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THE Athena Hotel in Blackpool, UK, looks like any ordinary seaside guest house. Behind the net curtains, it is anything but. The guests, who typically stay for months, have been selected because they share a common mission, one so important that they can’t waste precious time cooking, doing laundry or holding down a normal job. They have come to Blackpool to save the world.

This is , people who take an evidence-based approach to helping others. It was purchased in 2018 with the proceeds of a cryptocurrency investment to allow data-driven philanthropists to dedicate themselves to improving and saving as many lives as possible. And yes, Blackpool was chosen for a reason. The 17-room hotel was a bargain at £130,000, freeing up the proprietor’s cash to subsidise the various projects being pursued.

When I first read about this place, I felt a twinge of guilt. Like many of us, I like to think I am a good person. I spend a few evenings a month volunteering with a charity that helps people with debt problems. I give money to my church. And I buy the occasional sandwich for homeless people. Learning about the hotel made me wonder if I could do good better.

Investigating how turned out to be a discombobulating experience. My principles were challenged in ways I never expected, and I ended up pondering some bizarre questions, not least how to think about the future of humanity. One thing is for sure: doing good is more complicated than you might think.

The origins of effective altruism can be traced to a thought experiment devised in the 1970s by philosopher Peter Singer. Imagine you walk past a shallow pond and see a child drowning. Should you wade in and save the infant, even though it means getting your clothes muddy? Most people will answer yes in a split second. But if we do it in this case, Singer argued, why wouldn’t we do the same for people dying of malaria or from unsafe drinking water or any other of the easily preventable poverty-related conditions that persist in parts of the developing world?

Singer’s point was clear. If you are born in the West, this throw of the dice makes you one of the richest 5 per cent of people in the world and gives you the chance to save thousands of lives with almost zero effort. All you have to do is give away a small proportion of your income. Even the money otherwise spent on a coffee would make a difference.

“Even the money spent on a cup of coffee could make a difference”

In 2009, Singer set up an organisation called to encourage people to donate to charities that have the greatest impact. His argument inspired several similar organisations. There was , which encourages people to give 10 per cent of their income to places where it will do the most good for the rest of their lives. Then came , which gives advice on how to get the maximum altruistic effect from the hours the average person will spend working in their career. The idea that we can wield evidence and reason to maximise the effect of our philanthropy caught on and today there is a global community of effective altruists, many of whom meet at international conferences to discuss strategy.

Extreme lengths

Effective altruists take many different paths. Some move to countries where they can live more cheaply and thus give more money away. Some choose an approach called earning to give, where they get high-paying jobs so they can give more to effective charities. Others conduct research to better understand which altruistic approaches work. the sentience of invertebrate animals. His idea is that encouraging people to think more about the suffering of other animals can change how we treat them.

A few people take effective altruism to extreme lengths. In her book on the subject, Strangers Drowning, journalist Larissa MacFarquhar wrote about a young man she calls Aaron Pitkin. He chose the cause of chicken welfare on the basis that it was a sure way to alleviate a huge amount of suffering. The trouble was that he pursued the cause so single-mindedly that it affected those close to him. He fell in love with a woman named “Jen”, who already worked for a charity, and they began a life together, committed to doing good as a couple. Gradually, however, Pitkin became more extreme, insisting they both adopt a frugal lifestyle and a strict vegan diet. Eventually, he refused to divert any time from the cause – even to do the dishes or spend time with Jen. When she asked him for a portion of his substantial inheritance to pay off the credit card debts that were tormenting her, he said no. After a couple of years, they separated, and Jen went to Paris to gorge on cheese.

I didn’t know what to make of Pitkin. On the face of it, he wasn’t a nice guy. But part of me couldn’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?

“Should you save the lives of five strangers or one person close to you?”

The thought led me to , 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 so would 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 such logic. 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 , 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 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 , 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 , where a select few charities monopolise donations.

GiveWell has recently said it is aiming to begin investigating philanthropy where the outcomes are less easy to measure.

Meanwhile, Will MacAskill, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, insists that effective altruism in general is broadening its scope. “Perhaps even most of the effort in the community now is on things where it’s much harder to measure impact,” he says.

GiveWell is certainly not the only game in town. In 2015, , an economist now at Northwestern University in Illinois, helped set up . Instead of insisting on the most rigorous research, it looks at the charity’s own data on the outcomes of its programmes and checks to see if its general approach is supported by independent studies elsewhere. This allows it to assess all manner of charities. “We have no criticism of GiveWell,” says Michael Weinstein, the president of ImpactMatters. “What they do, they do well. But we want to do 1000 impact estimates by the end of 2019, whereas they do more like two or three assessments a year.”

“Thinking in terms of maximum impact can lead to some strange conclusions”

Making more evidence available has to be a good thing. But I wonder if relying on these sorts of evaluations makes us too passive. More broadly, what if divorcing altruism from emotion, as many effective altruists recommend, is ultimately unhelpful?

Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford University in California, has argued that effective altruism is “misguided” because it fails to account for empathy’s role in motivating and maintaining philanthropy. He points to evidence that the positive feelings people get from donating to a cause they feel strongly about or volunteering with a charity, where there is engagement with the people you seek to help, can encourage more persistent giving.

MacAskill doesn’t buy this. “I think there’s only a superficial tension between empathy and effective altruism,” he says. “It’s really a failure of empathy if you can only empathise with people you’ve interacted with.”

What he and other effective altruists do accept, however, is that GiveWell’s recommended charities should serve merely as a baseline. Indeed, MacAskill points out that finding new and unusual approaches to maximising your impact, even where the chances of success are less than perfect, is increasingly important to the movement. The trouble is that thinking in such terms can lead to some peculiar conclusions.

Are all lives equal?

To see why things can get strange, remember the thought experiment about the child in the pond. It taught us that two lives separated in space ought to be treated equally. You can apply similar thinking to the time dimension. If you could save one life now or 10 lives in 30 years, should you not choose the latter?

Effective altruists increasingly seem to think so. In 2012, GiveWell partnered with , a foundation set up to give away some of the huge wealth of Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife Cari Tuna. This, in turn, led to the formation of the – and committed to offering long-term support to high-risk projects, provided the potential pay-offs are sufficiently large. In practice, that has come to include funding research that could prevent existential threats to humanity, such as pandemics, catastrophic climate change and – most controversially – an apocalypse caused by rogue artificial intelligence. Indeed, in 2017, Open Philanthropy agreed to give $30 million over three years to San Francisco-based OpenAI, whose stated mission is nothing short of “discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence”.

The reason for this is that many effective altruists have become convinced that they can do vastly more good in the future. They argue that, in terms of sheer numbers of lives, the stakes are enormous. The most important moral imperative, therefore, is to prevent anything that could kill vast numbers of people in the centuries to come.

“Many people are now focused on preventing a possible AI apocalypse”

I can see the logic, just as I could with Pitkin’s joyless dedication to chicken welfare. But I am not convinced. I know with near certainty that I can save lives by giving to charity, whereas there is a risk that organisations like OpenAI are fighting a threat that never materialises. Fiennes is among those who shares my suspicion about making AI a priority. “I think that’s absolutely a surreal conclusion,” she says.

Open Philanthropy still gives more to global health projects than to existential risk research, says spokesperson Michael Levine, although he expects the balance to shift as AI research gathers steam. Levine also acknowledges that trying to solve the problems of future generations isn’t obviously going to do more good than acting on existing problems. “We tend to agree that future generations could be more prosperous than us, and in a better position to solve their own problems than we are,” he says. “But that assumes that those futures come to exist at all. That’s why we’re interested in the prevention of an event that would cause a global extinction.”

I won’t be donating to avert an AI apocalypse any time soon. But having evaluated my own altruistic habits, I do feel compelled to revisit my decision to give only to charities backed by the most exacting evidence.

I have resolved to give half of my monthly donation fund to , which transfers cash straight to poor people in developing nations (see “Gaining currency”). That not only feels right, but is also well-supported by evidence, including multiple randomised trials. Indeed, GiveDirectly appears in GiveWell’s list of recommended charities. The other half will go to , a group that funds research into the interventions that do the most good. For all that I have sought to scrutinise effective altruism, I do think it is worth testing new approaches.

As for the hotel in Blackpool, I’m still intrigued, but the twinge of guilt has gone. Effective altruists are to be commended for making us think harder about how to do good, and I don’t buy the idea that they are cold and calculating. After all, they are compelled to act by an urge to help people. But now that I understand how they reach their more outlandish conclusions – not least the importance of saving the lives of people in the far future – I feel better about my own approach to doing good in the here and now.