Effective Altruists And The Spreadsheet Gospel

Over the past decade, an emergent secular philosophy has taken root in Silicon Valley. It now drives many conversations around politics and technology, particularly as its ideas shape how our society approaches artificial intelligence. Known as “effective altruism,” this worldview is having a moment. The Economist recently called the philosophy “this century’s biggest idea” and labeled the movement as “admirable, but dangerous.”

Even as this philosophy is moving markets and shaping global debates, many Christians are unfamiliar with it. As a Christian and tech-policy analyst based in Washington, DC, where many of these conversations are taking place, I want to explain what effective altruism is, examine what it promises and where it fails to deliver, and show why this budding movement is incongruent with and a poor substitute for the gospel.

What Is Effective Altruism?

Effective altruism emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s from the convergence of several intellectual movements, particularly utilitarian philosophy and evidence-based philanthropy. Australian academic Peter Singer provided an important foundation with his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” where he argues that people have a moral obligation to prevent suffering when they can do so at relatively little cost to themselves. At its core, effective altruism is consequentialist, judging the rightness of an action chiefly by its outcomes.

The tenets of effective altruism are straightforward: People should use reason, logic, and personal resources to maximize the good they do in society. The Centre for Effective Altruism explains, “We’re committed to prioritizing actions that benefit more lives over actions that benefit a few—that saving a billion lives is more important than saving ten.”

The tenets of effective altruism are straightforward: People should use reason, logic, and personal resources to maximize the good they do in society.

The movement took shape with the founding of several philanthropic organizations, such as GiveWell and 80,000 Hours. These groups emphasize measuring charitable impact, directing money toward the most effective actions, and choosing “high-impact” careers based on their potential to do good. Their approach to charitable giving has produced endeavors to improve global health, animal welfare, and economic disparities, among other areas.

Over the past decade, effective altruism has expanded its scope, focusing on posterity and “longtermism,” the belief that “positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” The Economist notes a belief this leads to: “Those not born yet should be weighed in the balance—and there could be trillions of them. Many EAs are ‘longtermists’ who feel bound to forestall risks in the distant future, even if that starves today’s good causes, such as helping the desperately poor.”

This belief manifests itself in a focus on concerns such as existential risk (e.g., climate change or the next pandemic), nuclear proliferation, and artificial intelligence. For many in Silicon Valley, advanced AI is the defining problem of our day. The concern about a potential AI apocalypse explains why the movement has invested heavily in AI research, AI companies, and AI advocacy and safety.

It’s not difficult to see why this philosophy has a natural audience among AI researchers and Silicon Valley tech luminaries. Effective altruism enables technologists to approach ethics in a way that can feel familiar: a series of probabilities, tradeoffs, and expected results—measuring an individual’s moral standing as mathematic calculations, similar to the process of building a software program where different inputs result in varied outputs.

For ambitious individuals accustomed to solving complicated projects through ingenuity and critical analysis, this movement delivers reassuring community in an industry that often feels isolating. Adherents have a sense of higher purpose and calling as they’re suddenly confronted with extraordinary individual wealth and wrestle with the consequences of their technological discoveries.

It’s hard to describe effective altruism without addressing its more eccentric views, some of which divide the movement itself. For example, the focus on animal welfare has led many in the movement to believe that any and all sentient beings share the same moral value, including but not limited to shrimp. Yes, since a dollar can go a long way to protect the well-being of a single crustacean, this cause could be the most efficient use of charitable giving.

Notably, the effective altruist community has also drawn scrutiny for its sexual culture. A 2023 Time investigation highlighted how the movement’s overwhelmingly male membership, heavy overlap between work and home life, and its subculture of polyamory (which some have promoted as more rational than monogamy) has created a “culture of sexual harassment and abuse.” These dynamics have caused many—including Christians—to be concerned about the group’s outsize influence on culture.

What Effective Altruism Promises (and Fails to Deliver)

Effective altruism’s turn toward longtermism promises that the right people, armed with the right understanding of the stakes, can steer humanity safely through an uncertain future. Many in this community believe their adherence to consequentialism and longtermism gives them a special moral qualification to shape public policy.

In their own eyes, effective altruists are the men and women of the hour. This conviction has moved from theory into practice. Political engagement by adherents has increased both on the public stage and backstage through building and funding civil society institutions to influence policymakers to embrace their ideology. One of the movement’s most prominent figures (though he has denied belonging to it), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has been leaning on this philosophy to guide his leadership of his company and shape his approach to the future of AI.

Yet for all its ambition, the movement struggles to deliver on what it promises. Effective altruism’s confidence in its own reasoning to navigate the future is a hubristic claim to possess unprecedented human knowledge. Any ethic that judges right and wrong by outcomes assumes we can reliably know what our actions will produce. It treats the future as a closed system of causes and effects that the right person or algorithm can calculate.

But human knowledge is finite. We can’t trace the full effects of a single choice, much less forecast the welfare of billions of potential lives. At best, an outcome-based ethic can render its moral verdict only in hindsight.

Most fundamentally, effective altruism fails us because it’s an ethic without a moral foundation. It has a laudable premise: Too many people around the globe are suffering, and those with means should help. Adherents can accurately quantify certain societal woes and calculate which actions could most efficiently produce the greatest benefit. But the philosophy largely assumes the moral obligations on which those calculations depend.

In Singer’s foundational essay, he uses an illustration of a man wearing expensive sneakers who walks past a drowning child. He does a moral calculation that it’s better to save the child even if it ruins his shoes. The illustration works only because we already know the child matters and that walking past would be monstrous. But a strictly consequentialist framework can’t tell us why. If people are ultimately containers of welfare to be added up, then no one has worth in himself. Each matters only as a quantity in a calculation. And who decides which quantities count?

Without an external source of moral truth, the answer is ultimately the individual. Each effective altruist must reason his way to his own conclusion about what “the most good” is, and no authority outside himself can tell him he’s wrong. Taken to its logical end, this leaves room for almost anything, including scenarios that say the earth would be better off without humans.

When pressed to the deepest levels, effective altruists are unable to identify a coherent source for a person’s moral value or explain why we’re called to love our neighbor in the first place. Suffering is simply a math equation to be solved, with no account of original sin or why the world is broken. Effective altruism commands us to love our neighbor yet dissolves that neighbor into a statistic. It asks for the fruit of the image of God while denying the root.

Why Christianity Tells a Better Story

Effective altruism recognizes a few truths about us: Our lives matter morally, our choices have consequences, and we should care about people beyond ourselves. At first glance, its call to do the most good possible can even sound like something Jesus might say. But Christianity places those truths inside a much larger story, one where goodness is defined not by our calculations but by God himself.

The world isn’t ultimately a collection of inefficiencies waiting to be optimized. Scripture teaches we’re God’s creation. We as humans are his image-bearers, not units of welfare whose value must be calculated. Every human life has worth and dignity rooted in the unchangeable character of God, not shifting cultural norms or measures of sentience.

Animals such as shrimp are part of God’s good creation and worthy of care, but they don’t bear his image. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus affirms that God cares for the birds of the air while still distinguishing them from the humans made in his image (Matt. 6:26).

We as humans are his image-bearers, not units of welfare whose value must be calculated.

By the standards of effective altruism, Jesus’s ministry could be judged as highly ineffective. He spends three years with 12 followers in an obscure corner of the Roman empire. He teaches that God seeks out the one at the expense of the 99 (Luke 15:4). He rebukes Judas when the disciple questions why an expensive perfume was used on Jesus instead of sold and given to the poor (John 12:6–7). And Jesus is executed at the hands of religious leaders who, ironically, think his death will spare the whole nation (11:50).

Jesus subverts and fulfills the effective altruist’s hopes. Jesus’s death was the sacrifice of the one for the many, but contrary to the calculating schemes of Jesus’s enemies, it unfolded according to the plan of God (Mark 10:45; Acts 2:23). His death really did accomplish the most good for the most people. And Jesus, being God incarnate, is the ultimate longtermist whose plan began before the foundation of the world and stretches into eternity.

When it came to our salvation, Jesus counted the cost. And the cross and empty tomb tell us we were worth it.

Invitation to Hope

From a human standpoint, the future is by definition full of uncertainty. Every individual and civilization has wrestled with this truth since the beginning. Yet Christ commands us not to worry about things we cannot control but to seek “first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to [us]” (Matt. 6:32–34).

God calls us to follow him even when we can’t foresee the results, and even when our own calculations point in a different direction. Instead of living in fear or relying on a few self-appointed oracles to divine the future, we as Christians are rooted in a deeper story of redemption and faith.

While many effective altruists fear the AI era could bring about humanity’s extinction, Christians can see our cultural moment as invitation to hope. Because we know that God is in control, we’re freed to approach the challenges of AI with confident trust in our sovereign God.

As Christian academic and current White House senior adviser Jonathan Askonas explains, “Hope is a theological virtue, one that finds its proper object in God. Especially as technological power increases, the belief that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ can come only from a conviction that God, and not man, is the Author of history” (emphasis original).

Effective altruism commands us to love our neighbor yet dissolves that neighbor into a statistic.

What if we viewed the rise of AI not through the lens of anxiety but through the lens of stewardship?

Christians can appreciate the value of maximizing the efficiency of tithes and giving without consequentialism telling them to do so. Christians and churches have consistently looked inside and outside our traditions to develop better methods of giving and evaluate the effectiveness of different ministries to support. Yes, effective altruists have set up various successful charities, but so have many churches and other Christian ministries—for a couple thousand years so far.

No matter how much good we think we can accomplish through spreadsheets and formulas, all our efforts pale in comparison to our Savior whose ultimate sacrifice did the most good in the world. He gave us the ethic to minister to others—now and until God makes all things new.

We’re not the first generation to face technological disruption. The printing press sparked the Reformation. The microphone transformed preaching. The internet transformed evangelism. In every era, the church has had to ask, How do we use this tool to proclaim the gospel and form disciples in a rapidly changing world?

The AI age is no different. Christians must speak up and join the debate over how AI is built and governed, demonstrating how God’s truth can help us navigate a time of change and uncertainty.