Has Effective Altruism done anything good for the world?

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Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, was set in 1920s Soviet Russia—the same Russia she escaped from before immigrating to the United States. Its theme is: the individual vs. the state. And so you might imagine that Rand’s focus would be the bloody brutality of the regime.

It wasn’t.

In 1937, an Italian film adaptation of We the Living was made without Rand’s awareness or participation. Decades later, after some legal battles, Rand helped edit an authorized version of the film for release to American audiences.

One scene she had cut involved the police firing guns at a main character. Rand’s reason for cutting it? She had deliberately left physical violence out of the novel because her aim was to illustrate how dictatorship destroys the human spirit.

Living, for Rand, meant far more than avoiding the morgue. Even if Lenin and Stalin had managed to avoid butchering tens of millions Russian citizens, their regime would have been evil because it stopped human beings from living human lives. As the heroine of We the Living explains:

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?”

Which brings me to Scott Alexander’s recent essay defending Effective Altruism.

Scott’s basic argument is straightforward: people are criticizing Effective Altruists for everything from the crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried to the boardroom shenanigans at OpenAI, but at the end of the day, no one can dispute that their efforts have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Recently, in the U.S. alone, effective altruists have:

-ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings

-cured AIDS and melanoma

-prevented a 9-11 scale terrorist attack

Okay. Fine. EA hasn’t, technically, done any of these things.

But it has saved the same number of lives that doing all those things would have.

About 20,000 Americans die yearly of gun violence, 8,000 of melanoma, 13,000 from AIDS, and 3,000 people in 9/11. So doing all of these things would save 44,000 lives per year. That matches the ~50,000 lives that effective altruist charities save yearly

Overall, Scott tells us that Effective Altruism has saved at least 200,000 lives. For anyone who values human life, these results are not to be taken lightly. But they are also not to be taken at face value.

Effective Altruism’s genuine achievement

Most charity is given and distributed without any meaningful assessment of its impact or its cost-effectiveness. If your goal is to save the most lives, donating to fight malaria is way more impactful than the vast majority of ways people give to charity.

The main reason charity has been so undisciplined about measuring its cost-effectiveness, though, is because the driving motive behind most charitable giving is not to improve human life, but to assuage human guilt. When people give out of altruism, their virtue is not measured by how many lives they’ve saved but by how much they have sacrificed. That’s why businesses, which save and improve billions of lives, are never given moral credit: they profited by helping people, and that robs their action of moral value.

Effective Altruists, by contrast, claim that they aren’t out to promote self-sacrifice, which puts too much focus on the giver. They are out to promote good outcomes. And so they have put careful measurement of the cost-effectiveness of charities front and center. See, for instance, how the Effective Altruist organization GiveWell assesses different charities.

Rigorously measuring impact is a good development in the charitable world. If you’re trying to save lives in Africa, it is important to know that malaria nets are more valuable than installing solar panels. When an Effective Egoist donates to a charity, precisely because his aim is not to sacrifice, he will want to know that his money is actually working to achieve his goals.

Effective Altruism deserves credit for taking charitable results seriously. But measuring the cost-effectiveness of different charities is only one piece of the Effective Altruism puzzle. Their agenda goes far deeper than that.

The poisonous moral framework behind Effective Altruism

If Effective Altruism was a movement that simply called on charities to more rigorously measure their impact, they would be an unequivocal force for good in the world. But that is not all that it argues for. Effective Altruism is a crusading movement that argues you have a moral obligation to “do the most good” in the world, and it defines “the most good” in strictly utilitarian terms.

“The most good” means promoting humanity’s well-being. Morally, you are to be indifferent between your own life and the lives of others. Since those others vastly outnumber you, this means in practice a demand for radical self-sacrifice.

No, Effective Altruists don’t take this to its ultimate, consistent conclusion. You don’t have to literally turn yourself into a meal for others to feast on. But the closer you can strive to lower your own standard of living in order to raise the standard of living of those worse off than you, the better. (See “Peter Singer is Truly Awful.”)

And it’s not just your wealth that you’re supposed to sacrifice. You’re supposed to sacrifice the irreplaceable moments of your life: instead of choosing a career that you love, Effective Altruists urge you to choose a career that will maximize your earnings so you’ll have more wealth to give away. You’re even supposed to give away your internal organs to strangers. (See “How Many Kidneys Does Sam Harris Have?”)

In short, the basic moral premise Effective Altruists crusades for is that you don’t have a right to exist for the sake of your own happiness—you exist as a tool to serve others.

But that raises a troubling question: why bother saving lives in the first place? So that there are more servants to serve servants to serve servants? If more people exist, but exist in the soul-crushing state of living death Rand describes in We the Living, is that really a victory? If the happiness of a single individual is not sacrosanct, if we are all to throw away our lives to maximize some “general good” that is good for no one in particular, then what the hell is the point?

Effective Altruists may be reducing deaths—but they are enemies of life. And, actually, it’s not even clear they are reducing deaths.

The greatest live-saving technology in history

200,000 lives saved is a lot. But it pales in comparison to the lives saved and improved by freedom. That number counts in the billions.

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The evidence is clear and overwhelming. We know that freedom creates abundance. The more that nations embrace rule of law, property rights, free trade, and free markets, the more they prosper—and the less they are dependent on handouts from freer, richer societies.

But look through the causes that dominate Effective Altruism and you will find promoting freedom conspicuously absent from their agenda. It’s like a doctor claiming to care about the health of his patient but only giving him medicine to reduce the symptoms of a deadly disease while refusing to administer a known cure.

Effective Altruism’s failure to promote freedom is appalling—and utterly predictable. As Yaron Brook and I argue in Free Market Revolution, there is an inherent contradiction between altruism and freedom. Altruism treats human beings as servants—freedom respects each individual’s right to exist for his own sake. Altruism regards the pursuit of your own happiness as immoral—freedom protects and celebrates your right to pursue your own happiness.

Effective Altruists, insofar as they advance their anti-self-interest moral framework, are not only failing to promote freedom—they are actively working against it.

Have they saved 200,000 lives? Maybe. But as opponents of the pursuit of happiness, they are enemies of the living.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.