1. You may be wasting your time and money.
Helping others is a task that few meaningfully succeed in. Two primary factors are at play: supporting ineffective interventions, and neglecting to consider replaceability.
Supporting ineffective interventions
Charities vary widely in their expected impact, even for the same cause. Some interventions are intrinsically more important because they hold more potential to help others and have more potential for progress. For example, supporting a local hospital in a wealthy nation doesn’t have the potential to help others as much as developing a national healthcare system in a poor country ravaged by conflict.
Within the same cause, impact can also vary greatly. For instance, in the anti-corruption field, measures to increase foreign aid transparency have done basically nothing to decrease corruption. However, citizen-initiated community monitoring programs that track government activities have proven highly effective at decreasing corruption.
Neglecting to Consider Replaceability
Most people who want to “help others” in their careers make only a minor net positive impact at best. They choose careers that someone else would have filled had they not entered the field. For instance, if a nurse retires who is working in an area where there is no nurse shortage, she will simply be replaced by another nurse who may be an even better nurse than her. On the other hand, making a large enough donation to a charity that will allow them to hire an extra employee should increase the overall impact of that charity.
2. It is living the commandment ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
Jesus stated that the second greatest commandment, after loving God, is to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ [Matthew 22:39] He didn’t state that it was to “Love your neighbors in a way that you find the most personally rewarding.”
“Neighbor” should not be taken to mean one specific person who lives near you. “Love as yourself” means to treat others as well as you would like to be treated, including receiving help when needed. Taking “neighbor” to mean “others” collectively, it is obviously impossible to give everyone such a high degree of love and help. Therefore, in order to get as close as possible to the ideal of loving neighbors as self, we have to be methodic to maximize the good we can accomplish.
3. It’s scientific.
People believe in science for every other field or endeavor except altruism. We demand that our health care is restricted to only the most evidence-backed treatments. We demand that infrastructure meets the strictest safety codes and our vehicles are powerful and designed for excellent handling and safety.
Regretfully, our expectation to utilize science and technology to maximize our quality of life hardly even enters the picture when it comes to our efforts at helping others. As long as we did “something” to help others, we our proud of ourselves and feel that our job is done. This dissonance does not hold up to reason.
By applying the same scientific principles that have driven progress in other fields to our efforts at helping others, we can expect to see the impact of altruism increase exponentially, resulting in rapid progress in improving people’s lives.
4. It’s surprisingly rewarding.
A central principle of effective altruism is that people should help others in such a way so as to maximize impact, rather than personal satisfaction. Whether or not there is a tradeoff between the two depends in large part on the nature of the personal satisfaction.
In general, people tend to find it most satisfying to help people by working directly with them, such as with social work. Besides direct work, the next most sought after form of altruism is something concrete like helping an identifiable victim, whether it is a person or group. For instance, helping refugees escape a conflict zone. This often has a higher impact than direct work and provides a different type of personal satisfaction.
More high impact, still, are interventions that help others through prevention, possibly affecting people in the future more than today. For instance, policy work for control of various toxic substances like pesticides or lead. The latter may not necessarily give one the gross fuzzies of hand-holding roles or the concrete relational satisfaction of helping identifiable victims that are currently suffering, but it can provide profound fulfillment of a yet higher order.
5. Extremely high impact opportunities are available today that may not be around in the future.
Since few people or institutions today have a mindset to maximize their impact, there are opportunities to help others with strikingly high expected value that are all but ignored, such as pesticide bans or Community Integrity Building. With effective altruism becoming increasingly popular, it is reasonable to expect that 10 or 20 years from now, the highest potential impact interventions may be taken up, leaving lower potential opportunities for altruism.
For instance, immunization was widely considered the “best buy” in global health, the cheapest way to save lives. However, in the past 15 years, it has been taken up by major players in global health to the point where there doesn’t appear to be any more opportunities at that level of cost-effectiveness for direct treatment in global health today.
6. It lets you practice comprehensive stewardship.
The Biblical concept of stewardship refers to God giving humans the responsibility of acting on his behalf to make the world as heavenly as possible. Stewardship is thus a broad concept that is inclusive of all the actions one may take towards this end — treating others well in your interactions, helping others near and far, supporting your church and religious outreach, protecting the environment… literally anything positive you can do for the world.
Regretfully, the concept of stewardship has been used as a church fundraising tactic to the point where it is now synonymous with church fundraising. While this is one important part of stewardship, Christians should be reminded that it is the entire world that God has entrusted us to steward, not only church. By practicing effective altruism, in addition to our everyday morals and religious contributions, Christians can practice stewardship to the best of their ability. As outlined in the parable of the talents, Matthew 25:14-27, God considers stewardship to be doing the most amount of good possible, not simply any amount of good.
7. It helps you to live up to your potential as person and a Christian.
You are probably not doing anything immoral or un-Christian by not practicing effective altruism. Even the best people can improve their morals and do more to help others. However, by using a significant portion of your money or time to help others in as effective a way possible, you will be able to create much more happiness than if you just concentrated on yourself and your family. You can only accomplish so much by trying to make your family happy, but the potential for you as an individual to benefit society at large is limitless.
From a Christian perspective, advancing human potential through altruism is especially significant. We have taken up the calling to live according to Christ’s teachings, which is largely based on altruism and becoming better versions of ourselves. The Bible tells us that we will be judged according to our actions, including how much we helped others. Maximizing our potential, therefore, takes on a significance far beyond the live the life you want, or enjoy financial freedom credos commonly seen in secular personal improvement circles.
8. Lastly, and most importantly, because people matter.
Everyone deserves dignity, happiness, and opportunity. Helping others to achieve those is a most worthwhile endeavor on its own accord. Jesus taught altruism as a necessity to please God. A mature attitude towards altruism, however, does not require obligation.
Young children first learn morals by learning what behaviors they will result in reward or punishment. As they get older, they learn that moral rules, such as not stealing, are important to be followed even if no adult will find out and reward or punishment isn’t an issue. As children get older still, they come to understand why moral norms exist, and when it is okay to break them. Adolescents come to understand that morals are important because the wellbeing of others is important, not because rules should be followed for the sake of it.
So it is with Christian ethics. Understanding God’s expectations for altruism is the first step. However, a morally mature person, Christian or not, should be motivated to help others by empathy alone. Altruism motivated by self-benefit, such as the expectation of a divine reward, is an early stage of moral development. Jesus’ life of preaching and his crucifixion was not beneficial to himself. It was done purely out of empathy.