'Effective altruism' has caught on with billionaire donors – but is the world's most headline-making one on board?

• Part of such notions’ appeal may be the argument that they’re not just exciting, or profitable, but would benefit humanity as a whole.
• But what do these phrases really mean – and how does Musk’s record stack up?

The greatest good

• In simple terms, utilitarianism holds that the right action is whichever maximizes net happiness.
• Like any moral philosophy, there is a dizzying array of varieties, but utilitarians generally share a couple of important principles.
• This is often summed up by the expression “each to count for one, and none for more than one.” Finally, utilitarianism ranks potential choices based on their outcomes, usually prioritizing whichever choice would lead to the greatest value – in other words, the greatest pleasure, the least amount of pain or the most preferences fulfilled.

Utilitarianism 2.0?

• Utilitarianism shares a number of features with effective altruism.
• In addition, both utilitarianism and effective altruism are agnostic about how to achieve their goals: what matters is achieving the greatest value, not necessarily how we get there.

Long-term view

• Longtermists, including many people involved in effective altruism, believe that those obligations matter just as much as our obligations to people living today.
• In this view, issues that pose an existential risk to humanity, such as a giant asteroid striking earth, are particularly important to solve, because they threaten everyone who could ever live.
• Longtermists aim to guide humanity past these threats to ensure that future people can exist and live good lives, even in a billion years’ time.

Measuring Musk

• Musk has claimed that MacAskill’s effective altruism “is a close match for my philosophy.” But how close is it really?
• It’s hard to grade someone on their particular moral commitments, but the record seems choppy.
• To start, the original motivation for the effective altruism movement was to help the global poor as much as possible.
• Musk did not, the public record suggests, donate to the World Food Program, but he did soon give a similar amount to his own foundation – a move some critics dismissed as a tax dodge, since a core principle of effective altruism is giving only to organizations whose cost-effective impact has been rigorously studied.

Futuristic solutions

• In fact, he has suggested that negative media coverage of autonomous driving is tantamount to killing people by dissuading them from using self-driving cars.
• In this view, Tesla seems to be an innovative means to a utilitarian end.
• His Boring Company’s attempts to build tunnels under Los Angeles, meanwhile, have been criticized as expensive and ineffecient.
• Answering this question requires thinking about three core questions: Are their initiatives trying to do the most good for everyone?