Will MacAskill
About
Effective altruism philosopher and CWT guest
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Claims by Will MacAskill (20 of 120)
Democratic Failure Leaves the Disenfranchised Unprotected
Beyond market failure, there is 'democratic failure': poor people in foreign countries, non-human animals, and future generations cannot vote, so neither markets nor democratic governments can be expected to protect their interests—leaving charity as one of the only remaining mechanisms to help the disenfranchised.
The PlayPump Failure
The PlayPump—a children's merry-go-round designed to pump clean water—was a celebrated but disastrous development intervention because local communities were not consulted, it was less efficient than the cheaper Zimbabwe hand pumps it replaced, and one journalist estimated children would have to play on it 25 hours a day to supply the village's water, leaving exhausting labor to elderly women.
Sustainable Cheerful Giving Is the Sweet Spot
The right attitude toward giving is not grim self-denial but cheerful sustainability: as Julia Wise argues in her post 'Cheerfully,' the ideal is being a model who says their life is great because of, not despite, their giving—because an unhappy, struggling giver is an uninspiring message, and pushing one's giving rate so high that motivation burns out and one quits entirely is a bad outcome.
Early-Stage Charities Like Startups Can Compete
Early-stage charities without a long track record can rationally compete with established, evidence-backed charities for funding in the same way startups compete with bonds and public stocks for investment—a refusal to ever fund early-stage organizations would be a mistake, and indeed a significant proportion of GiveWell's annual expenditure goes to early-stage nonprofits with potential to become top recommendations.
Care About Outcomes Not the Helper's Virtue
When facing terrible suffering and injustice, what matters is that the suffering stops, not whether the person who helps is virtuous or how much they sacrificed; thinking about charity in terms of virtue or sacrifice rather than outcomes is fundamentally the wrong frame, and as long as no harm is done along the way it is irrelevant whether helpers are paid much or little.
Public Commitment as a Motivation Hack
Public commitment to giving is a powerful psychological device because once altruism becomes wrapped up in one's identity and social relationships, reneging carries a reputational cost, making the commitment durable—MacAskill notes he would not abandon his giving even if offered a million pounds because it has become part of who he is.
Don't Stigmatize Wealth; Inspire Rather Than Guilt
Stigmatizing wealth per se is counterproductive because legitimately built companies create enormous surplus and gains from trade; the better aim is 'market segmentation' where some role models show extreme sacrifice while others, like Bill Gates, show that one can have an amazing wealthy life while giving away vast sums—and the inspiration framing, not guilt, explains why effective altruism spread rapidly in a decade after Singer's guilt-based arguments gained little traction over four decades.
Earning to Give Depends on the Cause's Bottleneck
Whether the best contribution is direct work or 'earning to give' depends on each cause's bottleneck: in fields like AI safety, pandemic preparedness, and scientific research there is more demand for competent altruistic people than money, so direct work dominates; whereas in global health and development, proven interventions could absorb hundreds of millions more dollars, making money the bottleneck and earning to give more valuable.
Knock-On Effects May Dominate Direct Effects
Any act of saving or helping a person sets off a vast stream of downstream consequences—the person innovates, has children, emits CO2, creates art, makes the country richer—stretching from now until the end of time, and it is quite plausible that these hard-to-predict knock-on effects are far larger in magnitude than the direct short-term benefit, though for consistency one must apply this lens equally to all causes being compared.
The 10% Pledge Is a Goldilocks Number
The 10% giving pledge is not a magic number but sits in a 'Goldilocks zone': a further pledge (capping income and giving everything above) would attract almost no one, while a 1% pledge would not change behavior since people in the UK already give about 0.7% and Americans about 2%—so 10%, with its long religious-tithing history, is large enough to matter yet small enough to be widely adoptable.
Offsetting Differs for Animals vs Climate
There is a non-consequentialist asymmetry between dietary and climate offsetting: buying a factory-farmed chicken while donating to a corporate campaign harms different chickens, so one cannot offset harm to one individual with benefit to another; but a lifetime of carbon emissions paired with sufficient donations to climate charities reduces the total CO2 in the atmosphere over one's life, leaving no individual harmed in expectation.
Birthplace Predicts Most of Income
The notion of the self-made man is largely a myth because roughly 80% of the information about a person's income can be predicted simply from their place of birth; the hardest-working person born into extreme poverty in Bangladesh will find it nearly impossible to become a billionaire.
Saving a Life Could Be a Yearly Moral Heroism
The deep satisfaction of running into a burning building to save a child—an experience that would rank among the top moments of anyone's life—is in fact available every single year through targeted, effective donations, yet our evolved moral instincts are blind to the scale of good a single person can now achieve.
Best Charities Are Hundreds of Times Better
People wrongly assume the best charities are only about 50% better than typical ones, but in reality the best organizations are hundreds or thousands of times more effective—antimalarial bednets save hundreds of times more lives per dollar than cancer treatment, factory-farm corporate campaigns help thousands of times more animals than pet shelters, and man-made pandemic risks dwarf natural risks like asteroids by perhaps a thousandfold.
Drowning Child Obligation Independent of Self-Reliance
Even if a person legitimately earned all their wealth themselves, that fact is morally irrelevant to whether they ought to save a child drowning in a shallow pond at the trivial cost of ruining their suit; the obligation to help persists regardless of how self-made one is.
Clean Water Not Water Access Is the Real Problem
The PlayPump misdiagnosed the problem: the main issue for the poorest people is access to clean water, not access to water, so chlorine dispensers installed at the point of source (like the Dispensers for Safe Water program) are far more effective because they sanitize water rather than merely extract it.
Bad Charities Don't Die Like Bad Businesses
Because in business the beneficiaries of a product are also the people paying for it, bad products fail in a functioning market; but in nonprofits the beneficiaries are separate from the funders, so there is a disconnect between funding success and program quality, meaning bad charities don't die nearly often enough.
EA Has Broadened Beyond Earning to Give
The popular image of effective altruism as merely earning maximum money to donate to GiveWell global-health charities misconstrues it in three ways: causes have broadened (future generations, existential risk, animal welfare, AI), most adherents now do good primarily through career choice rather than donations, and EA is best understood as a research methodology and evolving project rather than a fixed set of recommendations.
Best Opportunities Lie in the Poorest Countries
The very best opportunities to improve lives tend to be in the poorest countries because the most cost-effective interventions have not yet been taken—malaria, eradicated in the US by the early 20th century, remains cheap to fight elsewhere—whereas in rich countries only the comparatively harder, more expensive problems are left.
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