This essay, on the problems with the effective altruism movement, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 8 October 2023, under the headline “Getting rich in order to give to the poor? The jury’s out, but it seems morally shaky”.

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Few people think of finance as an ethical career choice”, William MacAskill observes. But they should. “By making as much money as we can and donating to the best causes,” he argues, “we can each save hundreds of lives.”

MacAskill is an Oxford philosopher and one of the founders of “effective altruism”, or EA, a movement that seeks to persuade people both to donate a large share of their income to charity – MacAskill says he lives on £26,000 a year, giving away the rest of his professorial income – and to ensure that donations are used in the most effective way.

Since the more that people earn, the more they can give away, MacAskill encourages students to become not relatively poorly paid aid workers or doctors, but bankers or traders who might earn millions. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, the insistence that the best way to do good is by getting fabulously rich has received a grateful hearing (though the part about giving most of it away tends often to be neglected). EA has become a movement with powerful backers.

One student whose head was turned by a now-mythical conversation with MacAskill was an American mathematics graduate, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). He became a financier, establishing cryptocurrency companies that made billions from which he donated millions to EA projects, turning him into the poster boy of the movement. Until, that is, he was arrested for fraud. Last week he went on trial in New York.

“I am outraged”, MacAskill tweeted after SBF’s arrest, adding that he didn’t know “which emotion is stronger: my utter rage at Sam … or my sadness and self-hatred for falling for this deception.” MacAskill and other leading EA figures are no doubt genuinely shocked by Bankman-Fried’s fall (though as early as 2018, they had reportedly been warned about his “unethical” actions, and ignored the warnings). Nevertheless, Bankman-Fried’s alleged actions cannot be fully divorced from the character of their movement or its philosophical underpinnings.

The basic premises of EA can seem almost incontestably bland. Do the most good you can. Ensure charitable donations are effectively spent. Don’t let personal sentiment distort philanthropic aims. Yet, as a social and political movement, EA can point in strange directions.

Most supporters of EA are “consequentialists”, believing that the rightness or wrongness of an action is defined solely by its consequences, and moral worth can be scientifically or mathematically quantified. “Effective altruists”, observes the philosopher Peter Singer, whose ideas lie at the heart of EA, “are sensitive to numbers and to cost per life saved or year of suffering prevented.”

Few people would dispute that the consequences of an act must play a major role in helping decide its moral worth. The trouble is, being merely “sensitive to numbers”, divorced from social context, can lead to perverse ends. Consider the argument that a well-paid job is morally good if it allows for greater donation to charity. MacAskill has argued that “speculating on wheat, thereby increasing price volatility and disrupting the livelihoods of the global poor” may be “morally controversial” but could also be “ethically preferable” to a less well-paid career.

There is something abhorrent in applauding actions that could make the poor poorer and more vulnerable to famine just to have more funds to help the poor survive poverty and famine. It’s an argument that puts the needs of the donor, and his or her self-validation, ahead of the needs of those whom the donor is supposedly helping.

MacAskill draws the line at what he calls “reprehensible careers”, such as “working as a hitman, a concentration camp guard, a drug dealer or a child trafficker”. It is difficult to know, though, why one should not become a hitman or a camp guard if the numbers add up. Indeed, Singer has argued that, from a strictly consequentialist perspective, it is plausible that “at least some of the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly” because they might have been replaced “by someone else … who would have been even more brutal.”

Not only does this logic defy our moral intuitions, it can also be applied less distastefully to justify almost any action, including Bankman-Fried’s. He might have scammed investors but at least he gave more money to charity than another scammer might have done. Most EA supporters, I imagine, would reject such arguments, but in so doing they reveal that there is more to morality than numbers adding up, and that concepts such as dignity or intrinsic worth may be as important as consequences.

Effective altruists tend also to target the symptoms rather than the causes of social problems, as it is easier to do so, and “easier” becomes translated as “more effective”. In his book The Life You Can Save, Singer discusses whether it would be better to campaign against the social and economic causes of poverty or to donate to charity.

Given that the powerful forces facing down such campaigns would mean that “political change [is] unlikely”, Singer concludes, “our efforts are better spent elsewhere”. In other words, the social and economic forces that create poverty are impossible to dislodge, so we should be more pragmatic in what we do.

Exposed here is a tension felt in all charitable work, whether food banks in London or the provision of vaccines in Africa. Food banks address a pressing need, but not the underlying reasons for that need – poverty wages and abysmally low benefits. Many of us recognise the necessity both of providing immediate help for people failed by the system and of campaigning to transform that system, thereby removing the necessity for food banks.

Ignoring that tension by discounting the underlying causes and seeking simply the most effective way of alleviating the symptoms is to ensure that the symptoms never disappear. “Effective altruism”, the philosopher Amia Srinivasan has observed, “doesn’t try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it”.

Supporters of EA respond that “systemic change” is compatible with the aims of effective altruism. In practice, though, the movement combines political pessimism with the ethos of an individualised consumer society, dismissing collective action for social change in favour of individual activity. Inevitably, it gives inordinate power to those with the biggest pockets, turning the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried into heroes. The consequence of such hero-worship is now playing out in a courtroom in New York.