In Tension: Effective Altruism and Mutual Aid

Both Effective Altruism and Mutual Aid are social movements aimed at providing aid and relieving poverty. And yet, there is a tension between a major subset of Effective Altruism (EA) and Mutual Aid (MA), where this variety of EA is committed to saying that it is morally wrong to participate in MA.

But first: What are these movements, and why think they are at odds?

Mutual Aid refers to a network of community members (usually, but not always, from the same geographic area) committed to offering, receiving, and exchanging material goods, wealth, and social support. Although Mutual Aid has a long history in marginalized communities, especially in queer and disabled communities, it has recently gone mainstream as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. (For an accessible history of Mutual Aid, see this 2021 APA Blog post by Jennifer Gammage). Typically, a community based in a particular location will use a social media platform (like a Facebook group) where community members can post their needs and others can attempt to meet them.

Mutual Aid networks address a wide variety of needs. Community members can request, provide, or trade: wealth (cash for bills, including rent, energy, and car insurance), material goods (such as clothes, toys, mattresses, or other household items), services (delivering groceries, tax help, legal advice), and care (like listening to problems, or offering commiseration). Ultimately, Mutual Aid networks afford a sense of community solidarity, where the individuals are invested in meeting the needs of others.

What is Effective Altruism?

Effective Altruism is a popular social movement, which contends that we should do the most good possible by sourcing our personal donations to highly effective charities that address the world’s most severe problems. These issues include access to food and clean water, adequate healthcare, and providing measures to avoid preventable diseases.

EA is largely about donating money to create the greatest impact, and where you should send that money is guided by certain major philosophical commitments.

• To maximize welfare—where this boils down to reducing needless suffering and loss of life.

• To be consequentialist—meaning that the goodness of the action is determined by the consequences of that action.

• To be science-aligned—where possible, EAs use data and scientific models to determine where aid can create the greatest impact.

• And last, to be impartial—everyone’s welfare counts equally. This helps underscore the global motivation for EA: We should focus our efforts on where poverty is the most severe and where we can do the most good.

I will focus on a particular subset of EAs, which I call Obligation-Oriented EAs (OOEAs). These EAs contend that we have a moral obligation to do the most good in the most effective ways.

This is pretty striking because it implies that when we have a choice between doing more good and less good, it’s always morally wrong to do the thing that produces less good.

According to this OOEA, it is a requirement to make a good faith effort to maximize good output, and any “good” action that fails to do this is wrong. For instance, if I choose to spend an hour giving my neighbor a ride to the DMV when I could have been serving meals at the food kitchen, I’m doing something morally wrong in this view.

Data from two relatively recent surveys of Effective Altruists suggest that this is far from a minority view.

In the 2017 survey, respondents were asked if they take EA to be a “moral duty” or more of “an opportunity.” I take it that this language was an effort to identify those EAs who take their tenets to be a supererogatory good and distinguish them from those who take their tenets to be a moral requirement. 56% answered that they take it to be a moral duty—a major subset.  

This leads us to another relevant question, which, thankfully, a subsequent survey has asked for us: What moral framework are these EAs relying on? While there is a smattering of other moral views, the 2019 survey suggests the vast majority—nearly 70%—of EAs who responded are Utilitarian. (I have previously argued that Effective Altruism is inherently Utilitarian, but even if that is not the case, these numbers alone will be sufficient to get the tension off the ground).

From here on out, I’ll focus on these Obligation-Oriented Effective Altruists who are also Utilitarians, or as I’ll call them OOEA^us.

OOEA^u and Mutual Aid are mutually exclusive philosophies of aid.

Importantly, Mutual Aid is perfectly compatible with dabbling in some non-obligation oriented (that’s to say, supererogatory) Effective Altruism. You can work with your local mutual aid group and also donate 10% of your salary to highly effective charities. But to do this, you have to take the commitments of EA in its weaker form.  

Based on the data, OOEA^us make up anywhere from almost a third to more than half of all Effective Altruists surveyed. They explicitly recognize a moral obligation where one ought not to distribute one’s wealth in a way that conflicts with the tenets of maximization, impartiality, science-alignment, and consequentialism.

But MA embraces community partiality: MA finds value in the connections we make by meeting the needs of our neighbors, rather than strangers abroad.

OOEA^u also requires maximization, whereas MA says that failing to maximize can still provide morally good results. For example, MA says it’s good for me to spend $5 buying a local homeless man a burger, even though I could send that $5 off to produce 20 mosquito nets. OOEA^u is committed to saying that my action is wrong.

OOEA^u judges goodness based on act consequentialism, whereas MA also values intrinsic goods. For instance, even if I fail to produce the object to fulfill the need, MA recognizes that I expressed care for my neighbors by trying to help them, and sees value in this distinct from my ability to deliver.

Simply put, Mutual Aid fails the moral obligation OOEA^u’s put in place. It does not maximize, it is not consequentialist, and it accepts and even encourages community partiality. There is a real sense that we can’t just “do both.”

So, their core features are mutually exclusive. If we must choose, why MA over OOEA^u?

I contend that MA has normative value that EA does not. It connects community members despite their salient differences: There’s something good about forming relationships with people who are different from us. Mutual Aid fosters that good.

There is also a structural benefit with Mutual Aid. EA takes the traditional, one-directional structure of top-down giving, where the wealthy donate to the poor. I worry that any top-down model will reaffirm existing class structures. In contrast, MA does not depend on the wealthy to give to the poor—it involves diagonal and horizontal aid distribution.

Additionally, instead of donating digitally via highly effective charities, Mutual Aid is tangible. It gives you the opportunity to invest in your own community, and meet and help your neighbors.

Mutual Aid also facilitates coalition-building and community advocacy. Naturally, after some time, patterns of the most common or greatest needs begin to emerge. Once aware of those problems, community members then have the network in place to go about finding or instituting political or material solutions.

In sum, OOEA^u would have us reject MA as wrong, but Mutual Aid has moral value: At the center of MA are normatively-laden concepts of social interdependence, community solidarity, and collective care.

Savannah Pearlman

Savannah Pearlman is a PhD Candidate at Indiana University – Bloomington, where she is writing her dissertation on Moral Deference and marginalized testifiers. As an active member in her local Mutual Aid network, Savannah has become interested in philosophical issues related to philanthropy and altruism.