Is Effective Altruism Totalizing?

by Vesa Hautala.

A well-known piece of EA writing, We are in triage every second of every day, talks about prioritization decisions EAs have to make using the metaphor of battlefield triage. Others have also used wartime metaphors in describing the thinking of people committed to radical altruism. In her book Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar titles a chapter, ”For do-gooders, it is always wartime”. The wartime metaphor is helpful in explaining some ideas in EA like personal sacrifice and prioritization under scarce resources, but it also highlights a possible criticism that EA, like war, is totalizing and even dehumanizing. Is this criticism valid?

The Critique of Demandingness

It is easy to cast utilitarianism, the ethical theory espoused by a majority of the EA movement, as exceedingly demanding. One of the stock objections to utilitarianism is called the Demandingness objection. Another recurring line of criticism for utilitarianism is that it does not value persons but subsumes them under an impersonal “good”. In these ways, utilitarianism, and also EA, can be portrayed as inhuman and totalizing.

Peter Singer, the most famous proponent of utilitarianism today, concedes the theory’s extremely demanding nature. In his classic essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, he argues that "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it." Living totally according to this principle leads to giving up one’s time, money, and everything else. As long as doing so can help someone suffering from something even worse, we ought to do so. And because the depths of preventable suffering in this world are frighteningly deep, someone else almost always benefits from our resources more than we do.

To engage with EA, it is not necessary to be a utilitarian or adopt the stringent conclusions following Singer’s argument. EA doesn’t require utilitarianism. It can be characterized as the project of getting the most out of limited resources while doing good but makes no normative claims about why or to what extent this should be done. In this framing, one can engage in EA and still choose not to commit everything to it. 

Singer famously makes a normative case for charitable giving as discussed above. But even a normative utilitarian may think that extreme demandingness doesn’t lead to the best consequences. In practice, Singer also advocates for lower standards of giving.

Practical Implications and Burnout

But even if EA is not overly totalizing and dehumanizing on the theoretical level, is this so in practice? It looks like EA can hurt some people. There’s been a lot of talk about EA burnout, and EAs have their fair share of mental health problems. EA has aspects that, in practice, are easy to turn into a kind of totalizing commitment trap.

Kerry Vaughan, who was active in EA from 2014 to 2019, sums up a lot of these criticisms in his Twitter thread:

“Effective altruism is a successful ideology because it has a powerful psychological effect on its adherents. … The core issue is that EA is serving the role of "provider of meaning" in most EAs lives. … The issue is that most people's conception of a meaningful life is fundamentally multifaceted. But the EA ideology places no real boundaries on how much it demands, it naturally tries to consume everything else that provides meaning if it trades against being a better EA”.

For some people, EA indeed seems to act as a kind of infohazard by overtaking the meaning-production role in their life. I think EA is not inherently different from other causes and social movements in this respect. EA has some particular hooks, most distinctively the idea of maximizing, but many movements provide a larger-than-life cause that can start to dominate everything else. 

Whether EA becomes totalizing depends on how a person engages with it. It is a different thing to agonize over the impact of the most minute decisions and sacrifice all of one’s time, energy, and above-subsistence financial resources on one hand, and to sometimes participate in the community and make occasional use of EA in big decisions on the other. Even heavy social, financial, and professional investment in EA can be handled in a healthy way, I believe.

Parallels with Christian Demands

In Christian ethics, it’s a common principle that nothing is evil in itself, only when used wrong or for bad ends. Every good thing can be taken into excess and turned into sin. If EA takes the role of the primary producer of meaning in a person’s life, this will count as idolatry from a Christian perspective, as this place belongs to God. It is also problematic if EA infringes on explicit Christian norms like not neglecting one’s family. (1 Tim. 5:8) Christian ethics has what could be called side constraints built into it that prohibit a naive form of utilitarian maximizing.

The demandingness of “totalizing” is not in itself a bad thing from the perspective of Christian ethics. Christian morality can also be very demanding. The aim is no less than perfection, according to Jesus: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”. (Matt. 5:48 NRSV) The metaphor of warfare is also something familiar from the Bible. The ethos that good is difficult to achieve but worth a sacrifice very much fits with Christian ethics. 

And “totalizing” is not bad if the “totality” in question includes all the elements that are needed for true human flourishing. Christians believe their faith is like this. A relationship with God is connected with a right relationship with other people, the rest of the Creation, and a right relationship to self, both body and soul. Picking up the metaphor of wartime, what is fought for is an inseparable part of the battle. It shapes and gives meaning to the fight and determines what it is like.

Conclusion

Theoretically, EA is not totalizing, at least following MacAskill’s definition. In practice, it can be for some people, but this depends heavily on how one engages with EA. The community has attempted to address possible negative effects. From a Christian point of view, demandingness itself is not a problem but engagement with EA becomes problematic if it infringes on limits set by Christian ethics. From a Christian perspective, EA is something they should relate to responsibly, like all other things in life.