Second, at least in my English-speaking cultural context, there is an informal or colloquial sense of the term “saint” which we sometimes apply to those we know personally who seem to be especially good, often in regard to their patience. But third, there is a technical philosophical sense of the term “saint,” and that’s what I want to focus on here.

This technical use of “saint” goes back to an essay by the British philosopher J. O. Urmson, published in 1958, titled “Saints and Heroes.” In it, he observed that the Anglo-American moral philosophy of his day only recognized three categories for moral actions: the wrong, the neutral, and the obligatory. Urmson argued that this was insufficient because it left out a fourth category of actions that were good but not obligatory, which is technically called the “supererogatory.” Supererogatory actions are good but one does not have to do them. While the supererogatory was a recognized category in Christian moral theology, especially among Roman Catholics, before Urmson’s paper it was not usually recognized in secular moral philosophy, and so here he set out to explain and defend it. Urmson then defined a saint as someone who does actions that are far beyond the limits of their duty, someone who lives a life of extreme supererogation. And that’s the sense of “saint” that is relevant to the question, “Are effective altruists saints?”

Susan Wolf takes up this idea in her 1982 essay “Moral Saints,” in which she defines a moral saint as “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be.” While Wolf is clearly working in the Urmsonian tradition of describing saints in moral rather than religious terms and associating such saints with supererogation, her definition takes things a step further. She argues famously and controversially that striving for moral sainthood is not a desirable or rational goal. She asserts that a necessary condition of moral sainthood is that one's life be dominated by a commitment to improving the welfare of others, which can crowd out nonmoral virtues and personal characteristics. The moral saint must justify every activity against morally beneficial alternatives, which prevents them from engaging in non-moral activities that contribute to a well-rounded, richly developed character, such as literature, music, art, gourmet food, wit, games, and athletic ability.

Thus, vis-à-vis Urmson, Wolf notes that if “we have reason to want people to live lives that are not morally perfect, then any plausible moral theory must make use of some conception of supererogation.” Supererogation in her view, as well as Urmson’s, is what rightly separates the rest of us from moral saints: we need to know when we have done enough morally and feel free to stop there. For Wolf, there are genuine goods other than moral ones, and we cannot allow the legitimate but limited claims of morality to dominate our lives.

I can now finally get to effective altruism! Since I first encountered this movement while researching the relationship between moral sainthood and altruism, it was fascinating to me that in the preface to The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer says explicitly that effective altruists are not saints. He writes, "Most effective altruists are not saints but ordinary people like you and me, so very few effective altruists claim to live a fully ethical life.”

But what does Singer mean by a “fully ethical life,” and is that a possible aspiration for a human being? In The Most Good You Can Do he says: "Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can." It is very curious then that Singer explicitly denies that effective altruists are saints. Why is that?

The answer has to do with supererogation. Wolf believes in supererogation, and as we saw earlier she thinks it is a necessary concept in order to protect us against the excessive demands of an exclusively moral approach to life. Let the saints be supererogatory, while we can get on with our morally good but not saintly lives.

Singer, by contrast, is much less in favor of supererogation. It is unclear if he believes that supererogation even exists as a moral category, or if we are morally obligated to perform every good action we are able to do. But it is abundantly clear that Singer’s thought tends toward this “anti-supererogatory” position.

I thus think that this is the real reason why Singer says that effective altruists are not saints: he probably doesn’t think that supererogatory goodness exists in the first place. In other words, he agrees with Wolf’s definition of moral saints, but unlike her he both commends it and doesn’t think that anyone actually achieves that status, because it is impossible to exceed the high demands of morality. According to Singer, “most [effective altruists] are somewhere on the continuum between a minimally acceptable ethical life and a fully ethical life.”

So, “are effective altruists saints?” Wolf would say yes, disapprovingly; Singer would say no, disappointedly.

Part 2 will explore a fourth understanding of sainthood and compare it with Effective Altruism.