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Debate

Doing the Most Good? Effective Altruism and Longtermism

Some charities save a life for a few thousand dollars, others achieve far less with the same money – the evidence on that is solid. Are we then obliged to give where it does the most good – and does that include people who will live in the far future?

Effective altruism began in the late 2000s as a movement asking a simple question: if you want to help, which way of helping does the most good? It has channelled large sums of money to causes such as malaria prevention and animal welfare, and its offshoot, longtermism, has shaped debates about pandemics and the risks of artificial intelligence. The 2022 collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, whose founder had been a prominent supporter of the movement and was later convicted of fraud, turned an academic argument into a public controversy. At stake is whether doing good can be a matter of calculation – and who gets to decide what counts as “the most good”.

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Positions

Give effectively

If you could save a drowning child at the cost of ruining your clothes, you should – and, Singer argues in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972), distance does not change the moral picture. Effective altruists add the question of effectiveness: since some charities achieve far more per euro than others, careful evidence should guide where we give. MacAskill co-founded organisations such as Giving What We Can, which encourage people to pledge part of their income on this basis.

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Longtermism: the future counts

If future people matter as much as present ones, and humanity might survive for millions of years, then most people who will ever live are not yet born. MacAskill concludes that positively shaping the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time, and Bostrom argues that reducing “existential risks” – catastrophes that would end humanity or permanently curtail its potential – is especially important. Parfit prepared the ground in “Reasons and Persons” (1984), arguing that human extinction would be far worse than a catastrophe most people survive, because of all the future lives it would foreclose.

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Integrity and partiality

A classic objection to utilitarian thinking, on which critics of effective altruism often draw, comes from Bernard Williams. A morality that treats our own projects and relationships as mere inputs into an impartial calculation alienates us from what gives our lives meaning: someone who saves their own spouse rather than a stranger, and first checks whether this is permitted, has had “one thought too many”. A good life, on this view, cannot be run from the point of view of the universe.

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Politics, not philanthropy

Srinivasan argues that effective altruism tends to leave untouched the system that produces poverty: it favours what can be measured and treats political change, which is hard to quantify, as a poor bet. Crary goes further, holding that the movement’s detached, quantifying viewpoint blinds it to structural injustice and to the knowledge of affected communities, and that its funding power distorts the causes it enters. Both ask who defines “the most good” – and in whose interest.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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