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I have a different perspective here, where a) I think it's conceptually possible, b) the interesting question is whether people who say they are are really only doing the pure altruism. I first encountered the term pure altruism in two papers by James Andreoni, from 1989 and 1990. In them, Andreoni lays out a model of altruistic giving, where agents contribute to a public good both because they value it in itself, but also because they get a private benefit, a "warm glow". He has some nice academic results, like a quick mechanism for indexing one's own altruism (if one was taxed one dollar less, or a thousand, how much more would one donate?), and other observations (taxation may not produce warm glow, and as a result increasing taxation by some amount doesn't reduce donations by that amount; when parents get a warm glow from giving to their children, children are incentivized to be more "spoilt" in a technical sense).
Are people who are saying they are doing pure forms of altruism actually doing so? Often not so. There are aspects of the EA community that just don't make sense by considering its participants as pure white cherubs of innocence and selflessness, although each particular case will be uncertain and ambiguous, and although pointing the discrepancy is tricky.
One of the biggest bets Open Philanthropy—a large philanthropic foundation I'm acquainted with—is making is in its own people. 161 people, earning say 150K to 250K salaries, with overhead of 20% to 40% (?) is 30M to 52M/year—probably higher than any one of their grants in 2024 and 2025. This does not include the cost of their office, another cool 16.5M. This leads them to have a class interest: they are invested in that form of doing philanthropy—rather than anonymous part-time rotating grantmakers whose funds under management grow or shring depending on their evaluated success (like the Survival and Flourishing Fund).
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed outlines how this happened with the apparatchik in Russia. The apparatchik are in charge of the wellbeing of the Soviet Union and ended up reallocating ressources to themselves. Some of my experience is that the grantmakers just want to be sucked up to, their ideas confirmed, their egos upheld, their strategies validated, their personalities admired. But at the same time they are selected for not rocking the boat in a deep way. More mundanely, people get grants from projects that don't work out, and don't pivot, because they think that would involve losing their jobs. EA seems like a failed Schelling point to me, because it advertises itself as doing pure altruism, but the actors end up fighting for their own self-interest, sometimes in quite obvious ways.
Is pure altruism selected out? If you do something for someone such that you don't get something out of it, can you continue doing that into the future? What is the mechanism? I think this is a key question that leads to rederiving some form of non-naïve form of altruism. Or alternatively, it leads to exploiting the pure altruism until its ressources are exhausted. One of the first guys to think about this ended up killing himself.
On the other side, pure altruism can be understood essentially as a mating display because it's a costly signal of strength, and it. The underlying purpose of ideology X isn't ideology X, it's displaying that you can still be a well-adjusted person even with its iron around your neck. Some version of this is fine by me, but the problem becomes when people really believe their ideologies and do cripple themselves for real, as happened with Germany's industrial economy as a result of their terrible energy policy. This matters to me, I made a heavily real, non-fake investment in learning German. I passed the C1 exam but probably at some point did have a C2 level in German. Now I just do business with Americans instead. I also do find it aesthetically distasteful when people do something which is nominally about, e.g., helping the homeless in a way that makes the problem worse, partly because nobody taught me how to do the Straussian reading.
At the same time, how do you coordinate around public goods? One cool answer is dominant assurance contracts but in practice this hasn't been implemented much, perhaps because the people who could have jobs as grantmakers they would rather preserve, but also because part of the problem of setting up a new project is just distribution, and you have a chicken an egg problem here (you could do a dominant assurance funding model if only you had already built the distribution funnel for your thing, but that's a big part of the job).
Anyways one answer here is to try to get people in man vs. nature games because man v. man conflicts are just fucked up.
I think "pure altruism" is a strawmanning of EA in general and Open Philanthropy in particular. One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.
Of course, it's always possible OpenPhil is actually bad at their stated mission for whatever reason, including design flaws. So having different models out there, like volunteer crowdsourcing, is a good thing.
Famously, the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts. Donors can always stop donating.
Scott has addressed this kind of thing--how much altruism is mandated or what is sufficiently pure--multiple times. Numerous essay in EA Land focus on the emotional unsustainability of pure altruism.
Some level of partiality/self-interest is allowable on pragmatic grounds alone. Martyrdom should not be a standard requirement.
Some things may be straw men of EA, but IMO it has made a lot of obvious errors as a movement, stretching its reputation to the point I don't think it maintains much credibility with people who are not already bought into charity qua charity. That most of EA freaked out about the PEPFAR cancelling is a great example. Its a 22 year old program that still requires massive outside subsidies, and there is no visible point on the horizon where that will not be true. You can call it many things, but "effective" is not one of them. Thats like calling a family where, after 22 years all the kids are still in the house, barely passing classes, and with no jobs and no prospects "effective parenting."
I think one can simultaneously believe that perhaps PEPFAR should not exist forever as a U.S.-funded program and believe that the way DOGE handled it was an unnecessary travesty that caused needless suffering.
But also you seem to be conflating "effective" with "solves something permanently" when those are not always the same thing. Sometimes the latter is not possible via charity but an effective band aid of sorts is feasible.
But really I'm not the guy to defend EA because I'm not one myself on several fronts.
What was needless? PEPFAR can either be cancelled or continued. If it is continued, there is needless suffering on those providing the funds and the marginal increase in prices in paying markets for the drugs. If it is discontinued the people getting the free shit suffer. There is always suffering. The only way you are reducing suffering is if you have an EV+ outcome, like if you teach a guy how to make houses, then he makes a lot of good houses, now he gets money for making houses, other people get houses.
The issue with the house-building-teaching-charity is it isn't scalable. You have to be judicious and wise who you teach to build houses. Not only are there diminishing returns on house-builders in any economy, there also is the issue of many people being unable to learn to be good house builders. So you have to keep your program small and admissions must be selective.
The abrupt end with little chance for handover to a different org/funding source.
How something is ended can matter quite a lot. This was not done gracefully. Or constitutionally, but that's a procedural issue.
I don't think PEPFAR and home construction training programs are a worthwhile comparison.
You really, really don't have to sell me on the downsides of humanitarian interventions as a general rule.
How does this change the problem of the program being bad? PEPFAR is bad. It keeps people alive for the sole purpose of spending money to keep them alive.
Its end was at least as legitimate as its illegitimate beginning. The program is obviously unconstitutional.
Why not? These are both hypothetical subsidies to Africans. In one scenario you subsidize sexual deviancy, in the other you subsidize housing. This is a worthwhile comparison in that obviously subsidizing sexual deviancy is bad.
I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.
Not sure I'd agree with that proposition, however. I'm not much of a Christian, but I do think George W. Bush had his heart in a charitable place when he got the program going.
Congress allocating funds? Is all foreign aid unconstitutional by definition? Generally, the constitution is far more free-wheeling on doing things for foreign policy than it is for domestic policy.
And being able to build houses would also be bad? Like what on earth do you think you're arguing by comparison here?
Those are very different things, to me, personally. Like, sure, most sexual deviancy probably happens in houses, which someone had to build, but that's true of a broad range of human activities. Am I to understand that building more houses would lead to more sexual deviancy?
Like houses are not inherently bad, right? And training locals to build their own housing gets around the classic problem of just providing a good such that the local market demand is satisfied and domestic production gets hurt. Now such training may or may not be a worthwhile charitable intervention, but it's not obviously terrible by default.
You can argue that PEPFAR is not just ineffective, but bad for reasons of sexual deviancy or whatever else without talking about African housebuilding, I think.
I mean, the market puts little to no value on their lives. I am simply pointing out that there is nothing different about keeping people alive for the sake of keeping them alive in PEPFAR than any other boring charity like food stamps or Medicaid. I suppose these people kept alive can also threaten to immigrate, which is a bad thing. So yeah. Why is this "effective?"
Foreign aid is arguably unconstitutional, but the inception of PEPFAR was not approved by Congress. They may arguably have adopted it later on, but the inception was just GWB going rogue.
No the point of the comparison is that my house building program IS actually good and effective, so long as you keep it small in scope. You scout 10 potentially talented homebuilders and spend time, money, and resources training them. Then they go out and make their world better by building homes. PEPFAR does nothing of the sort. It just lets anyone who contracted a deadly STD keep on living with no scrutiny as to whether they can or will make the world better by their continued existence, and past performance indicates not so.
I was posing a hypothetical charitable educational program that had the potential for being effective, not just a self licking ice cream cone.
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How much of the lives of the Americans paying are you willing to sacrifice to allow Africans to have happy fun times without consequences?
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