Julia Wise had always imagined herself becoming a mother. Nevertheless, through a “particularly intense” stretch in her twenties, she was beset with uncertainty.
“At the time, I was really focused on the money that it would cost to raise a child,” she said. “And that would be money that I couldn’t donate. And I just thought, like, that’s ethically wrong.”
Since 2012, Julia and her partner, Jeff Kaufman, have been donating around half of their annual pre-tax income to charity. They keep scrupulous records of their contributions online, down to the dollar. Last year, they donated $400,000; the year before, $264,727. In 2008, as fresh college grads, they were already giving away a third of their income. Roughly a decade ago, the couple took an official pledge with an Oxford-based organization called Giving What We Can to donate at least 30% of their income to effective charities.
Childcare, housing, food, education, healthcare, time off from work, every spent and borrowed dollar between conception and delivery: for many, having a child is the most expensive financial decision of their lives. On paper, Julia and Jeff look like comfortable one percenters. Until this summer, Jeff had been earning most of the family’s income as a senior software engineer at Google (he recently took a salary cut to conduct research identifying early warning biological risks). However, since most of the money they’re not donating goes into savings, their regular consumption expenses are lean.
Despite her moral ambivalence about the tradeoffs between donations and children, the thought of growing old without them left Julia feeling increasingly hollow.
It was plain to Jeff that Julia would be devastated if she didn’t get to raise kids, so he devised a new budgeting plan. Jeff and Julia had been earmarking their donations separately at the time: Jeff’s salary was split between donations, household expenses and savings while Julia’s take home earnings went 100% to charity. The pair canvassed books on childcare and estimated the cost of raising a child to adulthood, and Jeff told Julia that he was going to set aside that sum from his earnings. “I could use part of my income to ensure that Julia could make the decision without considering whether it would be taking money away from people who need it,” he said. The money didn’t necessarily have to be used on a child. It could be for themselves — they could go on nice vacations, for example. The only stipulation? She couldn’t donate it.
“Once he said that, I was like, yeah, there’s nothing else I want to do with the money more than having a child. That made it very clear to me,” she said.
Now, Julia is midway through her thirties and the mother of three: Lily, who is eight, Anna, who is in first grade, and Nora, just over one.
Julia possesses the modest warmth of a schoolteacher, and her slightly downsloping eyebrows add to her teacherliness a perpetual look of concern. Her home doesn’t resemble an exercise in puritan austerity; it’s filled with light, and her daughters’ paintings hang crowded and colorful on the walls. When she sat down to talk this spring, a child began cooing in the room over, and Julia left to fetch her. She returned with the giddy, gleeful interloper — Nora, her youngest, charismatic and bright-eyed in her swaddled nine months — as the intimate tableau of their family life played out before a stranger without any reservation at all. That is often the case with parents: it is obvious to them that others will share in their joy. Nora stayed for the rest of the conversation, her fingers occasionally grasping at the air.
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Julia grew up in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, where her extreme empathy from a young age mostly led her parents to worry that she would become destitute later in life. From the time that she was in high school, she saw donations as a tool she and everyone else had access to that could make the world a better and fairer place.
For college, she headed off to Bryn Mawr, a small all-women’s liberal arts school near Philadelphia, where she studied social work, saved and donated the little money she earned, and spent her free time folk dancing. Jeff, who studied linguistics and computer science at neighboring Swarthmore, also loved folk dancing. Between that, their shared frugality, and disinterest for college drinking and bacchanal nights out, they found they had a good deal in common.
By the time they got married, Julia was working as a mental health counselor in a jail in south Boston and Jeff had landed a position working in computational linguistics. Both were donating to charities they liked, even with their fresh-out-of-college salaries, but it wasn’t until they stumbled upon Giving What We Can and GiveWell, an organization which conducts data-driven research to determine and rate charities’ cost-effectiveness, that they began to identify in earnest others who took donations as seriously as they did.
It didn’t take long for Julia and Jeff to start organizing monthly dinners in the Boston area for other people they knew or heard of who also cared about effective giving. Often, there weren’t enough chairs in the house to go around. Although Julia loved her job as a social worker, she didn’t feel like she had much of an edge in the profession, and she was getting frustrated by the lack of practical change. She began devoting her time instead to community-building within the nascent effective giving movement. This movement would in time be given an official name: effective altruism.
These were the early 2010s, when conversations like the ones Julia and Jeff were having around their dinner table were taking place in lots of other spaces, too, including the centuries-old gothic buildings of Oxford’s campus. Effective altruism’s intellectual heart lies at Oxford — exactly and expectedly the sort of gray and brooding place that moral philosophers like to flock to. The Centre for Effective Altruism is headquartered there, which in 2011 became the umbrella organization for Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, a group focused on helping people lead impactful careers.
In the past decade, those early philosophical hunches have turned into a global social movement. Right now, it has come into a critical new moment of growth and public recognition, having attracted funding and philanthropic backing from numerous organizations and entrepreneurs keen on using their wealth to do good. Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-year-old crypto billionaire, has been giving away his fortune to effective altruism (EA), which has also meant that it is capturing increased political capital. This summer and fall, many major news outlets and magazines — among them TIME Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times — have published pieces introducing their audiences to EA, marking a tide shift as the once-niche movement grapples with newfound wealth and outside skepticism. As Vox writer Dylan Matthews observed in a recent profile of the movement, “Effective altruism in 2022 is richer, weirder, and wields more political power than effective altruism 10, or even five years ago.”
On the Centre for Effective Altruism’s website, EA is described as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.” While communities proliferate on university campuses, professional settings, and area groups like the one Julia helped bring together in Boston, the Center itself has been since its genesis an official locus of EA community-building, public education, and funding for nonprofits, projects and conferences. Julia herself became the president of Giving What You Can in 2017 and now works as a community liaison at the Center, helping local EA groups support their members.
At its best, effective altruism models a kind of radical compassion minus pretense and idealism, which, for certain types of do-gooders, can make for a compelling cocktail. Some causes, effective altruists point out, are more neglected than others, and if you are seriously concerned about using your life to do good amid a landscape of profound suffering, then thinking like an effective altruist can help you tip away from biases and poorly reasoned judgments.
While the movement’s central precept to live a life of maximal social impact might sound inoffensive, it can also lead to counterintuitive, even unsavory conclusions. That impulse you have to donate to the most recent hurricane relief efforts? An effective altruist, noting the pots of money pouring in from other donors and the relatively high overhead costs of aid organizations on the ground, may suggest that you put your dollars elsewhere, like providing mosquito nets to reduce the risks of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa or medicine to clear children of parasitic worm infections. Detractors also criticize the movement’s recent turn toward an ethical view known as longtermism — which argues for the moral significance of future generations — and the kinds of priority areas which often come attached at its hip, like working on artificial intelligence safety and other existential threats to human civilization.
Most of the time, people feel a greater sense of obligation toward some more than others: parent to children, sister to sister, best friend to best friend. But effective altruists often believe that love and concern ought to be offered to others without distinction, regardless of their affinity or closeness to oneself. Given there is so much suffering — given that there are so many urgent demands for our daily attention — shouldn’t we attempt to extend care indifferently (impersonally, even)? Will trying to do so reduce some real, thick dimension of human experience — the part of us that reaches first for ourselves and our loved ones, for the infant girl whose pointer finger is curled midair?
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The same question holds for Julia now as it did fifteen years ago — how can we do the most good? — but these days she leans heavily on the knowledge that a diverse number of things can motivate and sustain even the most altruistic among us.
“Especially in my early 20s, I just wanted to squeeze as much out of myself as I possibly could, but I wasn’t thinking a lot about how I would develop myself to be able to do more good than I am currently. Like, how will I sustain this over the decades of my work?” she said.
That question is one that others in the movement are grappling with, too. It can be especially hard when someone’s personal mandate is to do the most good, a goal that doesn’t necessarily come with a natural boundary, which can incline someone towards continuously optimizing one’s life for impact and productivity at the expense of their own wellbeing.
Dr. Bernadette Young, an Oxford doctor married to the EA philosopher Toby Ord, remembers, when she was pregnant eight years ago, reading some dismissive remarks made by EAs who suggested that parenting would result in too great of a lapse in productivity. For reasons not unlike those of Julia and Jeff, Bernadette and Toby spent a long time thinking about whether they should become parents. Bernadette said that having a child was something she wanted to do for a long time, but for a while she believed that her commitments to do good in the world cut her off from that possibility.
Ultimately, after agreeing with Toby that having a child was something that they could afford to do outside the bounds of what they pledged to donate, she came around to the view that she could be an effective altruist and a mother, too.
Bernadette’s story reveals that, despite all the energy that EA devotes toward stewarding the world for future generations, the movement can seem hostile to prospective parents. But true anti-natalism — the view that one should, on moral grounds, abstain from having children — is a rare position to come by in EA. Those who do hold that view may be motivated by an overriding concern for the environment or for animal welfare, or otherwise because they weigh the relative badness of suffering more heavily than the goodness of flourishing.
“The only way we actually might wrangle nature to have less suffering is if we have many generations of careful thinking and moral expansion,” Luke Freeman, who succeeded Julia as the director of Giving What We Can, said. This is a view that Will MacAskill — a philosopher at Oxford and the movement’s pop icon, if there were to be one — endorses. MacAskill writes in his recently published book on longtermism, What We Owe The Future, that having children can not only be instrumentally good — because future generations can mitigate economic and technological stagnation and contribute new ideas to society — but also good for them, so that they can experience the meaningfulness of human life. And if you are really worried about the environmental footprint of having a child, Jeff added, then you can consider adopting other environment-friendly lifestyle practices or put some of your income toward carbon offset costs for an average lifetime’s worth of emissions.
Ultimately, none of the eleven effective altruists interviewed took up philosophical anti-natalist critiques very seriously. Julia said the view was mostly “marginal,” and others eagerly offered to refute the maximalist interpretation of EA. For one thing, even if becoming a parent means that you can’t be a hundred percent effective with your time or money, it would be hard to build a social movement by asking others to deprive themselves of things they deeply value. Ben Smith, a neuroscience postdoc living in Auckland who married late last year, balked at the idea that effective altruists have to entirely set aside their own desires and needs in order to make a significant difference in the world. “I think asking people to make substantial personal sacrifices to achieve a goal probably discourages a lot of people who could otherwise be involved from participating,” he said.
***
A child cries — and doesn’t everything else seem to vanish? Few things compel such an immediate physical response. To be a parent is to agree to being tugged this way for the rest of your life.
“One of the things about parenthood,” Bernadette said, “is that it does create a special and privileged relationship with someone that is different from the generic kind of duties we might owe everyone.” She doesn’t believe one person is worth more than another, but she also recognizes that she possesses a particular relationship with her daughter that involves different intimacies, different responsibilities, and ultimately a greater kind of protective duty that other people don’t replicate in the same way.
When we spoke, Bernadette’s daughter was seven and three-quarters — it is important to get this exactly right. While Bernadette explained that she wants her daughter to understand her values and have the chance to take those on, particular tensions can arise when her daughter is doing something that she supports that also carries a certain degree of risk.
Last year, Bernadette’s daughter overheard her talking to Toby about a COVID-19 vaccine trial that was going to take place in children. She immediately interjected and said she wanted to sign up, even after Bernadette explained how the vaccine trial would involve things like blood tests and needles. She told her parents that she wanted to help out in the pandemic, and she knew that vaccines would help during the pandemic.
“She very clearly, at least to me, chose to do that voluntarily, at least partly because she thought it was a kind thing to do,” Bernadette said.
***
At the time when Jeff and Julia were starting to think about having kids, they were among the few would-be parents in the movement. Back then, the EA movement was itself very young — and many of the people drawn to it were also young themselves, right around the time when one is discovering for oneself what a meaningful life looks like.
The movement is growing up. At a GiveWell meeting last spring, Julia describes that one board member was out because his wife was in labor, another said that they were expecting, and then another, and then another — in total, about half of those in attendance. As more and more effective altruists reach child-bearing age, EA spaces have also become communities for new and expecting parents to go to each other for resources and practical advice on milk fat ratios, birthday parties, and iron supplements.
Couples like Julia and Jeff, who are heavily involved with EA and have been for a number of years, often serve as informal mentors to new and expecting parents. Both keep up public blogs with posts about parenting and effective altruism along with transparent records of their donations and contribute frequently to discussion forums and community meet-ups. Julia guesses that this sort of public engagement and outreach has been at least as impactful as the actual donations they’ve made.
And even though the couple haven’t actively tried to teach their daughters about Effective Altruism, Lily, their eight-year-old, already sounds a lot like Julia: she is very empathetic, gets ruffled easily by suffering or the idea of death, and also loves to dance. Just the other night, she refused to eat dinner with the family because meat was being served.
When asked whether parenting had substantially transformed her prior ethical beliefs the way that her altruism influenced her decision to have kids, Julia paused, considering the question. “I think there were times when I would think, before I had kids, that if there was nuclear war or something, and we would all die, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad because at least we wouldn’t be there to be sad about it. I could come up with reasons about why things wouldn’t be as terrible as they seemed. Once I had kids, it was harder to tell myself some story where it’s not all that bad. Once I had kids, it felt like no, not that. That kid? Yeah, don’t let that happen. Yeah.”