Why Charity For All?

Explore effective charity and the culture and arguments around doing good with me

Tens of thousands, if not millions, of people wake up every day and try to improve the world as best they can.

Some do it while protesting their governments, fighting corruption, discrimination, and bigotry. Others channel the same drive while serving within those very governments. You see this approach in high-income countries among those battling homelessness, staffing food banks, or pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and technology. I've witnessed it in my hometown of Chicago, where doctors at a free clinic serve those without access to health insurance.

This same spirit drives those fighting global poverty in low-income countries, offering shelter, medicine, and food to the poorest among us. I've seen it firsthand in India, where community health workers strive to improve child health despite immense resource constraints.

That I, too, try each day to improve the world doesn't make me unique or even particularly unusual. But what distinguishes my approach is how I tackle it—through the principles of effective altruism. The basic idea is that, all else equal, I think we should seek to help improve the world as much as is viable.

I'd add the moral constraint that when I seek to help, I want to help those who need it most, without regard to how much they resemble me or how close they are to my daily life. I don't think the accident of my birth in America should justify valuing Americans—explicitly or implicitly—as orders of magnitude more important than people from Bangladesh or Kenya. This means prioritizing based on need and impact rather than familiarity or convenience. To the extent I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to help others, I value charity for all.

But with a mission this broad, you need to acknowledge and make tradeoffs. Given limited time and resources, you either prioritize explicitly or will do so implicitly—there's no avoiding choices. Sometimes the tradeoff is straightforward: saving ten lives rather than one. But more often, the decisions are far more complex—weighing immediate relief against long-term change, or comparing interventions across entirely different domains—and yet you still have to choose.

With all things, we’re never going to get everything right on the first try. The world is genuinely difficult to understand, so we should carefully seek the truth and revise our actions in light of new feedback.

Doing all of this is no easy task, but it amounts to a rough first pass about how I think about doing good. Following the words of CEA’s Zach Robinson, I try to approach doing good in a manner reflecting these core principles (citations omitted, my commentary after):

Scope sensitivity: Saving ten lives is more important than saving one, and saving a thousand lives is a lot more important than saving ten.

This means being willing to prioritize interventions that help larger numbers of people, even when individual stories might seem less compelling than dramatic cases that capture media attention.

Scout mindset: We can better help others and understand the world if we think clearly and orient towards finding the truth, rather than trying to defend our own ideas and being unaware of our biases.

This requires genuine intellectual humility—being willing to change course when evidence contradicts our assumptions, even when it's uncomfortable.

Impartiality: With the resources we choose to devote to helping others, we strive to help those who need it the most without being partial to those who are similar to us or immediately visible to us. (In practice, this often means focusing on structurally neglected and disenfranchised groups, like people in low-income countries, animals, and future generations).

A child's suffering matters equally whether they live next door or across the globe.

Recognition of tradeoffs: Because we have limited time and money, we need to prioritize when deciding how we might improve the world.

Every dollar spent on one cause is a dollar not spent on another—so we should think carefully about where our efforts can do the most good rather than spreading resources too thin.

This type of approach isn’t a panacea. I take each of these principles as guidelines, not dictates, and I have more than my share of quibbles with how particular people apply these principles in practice. I don’t want to just tease this, you will hear some of those quibbles and gripes in forthcoming posts as I think some of these are pretty substantive disagreements.

For example, there are legitimate concerns that any attempt to improve the world through this type of deliberation will over-emphasize what can be easily quantified. I don’t think there’s a universal answer to that concern, except to say I think there are times where it applies and instances where it doesn’t. The right course of action is rarely obvious, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t mean we should avoid taking steps we have strong reasons to believe are valuable..

In my day job, my organization, Rethink Priorities, reflects that uncertainty having worked with a really wide set of actors on research, consulting, and strategy. We’ve done everything from working with climate change donors and major global health meta-foundations like GiveWell and Charity Navigator, to global health implementation groups like Lafiya focused on family planning in Nigeria. We’ve worked on nuclear risk, farm animal welfare, the value of prizes in spurring innovation, and how to make practical decisions in the face of moral uncertainty.

What unifies this work is a commitment to improving the world through rigorous thinking that translates into action, maintaining high standards, and staying skeptical of both our own conclusions and others'. The reality is that it's difficult to know what truly works and how to navigate complex tradeoffs. We constantly grapple with comparing interventions across vastly different cause areas, weighing uncertain evidence of varying quality, and balancing immediate needs against long-term potential. Much of the available evidence and argumentation lacks the quality or specificity needed to resolve the actual decisions we face. Yet many problems still demand our attention and effort.

Still, as much as others and I seek to improve the world, some people wish to undermine the values of equality, freedom, and opportunity that millions of people work every day to expand. So, having “charity for all” doesn’t mean being naive about those out to destroy you. After all, when Abraham Lincoln made that statement, he was in the middle of a civil war where hundreds of thousands of people had died, and his opponents wanted to impose a strict hierarchical, race-based slave society on the rest of the country.

Understanding how to do good could be said to be a Sisyphean task—you work constantly to reach the summit, only for real-world events to push you back down as situations change or our understanding of reality evolves. And yet morality calls for you to begin again.

This is a blog about those perpetual new beginnings, about doing good and the conceptual and practical challenges inherent in that pursuit. It will explore charity and the people working within that space, but it will also examine the broader political and philosophical landscape that shapes how we think about all our actions. The ideas and arguments that guide our efforts to improve the world deserve scrutiny, whether they emerge from academic theory or hard-won experience.

For how I wish to approach the world and this blog, I leave the last word to Lincoln:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”