The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Effective Altruism

The philosopher Peter Singer reflects on whether his brainchild will survive the downfall of its former poster boy, Sam Bankman-Fried. Spoiler alert: He's largely optimistic.

At the beginning of his famous 2013 TED Talk, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer shows a video of a two-year-old girl who, lying on the street after being struck by a lorry, is passed by several people before someone finally takes her to the hospital. “How many of you would have helped this girl?” Singer asks. As expected, virtually everyone in the audience raises their hand.

Then, another image: a report from UNICEF stating that, in 2011, 6.9 million children died of preventable, poverty-related diseases, many of whom could have been saved with a small monetary donation. “Does it really matter that we’re not walking past them in the street?” Singer doesn’t think so. At least, not morally. If you would help someone in person, there’s no good reason you wouldn’t also help them from afar — especially if all that’s required is clicking a button.

This idea, first formulated in Singer’s 1971 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and expanded in his 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do eventually gave rise to a movement known as effective altruism (EA). What began as a plea to increase charitable donations in affluent countries soon grew into a concentrated effort to measure and compare the importance and efficacy of non-profit organizations. EA argues that people shouldn’t simply strive to do good but to do as much good as possible, as efficiently as possible.

There is no single correct way to practice EA. While some join or found non-profits of their own, others enter the private sector in the hopes of earning as much money as they can so that, when they retire, they can give (almost) all of it away. For a while, the most successful and well-known of these selfless capitalists was Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. While his rise greatly expanded the EA movement, his May 2024 conviction for orchestrating one of the biggest financial frauds in history has called the future of the movement into question.

In the following interview, Singer reflects on whether his brainchild will survive the downfall of its former poster boy. Spoiler alert: He’s largely optimistic.

The rise of effective altruism

“I certainly would not have expected the EA movement to become as big as it did when I wrote ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ back in the seventies,” Singer tells Big Think.

The internet helped the movement take off in the early 2000s, enabling people with unusual ideas to more easily connect. “The internet also made it easier to conduct the kind of research necessary to give as effectively as possible,” Singer adds.

Over the years, Singer’s ideas have taken on a life of their own, with other academics building on the groundwork offered in “Fame, Affluence, and Morality.”

“I don’t think you could read my 1971 article and see it as specifically advocating effective altruism,” Singer explains. “It’s advocating altruism, to be sure, and saying we can and should help people, but I didn’t do any research to show that we can find out how effective a particular non-profit is, nor argue that we should focus on those that give us the biggest bang.”

These contributions came from people like Toby Ord — a fellow Australian philosopher, a co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity — and William McAskill, a Scottish philosopher and author of Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, among others.

Thanks to the internet and social media, EA has spread to all parts of the globe, from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to Europe, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In May, Singer traveled to Paris to attend a meeting organized by Effective Altruism France, attended by nearly 1,000 people.

“It’s a universal idea, and easy to grasp,” he says of the movement’s cross-cultural following. “We are wealthy people who think nothing of spending more on a latte than people in the developing world earn in a day.”

“Maybe we can help them by reducing our expenditure on things we do not really need and be rewarded with a sense of purpose, by helping those who through no fault of their own are less fortunate than us.”

EA after FTX

How does Singer feel now that nearly every news article on Bankman-Fried’s trial mentions his connection to EA and, by extension, himself?

“Not frustration,” he says, “but certainly disappointment that what began very promisingly collapsed the way that it did.”

“I believe Sam Bankman-Fried was entirely genuine in wanting to earn a lot of money and then give away nearly everything he earned; he became the richest person in the world under

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