Doing One’s Part: An Anthropological Interrogation of Effective Altruism and Why We Help

By Nadia Pritta Wibisono

There was cinnamon in the stew.

There was cinnamon in the air, too; dust suspended after it had been freshly ground from whole sticks, not the stale powdered kind kept in the back of the spice rack. The kitchen ran with a busy hum: people chopping vegetables with varying levels of confidence, someone wiping down a counter that would immediately be dirtied again, and I was dicing my second crate of pears for this evening’s crumble, observing it all while making small talk with a fellow dicer. The kitchen leader had his arms crossed as he looked at the whiteboard detailing today’s menu, which best utilised the donated ingredients in the kitchen. 

The cinnamon felt almost excessive. It caught me off guard. Later, the volunteer in charge of the stew told me it was part of her family’s recipe. A small detail, offered without ceremony, folded into a meal that would be served to people who had nowhere else to be that evening.

London has more than 150 organisations working on homelessness. That number alone should tell you something. Not just about the scale of the problem, but about its stubbornness. The issue of homelessness is a dense, tangled knot of housing shortages, mental health crises, migration policy, labour precarity, addiction, austerity, and bureaucratic exhaustion. In policy circles, it’s often called a “wicked problem”—a term that manages to sound both technical and defeated.

Moving to London meant confronting the issue and visibility of homelessness every day. I started volunteering with a few organisations: soup kitchens, temporary shelters, and meal services. Sometimes it feels good in the way that helping often does, but sometimes it feels bleak. When I go home, feeling both satisfied and exhausted, the questions come:

Am I doing this because it helps, or because it helps me feel better about myself? Am I putting a band-aid on a gaping wound that requires surgery? Would my time be better spent elsewhere? Should I be doing something more aligned with my skills, or with causes that are said to have greater impact (and what does that even mean)?

I’ve been circling these questions for most of my life. When I was fifteen, I started my school’s first volunteer house-building project. After fundraising enough money for two houses, a handful of high school students spent a day under the blistering tropical heat at a construction site. We learnt to bend wires, mix and pour cement to build the foundation, which took hours and left a permanent scar still visible on my left arm. I remember watching the professional construction workers who taught us, finishing in hours what we struggled to approximate in a day. At the time, the logic seemed obvious to me: why would a group of teenagers do work that could be done faster, better, and definitely safer by trained construction workers instead? Wouldn’t it be more efficient for us to focus on fundraising and let the professionals do the job?

Years later, I learnt that this approach had a name: Effective Altruism. It has a simple premise: given limited resources, how can we do the most good? Effective Altruism draws on a utilitarian moral philosophy that leans heavily on evidence, measurement, and comparison. The appeal is obvious. Why wouldn’t we want to help out as many people as possible and make our efforts worthwhile? Effective Altruism resists vague goodness. It demands ROI-optimised rigour (Return of Investment), encourages impartiality, and urges us to care about suffering wherever it occurs, not just where it’s most visible or emotionally salient. It advocates for what they call “long-termism”, pushing us to zoom out of our human lifetimes and consider the generations yet to come.

Some of the causes championed by Effective Altruists are undeniably important. People inspired by Effective Altruism have referenced GiveWell’s research, for example, and donated to its recommended charities, such as the Against Malaria Foundation, which has distributed over 200 million insecticide-treated bednets. They reported that collectively, their efforts have “saved 159,000 lives”. Other priority causes they’ve calculated as important include AI safety, animal welfare, and pandemic prevention; causes we can all agree are important.

What about homelessness then?

If reducing suffering is the goal, then surely homelessness should be a priority. Living on the streets shortens lives. It damages health, dignity, and social belonging. It’s visible, immediate, and deeply human. And yet, within Effective Altruist frameworks, homelessness is not explicitly called a priority. The reasoning is usually framed in terms of cost-effectiveness. Homelessness is a complex, hard-to-evaluate social issue, and the same money spent elsewhere could do far more good. It’s altruism arbitrage: your £5 would go further in Lagos or La Paz than in London. So is working on homelessness, by Effective Altruist standards, ineffective?

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I turn to anthropology to interrogate some of the principles of Effective Altruism.

I was drawn to Effective Altruism’s rigour to soothe myself from the frustration of seeing all the feel-good activism that treated beneficiaries as photo props. “Numbers don’t lie,” we always hear. The aura of neutral certainty appealed to me, but Sally Engle Merry (2011) argues that indicators conceal who gets to define them, use them, and for what purposes: “The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise.” The numbers have names, and the numbers have faces.

Effective Altruism’s long-termism often carries an implicit faith in our ability to model the future: that with enough data, foresight, and analytical clarity, we can identify the right levers and pull them in time. In today’s short-termist world, thinking about the seven generations to come feels radical. In The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric shares the same long-termist belief, but introduces the notion of “deep-time humility”. Perhaps, by placing human history against the vast scale of deep time, it reminds us how provisional our knowledge really is, and how easily urgency can harden into certainty. Caring for the long-term is not only a question of choosing the right interventions, but of tempering confidence with restraint and avoiding “solutionism” as a default posture.

We are talking about value: what counts, and who gets to count it. David Graeber (2002) asked. He wrote about the “false coin” where market principles (rational, self-interested calculation) and their supposed opposites (family values, altruism, devotion) are presented as distinct but are, in fact, two sides of the same flawed system. Maybe I find Effective Altruism fascinating because, far from opposite sides of a coin, it welds market principles and altruism into one: a laminated moral economy rather than a coherent alloy.

Effective Altruism tends to treat value as something that can be abstracted from context, compared across causes, and optimised. Anthropology is more suspicious of such abstraction. Value, according to Graeber, “is the way actions become meaningful to the actors by being placed in some larger social whole, real or imagined’’. True value is deeply embedded in the social process itself, in the ongoing creation of human society, meaning, and relationships, rather than in detached, objectified, or individualistic notions perpetuated by dominant ideologies.

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So then, why do we help?

The people I’ve met while volunteering aren’t naïve. They are clear-eyed about the limits of what they’re doing. Unlike Crisis UK’s “together we will end homelessness” slogan, none of the volunteers genuinely believes that they are going to end homelessness. Many of them regularly question whether their efforts matter, yet they do it anyway. Why?

A recurring conversation among volunteers is the paralysing moral overload of figuring out what to do when coming across a homeless person in the street. Sometimes buying a meal deal for someone sitting out in the cold or picking up a volunteering shift could be enough to make them feel like they have done their part, without fully addressing the issue.

“Survivor’s guilt” is a common phrase I hear. They say that life feels like the luck of the draw, that they were born lucky to be in a family that could afford school and housing, or lived in a city with a network of support.

“If I suddenly lose my job, I could just move back in with my parents. Relatives or even friends could give me some sort of support, but they don’t have anyone. The people back home, far, far away, are relying on them,” one volunteer shared.

Being born lucky also means they are mere inches from the chance of homelessness. “It’s like there is an invisible barrier separating the two worlds: the housed and the homeless,” someone brought up as we were chopping vegetables. The guilt is insurmountable: helping, penetrating that barrier, even when it never feels like enough, feels better than remaining paralysed by it.

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Volunteering is also an act of reweaving the frayed social fabric of the city. In my conversation with a retired man who has volunteered at the shelter for eight years in a row, what initially seemed like a tangent gradually revealed something deeper.

“Developed places like London have become more affluent. The poor come up, ‘make it’, and forget about their past. Like my 86-year-old cousin Dot [who lives far away from the city], who has sons that don’t come back and help.” His voice slowed as he recalled these moments.

“I guess I was the same, too. When I was young, my aunty kept calling. I just left it to ring. What does that say about me? I regret not helping my aunty. She passed now…” He paused and looked into the distance.

“Maybe that’s why I volunteer.” Volunteering, for him, appeared to be a form of repentance, a way of being there for others now, in the face of earlier absences after moving to the city.

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During meal service, we ladle stews into their bowls, give extra servings, and ask if they would like cream with their crumble. When it was time for us to close, I heard a group of patrons who seemed to have just met for the first time gather and call the volunteer leader to joke about giving “compliments to the chef” like they were in a fine dining establishment.

I asked why she continued to volunteer. She stated simply, “My country’s migration policies and border control have impacted the people we see today, and the people we probably would never see. Doing this is my duty as a British citizen to make up for it. I’m just doing my part.”

She then loaded the van with empty gastros to return to the kitchen, not to rest, but to prepare for the next day.

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These motivations look messy from an optimisation standpoint. They are inconsistent. They are emotional. They are deeply personal. And yet, they are not trivial. They reflect an understanding of ethics not as a problem to be solved once and for all, but as something lived, negotiated, and revisited over time.

Anthropologists like Veena Das and Michael Lambek (2010) sometimes refer to this as ordinary ethics: the ways people make moral judgements in the course of everyday life, without grand theories or guarantees. Ordinary ethics doesn’t promise maximum impact. It doesn’t pretend to be pure. It operates in conditions of uncertainty and constraint. It accepts that moral life often involves doing what one can, rather than what would be ideal.

This doesn’t mean abandoning effectiveness. It means recognising that not all forms of value are legible at scale. Care, especially relational care, does not always aggregate neatly. Its effects are diffuse. They show up in moments of recognition, in the maintenance of dignity, in the quiet refusal to let someone be reduced to a problem to be managed.

There is a tendency, in debates about helping, to frame things as either/or. Either you care about effectiveness, or you indulge in feel-good gestures. Either you think globally, or you’re trapped in parochial concern. But these binaries flatten moral life. They obscure the fact that different value systems can coexist, sometimes uneasily, without one invalidating the other.

Effective Altruism has pushed important conversations forward. It has forced many of us to confront the limits of intuition and the dangers of sentimentalism. But anthropology reminds us that value is not only about outcomes. It is also about relationships. About presence. About the quiet insistence that care still belongs here—sometimes no more elaborate than cinnamon in a pot of stew.

References

Crisis. (2019). Ending homelessness: Together we will end homelessness. Crisis. https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/

Das, V. (2012). Ordinary Ethics. A Companion to Moral Anthropology, 133–149. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118290620.ch8

Effective Altruism. (2022). Introduction to Effective Altruism | Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism

Graeber, D. (2001). Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value. Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299064

Homeless Link. (2023). 2023 London Atlas of Homelessness Services Launched. Homeless Link. https://homeless.org.uk/news/2023-london-atlas-of-homelessness-services-launched/

Krznaric, R. (2020). The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. Wh Allen, Penguin Random House.

Lambek, M. (2010). Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. Fordham University Press; JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x07p9

Merry, S. E. (2011). Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance. Current Anthropology, 52(S3), S83–S95. https://doi.org/10.1086/657241