“The primary goal of most of those who identify themselves as effective altruists is the prevention or alleviation of suffering and premature death resulting from poverty and disease in the areas of the world in which these problems are worst, or affect the greatest number of people. To the best of my knowledge, none of the philosophical critics of effective altruism reject this goal. It is therefore dispiriting to read their criticisms, which often ridicule people who are devoting their lives, often at considerable personal sacrifice, to the achievement of this shared goal, and are often gleeful rather than constructive in their attempts to expose the effective altruists’ mistakes in their choices among means.”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism

“One may think that I have harped excessively on the fact that the philosophical critics of effective altruism tend to express their objections in a mocking and disdainful manner. But this seems significant to me, as it is suggestive of bad faith. The issues that the effective altruists are addressing are of the utmost seriousness. They should not be occasions for the scoring of debating points or for displays of cleverness, rhetorical prowess, or moral exhibitionism (as when critics, while presenting their objections, pause to reveal parenthetically how much they have donated to charity despite their theoretical misgivings).”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism

“Most criticism of effective altruism is character assassination. We lack empathy, we’re cold and calculating, we have no sense of personal virtue and see people as data points rather than as human beings. It’s much less often that I hear our critics say that we’re doing a poor job of improving or saving people’s lives.

Essentially, the more good we do, the worse we are as human beings. At some point, I’m tired of trying to convince these critics that they’re mistaken about us.

I simply want to respond, ‘Fine, keep looking down on us from your moral high ground. I’d rather be a bad person who does a tremendous amount of good than a good person who hasn’t given a single thought to the magnitude of his life’s impact on others.’”

— Dillon Bowen

“The implication is that goodness can only come from selfless feelings, that goodness itself is nothing more than externalized character traits. Many, many people hold this view. I grew up getting this message indirectly in church and school. It’s a common objection to effective altruism: we’re “cold and calculating,” we aren’t “giving from the heart.” And it makes me crazy, because I think viewing good acts merely as evidence of character is unbelievably narcissistic. This is what makes giving about the giver and not the receiver.”

— Holly Elmore, More on narcissism (July 30, 2016)

“I know how it feels to think that pure motives and actions must somehow translate into good for the world. It’s a natural way for humans to think, and the pathology of it only really becomes clear when someone takes moral behavior very seriously, which is tragic because caring about morality is a good thing.

It’s a hard thing to learn, but we have to learn to see moral actions mechanistically the way we see less charged issues. We have to demand to know how an action will affect the good outcome we want, and we have to be open-minded about weighing the various harms and goods that the various available options entail. We have to see moral problems as problems to be solved instead of just evils to oppose. This is why the Effective Altruism movement is so important to me.”

— Holly Elmore, We have to think mechanistically about morality

“Any intelligent person will ask themselves a simple question: should I pay up to 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the grower; or should I just buy the regular ones and give the difference to a decent development charity?”

— Philip Oppenheim, Fairtrade Fat Cats (The Spectator, November 5, 2005), pp. 17-18

“[W]e are aiming to help people be more clear-thinking, long-term oriented, empathetic, and utilitarian. This not only increases their own flourishing, but also expands their circles of caring beyond biases based on geographical location (drowning child problem), species (non-human animals), and temporal distance (existential risk).”

— Gleb Tsipursky, Intentional Insights and the EA Movement – Q & A (Effective Altruism Forum, January 2, 2016)

“One need not be a consequentialist to find something odd in a Kantian’s proposal to donate $100 to a famine relief organization she happens to know is especially inefficient when there is a more efficient organization that will save more people standing by.”

— Dan Moller, Should We Let People Starve: For Now? (2006), p. 244

“Effective Altruism is what I call the part of my life where I take the demandingness of ethics seriously.”

— Haseeb Qureshi‘s variation on Ryan Carey paraphrasing Daniel Dewey

“The Roman historian Sallust said of Cato “He preferred to be good, rather than to seem so”. The lawyer who quits a high-powered law firm to work at a nonprofit organization certainly seems like a good person. But if we define “good” as helping people, then the lawyer who stays at his law firm but donates the profit to charity is taking Cato’s path of maximizing how much good he does, rather than how good he looks.”

— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…

“Effective altruism is all about combining empathy, reason and evidence. By carefully considering what we value, and by working together to find the best ways of achieving that, we can each do an amazing amount of good.”

— EA UNSW

“Working on issues that affect us, that our friends work on, or that captivate our attention form good starting points for realizing the importance of working to create social change. It is to effective activism what recycling is to an environmentally sustainable lifestyle: it’s the place that pretty much everyone starts out at. But it shouldn’t be an end- point. Once we’ve developed the spirit of social concern, once we’ve seen the value in working to create a better world, we need to move forward in becoming more thoughtful about how we spend the limited amount of time and energy we have. We need to begin choosing our activist work from a utilitarian perspective: How can I do the most good? How can I reduce the most suffering and destruction of life? Slogans like “practice random acts of kindness” feel good and are easy to put into practice. But if we don’t take our activism more seriously than that, our motive is probably a desire to feel good about ourselves, to help ourselves or those close to us, or to act out our self-identity. The endpoint of authentic compassion is a desire to do the most good that one can, to be as effective as possible in creating a world with less suffering and destruction and more joy. Figuring out how we can do the most good takes careful thought over a long period of time, and it means moving into new and possibly uncomfortable areas of advocacy. But the importance of taking our activism seriously and approaching it from this utilitarian perspective cannot be overstated. It will mean a difference between life and death, between happiness and suffering, for thousands of people, for thousands of acres of the ecosystem, and for tens of thousands of animals.”

— Nick Cooney, Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us about Creating Social Change (2011), pp. 22-23

“Effective altruism is using evidence and analysis to take actions that help others as much as possible.”

— various authors, What is Effective Altruism? The Effective Altruism FAQ

“Effective altruists are here to help change the world for the better! And we’re open to whatever lets us do that most effectively, be it hard evidence or new ways of thinking.”

— Effective Altruism Wikia

“Effective altruism is a growing social and intellectual movement at the intersection of academia and the public domain. It seeks to use insights from philosophy, economics, and related disciplines to identify the best means to improve the world. The ethical considerations that serve as a foundation for effective altruists typically involve a sensitivity to the different kinds of impacts our decisions about giving and spending can have, reflection on the values we place on helping others and spending on ourselves, and willingness to worry about the impacts of different kinds of career choices.”

— William MacAskill, Jeff Johnson, Essays in Philosophy: Effective Altruism (Volume 18, Number 1, January 2017)

“[Effective altruism is] the application of cost-effectiveness to charity and other altruistic pursuits. Just as some engineering approaches can be thousands of times more effective at solving problems than others, some charities are thousands of time more effective than others, and some altruistic career paths are thousands of times more effective than others. And increased efficiency translates into many more lives saved, many more people given better outcomes and opportunities throughout the world. It is argued that when charity can be made more effective in this way, it is a moral duty to do so: inefficiency is akin to letting people die.”

— Stuart Armstrong (Gizmodo, March 29, 2016)

“[The effective altruism philosophy is] sort of a set of ideas including consequentialist framework for maximizing well being, a focus on individual decision making, sophisticated decision theory, interdisciplinary open-mindedness, belief in scientific analysis and a realist worldview. That’s how I see it, not an official definition.”

— Kyle Bogosian

“At once pious and rational, comforting and selfless, effective altruism promises a life free from all the hokeyness involved in the business of finding ourselves and our deepest impulses. It promises to shield our do-gooding from the temptations of faddish causes and poignant advertising. It promises an unsoppy, no-bullshit morality. The fact that it seems to require an astonishing degree of self-abnegation, foresight and mathematical ability does not faze the effective altruist any more than it did the Victorian utilitarian. On the contrary, it poses just the sort of technical challenge likely to galvanize a movement spearheaded by graduates in philosophy, math and computer science, who are already disposed to want to do only what they ought, rationally, to do.”

— Nakul Krishna, Add Your Own Egg (The Point Mag, 2016)

“[O]ur moral obligation is not to live out a set of values that we like to see — it’s to improve life for others as much as we possibly can. This is what Effective Altruism has to offer — a rigorous, tough minded approach to doing good that isn’t content with aspiration.”

— Scott T. Weathers, Effective Altruism: The Biggest Impact We Can Make (Medium, December 22, 2015)

“There is a tremendous amount of suffering in the world. Unfortunately, our resources are limited. Time and money spent on one project is time and money that is missing elsewhere. If all lives count for the same, then it follows directly that numbers and cost-effectiveness matter. It pays to invest time and money into figuring out where resources can do the most.”

— Lukas Gloor, Rationality: The science of winning, Part III (Raising for Effective Giving)

“While the ideas of effective altruism may seem calculating and abstract, we should never forget that the suffering of millions of sentient beings is real. In order to alleviate as much suffering as possible, it is crucial that we combine our empathy with rational thinking.”

— Sentience Politics, The Benefits of Cause-Neutrality

“For most people, the goal of any altruistic act is simply to do something helpful. Very few of us choose where to donate, where to volunteer, and how to live our lives based on the answer to the question, “How can I do the most possible good in the world?” And yet it is that calculating attitude that is crucial to helping as many animals (or people) as possible.”

— Nick Cooney, Veganomics: The Surprising Science on What Motivates Vegetarians, from the Breakfast Table to the Bedroom (2014)

“We should reward the charities that we believe do the most good, not those that have the best marketing strategy, otherwise the most successful charities will be those that are best at soliciting funds, not those that are best at making the world a better place.”

— William MacAskill, This week, let’s dump a few ice buckets to wipe out malaria too (Quartz, August 18, 2014)

“Charity is a way to relieve guilt, a way to advertise one’s willingness and ability to make sacrifices, and a way to make other people better off. For those of us who want to maximize the last of these when we give, GiveWell is a godsend.”

— Steven Pinker on GiveWell

“The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.”

— Derek Thompson, The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)

“Humanity faces some big challenges in the 21st century, and I’m glad the effective altruism movement exists to tackle them.”

— Eric Drexler, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)

“We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology. Modern society desperately needs the finest minds available to devise solutions to these problems.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 350

“Effective altruism drives a stake through common but ill-conceived notions about what ‘doing good’ means, and offers a real alternative in its place. The importance of this movement cannot be underestimated: it’s going to be huge.”

— Aubrey de Grey, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)

“Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them.”

— Jaan Tallinn, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)

“Effective altruism is a growing social movement founded on the desire to make the world as good a place as it can be, the use of evidence and reason to find out how to do so, and the audacity to actually try.”

— Centre for Effective Altruism

“Effective altruism is about asking “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s true, and a commitment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be. As the phrase suggests, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be.”

— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Effective altruism – efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off – is one of the great new ideas of the twenty-first century.”

― Steven Pinker, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)

“There is a growing movement called effective altruism. It’s important because it combines both the heart and the head.”

— Peter Singer, The why and how of effective altruism (TED Conference, 2013)