Leftists should support some kind of Effective Altruism

Part I: The Escrow Account

This is the first in a series of articles that will (1) argue that leftists should donate a portion of their discretionary income to effective charities, and (2) address objections from (but not always exclusive to) the left.

TLDR: it does.

I’m using “Effective Altruism” (EA) here to refer to the general principle that, as Peter Singer put it in The Life You Can Save, “we should donate to aid people in extreme poverty when by doing so we can prevent suffering and death without giving up anything nearly as important.” (21-22). People living in developed countries who have discretionary income should live more modestly than they must and help these people (and nonhuman sentient beings). We should help them by supporting charities that use the same rigor we’d expect from someone doing something important to us, such as a doctor treating us for a serious disease. When I say “EA” I don’t necessarily mean the whole EA movement and culture and all its idiosyncrasies.

This first article will do two things:

1. Identify an asymmetry between how two aligned and overlapping movements respond to objections. EAs typically take bad faith, defensive critiques at face value rather than identify them as motivated reasoning. Vegans, on the other hand, are quick to point out their opponents’ motivated reasoning.

2. Propose an ‘escrow account’ as a thought experiment and rhetorical device to either (a) expose motivated reasoning, or (b) focus debates on demandingness arguments without being counterproductively confrontational.

Opponents of Effective Altruism, especially on the left, go after the ‘E’—effectiveness. They say that Longtermism is weird. Or that we have plenty of poor people here. Or that giving money to provide Vitamin A supplements to prevent blindness for children in sub-Saharan Africa is colonialist paternalism. Don’t even get me started on the shrimp. EAs sometimes find themselves on defense for the ‘E' and trying to avoid getting bogged down on EA’s real or imagined popularity among tech bros, SBF’s fraud, utilitarians’ penchant for harvesting organs, “structural change”, billionaires’ reputation laundering, and more. But EAs are being too generous by taking their opponents' agreement with the ‘A’ as a given.

Bentham’s Bulldog, one of the most outspoken proponents of EA, illustrates this in his article titled Criticisms Of Effective Altruism Are Obviously Motivated By People Not Liking Individual Effective Altruists. The critics, Bentham’s Bulldog says, are “motivated by spite” and dislike EAs because they’re “disproportionately nerdy and autistic and likely to talk about expected value.” Bentham’s Bulldog flags their motivated reasoning only as an aside: “So unless journalists want to give away 10% of their money to save kids from malaria—and they don’t, they have cocktail parties to attend—they have to come up with some rationalization about why effective altruism is actually terrible.” In fact, Bentham Bulldog’s comment here about hypocritical journalists is more convincing than his main point about unpopular nerds.

People don’t donate to effective charities because they prefer to spend money.

Walk outside and ask anyone why they think people (other people, of course) don’t give a percent of their income to the Against Malaria Foundation. They’ll tell you that people like having and spending money. It’s the equivalent of saying “but bacon” to a vegan. The difference is that vegans are perfectly aware that they’re dealing with ad hoc rationalizations and motivated reasoning. Vegans know that their critics are not tearfully ordering steaks in order to avoid condemning hunter-gatherer tribes in inhospitable climates that can’t grow crops.

But, as far as I can tell, this rarely comes up in actual EA responses to critiques. I started thinking about this after listening to the really great conversation last week between Bentham’s Bulldog and philosopher Richard Chappell.

Bentham’s Bulldog kicks things off: “You and I are both kind of a little befuddled by many of the objections to EA.” Chappell, noting the “extraordinary levels of hostility” to EAs, cautions: “It’s always dangerous to speculate about other people’s psychology, especially, like, negatively, so I feel a bit uncomfortable doing so but it is such a mystery because the arguments are just so bad, so you kinda feel like there needs to be some explanation of what’s going on.… [It] threatens people’s sense of themselves as a good person or whatever so that makes people uncomfortable.” Chappell says that critics are not necessarily “conveying what their real objection is” but restrains himself by noting the “risk of uncharitability.”

Perhaps “people like money” is just too obvious to be interesting to philosophers. Such an accusation also violates the norms of philosophers, who try to treat opposing arguments in a generous spirit. Also, people who are active in EA circles (not just guys who set up recurring payments and spend their time doing other things) are, I’m told, very nice.

Sometimes EA philosophers have gotten close to making the accusation. Chappell himself, in Why Not Effective Altruism, answers critiques of effective altruism compiled in the book The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, edited by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen. Chappell:

Many authors in the same volume complain that they are no longer so competitive for funding when funders are guided by EA principles. And wealthy academics in developed countries have obvious social and financial incentives to prefer moral ideologies that valorize saying the right things over opening their wallets. So even if EA principles were entirely morally correct, we should still expect them to inspire backlash from those advantaged by more traditional conceptions of ethical life and decision-making.

In a footnote to this paragraph, Chappell notes the “well-established social phenomenon of “do-gooder derogation”, as discussed in Minson and Monin (2012)” where cognitive dissonance about one’s own identity as a good person leads to hostility toward moral behavior, as vegans often experience.¹ Chappell continues: “It would be extremely surprising if effective altruism failed to motivate similar unjustified hostility, since it is so plainly contrary to the material interests of the currently comfortable.” (Emphasis added.)

Similarly, philosopher Brian Berkey’s The Institutional Critique of Effective Altruism makes this point, but somewhat obliquely. Berkey is responding to, among other things, Judith Lichtenberg’s article in The New Republic, Peter Singer’s Extremely Altruistic Heirs, which really plays all the hits (“[EA] requires people to sacrifice values we cherish, like loyalty and love”). Berkey refers to the idea that people like to keep their money and buy stuff in a maximally generous way. EA, as Berkey puts it, asks people to “set aside their personal commitments.” Berkey walks right up to the line of accusing EA critics of bad faith and selfish motivated reasoning (emphasis added):

But in fact attempting to direct responsibility to institutions can do little, if anything, to reduce the moral burdens on individuals in conditions in which well-functioning institutions do not yet exist. However demanding it is for an individual who cares deeply about the members of her (well off) family, charities to which she feels a special connection (such as, for example, one that trains guide dogs for the blind), and personal projects of the sort that many well off people pursue, to deprioritize those values in favour of directing resources to the highly effective charities recommended by effective altruists, it will be equally demanding for them to deprioritize those values in favour of directing resources to anti-capitalist revolutionary efforts, or any other political efforts that can succeed only with massive collective investments of time and resources.

[…]

For example, they could suggest that well off individuals ought to commit themselves to devoting a significant percentage of their income to promising efforts to bring about important institutional reforms that would benefit badly off people. Or they could suggest establishing an institutional change-focused organization to gather evidence about which efforts to promote institutional change individuals should contribute to, taking into account, for example, what the efforts would be likely to achieve if successful, how likely they are to succeed, and whatever other factors they might think relevant to determining which efforts there are the strongest reasons to support. Recommendations of this sort are, however, conspicuously absent from all of the pieces in which the institutional critique features that I have discussed. And this makes it difficult not to suspect that proponents of that critique are, to a significant extent, motivated by the desire to avoid accepting that well off individuals ought to be making significant sacrifices in order to contribute to addressing global suffering and injustice, rather than by a commitment to global justice that extends beyond that of effective altruists.

Although I haven’t exhaustively read through the EA literature, I’ve been making an active effort to follow the field since I first read Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save a few years ago. I haven’t found contemporary EA philosophers get much closer to making the bad faith accusation than what I’ve quoted in the above paragraphs. I find this surprising for two reasons:

1. There is a lot of overlap between EAs and vegans. Vegans might shout “That’s bullshit, you just want an excuse to eat burgers!”, but even when they don't, that’s implied whenever they weigh death and suffering against the enjoyment of a sandwich. But you don’t really hear the EA equivalent: “That’s bullshit, you just want to justify buying that iPhone 17 Pro Max!”

2. Singer’s 1972 Famine, Affluence, and Morality, arguably the founding document of EA, makes this exact point explicitly: “People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief.” Remember, ruining one’s clothes is at the center of the thought experiment!

I suspect that EAs refrain from this kind of argument, besides the reasons mentioned above, because it’s really personal and aggressive in a way that the vegan equivalent isn’t. And of course non-vegans enjoy eating meat! There’s also no question of degree. Vegans don’t think it’s OK to enjoy some meat the way that EAs think it’s OK to have some nice things. The vegan equivalent is also not as intrusive as asking about someone’s personal finances and consumption habits. This would put people on the defensive and make them less persuadable.

As I’ve tried to think of a way to make this point in a less hostile way, I think I’ve come up with something that can be a modest contribution to the discourse. EAs could follow Berkey’s thinking a step further. He notes that those who raise the structural critique do not, in any widespread way, appear to be committing their incomes to effective ways of changing the system, whatever that means to them, and this suggests that they’re using the structural critique as a way to just enjoy money that they’d otherwise donate. Answering objections about the ‘E’ gives critics credit for agreeing to the ‘A’ when, in most cases, they’ve made no such commitment. So let’s stop doing it up front.

The escrow account metaphor refocuses the debate.

A metaphorical escrow account takes EA critics at their word.

Answering objections about the ‘E’ gives critics credit for agreeing to the ‘A’ when, in most cases, they’ve made no such commitment.

In certain legal disputes, one party will put money in an escrow account as a show of good faith. For example, if your roof is leaking, and your landlord refuses to fix it, you might pay rent into a court-approved escrow account to show that you’re not using the roof as a pretext to buy yourself a Taylor Swift concert ticket. You’re willing to part with the money under the appropriate conditions (the landlord fixing the roof).

In the EA context, the EA proponent would suggest that the EA critic agree that a significant portion of their income should go toward helping those in need somehow. This money would go into a hypothetical escrow account. The EA should acknowledge the disagreement about where that money should go, and can also hash out any differences about the amount (such as the flat 10% of Giving What We Can, Singer’s income-based tiered system, or something else). The critic can then do one of three things:

1. Balk, inviting the accusation of motivated reasoning behind the structural critique.

2. Raise a demandingness argument and discuss it.

3. Agree on the altruism part and move on to the question of the E (strike funds vs. malaria nets).

My hope is that this thought experiment will reduce the credibility of frivolous arguments that aren’t people’s genuine reason for not giving to effective charities. Perhaps it will also convince some leftist critics of EA to put their money where their mouth is and fund causes aimed at systemic change here and abroad.

Many critiques, some compelling and some not so compelling, will remain. However, EAs can win people over because every objection to EA can usually be answered by pointing to a different type of EA. As Chappell put it in “Why Effective Altruism?”: “[T]he important question is not whether we should blindly defer to actual EAs (of course we shouldn’t), but whether there is some version of the EA project that is worth pursuing.” (Emphasis added.) You don’t have to support longtermism or x-risk if you think, as I do, that we’re too uncertain about the future to divert resources from the present. You don’t even have to support the Shrimp Welfare Project if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to support animal charities at all; there are plenty of charities that save humans. You just have to donate. By preempting bad faith critiques with the escrow account thought experiment, maybe we can steer critics to an EA cause that speaks to them, even if they decline to support others.

Ideally, they’ll ultimately feel satisfaction from giving, explore EA more, and deepen their commitment. As Imam Ali (A.S.) said, “Be generous with that which perishes and you will be compensated for it with that which lasts.”

1. I wrote about the “do-gooder derogation” phenomenon in the context of the media’s reaction to Tucker Carlson’s April 2026 apology for endorsing Trump in Tucker Carlson: Moral Rebel.