“Alive and well”: Peter Singer on effective altruism after FTX

At the beginning of his famous 2013 TED Talk, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer shows a video of a two-year-old girl who, lying on the street after being struck by a lorry, is passed by several people before someone finally takes her to the hospital. “How many of you would have helped this girl?” Singer asks. As expected, virtually everyone in the audience raises their hand.

Then, another image: a report from UNICEF stating that, in 2011, 6.9 million children died of preventable, poverty-related diseases, many of whom could have been saved with a small monetary donation. “Does it really matter that we’re not walking past them in the street?” Singer doesn’t think so. At least, not morally. If you would help someone in person, there’s no good reason you wouldn’t also help them from afar — especially if all that’s required is clicking a button.

This idea, first formulated in Singer’s 1971 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and expanded in his 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do eventually gave rise to a movement known as effective altruism (EA). What began as a plea to increase charitable donations in affluent countries soon grew into a concentrated effort to measure and compare the importance and efficacy of non-profit organizations. EA argues that people shouldn’t simply strive to do good but to do as much good as possible, as efficiently as possible.

There is no single correct way to practice EA. While some join or found non-profits of their own, others enter the private sector in the hopes of earning as much money as they can so that, when they retire, they can give (almost) all of it away. For a while, the most successful and well-known of these selfless capitalists was Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. While his rise greatly expanded the EA movement, his May 2024 conviction for orchestrating one of the biggest financial frauds in history has called the future of the movement into question.

In the following interview, Singer reflects on whether his brainchild will survive the downfall of its former poster boy. Spoiler alert: He’s largely optimistic.

The rise of effective altruism

“I certainly would not have expected the EA movement to become as big as it did when I wrote ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ back in the seventies,” Singer tells Big Think.

The internet helped the movement take off in the early 2000s, enabling people with unusual ideas to more easily connect. “The internet also made it easier to conduct the kind of research necessary to give as effectively as possible,” Singer adds.

Over the years, Singer’s ideas have taken on a life of their own, with other academics building on the groundwork offered in “Fame, Affluence, and Morality.”

“I don’t think you could read my 1971 article and see it as specifically advocating effective altruism,” Singer explains. “It’s advocating altruism, to be sure, and saying we can and should help people, but I didn’t do any research to show that we can find out how effective a particular non-profit is, nor argue that we should focus on those that give us the biggest bang.”

These contributions came from people like Toby Ord — a fellow Australian philosopher, a co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity — and William McAskill, a Scottish philosopher and author of Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, among others.

Thanks to the internet and social media, EA has spread to all parts of the globe, from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to Europe, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In May, Singer traveled to Paris to attend a meeting organized by Effective Altruism France, attended by nearly 1,000 people.

“It’s a universal idea, and easy to grasp,” he says of the movement’s cross-cultural following. “We are wealthy people who think nothing of spending more on a latte than people in the developing world earn in a day.”

EA after FTX

How does Singer feel now that nearly every news article on Bankman-Fried’s trial mentions his connection to EA and, by extension, himself?

“Not frustration,” he says, “but certainly disappointment that what began very promisingly collapsed the way that it did.”

Still, Singer does not believe the fall of Bankman-Fried will lead to the fall of EA.

“Sure, it damaged the reputation of the movement,” he says. “But the movement is much bigger than Sam Bankman-Fried, or any one person, no matter how wealthy. There are many other people who donate to EA without committing fraud or other crimes, some very wealthy, others not very wealthy at all. I think we’re getting over it, and seeing that the movement is alive and well and continuing its path to do more good.”

While Singer says Bankman-Fried’s actions do not speak for the movement he was part of, critics of EA beg to differ. From Émile P. Torres’ to Alice Crary’s, arguments against EA tend to boil down to the notion that the movement is neoliberal in its character, with SBF’s arrest serving as confirmation of that character. Through its focus on charitable donations, they argue, EA is all about remedying the symptoms of suffering rather than addressing their underlying causes, the systems of power, imperialism, and capitalism that have put much of the world population in inescapable poverty.

Instead of becoming CEO of Shell to donate your multimillion dollar paycheck to clean energy research, their reasoning goes, wouldn’t it be better to change Shell itself?

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Singer says of those who equate effective altruism with neoliberalism. “I’m not a neoliberal. I’ve never voted for a right-wing party in elections.”

“I don’t think there’s anything in the general approach of effective altruism that suggests neoliberalism. EA is interested in the best ways to help people in extreme poverty, among other causes. EA is interested in evidence, and I don’t think the evidence supports neoliberal solutions to global issues. For industrialized countries, it supports strong systems of social welfare and possibly universal basic income schemes, too, though I don’t think the answers as to how well that works are really in yet. We need to do some more trials to see how those schemes can be tweaked to work well.”

As for low-income countries?

“We’re not opposed to these things in the way that neoliberals are. What some people might want to say is: EA doesn’t want to overthrow the global capitalist order, which is true if only on the basis of current evidence. We don’t see any prospect of that succeeding, and if you want to be effective in your altruism, there’s no point in bashing your head against a brick wall. You’ve got to find a way in which you can change the system so that it will become better than it is now, and do so in incremental steps. Effective altruism will support that when there’s a possibility of actually achieving it.”

That doesn’t mean Singer has no quarrels with the movement in its current form.

“I don’t really agree with the emphasis on long-term thinking,” he says. “For example, thinking not just about people or non-human animals we can help now, but the survival of our species and the good we can achieve in not only the next century, but the next millennium or even the next million years.”

For some time, EA discussion boards have distinguished between “near-termist” goals, such as fighting preventable diseases, and “long-termist” goals like colonizing Mars or stopping AI from taking over the world, with an increasing number of followers deeming the latter more important than the former.

Singer believes long-term thinking should not come at the expense of solving present-day problems. (Credit: Don Davis / Wikipedia)

“I recognize that reducing the risk of extinction for our species is an important goal,” Singer says, “one we should think more about and have to an extent neglected. But, for a time, this kind of long-termism actually seemed to dominate affective altruist discussion. Again, there’s good reasons for that. Toby Ord wrote as much in The Precipice, as did William McAskill in What We Owe The Future. It should be part of effective altruism, but I think it should be just one part among others.”

Critics of EA object to the notion that you can rank issues in terms of urgency. While Singer agrees that rankings can never be truly objective, he defends inquiring into the relative importance of issues and the efficacy of charitable institutions for the sake of maximizing altruistic contributions. On top of this, such criticisms generally brush off the serious philosophical questioning that goes into deciding which goal is most important.

“There are deep philosophical questions that preclude us from simply saying, ‘Here’s the math, this is the answer’,” Singer explains, before zooming in on a cause that he himself is particularly passionate about, and has been for all his adult life. “Among those questions are: How do we compare the suffering of humans and non-human animals? Is there some number we can ascribe to it, like saying the suffering of a pig is half as important as the suffering of a human, less than half, or equal?”

How to start giving what you can

While debating the semantics of EA helps ensure that we are indeed giving effectively, it arguably distracts from larger, more obvious questions, like how to pick a cause. “My lifelong support for animal welfare isn’t based on any personal life experiences,” says Singer, who wrote Animal Liberation. “A lot of people who read that book ask me if I have pets or saw some great animal cruelty that moved me, and the answer is no.”

Instead, Singer arrived at this cause through his graduate studies at Oxford.

“A friend prompted me to reconsider my assumption that issues relating to animals were less important than those relating to humans,” he says. “I looked at how past philosophers justified our use of animals, from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant, and found their arguments to be quite hopeless.” One philosopher who did resonate with Singer was Jeremy Bentham. “He said, it’s not about whether animals can talk or reason, but whether they can suffer.”

Another practical question to consider is the relationship between thinking and acting. While attendees of his 2013 TED Talk agreed there was no moral difference between helping someone who gets run over in front of you and helping someone starving on the other side of the world, one wonders how many people actually went on to pledge donations to famine or malaria foundations.

Does the suffering of animals matter less than that of humans? Singer doesn’t think so. (Credit: Molgreen / Wikipedia)

Singer’s philosophy has certainly been shown to make a difference. In addition to receiving fan mail from people attesting that his books turned them to vegetarianism or EA — one even credited the philosopher with inspiring them to donate a kidney — Singer once participated in a randomized study at the University of California, Riverside, that tracked the food orders of students at the campus cafeteria. The study found that students who attended a class on the ethics of meat eating began ordering significantly less meat than those in the control group, who didn’t attend the class. 

Still, for every person who begins to seriously practice EA, many more carry on living the way they did before: for themselves.

“Ultimately, I would say we are the descendants of beings who thought primarily of their own survival and reproductive opportunities, and those of their offspring,” Singer says when asked what’s stopping them. “To some extent, it’s wired into us.”

Of course, we also evolved the capacity to reason and to link our own survival to that of others both near and distant. But even though we may understand the need to give what we can, we don’t always feel it, the way we feel the importance of caring for ourselves and our loved ones.

“Is the urge to give as powerful as love or fear or concern for our children?” Singer asks. “In some people, they are at times even more powerful. In others they are equal. And in others still, they are far less powerful. This is where we get the whole range of responses to EA. Some people do amazing things, give away nearly all of their fortunate, give a kidney to a stranger because they learned they can do fine on one kidney, and there are others on the waiting list who will die or have a poor quality of life if they don’t get one. Some people are extremely altruistic. There’s a whole spectrum. What EA is trying to do is push the needle towards the more positive, more altruistic end of that spectrum. We’ve had some success, but only a small percentage of the success that’s potentially there if we reach more people and show them that this can be a rewarding activity.”

Perhaps the most convincing argument for why a person should take up EA is simply that helping others is fulfilling in a way that caring for ourselves is not:

“I cofounded the organization The Life You Can Save with Charlie Bresler,” Singer says. “He’d had a very successful career in business, becoming the president of a nationwide clothing retail chain. But he did not feel fulfilled. Now, he often says in interviews, ‘The first life I saved was my own,’ because he really feels that his life has meaning and fulfillment because he has contributed to this organization, raising more than 100 million dollars to give to effective charities. Not everyone can do that. But everyone can feel their life has more meaning and purpose when they are not simply thinking of themselves but of how they can reduce the amount of suffering in the world.”