History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
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.
The founding
Toby Ord founded Giving What We Can in 2009 around a pledge to give away a tenth of his income for life, and William MacAskill co-founded it; the phrase effective altruism was settled on around 2011 when the group was choosing a name for the organisation that became the Centre for Effective Altruism. Peter Singer's 1972 argument that distance does not reduce obligation is the intellectual ancestor everyone in the movement cites.
Its founding is bound to William MacAskill and Toby Ord — 2011 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Ordinary naturalism; the distinctive commitment is to expected value as the tool for deciding what to do.
The divine. No 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..
Death and after. None asserted. The longtermist wing's concern with future generations is about people who will exist, not about anyone surviving death..