Effective altruism applies evidence and calculation to doing good: give where a dollar does the most, choose causes by scale, neglectedness, and tractability — and, in its longtermist form, weigh the vast future as the largest cause of all.
Effective altruism gathered in Oxford around 2009 — Giving What We Can, then 80,000 Hours, GiveWell's charity research as its older sibling — from Peter Singer's pond argument and Toby Ord's calculations of what a lifetime's giving can do. Longtermism, named by William MacAskill and developed in Ord's The Precipice, extends the same impartial arithmetic across time: if the future could hold vast numbers of lives, safeguarding it outweighs every present cause combined.
Ultimate Reality
The position's metaphysics is utilitarianism's: value lives in sentient experience, and it aggregates. What effective altruism adds is not a new reality but a new bookkeeping — expected value as the universal solvent, in which malaria nets, pandemic preparedness, and artificial-intelligence alignment can be priced on one ledger and compared.
The Human Condition
The condition is Singer's pond, generalized: preventable suffering surrounds us at trivial personal cost, and our moral intuitions — tuned to the near, the visible, and the identified victim — systematically misprice it. The movement's psychology is therefore self-suspicious: the warm glow of giving is treated as a bias to correct, not a guide to follow.
Knowledge and Truth
Evidence is graded as in medicine: randomized trials at the top, expert elicitation below, and everywhere the discipline of the counterfactual — what happens because you acted, that would not have happened otherwise. Cause selection follows the importance-tractability-neglectedness framework, and the movement institutionalizes its own fallibility in research organizations whose job is to be wrong on the record and update.
Right and Wrong
Right action is the action with the highest expected good, impartially counted; earning to give converts careers into instruments, and the pledge — a tenth of income, for many members — functions as the movement's tithe. Wrong, in this register, is usually not cruelty but waste: the donation that feels good and does little, priced in the lives it did not save.
Human Destiny
Longtermism gives the position its eschatology: humanity stands, in Ord's image, on a precipice, with existential risks — engineered pandemics, misaligned superintelligence, nuclear war — holding the power to end the story early, and a potential future of astronomical value as the stake. Destiny is thus not awaited but underwritten, and the present generation is cast as the future's trustee without its consent.
The Conversation
Effective altruism asks the charitable world what its overhead ratios and galas are for, if not outcomes, and it asks the religions why their giving so rarely audits itself. Its critics answer from two directions: that the calculus colonizes goods it cannot price — solidarity, presence, the local — and that a movement of trust placed in expected value was badly burned by its most famous fraudster, a stress test its bookkeeping is still absorbing.