I skimmed through the website, and I’m not entirely sure how they’re calculating the dollar amounts. The comparisons also seem somewhat subjective, and some of the proposed impacts (e.g., creating more plant-based meat options) don’t obviously translate into measurable reductions in meat consumption.
I’m also not sure what they mean by this statement:
“We don’t actually think you should donate less to something because it’s more effective.”
Hi, thanks again for the detailed reply — I really appreciate the clarity. I’m finding it genuinely eye-opening that many issues I assumed were morally significant turn out to matter far less in practice once scale and impact are properly quantified. I think I was heavily influenced by various online movements that are very loud and visible, so it confused me that EA rarely foregrounded topics like slave labor in chocolate or Coca-Cola’s water practices, despite covering other global issues such as malaria.
One thing I do want to clarify is that there are ethical chocolate companies using fair-trade, non–child-labor supply chains, so it’s not that “all chocolate must be boycotted,” but rather that many major brands have problematic sourcing. Still, your calculations make it clear that a solo boycott makes essentially no difference to the working hours or conditions of any child laborer, and similarly an individual boycott won’t meaningfully affect things like water extraction by Coca-Cola in Africa or India.
I am also not sure what you mean regarding your calculations about buying a child’s freedom for $9 per hour and also the whole valuing your own hour by $20-30. I mean to be honest from a consequentialist perspective there isn’t a difference between personally doing harm or letting harm to continue but in this case you aren’t I guess buying a child’s freedom you are just not forcing them to work an additional hour if that reframing makes sense. Kinda like veganism doesn’t save lives its just not about killing additional lives. To put it quite simply, by refusing to by slave labor chocolate you are not really helping people you are just not hurting them (and buying the chocolate leads to harm).
On the broader question of morally permissible actions, I’ve been strongly shaped by this Aeon article (“Why it is better not to aim at being morally perfect”). I agree that doing genuine moral good matters, but being a 10⁄10 moral saint is neither realistic nor psychologically healthy. That’s why I find Schelling points useful — for example, the 10% pledge. Without Schelling points, it feels like the only consistent utilitarian answer would be to live extremely frugally and donate almost everything. So my original question was really about which actions rise to the level of meaningful Schelling points. It seems that many things that online activists frame as huge moral imperatives (boycotting certain products, etc.) actually have very small expected impact and thus probably don’t qualify.
On veganism: I’ve been extremely strict (even avoiding foods with small amounts of egg or dairy, even while traveling), but seeing that roughly 75% of the EA Forum isn’t vegan does make me wonder whether relaxing a bit would still be morally acceptable. At the same time, I’m not fully comfortable with an attitude of “it’s fine to cause some harm as long as I donate to GiveWell later,” since that can be used to rationalize almost anything (e.g., “I’ll do X harmful thing like murder a man and offset it with $5k to AMF”). I understand the logic in small, low-impact cases, but taken broadly it seems like a slippery ethical framing.
A (slightly personal) question: do you think one could argue that you might actually have more impact as an aerospace engineer donating 10% of your income than by doing local EA organization work? I imagine it depends heavily on the quality of the contributions and the kinds of community-building work being done, but I’m curious how you think about that tradeoff.
Regarding longtermism: I’ll admit I’m somewhat biased. I’ve absorbed a lot of the “nothing ever happens” attitude, so doomsday scenarios often feel exaggerated to me. But setting that aside, I can acknowledge that global catastrophic risks like nuclear conflict, pandemics, and climate instability are real and non-zero. We literally just lived through a pandemic. My concern is that nearly all meaningful action in these areas ultimately seems to run through political institutions. Research can help, but if political leaders are uninformed or uninterested, the marginal value of EA research feels limited. That sense might also be influenced by my experience with college ethics classes — AI ethics, especially, often felt detached from real-world levers.
Realistically, it seems like the most impactful thing an individual can do for x-risk at the moment is vote for politicians who take these issues seriously, but politicians who are aware of (or influenced by) effective altruism seem rare.
Finally, several of the replies have made me think about the prisoner’s dilemma dynamic underlying many collective-action problems. With things like chocolate, it seems like individual action is (almost) negligible. Veganism is different because the per-unit harm is much larger. But I’m curious how EA generally thinks about prisoner’s dilemmas in areas like climate change, voting, or even the Donation Election. Why should I vote in the Donation Election if my individual vote is almost certainly not decisive? Or more broadly, when do extremely low-probability marginal contributions still matter?
Thanks again — the discussion has been really helpful in clarifying what actually matters versus what merely feels morally salient.
To clarify my position, I am fairly confident that the consumption of chocolate produced through slave labor follows a straightforward supply-and-demand pattern: increased consumer demand leads to increased production, which in turn requires additional exploited laborers. In the same way, it is commonly stated that producing one liter of Coca-Cola requires approximately two liters of water. If Coca-Cola sources this water from communities already facing scarcity, then purchasing a two-liter bottle could be understood as indirectly contributing to the extraction of four liters of water from a community that may urgently need it.
With that in mind, I am interested in whether there are other common, everyday behaviors—analogous to veganism or the examples above—where an individual’s consumption reliably results in a direct negative impact. If so, are these harms measurable in any meaningful way? And if they are not easily quantifiable, should we treat them as negligible or morally permissible in order to avoid the implication that one must adopt an ascetic lifestyle simply to remain ethically consistent?
When I referred to boycotting Nestlé and Coca-Cola, my primary focus was on the basic dynamics of supply and demand. If consumers continue to purchase chocolate produced with slave labor, increased demand will logically require more exploited laborers and more total labor to meet that demand. The underlying principle seems similar to the reasoning behind veganism: purchasing animal products contributes, at least marginally, to the continued production of those products. Please correct me if I am mistaken in drawing this parallel. Likewise, it is often stated that producing one liter of Coca-Cola requires approximately two liters of water. If Coca-Cola’s operations reduce water availability in communities that already struggle with access, it seems reasonable to ask whether consumers bear some indirect responsibility—e.g., if a person buys a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, does that effectively correspond to four liters of water extracted from a community that may have needed it for agriculture or drinking?
However, I am interested in your view on which kinds of actions should be considered morally permissible and which should be regarded as morally obligatory. I do not believe we should, as some critiques phrase it, adopt “the life goals of dead people” and simply attempt to avoid all entanglement with harm, yet I also find it notable that issues such as widespread contempt for Nestlé or the extensive discussions about ethical and fair-trade chocolate seem largely overlooked in this forum. This is surprising given how readily veganism is embraced. I am not attempting to diminish the moral weight of animal suffering, but I do sometimes worry that it is invoked in a way that unintentionally marginalizes concerns about human suffering.
I also find it striking that, according to the statistics shared, a substantial portion of the EA community is neither vegetarian nor vegan. This raises questions about the criteria by which individuals consider themselves part of the effective altruism movement, although I recognize there are no strict requirements or definitive rules—ultimately, many of these norms function more like Schelling points, such as the commonly referenced 10% donation pledge.
I am unsure what to think, as I often encounter conflicting information online. Given the rapid pace of technological advancement, I am also concerned that the environmental impact of AI may increase over time. In particular, image and video generation appear to require significantly more computational resources than text generation. If these modalities become more widely used in the future, especially at large scale, AI systems may have a substantially greater environmental footprint.
Additionally, it is worth noting that Grok may differ from other AI models in this regard, as Elon Musk has made several decisions about its development and deployment that appear environmentally questionable in ways other companies have generally avoided.
When I mentioned Nestlé, my point was that the situation is somewhat analogous to veganism. For example, if someone buys chocolate produced with slave labor, that purchase contributes to supply and demand: the more such chocolate is bought, the more of it is produced. Veganism follows a similar logic—purchasing animal products signals demand, which leads to more animals being raised and slaughtered in their place. So individual consumption choices can, at least in theory, causally contribute to additional harm.
To be honest, I feel like you focused on the weaker examples I gave, such as Nestlé’s role in the California drought or Coca-Cola’s operations in Israel. There are stronger, more morally serious concerns, such as the documented use of child and slave labor in parts of the chocolate industry. Financially supporting that industry seems likely to increase its operations, total output, and ultimately the number of exploited laborers and total suffering. Similarly, Coca-Cola has faced major controversies over water extraction in Africa and previously in India, where communities experienced significant harm from overuse of local water resources. These situations suggest that reducing demand for specific products may indeed reduce the scale of the associated harm, even if boycotts alone are not enough to produce systemic change. I agree that boycotts rarely succeed in transforming entire industries unless large numbers of people participate, but even small reductions in demand might still correlate with smaller harms—just as veganism does not end factory farming but may marginally reduce the total number of animals killed. So while I understand concerns about “purity culture,” I think the issue is more complex: some personal choices do have real, non-negligible downstream consequences for suffering.
That said, I am genuinely curious about what you consider to fall within the realm of morally permissible personal actions. In my original post, I emphasized that I want to preserve as much personal freedom as possible without completely violating moral obligations. But I’m unsure where the line should be drawn. What counts as negligible harm, and what counts as morally relevant? With something like slave labor in the chocolate supply chain, the impact of an individual purchase is very hard to quantify. How does one even begin to calculate that impact with any precision?
Finally, I remain quite skeptical of the heavy emphasis on “longtermism.” I’m not denying that nuclear war, pandemics, or other existential risks are important, but these seem like issues far beyond the influence of any individual person. They are mainly the domain of governments, policymakers, and international institutions, and addressing them relies on trusting political systems rather than individual actions. By contrast, donating to save kids from malaria or starvation has clear, measurable, immediate effects on saving lives. If I donate money to Gaza, I know my money is being used to put food on the table for innocent kids. I don’t exactly know what my money is being used on for AI academic “research”. My concern is that focusing on very low-probability, extremely high-stakes scenarios resembles a classic problem in consequentialism: when potential outcomes are enormous enough, even a tiny probability can outweigh more certain but smaller benefits. It’s like the thought experiment of a cult leader claiming the world will end unless we sacrifice one person. Even if there is a 99.99% chance he is lying, the small remaining probability—if taken seriously—would mathematically “justify” the sacrifice, even though this conclusion feels deeply counterintuitive. Longtermism can sometimes seem to rely on similar logic, where speculative future catastrophes overshadow clearly identifiable present-day suffering.
Hey, I appreciate the response!
This comment is just out of complete curiosity, and even thinking about this I find really distasteful.
Quick question — one thing I’ve noticed is that it seems pretty easy to fake participation in volunteer events, especially virtual ones. Do you think it’s bad to do that just to boost volunteer hours?
For example, I recently did about 8 hours of virtual volunteering. I wasn’t super productive the whole time, but I did technically spend those hours working. Would it be bad to pretend to have done an event that can’t really be verified (like writing cards for the military)?
There probably would be employment consequences if someone got caught, which is one of the major reasons why I don’t want to do this even though I don’t there is any system present to even remotely verify this.
That, and also I find lying like this to be pretty repugnant.
However, in context of utilitarian ethics, I can’t help feel like this is some sort of strange moral obligation or moral “should”.
Thanks.
Okay, so “taxable units” have nothing to do with the Pledge then.
Thanks.
Asked this question because in The Life You Can Save, there is a section dedicated to this question regarding the pledge :
”
I only earn $75,000, but my partner and I have a joint income of $150,000. Is it my own income or our joint income that I should enter when taking the pledge?
It depends on whether you both want to pledge, and on how you manage your finances. If you both want to pledge, then we suggest you take your combined income and enter that. Peter’s pledge calculations are based on “taxable units,” which refers to couples in the United States; in many countries, taxable units are individuals, whether married or not. If only one of you wants to pledge and you keep your finances separate, then enter your individual income.”
So in general I was asking whether this was a similar part regarding the pledge as in if the married couple counts as a “taxable unit”. So just clarifying then, whether finances are kept separate or put into a joint account, you only donate 10% of the income you bring to the table, not factor in total income and then take 10%?
Hi,
Few questions :
1) If you take 10% pledge now, does it apply to previous money you got/saved? Does it apply to small amounts of money you got (e.g. a friend gifts you 20 bucks as a birthday present) or only just the large amounts of money you get from like a job or whatnot. Also, do you donate every month or every year? Honestly, why not just wait until you are dead before donating it in your will? There are also things like Certificate Deposits where you have money stored in a location where you don’t want to withdraw it too early to get interest.
2) Does 10% just apply to income or wealth in general?
3) What’s the point of the 10% pledge if you encourage people to find a level of giving that suits them?
4) I live in the USA. I’m not sure if donations are tax-deductible. If they are, what is the process of making sure that you get them deducted from taxes?
5) What’s the most effective charity to donate to? Like I see there are multiple charities listed. But if you donate your 10% to a less effective charity thats listed (like idk x bucks to save a life for one charity, x+1 bucks to save a life for another charity), is that counted as part of the 10% pledge?
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.