Effective Altruism: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

Work out where the money does the most good, then send it there for the rest of your life.

A movement that began at Oxford around 2009 on the claim that charitable giving can be assessed like any other intervention, and that the difference between good and bad giving is measured in lives. It has a public vow with a register of names, an annual conference circuit, a career-advice pipeline, communal houses, an internal press — and, since the collapse of FTX in November 2022, a documented crisis about whether any of that was a good idea.

On the record

Sam Bankman-Fried, the movement's largest funder through the FTX Future Fund, was convicted in a New York federal court on 2 November 2023 on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy following the collapse of FTX in November 2022, and on 28 March 2024 was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit approximately 11 billion dollars. He was not charged in connection with effective altruism and no effective altruist organisation was charged with any offence; the Future Fund's staff resigned in November 2022 citing fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of their work, and grant recipients faced clawback claims from the bankruptcy estate. A TIME investigation published in March 2023 reported that several senior figures in the movement had been warned about Bankman-Fried's conduct in 2018 and 2019 and had not acted on the warnings.

Why it is filed this way

Whether this belongs on a site about faiths is genuinely contested, and it is included on the evidence rather than the vocabulary. Effective altruism describes itself as a question rather than an ideology — using reason and evidence to find the most effective ways to help others — and its participants generally reject the religious comparison. Against that: it has a lifelong public vow with a register of signatories, a canon, an annual gathering, communal living, a vocabulary outsiders cannot follow, a career pipeline that functions like a novitiate, a schism between its global-health and existential-risk wings, and after FTX a period of collective self-examination that reads unmistakably like a crisis of faith. It is filed as a movement on the strength of what it does, with the disagreement recorded here rather than resolved.

DeitiesNo god and no substitute. What occupies the position is expected value — the practice of assigning probabilities and magnitudes to outcomes and acting on the product, applied to questions that most traditions answer with duty or sentiment. Critics both inside and outside the movement argue that this is a metaphysics wearing a spreadsheet, since it requires treating aggregate welfare as the thing that ultimately matters.

Founded2011 CE · Oxford, England

FounderWilliam MacAskill and Toby Ord

AfterlifeNone asserted. The longtermist wing's concern with future generations is about people who will exist, not about anyone surviving death.

TextsPeter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972) · William MacAskill, Doing Good Better (2015) · Toby Ord, The Precipice (2020)

The map

Effective Altruism’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

The same money saves twenty lives or one, and which it does is findable. The founding observation is about variance rather than generosity: interventions differ in cost-effectiveness by orders of magnitude, so the choice of where to give matters more than the decision to give. Go deeper — context & 1 source →

Whether the far future outweighs everything happening now. The longtermist argument is that the number of people who could exist dwarfs the number who do, so reducing existential risk beats treating malaria. It split the movement and the split has never closed. ⚖ contested within Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

P Peter Singer — the drowning child. If you would ruin your shoes to pull a drowning child from a pond, distance and numbers cannot be what excuses you from the same obligation to a child you cannot see. Everything else follows from refusing to let that argument go. Domain The obligation to strangers at a distanceStanding Universally cited and not treated as an authority — effective altruists disagree with him in print regularly Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

The Pledge. You commit publicly to giving away at least ten per cent of your income for the rest of your working life, and your name goes on a list. 11,153 people from 118 countries have done it. When Once in a life, and reported every year afterwardsWho Anyone; the register is public Go deeper — context & 1 source →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Judaism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith The Bahá'í Faith — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Branch Effective Altruism — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what Effective Altruism shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

2 cited texts

The Centre for Effective Altruism, effectivealtruism.org where it is cited →
Giving What We Can, givingwhatwecan.org where it is cited →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.