What is Effective Altruism?

(This interview was conducted by Emerson Alden and Michael Peeler.)

For the Tocqueville Center’s 2024 Lecture Series, Leah Libresco Sargeant visited Furman’s campus to discuss Catholicism in America. Mrs. Sargeant is a Catholic, a wife and mother, an author of two books (Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option), a prolific columnist, and an advocate for local community building. She also finds time to advocate for family policy on the Hill in Washington, DC. But today, we're here to talk with her about another cause she's been deeply engaged with: the Christian Effective Altruism movement.

Michael: “We wanted to start with just a little bit of background, mainly on the topic of what is effective altruism, and what do you mean by calling yourself an ‘Effective Altruist’? How do you see that as also fitting in with your Christian beliefs?”

Leah: “Let me give you kind of a basic one sentence definition and then get into the nuances a little bit. Effective Altruism is really just asking, when you're giving money, specifically, how do you make sure your money is really doing the good you intend and that you're making a prudent choice with it? And I think it's something people have always been interested in with charity, but they often asked it in a very narrow way. One of the ways people would rank charities in the past would be to say, ‘How much of the charity's money do they spend on overhead, on staff salaries, etc, versus the real intervention’— the idea being, if too much is going to overhead or the organization, that's bad, if most of the money is going out the door, that's good, as a pretty blocky, unhelpful rule of thumb. 

A group called GiveWell— which was founded by people who had become unexpectedly very rich in the startup world and really wanted to give their money well, and knew they weren't prepared to do it— framed the question differently. They said, ‘What does this charity claim to do in the world? Can we check they're actually doing it? And can we check that it's worth spending money on?’ I think one of the examples people go to is there are some charities that have a good brochure, which might be, ‘We bring puppies to sick children.’ And it's not that that's a bad thing to do. But you can kind of pause and look past the brochure and say, ‘Okay, what do I think the effect of that is, and when I'm spending money, is that where I want to put it?’ And then you have charities that make a more ambitious pitch, which is, ‘We want to distribute malaria nets, and we think that will result in people not dying. And we think we can turn dollars given to lives saved, reliably.’ And GiveWell doesn't just say, ‘Well, that's more ambitious, we like that one better,’ they say, ‘Can you prove it? Can you prove you succeeded in delivering them? Can you prove that death rates drop?’ And they're really taking this empirical approach to looking at charity. They say, ‘What is it that you claim your charity does? And how do you check that you're right?’”

Emerson: “So what drew you to this Effective Altruism movement? And how has your involvement in the movement woven in with your faith? Also, on the timeline of your joining the Church—when did your interest in Effective Altruism take root?”

Leah: “I think it started before I became a Christian, because there's just a lot of discussion about it in the other circles I moved in. And what I really like about it is, you know, it's a curious movement overall. But I'd say it's not there just to check on charities or call out bad charities, they are really interested in finding unusually good and neglected interventions. And so GiveWell will both identify groups where like, ‘We're really confident that when you put money in, you get big results out,’ and they'll also say, ‘Here's a group where we're not sure, we're looking for funding to help people conduct bigger trials, scale up, see if this works.’ They're very transparent, too—if you're coming to us saying, ‘I just want to give money and be confident it's helping,’  pick from this column. If you're coming and saying, ‘I want you to try and find neglected opportunities that might exceed your  recommended charities, give here, but we want to be upfront with you, maybe you'll find out they didn't help.’

I think what can often happen is there's a defensiveness to charity work, where people are like, ‘Well, our intentions are good, and it's all good people here. So obviously, what we're doing is worthwhile.’  I think that actually doesn't just wind up being bad stewardship of the money—it's bad stewardship of the people, who often in the nonprofit world are working for very low salaries, for very long hours, in very difficult environments. I think partly it's our duty to steward the people who are willing to give of themselves well by making a credible promise, and that when we ask big sacrifices, it's because we're sure they're worth it.”

Michael: “You kind of alluded to this when you mentioned that Effective Altruism is a movement that has support in a lot of different groups. The historical demographics of Effective Altruism has been more secular elites and utilitarian philosophers. And as a Catholic journalist and self-described virtue ethicist, you don't really match that archetype. Does this drive any sort of tension between yourself and the wider Effective Altruism movement? Or how do these differences in philosophy produce differences in the altruistic practices?”

Leah: “I think people think of Effective Altruism as being kind of like, ‘Oh, it's a bunch of boring utilitarians who want to put money in and get utils out.’ However, one of the things that happens once you talk more frankly about impact, and how you measure it, and what your assumptions are, is that it really surfaces profound values disagreements, which I think are explored well within Effective Altruism. So you wind up with very different camps and priorities, because their values are different. And they debate them as values: they're not always bloodless calculators, as people think. You might have to say, ‘I think some of the stuff we should put things into is reducing factory farming, because there's an enormous amount of suffering, and it's worth pulling back on.’  But they're not just making that case, they have to then say to other people, ‘And I think animal suffering is… the same thing as human suffering, maybe? Are you saying it's not as important as human suffering, but there's just so much of it, it kind of winds up being important?’ I think what I like about Effective Altruism is you get a lot more explicit debates about values as values and questions about how to sort out competing value claims than you do in most other environments.”

Emerson: “That brings us into another question, which is about the relation of Effective Altruism and the pro-life movement. You've been fairly outspoken in your pro-life stances, and reducing pre-natal mortality is an effort that seems pretty ripe for an Effective Altruist approach. But the pro-life movement has historically had a very different base than secular Effective Altruism. So my question would be, how have you seen Effective Altruism applied in pro-life spaces? And what would you argue is the most effective way one could advocate for this issue, and help people?” 

Leah: “I haven't seen a lot of crossover. But I'll tell you, one of the things I'd like to see is more evaluations and research done into things like sidewalk interventions. When I'm giving to the pro-life movement, I'm usually giving to particular people or institutions where I have a great deal of trust in their integrity, and usually, where they have a fairly simple model of what they're doing. You know, I'm giving to this specific crisis pregnancy center where I know the people who work there, and I'm confident about how it's run. I've got a very small-scale giving approach there; or giving to the Sisters of Life, where I both know them, work with people who have worked with them, and I'm confident of their approach, their kindness, and other things, rather than big scale groups. But there are other groups where I've given to occasionally, and I wish I had more data, not because I'm trying to catch them out, but because they've got a weirder intervention that I think deserves actual evaluation. 

There's a group called Save the Storks. And what they do is they buy vans and put an ultrasound machine inside. They park outside an abortion clinic, and they make the very hard pitch of, ‘Would you like to get in our weird van and see your baby?’ But some percent of people get in the van, and then some percent of people hopefully do not go through with their appointment. And often—and this is not something unique to the pro-life, this is really common in the nonprofit space—people tell individual stories of, ‘Here's one person who turned around,’ and the stories are moving. But I want to know something about what percent of people get into the van? What percent of people make a change? How do you follow up? What do you know? I think—again, in most nonprofit spaces, and not particularly with the pro life movement—people are a little nervous about those questions, because the worry is your numbers aren't high enough, or you don't know what number counts is high enough. And again, I think a good thing about the Effective Altruism general community is it's not usually just, ‘Give us your first numbers, those numbers suck, we're moving on,’ it's like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s interesting, what's your theory of what it would take to move the numbers up?’ It's an active conversation, not a test that you pass or fail.”

Michael: “Shifting more towards the future of Effective Altruism and Christianity: under a Christian framework, there's this idea that a single conversion can have a potentially infinite moral value or utility; but when examining charitable efforts from an economic lens, how can a Christian Effective Altruists justify anything other than mass missionary movement? How do you weigh the Christian hope of the resurrection against the secular hope of doing good in this world?”

Leah: “I just think it's more when you totally abstract it that they sound competitive—in practice, they're not as competitive. Including that as you convert people, and they develop a relationship with Christ, they don't just say, ‘Wow, I want to cease to speak to anyone except about missionary things; I'm never giving to the poor.’ You don't actually have an integrated Christian life at that point. And it's very hard to produce an assembly line missionary effort, right? You can think a lot about, things like ‘Okay, is it a good idea to send a bunch of teenagers on a mission trip to different cities? Is it actually helpful to just throw them out on the street for a week and have them evangelize to people? Maybe?’ That's something where you can ask the question without kind of winding up on an all or nothing approach. I think part of it is—and this is more of the tension of secular Effective Altruism—there's sometimes a temptation to look at our own lives as just raw material that you can throw like money into the ‘doing good machine,’ and Christians don't have that option. Because not only is a conversion infinitely precious, so are you.” 

Michael: “Like within the Pope’s recent document on the infinite dignity of the human person.”

Leah: “Mm-hmm. And you can’t just slight God’s handiwork by thinking, ‘I am just raw material I need to feed into making more conversions.’”

Emerson: “So we've focused mostly on your work on Effective Altruism here, but you've also written a few books. One in particular, Building the Benedict Option, focuses on creating a hyperlocal Christian community and focusing on work within that group. How do you reconcile that localist approach with the globalism that's inherent in Effective Altruism?” 

Leah: “I think this is the part where you think about ‘What does it mean to be a good steward of the different things I hold?’ I have money in my bank account that can go to a variety of places. And some of it should go to the poorest people on Earth who have the least capacity to come and ask me personally. To be a good steward, I have to think about who can be the intermediary between me and the poorest, so that my money doesn't just stay in my medium affluent American neighborhood, but goes out in a generous and trustworthy way. But I don't just give money, right? I also give time and presence to those around me in a way I’m not able to give to everyone— especially as a mom of young kids with one on the way. I'm not going to be able to give the gift of present faithfulness, or bringing food, to a mom who herself has just had kids in a village in Tanzania— I can give them my money, but not my time. So I think more about spending different currencies in different places, where they make sense. And I also think I can do good and alleviate suffering by giving money, and do good for myself by not burdening myself with access to wealth that could drive me to hell, but it's hard for that kind of giving to change my heart very much, because it's very abstract. It's ‘press the button, send the money.’ So I really try and pay attention to… It's the local operators that tutor us in love, and hopefully prompt us to do good in that broader abstract globalized way, but it's hard to learn love from those distant activities.” 

Michael: “On that exact topic, at Furman, we have the Mere Christianity Forum, a ministry inspired by C.S. Lewis's theology. And something that Lewis talks about, especially in his book The Screwtape Letters, is the way that evil can prevail by encouraging people to do good far away from themselves, letting them feel moral, while at the same time provoking rudeness or apathy towards those immediately around them. And this can come from a physical and an emotional distance from the good you're doing, while you're present to the evil that you're doing. How do you think Effective Altruism can work to avoid this?”

Leah: “I think it's not a bad idea to take a little bit of Lewis’ advice and think, ‘If I'm never annoyed by the people I'm serving, I'm not serving closely enough.’  I'm never annoyed by the people I send malaria nets to, right? They've never bothered me, they never interrupt me. It's good that they have the nets, but it's not doing much for my conversion of heart. At the end of the year, my family keeps a big spreadsheet of everyone we’ve given money to—both kinds of personal asks, and charity—and we look over at them and go, ‘Did we hit a reasonable benchmark? Or should we give more to top up at the end of the year?’ So we kind of have a target in mind. But it's not bad to have a kind of emotional checking, of, ‘Has any of my gifting been personally hard for me? Has anywhere where I've served someone, or’—and I think it's important to think of where someone has served me and my need—’caused me to be a little short tempered or challenged, and I had to bring that to prayer and ask Christ for help, because I was struggling with being a giver or receiver gracefully?’ And if it's no all the time, there are two possibilities: One, you live a life deeply rooted in Christ and you're on your way to being a saint, or two, you're not giving and receiving in challenging enough circumstances—and mostly, you should assume it's the latter.”

Michael: “We've talked mostly about doing good in the world, but part of virtue ethics and the Christian ethic is also avoiding evil. I encountered a question about this a few weeks back on Palm Sunday, when a question came up on whether or not our palm fronds were ‘ethically sourced,’ or whether we should make sure they were. Someone gave us a Thomistic answer, that we had no culpability since we were removed enough from any sort of evil that may have been committed. But my friends and I that were discussing this were fairly disconcerted—we felt like that may make sense for something that's absolutely necessary, but when you have the capacity to avoid something, it seems that you've probably got some level of culpability there. But there are so many things today where you can't escape it, so many questionable things that we just don't have the proximity or the amount of money that would be necessary to investigate these questions. How do we think of the culpability we have for avoiding remote evil, the obligations that we owe to avoid it, and how we go about limiting cooperation with it?”

Leah: “I think it's good to recognize, to sorrow over, and to pray for the ways that evil is entangled with day-to-day life, so much so that it'd be a real effort to untangle each act of cooperation. I have a friend who doesn't buy anything made in China full stop, because there are some cases where we know of clear abuses in how things are manufactured, particularly in the genocide being carried out against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. That most affects the cotton industry. But you see that and go, ‘How confident am I anywhere else that things are being well made?’ So that's a choice she's made about, ‘Where am I going to take one step back from cooperation?’

There are other things that I kind of prioritize about not participating in or buying, and I think part of the challenge is, first of all, both, you can't completely disassociate, and we're not asked to exactly—we're not held as accountable when it's woven in so deeply.But pick one or two things to personally step back from and pick up enough of them, that it's at least mildly inconvenient. And then I think the challenge there is both lifting up things that are good as alternatives, and seeing where you can work in solidarity with others to target and step back from one evil together, which makes a bigger impact than just doing it alone. So step back individually from enough that it's inconvenient for you, and look for opportunities to target and step back from something broadly.”