To begin, I want to make it clear that I’m an atheist, and I’m probably going to say some things in a weird and offputting way. But I’m writing this essay anyway because I think it’s important.
In Luke 16:19-31, there’s the parable of the rich man and Lazarus:
“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
25 “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
We, all of us in the developed world, are the rich man, and the developing world are the Lazaruses at our doorstep. North America and Europe have sixty percent of the world’s wealth and about twenty percent of its population; Africa has fifteen percent of its population and four percent of its wealth. How many of us have bothered to give them the crumbs from our table? Or do we just let the dogs lick their sores?
But we’re good people. We don’t ignore the developing world because we don’t care about them. It’s just hard. Lazarus was an actual beggar and if you fed him he would be fed, sort of by definition. Donating to charities in Africa is much more difficult. How do you know whether the money you donate is going to do any good? How do you know it’s not going to get stolen or used to prop up a dictatorial government? What if you give them something and all it does is take away jobs from local Africans? It’s a lot easier to give to your local church or soup kitchen: it might not do as much good, but at least you know it’ll do something.
But what if you knew?
GiveWell is an organization that does extensive study of which charities actually help people. You might be used to programs like Charity Navigator, which let you figure out whether a charity is doing good things with your money or just buying their boss a big car. GiveWell takes it a step further. If you could donate the same amount of money and save ten lives instead of one life, wouldn’t you want to do that? That’s nine more people! I’ve used GiveWell to guide my donation decisions for years, and I’ve always been impressed by their conscientiousness, intelligence, and clarity; I encourage you to check out their reports on their top charities.
One thing I want to make clear: a lot of Christians are understandably reluctant to give to secular charities, because they’re afraid that it will go to causes that are against their values, like abortions or the distribution of condoms. That’s the advantage of GiveWell’s transparency: you can see exactly where your money’s going and know that you’re not buying anything you’d disapprove of. Right now, GiveWell’s top charities are the Against Malaria Foundation (which buys malaria nets), the Schistosomiasis Control Institute and Deworm the World (which cure tropical diseases), and Give Directly (which gives money to poor Kenyan families), none of which a good Christian ought to have any problems with.
In Matthew 25:31-46, there is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats:
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
And notice what it doesn’t say.
It doesn’t say “the least of these, who go to my church.” It doesn’t say “the least of these, who live in my country.” It doesn’t say “the least of these, whom I happened to encounter in my day-to-day life.” It says “the least of these.”
It says that every one of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world– every one of the billion people in the world living on less than a dollar a day, the eight hundred million people who go hungry, the five percent of babies who die before their first birthday– is Jesus Christ. When you give money to the Against Malaria Foundation, Jesus sleeps under the malaria net; when you give to Deworm the World, Jesus can play for the first time in years, no longer languishing from worms; when you give to Give Directly, Jesus has food to eat tonight, Jesus has a tin roof to keep out the storms, Jesus has school fees to send his daughter to get an education.
On the other hand, can you imagine, on Judgment Day, looking into the face of your Savior, who died on the cross to save you from sin, and saying “well, I really needed that new flatscreen TV”?
Notice, also, that the Scripture doesn’t talk about saving souls. The Great Commission matters, but so do the everyday practical details of life– having food in your belly, medicine for your illness, clothes on your back. Bringing people the Good News is important, but so is charity and caring for the poor. Throughout the Bible, God expresses his love for the widow and orphan, the poor and hungry.
I would like to encourage you to take the Giving What We Can Pledge. Based on historical precedent– including the Christian tradition of tithing– the GWWC pledge requires you to give ten percent of your income to effective charities like the Against Malaria Foundation, the Schistosomiasis Control Institute, and Give Directly. I think it’s, well, what Jesus would do.
Thing of Things 
I’ll give my perspective as a Catholic: this kind of effective altruism pitch, with GiveWell and malaria nets, is a good one, I think. It’s when people start getting into heavy utilitarianism and/or seriously considering donating to SIAI oops i mean MIRI that it starts getting offputting. That said, Catholics at least tend to give a lot to the Church both to support the Church itself and to support its charitable programs. Also, there’s a lot to be said for the benefits to the soul of physically helping the poor yourself. In general, though, EA is pretty laudable, especially when it saves you from grievous errors like giving one red cent to Komen or something.
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What do you mean by “heavy utilitarianism”? For example, when Ozy says:
How heavy is that? And I guess more generally: where do you and utilitarianism part ways?
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There’s none of what I’m referring to in this post; it’s more things like “I will oppose abortion because the 10% chance that infants are morally relevant, when multiplied out, outweighs the suffering caused by preventing it” that kinda make my head spin. I have a lot of ideas about what morality really is, some that may contradict each other, but none of them are about maximizing something that I don’t even think is quantifiable and probably wouldn’t care about maximizing if it was, so I don’t think I was ever on the same way as utilitarians to be able to part with them.
So, you might ask, why can I praise EA? Well, being a sincere and diligent attempt to do the right thing is as good a reason as any. Faced with finite resources, trying to triage, and basing it on something other than your own good feelings, is a praiseworthy thing.
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Usually people part ways with utilitarianism when it produces results that diverge seriously from basic moral intuition, particularly when there’s a consensus between virtue and deontological ethical systems.
Any thought experiment involving 3^^^3 dust specks is going to trigger that reaction, as will most trades in which one actively kills people in exchange for things other than the saving of human lives.
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I’m curious, do you know if you were giving 10% to effective charities to help the very poor, whether the Catholic Church would nevertheless insist that you also gave to the church?
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I don’t know. I know most (but not all) Protestant leaders would say “no,” though some would add that you should give at least something to help people spiritually as well as materially.
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Canon law (canon 222) states, without going into specifics, the obligation for the faithful to materially support the Church and to assist the poor. Generally people give to their parish to pay for its upkeep, and occasionally (annually, say) to their diocese. But there are no specifics like 10% tithes, that’s just a (really old pre-Christian) tradition.
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As another Catholic, the message of “I’m an atheist, but I know what Jesus taught better than you do anyway” is intensely off-putting. For me, it would be much more effective to describe GiveWell and it’s goals in a value-neutral way and let me decide for myself whether those goals are important to me. Something like: if you want your donations to be most effective according to criteria x, y, and z, then you should take the recommendations of GiveWell.
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The fact that skeptics of a religion tend to know more about it than its followers can be disturbing, but only if it violates your model of how things work. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious
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Maybe a good thing to do as an atheist would be to try to signal boost (and, if you actually know any other religious folk in EA, suggest that more people write) articles like “Christianity and Giving” over at the Giving What We Can blog (not sure if I can link it, first time I tried to make this comment it refused, but it shows up in Google pretty easily, where they talk about how their faith and effective charity interact from their own perspective, with the credibility that comes from actually being the person with it.
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I have taken the GWWC pledge, and it’s been smooth sailing so far.
I recommend it to anyone who wants to be a more charitable person and who finds formal obligations and metrics (e.g. contracts, test scores) motivating
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Oh, is this something GiveWell looks at? That would be good!
Also, I wanted to say – I’m not a Christian, but I am a theist, and I find this pretty convincing-y.
I’m pretty sure I’m never taking the pledge, because people, but I already try to set aside 10% of my income for tzedkah (try here means I have executive dysfunction and am often bad at keeping money things straight), and this is definitely weighing me more toward looking at the GiveWell places as possible good destinations.
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Would an ‘effective altruism from a Jewish perspective’ article be interesting or useful to you? I know some people who could potentially write it.
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It would definitely be super interesting! (The tzedakah word use gave it away, did it? :))
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random christian thumbs uppity. although i admittedly was already convinced and plan to take the pledge when i have an income.
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NB. Comment on wealth: ‘North America and Europe have sixty percent of the world’s wealth and about twenty percent of its population; Africa has fifteen percent of its population and four percent of its wealth. ‘ has caveats linkedt to on some SSC link post. If, anything, probably means figures above understate the disparity.
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Yes, yes, so frigging yes. I never ceased to be disappointed in how little overlap there is between those in my social circles who share 1) my faith; 2) my interest in effective altruism, or even, for that matter, awareness of basic utilitarian ideas.
Matthew 10:16 is contextually an instruction to the apostles, about how to pursue their mission despite persecution prior to the resurrection*. But TBH I’ve thought it applies as very general advice to Christians in the world:
Christians absolutely need to have bleeding hearts, but I firmly believe we are also asked by God to combine this with the hardest of hard-headedness.
I might have to spam links to this to a few people.
——————–
* Or the second coming; or perhaps, ahem, the end of the world that was supposed to come during their lifetimes 🙂
P.S. Props for the ESV use 😛
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I don’t think you’ve said this in an off-putting way at all. I should probably give some thought to giving a sermon about effective altruism at my church, although I probably need to give a lot of thought about how to write it, because there are so many ways in which a young, middle-class white dude lecturing a room which is mostly older, less well-off black women on how they should be giving more of their money to Africa could go badly…
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Just gonna join the chorus of voices saying that, as an Xian who was already into EA, this is very trueand not at all offputting.
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Disclaimer: not a Christian, am a utilitarian.
Those arguments, and other Christian arguments I’ve heard, seem to support altruism but not necessarily effective altruism. Giving 10% of your income to effective charities but none to the local beggar seems more spiritually risky than giving a small amount of money to anyone who asks and seems at least minimally worthy.
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I think the effectiveness part is implicit in
1) the universality of the ethics, which is touched on throughout the Gospel’s, including the parables Ozy’s OP covers
plus
2) how maths works.
Choosing to spend your finite means helping one person who you happen to see every day. instead of a hundred other people somewhere else, is pretty reminiscent of. say. loving only those who love you, “like the pagans”, rather than the Godly perfection of equally loving your enemies (Matthew 5:43-48).
And theologians have been fighting over the details for centuries apparently, but clearly one of the main points of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that the “neighbour”, who you are supposed to love as thyself in the second great commandment, is not literally the person who lives on your street, and in fact is probably something much more like the opposite of that.
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Ozymandias says: ‘Notice, also, that the Scripture doesn’t talk about saving souls. The Great Commission matters, but so do the everyday practical details of life– having food in your belly, medicine for your illness, clothes on your back. Bringing people the Good News is important, but so is charity and caring for the poor. Throughout the Bible, God expresses his love for the widow and orphan, the poor and hungry.’
How easy it is to make sweeping dismissive statements when it suits! Scripture surely DOES talk about saving souls. The whole Book, from the original disaster of human rebellion against (or disregard for) the word of God in an idyllic garden on our earth to the very end of the Revelation in a garden city of a new earth is a story of a creator God committed to changing the heart and reversing the consequences of human rebellion against, or disregard for, his words. This is in truth a grand drama about human salvation, or deliverance. But this deliverance is NOT about the scandalous ‘making of decisions for Jesus’ that have no transformative consequences in life or relationships. This deliverance is altogether more scandalous, and changes everything. It is changing everything, sometimes dramatically but mostly gradually, in my own life and relationships.
Ozymandias’ assumption seems to be that there is no correspondence between the Great Commission and ‘the everyday practical details of life’, between ‘the Good News’ and ‘caring for the poor’. I completely disagree. And so does Matthew, the eyewitness of the miracle-working, truth-teaching, disciple-making and resurrected Jesus, who in his single available writing gives us both the quoted ‘parable of the sheep and the goats’ as the last word of Jesus to his disciples prior to his arrest and crucifixion, and the referenced ‘Great Commission’ as the last word to his disciples after his resurrection. And this commission to his disciples is to disciple all nations, an assignment with TWO essential dimensions: to flood nations with experiential knowledge of, or overwhelming encounter with, the true and living God in all his triune fullness; and to teach the nations to obey all that Jesus taught his disciples, including the lifestyle of the sheep in the quoted parable and the lifestyle of this Great Commission. The salvation of God and the role of disciples of Jesus in this process is a total scandal.
Let’s not create a presumed philosophical dichotomy where the God of the Scripture portrays a picture of one complete whole.
As an afterthought, Matthew and Jesus say nothing about ‘medicine for your illnesses’ in their list of six responsibilities towards him and the least. I believe our commitment to man-made patented products which are not part of the creation and provision of the Creator for our needs is gross arrogance and ultimately to designed to serve the interests of the provider at the expense of the recipient, who is not empowered but made dependent.
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I interpreted Ozy’s “the Scripture doesn’t talk about saving souls.” A reference to the particular words of the scripture in question, rather than all the accepted canon of Christian scripture. In which case “I’m probably going to say some things in a weird and offputting way” is a fair acknowledgement – I didn’t find out outputting, but I can see how it would be unorthodox phrasing for a Christian.
To the issue under discussion: This was something I noticed when I was a Christian and studying this passage. In addressing the sheep and the goats, Jesus doesn’t talk about evangelism. He certainly does elsewhere, but when he talks about how we are to be judged, there is no mention of it.
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