The Problem with “Effective Altruism”

A little after six o’clock in the evening on April 15, 2019, the Monday before Easter, while Mass was being celebrated, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris caught fire. Incompetent security staff initially failed to locate the blaze (up a narrow flight of 300 steps in the main attic); for half an hour, the medieval church burned out of control before the fire department was called. Soon, shocked Parisians, drawn by the smoke, lined the banks of the River Seine; on social media, the rest of the world watched in disbelief as the mounting inferno consumed the intricate oak lattice of the roof and transformed the needle-like flèche—the church’s spire—into a refulgent pillar of flame.

Ash drifted on the wind; burning flakes sifted down over the stunned crowd. As the fire swelled, heating the windows of a café across the street, the 750-ton flèche cracked asunder and collapsed, plummeting like a burning spear into the hot heart of the conflagration. The ancient forest of roof beams crashed down onto, and through, the vaulted stone ceiling, leaving ragged holes open to the sky. When firefighters finally beat back the blaze, several hours later, the zero point from which all distances in France are measured was a ravaged hulk—contaminated with lead, its thousands of square meters of Gothic stonework coated in toxic dust. Those who had watched it burn, including the cathedral’s rector, Monsignor Patrick Chauvet, feared that it was irretrievably lost.

So it was a joyous—almost miraculous—occasion when, on December 7, 2024, after a five-year, $760 million restoration (requiring the labor of 2,000 workers, many of them skilled artisans, and accomplished in what, for sclerotic Europe, counts as lightning speed), with foreign heads of state in attendance, the cathedral reopened its doors.

The details of its reconstruction astonish. Acres of oak trees were felled to duplicate the roof lattice, the modern carpenters hewing the beams with hand axes, as did their medieval forebears. The cathedral’s sonorous organ, the largest in France, was painstakingly taken apart, its 8,000 pipes and 115 stops individually decontaminated and cleaned—as was the entire church—before being retuned and reassembled. New stonework closed wounds in the torn-open vault; special gels lifted centuries of grime off the creamy limestone walls. No brief summary of the Herculean labors of stonemasons, sculptors, gilders, glassmakers, and other specialists involved in the salvage effort can hope to be exhaustive; but a pervasive sense of Notre-Dame as “a living, wounded entity” drove the restoration. There were moments of good fortune. Fragments of what is thought to be Christ’s crown of thorns, and of the mortal remains of Saint Denis and Saint Geneviève, were recovered intact from inside the golden rooster that had once surmounted the spire and was found damaged in the rubble the day after the fire. All the relics have since been placed inside a new golden cock, along with a sealed document listing the names of everyone who took part in the restoration, and the gleaming bird hoisted into place atop the reconstructed spire—the preeminent emblem of the church’s phoenix-like rebirth.

But not every observer was suitably dazzled by the restored grandeur of this jewel of European culture. Ever do the small-souled see in pinched perspective; and as if to prove the point, Dylan Matthews of Vox seized the chance to pour scorn on the donors—some 340,000 people across 150 countries—who had contributed the necessary funds, and then some, to repair the UNESCO World Heritage site, which just so happens to be an unmissable part of the Paris skyline. Matthews is an advocate of a movement known as effective altruism, which has gained influential adherents in Silicon Valley, spawned philanthropic organizations and research centers, and received extensive coverage in the elite press, including a 2022 New Yorker profile of philosopher William MacAskill, one of EA’s gurus. Effective altruism asserts that charitable dollars are fungible and can be spent as easily on cause X as on cause Y, so we should strive to allocate every available dollar only to the worthiest causes, the most effective charities, the ones doing—by some utilitarian calculus—the most good, even if that means abandoning the rest. To Matthews, this means buying bed nets to protect Africans from malaria-carrying mosquitoes—his preferred charitable cause—rather than renovating a cathedral. To do otherwise, he argues, is tantamount to willing the deaths of people whose lives might have been spared.

Matthews really believes it. The guiding principle behind restoring Notre-Dame, he says, was: “We should let children die to rebuild a cathedral.” Matthews figures that, at $16,000 per life saved in the Global South by antimalaria charities, the funds spent on the cathedral could have saved 47,500 people from a deadly disease. This leads him to a gross absurdity: accusing the donors who financed the refurbished church of having blood on their hands.

[That figure] is about five times the population of the town I grew up in, Hanover, New Hampshire . . . It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, “I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.” And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die.

Presumably, few of us would relish being the bearer of such grim numerical news. But Matthews’s reductionist conclusion proceeds from defective premises—namely, that causes are interchangeable; that direct and indirect consequences are morally indistinguishable; that our ethical obligations to others admit of no practical limits, financially, geographically, or otherwise; and that the world of moral and economic action is zero-sum. Like the trendy “degrowth” movement—which calls on developed nations to abandon technologies that drive material progress in the name of saving the climate—effective altruism functions as philosophical cover for a familiar practice: buying indulgences to assuage the guilt of being born into (more or less) fortunate circumstances in a (more or less) functional First World society.

Matthews, according to his X bio, tithes 10 percent of his income to various “effective” charities, but other EA champions are more extreme: they advocate working hard to maximize your income, then giving away as much of it as possible to distant others, even if it means living a spartan existence yourself. Note how neatly this reverses the logic of colonialism: instead of native serfs in the Global South breaking their backs for the sake of London or Rome, now Westerners must drudge their whole lives—not for the sake of the least among us, far less for themselves, but for the least of humanity in the farthest-flung, most impoverished, least self-sustaining corners of the globe.

Among the loudest and proudest devotees of this self-righteous ideology in the past decade was Sam Bankman-Fried. Now serving time in federal prison, the onetime CEO amassed a net worth of billions running his fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. Ostensibly earmarked for good works—as he regularly proclaimed—his fortune seems to have been used instead to enrich his family and buy influence in Washington, while financially ruining countless FTX users and very nearly destroying an entire asset class and nascent industry in the process.

Matthews, however, reserves his bile for the record-company billionaire David Geffen, who, in 2015, gave Lincoln Center $100 million to fund a major renovation of the concert hall where the New York Philharmonic performs. Formerly named Avery Fisher Hall, the venue was renamed in Geffen’s honor, though not before Lincoln Center had paid the Fisher family $15 million to give up its own naming rights. That $15 million came from a line of credit, as the New York Times reported several months before Geffen’s gift was announced, “that will ultimately be covered by the gift of the new donor.” What this means is that Geffen, in effect, donated $85 million for the renovation and paid a further $15 million to get his name on the building, and not, as Matthews tendentiously claims, that “the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.”

Matthews should have known this, since he links to the Times article in his piece. No matter. The notion of Geffen putting his money “not toward saving lives but toward improving the acoustics of the New York Phil,” writes Matthews, “fills me with visceral disgust.” And what are mere facts beside the need to vent such spleen?

Consider a different vision. The night before reading Matthews’s post, as it happens, I had attended in David Geffen Hall a New York Philharmonic performance of Handel’s Messiah. In that acoustical heaven-haven, the orchestra and singers—veteran baritone Klaus Mertens, tenor Kieran White, countertenor Maarten Engeltjes, and soprano Maya Kherani, resplendent in a sparkling gown of Christmas green—provided countless stirring moments as they took up the oratorio’s timeless theme of Jesus’s birth and rebirth. In accord with tradition, the audience rose as one to stand for the “Hallelujah” chorus; and that triumphal mood persisted, as always, in Part III, with Kherani’s rendition of the aria “I know that my Redeemer liveth” and the magnificent duet of tenor and countertenor, “O death, where is thy sting?”

Having experienced this sublimity, I can’t seriously credit the claim—advanced by Matthews and his fellow travelers—that the charity on which the symphony and its concert hall depend is a waste, much less a moral abomination. You do not have to be the sort of squish who adores Dead Poets Society to believe that art is one of the things that make life worth living. Bare existence is not enough.

Besides, once you start down that road, there is no end to it. How many dead Africans does your iPhone equal? Your car? Do you deserve to eat three meals a day while some people go hungry? Why should you enjoy two kidneys when other people need only one? Immiserating oneself for the sake of alleviating others’ misery is, if not precisely unsustainable, at least unwise—even philosophically incoherent. It is, at bottom, the logic not of care but of Communism.

Matthews wants us to believe that effective altruism—though to give it this name concedes more than the movement deserves, as if, indulging in a form of culinary special pleading, we dubbed some sad confection Delicious Cake—simply “asks us to use reason and evidence to find the charitable causes that can do the most good per dollar.” In fact, the movement disregards the chief reason that the charitable impulse exists: to forge bonds of mutual dependence between loved ones and neighbors, to knit together otherwise balkanized or chimeric communities. Avery Fisher’s goal in giving money to Lincoln Center, according to his son Charles, was “to give back to music lovers what they had given him.” With this in mind, Lincoln Center was indeed the right choice to do “the most good per dollar” with Fisher’s money.

For a judicious distinction between charity arising from natural passions and the extortionate alms that EA insists upon, we can turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Sage of Concord crushed the EA philosophy before it was born:

Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

All people may be equal, but equal does not mean interchangeable; and while dollars clearly are fungible, human beings are not. Nor are houses of worship, much less historic monuments. “All true charity,” says theologian David Bentley Hart, “begins in attachment to what is most intimate and familiar.” Even as we mature and venture out in our affections, expanding the locus of our concern to embrace larger populations, we remain—we should remain—tethered to our native and elective affinities.

Roman Catholics call this ordering of love and obligation ordo amoris. Vice President J. D. Vance, who is Catholic, drew on this tradition in a January 2025 Fox News interview, and later, in an X post, he referred to it by name. He described concentric circles of love and attachment—expanding outward from the family unit—such that only after we have satisfied our obligations to the near and dear should we then “focus [on] and prioritize the rest of the world.” His political opponents (and even some natural allies) came out of the woodwork to object. Yale professor Rory Stewart, a former British parliamentarian in the Conservative Party, decried Vance’s words as a “bizarre take . . . less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians.” Vance retorted: “Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”

The abstract concept of a hierarchy of obligations has taken on concrete force with the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, the federal government agency in charge of international humanitarian aid and development assistance. The move is driven by a sense that it is unfair, even immoral, to expect American taxpayers indefinitely to shoulder the burdens of the rest of the world—above and beyond the dubious nature of some of the initiatives that USAID has funded.

Just so, the EA notion that Westerners should act like deracinated economic units, slaving away their whole lives so as to hand over as much money as possible to people abroad they will never meet, and with whom they will never share bonds of reciprocity, is fundamentally antihuman. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen commented, “The individual has the intrinsic moral right to live his life in a special and fulfilling way without subordinating to the universal collective. Purveyors of infinite abstract guilt must not steal that from you.” In a meme that Andreessen shared on X, a beanie-wearing burnout with a cigarette between his lips, his face careworn and eyes tired, asks a blond, bearded Chad, “In a world with so much suffering, don’t you think it’s a little embarrassing to let yourself be happy and enjoy your life?” To which the bearded Chad replies bluntly: “No.” Or as the poet Jack Gilbert put it: “To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

What I hope comes through in these quotations is this: the life of the mind and of the spirit has a legitimate claim on us. That is why, during World War II, the Polish writer and army officer Józef Czapski lectured—from memory!—to his fellow Soviet prisoners of war on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; that is why the director of the French Musées Nationaux, Jacques Jaujard, ordered workmen secretly to spirit away the treasures of the Louvre in 200 trucks before the Nazi army of occupation arrived; that is why Balthus, a Parisian by birth, continued to paint serene and stirring landscapes amid Hitler’s territorial expansion.

One could go on indefinitely listing triumphs of noetic and aesthetic value over utilitarian nostrums—and perhaps one should. For if a cathedral or a symphony hall is deemed unimportant, what about a library? A museum? A small literary magazine or a publisher of neglected poetry? Faulkner once remarked that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was worth any number of old ladies—he, at least, had the convictions of his culture. So, too, did Ariel Weil, mayor of Paris’s Fourth Arrondissement, home to Notre-Dame. Reflecting on the firefighters’ efforts to save the cathedral, he told the New York Times, “There was a feeling that there was something bigger than life at stake.”

As indeed there was.

How much do we value our civilization, and of what does that civilization consist? The question is newly urgent. The burning of Notre-Dame reminds us how easily even our seemingly sturdiest monuments might be ruined; it reminds us that nothing is gotten for nothing, that none of the astoundingly complex (and, in this case, astonishingly beautiful) constructions of advanced society—whether medieval churches or networks of public libraries or interstate highway systems—is a natural feature of our world, as are rivers and mountains. None is self-sustaining. They all require ongoing investment, upkeep, and buy-in from those who benefit.

Before the fire, in fact, the cathedral was in bad shape—in need of an estimated $112 million (as of 2017) to repair the wear and tear of centuries. The blaze, in a sense, was a boon. Inasmuch as a devastating fire is far more dramatic than the slow ravages of pollution and decay, it shocked open hundreds of thousands of wallets worldwide for the purpose of saving Notre-Dame, among them the billfolds of luxury-goods billionaires Bernard Arnault and François-Henri Pinault, who pledged for the cathedral’s reconstruction 200 million and 100 million euros, respectively. These wallets would surely have stayed shut, absent such an emergency.

But we ignore decay at our peril. We cannot simply leave our communities on autopilot and expect them not to fall apart, even as the customs, values, and processes by which they are upheld lapse into desuetude. The creation of the world, as Proust says, did not occur at the beginning of time; it occurs every day.

Like Monsignor Chauvet, I have found in Notre-Dame’s ruin and renewal cause to reflect on our fragility: “The fragility of man, in respect to God,” as the rector told the Times. “We are nothing but—creatures.” That creaturely frailty enters to some extent into all our works. And reflecting on the fragility of man-made complex systems reminded me of a web comic that has made the rounds on social media. First panel: “Climate change will kill us all,” a guy in a green T-shirt declares, “let’s dismantle our socio-economic system to prevent it!” Second panel: a man in a blue turtleneck proffers a manila folder. “How about nuclear power?” Third and fourth panels: Green Shirt angrily sets fire to the folder. “I don’t want nuclear power! I want to dismantle our socio-economic system!”

The analogy, I trust, is clear. When someone advances the notion that Notre-Dame should have been left in ruins because Africans need lifesaving bed nets, we should ask whether it might not have less to do with wanting to save African lives than with wanting to leave Notre-Dame in ruins. My working theory is that a not-inconsiderable fraction of people feel a natural affinity for such ideas, just as certain personality types recur over time. To read about Trotsky railing against tipping culture in a Bronx restaurant staffed by Russian émigrés (who reportedly spilled hot soup on the revolutionary, out of spite) is to perceive a continuity of ideological attitudes persisting, little changed, for more than 100 years, down to the warmed-over Vox pieces of the present day. But if the clutch of preferences and persuasions now trendily repackaged as effective altruism is ineradicable in some subset of the population, that does not mean that the rest of us should feel compelled to go for a ride on its guilt trips or submit to its sermons.

To put such ideas truly into the shade would require efforts that we may not be prepared to undertake and that are certainly beyond the scope of this essay; I can refer to them only in the most general terms. First, a renewed faith in the American project and in Western civilization writ large, requiring, at minimum, an overhaul of the U.S. education system, public and private, at every level from elementary school through university; an end to suicidal empathy preached as progress, which has distorted public policy in America and Europe and has silenced anyone who speaks of obvious trade-offs or dares to mention hard truths; in the realm of moral action, a re-prioritizing of the local over the distant (thereby diverting the rivers of social clout away from the floodplain swamp of useless virtue signaling); and—well, let’s stop there for now. The EA ethic, like the gospel of degrowth, suffice it to say, must itself be outgrown by a people wiser, more robust, and maturer than ourselves.

Top Photo: An illuminated Notre-Dame Cathedral after its $760 million restoration (Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times/Redux)