44 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019couldn’t help thinking he was morally right.
As a practising Christian, I am well aware
of Jesus’s insistence that his followers should
love their neighbour as themselves. If I took
that seriously, shouldn’t I be putting the needs
of people in poverty above those of my family,
who live in relative luxury? Perhaps I should
even get a room at the Athena?
The thought led me to “Moral saints”,
an essay in which philosopher Susan Wolf
argued against the idea that our lives should be
dominated by a commitment to improving the
welfare of others. Her point was that doing sowould diminish or even exclude non-moral
characteristics, making life “strangely barren”.
Ultimately, Wolf wrote, life wouldn’t be worth
living if we were all relentlessly altruistic.
It is also far from clear that a strict utilitarian
approach is the best way to be morally good.
Let’s imagine a scenario in which you have to
choose between saving the life of five strangers
or that of someone close to you. Utilitarian
principles say you must go for the strangers
because saving five lives is better than saving
one. Most people would be appalled by suchlogic. And that’s fair enough, according to
Larry Temkin, a philosopher at Rutgers
University in New Jersey, because there is
more than one way to decide if an action is
good, including how it affects our family and
friends. We have special obligations to certain
people, says Temkin, without which we would
be unable to sustain the trust and mutual
cooperation on which societies depend.
All of which comes as a relief. I quite like my
wife and children and don’t want to abandon
them. But accepting that I don’t need to devote
myself entirely to strangers is not to say that
I couldn’t do more to help them. Indeed,
effective altruism as originally conceived was
about achieving the greatest effect from not a
lot of effort. Perhaps it can help me make more
of the time and money I already give.
When I have considered that goal in
the past, I have always turned to GiveWell,
a non-profit organisation that ranks the
most effective charities, in terms of lives
saved or lives improved per dollar, according
to what it considers the best possible data,
including randomised controlled trials. Its list
of top-rated charities includes the Malaria
Consortium, for example. According to
GiveWell’s analysis, the programme that gives
antimalarial medication to young children
substantially reduces cases of the disease and
costs $6.93 to deliver to one person for four
months. That is a lot of good for very little cash.
I’m not the only one persuaded by GiveWell’s
logic. The organisation estimates that it helped
direct $149 million into the coffers of the charities it champions in 2017. The question is
whether it really does offer the best way to
choose where to donate.
Caroline Fiennes, who runs Giving Evidence,
a consultancy specialising in evidence-based
philanthropy, points out that GiveWell has by
its nature been biased towards charities whose
outcomes are easily measurable. This tends
to mean those that provide health-based
interventions. Yet there are many other actions
that seek to reduce adversity or poverty that
don’t easily lend themselves to empirical
scrutiny. How do you measure the impact
of an organisation that aims to eliminate the
structural origins of inequality – by tackling
corruption, say? Or evaluate a charity that
campaigns for environmental action?
“It used to drive me mad that GiveWell only
looked at interventions that were direct service
delivery,” says Fiennes, who sits on the board
that selects the charities recommended by The
Life You Can Save. “That approach rules out so
many other ways of doing good.” Others,
meanwhile, have raised the prospect that
GiveWell could push us towards a more“ Should you save
the lives of five
strangers or one
person close to you?”
Countless charities
compete for your
money, but which
will use it best?NY
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