Leif Wenar's 'Takedown' of Effective Altruism

Published on October 12, 2026 11:41 AM GMT This is a crosspost from my Substack newsletter. This month’s most embarrassing piece of public philosophy appeared on invitation in a piece for The Economist by the Stanford philosopher Leif Wenar. Once more, Wenar tries to gain publicity by singing an obituary for effective altruism, one that oozes with self-confident smugness and hostility. All that may be forgiven if he were right, but his arguments, if one can even call them that, are so poor that I’m embarrassed to be part of the same profession. BUDDHA, JESUS and Mo Tzu lived among the poor and taught compassion for all. The early British utilitarians championed human equality, as they campaigned to end slavery and win equal rights for women. My fellow readers of The Economist may be bemused to hear that the effective altruists now have this century’s biggest idea. You mean, the folks who can look at our fractious and bedraggled world and declare, “We must save the shrimp”? What’s good in effective altruism isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t good. Yet some effective altruists have power over artificial intelligence, and that’s a problem for us all. Oh no! Caring about whether shrimps have their eyes crushed or cut off?! Caring about whether they are stunned before being killed?! The horror!!! People like Wenar made the very same tired arguments over the last few decades when it came to caring about cows, pigs, chickens, and fish. Rather than engage with the arguments, which reflect an emerging consensus among animal consciousness and animal welfare researchers that shrimps, lobsters, and crabs can feel pain, and the fact that the UK has recently expanded legal protections to these creatures (alongside octopuses), he prefers to sneer at the very suggestion of caring about shrimps. What he doesn’t understand is that effective altruists care about neglectedness. Some of the worst problems in the world have received insufficient attention. A tiny donation of $15 can improve the lives of about 22,500 shrimps. There are few donations one could make with even remotely the same expected payoff. Even if we give shrimps only a small chance of actually experiencing pain, their numbers are so vast, outnumbering all other farmed animals, that we should try to prevent their suffering. Wenar sounds a bit like the people who denied infant pain a couple of decades ago, trying to make everyone who cares about them look like a fool. But in the end, he just makes himself look heartless and uninformed. I have little doubt that he didn’t even bother to read anything about shrimp pain before trying to ridicule an entire movement. He could have bothered to look at the Wikipedia article on crustacean pain. And you don’t even have to agree with giving to shrimp charities to be an EA. It’s just what many believe. There remain constant debates about whether and how much we should give to them. Those debates will not be solved by Wenar-style sneering. As it stands, shrimps receive much less than 0.1 per cent of all funding dedicated to animal welfare. Is that so insane? I’m currently writing a book arguing that it is not. For years I have watched the growth of effective altruism with concern. I head Stanford University’s ethics centre; we run many programmes to help technologists think through the social impacts of what they are building. Part of our challenge is getting through to the students who just want to get rich. Sometimes more challenging still are the effective altruists, who want to save the world. Moral ambition is great. Good judgment is more important. If you visit an EA message board, you’ll see many asseverations of civilisational importance, often presented in a goulash of mathy jargon. What you won’t see is much common sense about how the world works, or about the impact of policies on real people’s lives. You might not come away from the message board thinking that you’d want an effective altruist to babysit your kids. Oh no! Again. The horror! I must imagine that Wenar struggled with mathematics if he cannot comprehend forum posts written by undergraduates. Perhaps we should all use common sense instead? All of the most serious ethical problems humanity faces involve a great deal of mathematics. This is inescapable, even if one wants to sneer at utilitarianism. Economics, artificial intelligence, biorisks: there are almost no issues of moral importance where one could avoid trying to assess risks. Wenar provides no evidence for his claim that EAs have no understanding of the consequences of alternative policies. The opposite seems to be true. And to put the cherry on top, Wenar insists on adding the embarrassing remark that he wouldn’t trust an effective altruist to babysit. EAs, who have occasionally even donated organs to complete strangers. My worry is the effective altruists who become too attached to being the hero. One popular EA book, Will MacAskill’s “What We Owe The Future”, tells you that “you can shap