Babies, Bathwater, and Effective Altruism

Published on October 5, 2026 5:26 PM GMT Subtitle: You can't reasonably dismiss it all After Trump's Department of War tweeted its opposition to effective altruism, there was suddenly a lot of social media discourse about EA. Much viral mockery focused on (i) Dylan Matthews' Vox post on how the cost of repairing Notre Dame could instead have saved 47,500 lives; (ii) Bentham's Bulldog's post on the aggregate importance of insect welfare or (iii) an AI-generated parody of longtermism. The first prompted philosopher Jennifer Frey to describe scale-sensitive beneficence (which she mischaracterized as "consequentialism") as "rot". The last inspired Brian Leiter to declare EA "an embarrassment to philosophy" (a remarkably unphilosophical attitude to take towards some of the deepest puzzles in ethics — how to coherently extend beneficence and decision theory to extreme cases — but I guess there's no accounting for taste). Christopher Frey implied that the work of (some? all?) EA philosophers was "neither true nor good." I doubt any of these insults could withstand an extended critical dialogue (or even just, say, reading my paper). But they are, sad to say, par for the course when it comes to how many philosophers talk about effective altruism on social media. This seems messed up. As my paper argues, there's room to dispute the specifics, but the core ideas or principles are about as close to indisputable as moral claims can be, while at the same time remaining extremely (almost universally!) neglected in practice.[1] Or as Andy Masley recently put it: When people first hear the basic argument for "effective" giving, that we should direct our donations wherever they save the most lives, their reaction is often "That's so obvious, why would you even need a special name for that?" It may seem obvious, but almost no one does it, anywhere. Many make misguided motte-and-bailey accusations at this point, and thereby miss the substantive point. More people really ought to endorse and act upon the neglected truisms of effective altruism, even if they reject our more controversial claims! It's worth encouraging people to attend more to reasons of scale-sensitive beneficence, and to use reason and evidence rather than just vibes or untutored intuition to determine how to target their moral efforts most effectively. If you don't often think about moral prioritization, there's likely low-hanging fruit available by which you could significantly increase your moral impact at minimal personal cost.[2] Scott Alexander has described effective altruism as a "tower of assumptions", where even if you knock off the top few floors, more foundational ones remain standing. Ever wonder how the child ended up in the pond? The way I think of it: there are many different streams of effective altruist thought, and no objection that targets them all simultaneously.[3] So it's a mistake to assess "EA thought" as if it were a single, monolithic thing. It's much more modular than that. Even if you have objections to how "expected value"-loving longtermists reason about tiny probabilities, or how Rethink Priorities' Moral Weight Project balances human and non-human welfare,[4] there are almost certainly a lot of remaining insights from EA thinkers that you could and should take on board, to end up in a place that's broadly "EA-adjacent". In this post, I'll highlight a few that stand out to me:[5] We have strong moral reasons to donate to effective charities—and, more generally, to seriously try to improve the world in an efficient, goal-directed way. We should all want more people to (i) make this a personal priority (i.e., endorse beneficentrism and take the🔸10% pledge if they can afford it) and (ii) encourage others to do likewise. Beneficent endeavors vary so much in cost-effectiveness that it's worth trying to distinguish top-tier options. It isn't immediately obvious how best to improve the world, so it's very helpful to have researchers like those at GiveWell look into these details for us. Many common—and apparently intuitive—evaluative heuristics (e.g. assessing charities based purely on accounting metrics like "overhead costs"; or catastrophizing trivial contributions to salient collective harms while neglecting worse but less-salient ones) are simply no good. It's extremely helpful to have a community of inquirers reflecting critically on which heuristics actually work in pursuit of better outcomes. Moral status depends on what a being is like, not how appealing we personally find them. But our gut moral judgments are driven by emotion (especially sympathy), which is predictably biasing. We should all appreciate that activating our sympathy is not necessary for moral status: ugly goblins could still matter morally, even if we found them aesthetically repulsive. Children out of sight matter just as much as those who enter our field of vision (or appear in the news). Abstract benevolence is a vital corrective virtue in light of thi