Compassionate Utilitarianism: Balancing the head and the heart in the pursuit of philanthropy

A review of William MacAskill's Doing Good Better

No one donates money to try really hard to cure cancer, or deeply empathize with Siberian tigers. The goal is to eradicate cancer. The goal is to save Siberian tigers from extinction.

And yet while philanthropy is oriented around specific outcomes, it's often driven by emotion more than measurements and analysis. Instead of trying to identify the most leverageable causes through rational evaluation, people gravitate toward the most dramatic and evocative ones.

That's a flawed approach. In his recently published book, Doing Good Better, Oxford philosophy professor William MacAskill evangelizes, dispassionately but engagingly, on behalf of calculated and reflective charitable giving.

MacAskill is a co-founder of the Effective Altruism movement, an approach to philanthropy that might be described as quantified selflessless. "I believe that by combining the heart and the head – by applying data and reason to altruistic acts – we can turn our good intentions into astonishingly good outcomes," he writes.

MacAskill presents five simple questions that can help focus philanthropic action:

1. How many benefit, and by how much?
2. Is this the most effective thing you can do?
3. Is this area neglected?
4. What would have happened otherwise? (I.E., are you just doing what someone else was likely to do anyway?)
5. What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?

In many ways, these questions roughly parallel the kinds of questions investors ask founders seeking funding:

1. What's the size of your market?
2. What's your unfair competitive edge?
3. Is there an immediate or imminent market need to fill?
4. Will competitors quickly occupy this market too and limit your ability to be successful?
5. What are the chances of success, and how valuable would success be?

In both cases, the goal is to gauge and maximize potential impact, so that whatever resources are invested will yield the greatest possible return.

In his work with his non-profit foundation, Bill Gates has shown how
effective an emphasis on outcomes, data, and testing can be when applied to philanthropic ends. In Doing Good Better, MacAskill's focus on rational assessment similarly generates a number of counterintuitive insights and useful propositions.

Take the idea of operational efficiency. One popular way to assess charities involves how they utilize their overall budgets. If they spend relatively little on administration and other overhead, and devote the bulk of their budget to programming, they are dubbed "efficient" and thus worth supporting. And on a certain level this makes sense – donors generally aren't that excited to see their dollars going toward photocopying machines and direct-mail solicitations. They'd prefer to apply their contributions to medical supplies, educational facilities, and other resources that will potentially have a direct positive impact on a charity's target recipients.

But what if an operationally efficient charity's programs have little impact? In MacAskill's estimation, a charity with high overhead may actually be preferable to a highly "efficient" charity – so long as the former's programs produce measurably high outcomes.

In another instance, MacAskill makes a persuasive case for the efficacy of supporting charities that combat malaria. If you live in the U.S. or another comparatively wealthy country, MacAskill argues that you should focus virtually all your philanthropy on poor countries, where your dollars have 100 times the purchasing power that they do in America. Malaria, in turn, claims millions of lives a year but receives relatively little funding compared to how much is spent on cancer and other diseases. Finally, there's an inexpensive but effective way to combat it – insecticide-treated bed nets. According to MacAskill's calculations, every $3400 spent on nets saves approximately one life a year.

As important – and impressive -- as leverage like that is, there are values beyond maximum leverage that should animate philanthropy. Philanthropy is a fundamentally social act, a form of human connectedness with a deeply embedded emotional component.

As members of the global community, we should be supporting anti-malaria campaigns – especially since such support is highly leverageable.

But we're also members of local communities, and we have a moral obligation to support philanthropic efforts in those communities too, even if they don't leverage our contributions as efficiently as they might somewhere else.

Local participation in philanthropy isn't just a moral obligation though. It also has its own utilitarian component through strong derivative impact. When you donate locally, you function as a tangible role model to others in your community. You help build networks for action. You form partnerships and alliances with other community members, and position philanthropy as a local norm, a tangible part of the culture that has a compounding effect over time by solidifying community ties, facilitating engagement and collaboration, and creating a tradition of mutual support.

Supporting causes just because they personally resonate with you has a similar benefit. While a favorite cause may not possess the most spreadsheet-friendly metrics, your personal engagement does have value. The personal connection you feel toward a given cause – for whatever sentimental or arbitrary reason -- is often what is most likely to escalate your involvement and keep you committed. Emotion is its own kind of lever, one that can build movements that produce massive change.

Even MacAskill himself acknowledges this to a certain extent. With his colleague Ben Todd, he runs an organization called 80,000 Hours that offers guidance to clients who want to make a difference in their careers. In this pursuit MacAskill continues to exhibit a commitment to rationalism. He talks about the virtues of earning to give, for example, wherein individuals focus on maximizing their earnings rather than, say, taking a low-paying job at a non-profit, with the intent of donating a significant portion of their earnings to philanthropic causes. (As long as you do indeed turn intent into action, this can be a great approach.)

He also insists that "following your passion is terrible advice." If you're not very good at your passion, you may simply be setting yourself up for failure. If few jobs are associated with whatever your passion may be, that's a problem too. It's also possible that the thing you're most passionate about isn't something that you can leverage to make a difference in the world.

A better approach, MacAskill suggests, involves finding a job that is a good "personal fit" for you. But while "personal fit" doesn't necessarily involve passion, it does involve finding a position that aligns your interests, aptitudes, and personality type with the requirements of the job and the company culture.

This parallels the approach to long-term career planning that I advise in my book The Start-up of You. When you're strategizing about the best way to create impact over time, you should take three factors into account: Your personal aspirations; current market realities regarding what industries are growing and what skills employers are seeking; and the unique assets you have to offer.

In the quest for personal fit, MacAskill recommends an "empirical approach" where you "try out different types of work" and learn as much as you can about the different kinds of jobs you think might be right for you.

Not surprisingly, this advice resonates with me – LinkedIn exists to help people improve their economic opportunities and autonomy by providing them with a rich source of network intelligence on all aspects of the world of work. You can use it to learn a great deal about companies and what kind of employees they're looking for. You can use it to interact with people working in the kinds of jobs you're considering, at the specific companies you're targeting.

As MacAskill suggests, this due diligence should be thorough, strategic, and informed by a kind of rational objectivity – you're researching a good potential fit for yourself, not just following your bliss.

But that doesn't mean your personal sentiments have been completely banished from the process. In fact, they remain a key driver: "If you're not happy at work, you'll be less productive and more likely to burn out, resulting in less impact in the long-term," MacAskill counsels.

Emotion and engagement, in other words, are themselves powerful levers – so you shouldn't discount them entirely. But of course you shouldn't rely on them entirely either. As Ben Casnocha, co-writer on my first two books, says, "Reason is the steering wheel. Emotion is the gas pedal." In the end, when you are driving toward scale of impact, it helps to have both. This, I believe, is true for job-seekers, it's true for entrepreneurs, and it's true for philanthropists too.