What distinguishes effective altruism as an ethic is not the content — give generously, help strangers, take suffering seriously — but the evidentiary demand attached to it. A claim about doing good is expected to arrive with a cost-effectiveness estimate, a source, and an explicit statement of uncertainty, and the movement's internal culture rewards people who publicly change their minds. Its critics argue that this produces a distinctive failure mode rather than eliminating failure: a community confident that it has quantified its way past the moral intuitions that would otherwise have stopped it, which is close to the diagnosis that was made of it after 2022. The formal doctrine has always rejected ends-justifying-means reasoning, and after FTX several senior figures said publicly that the rejection had not been emphatic enough.