Humankind by Rutger Bregman is one of my favourite books. Moral Ambition, also by Rutger Bregman, is not.
Humankind does an amazing job showing how humans across history have defaulted to cooperation and kindness. Bregman argues that we thrived not despite our nature, but because of it. At the time, I didn’t realise how much I needed to hear this hopeful perspective. As someone raised Christian, I’d internalised the belief that humans are inherently sinful and only external guardrails stop us being horrible to each other.
In Moral Ambition, Bregman publicly embraces Effective Altruism (EA), a movement rooted in utilitarian philosophy. It takes the principle of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ and applies it to the question of how individuals can do the most good with their lives.
Bregman encourages readers to consider trying to maximise their positive impact on the world, highlighting inspiring examples like Rob Mather, founder of the Against Malaria Foundation. According to Bregman, you too could be like Rob, if you just quit your corporate job, join a charity incubator and work with other budding altruists to pinpoint the world’s most neglected problems, even if you don’t initially care about them.
But if you read Moral Ambition closely, that's not Rob’s story. Rob didn’t leave consulting because he thought about it rationally and realised he’d have more impact fighting malaria. He quit because he watched a documentary about a two-year-old girl called Terri who’d suffered major burns in a fire, and felt moved to do something. As he put it, “I’m not an emotional person, but my wife and I already had two small children by then, and I'm not ashamed to say tears streamed down my cheeks for the entire hour.” Through organising Swim for Terri, Rob discovered how good it felt helping others. The analysis about what more he could do came after.
This is where I diverge from the effective altruists. I’m more inclined towards enlightened selfishness, an idea I came across in another book, Question 7 by Richard Flanagan. In describing his father’s reflections on the beauty of Australian mateship in the trenches, he says this:
“The Australians, he told us, held together as one, the officers being compelled to pool their stipend to buy drugs and food for the sick on the black market, and working in the camp hospital and kitchen to help the group. Together they survived – or at least far more of them than the English… When someone was down you helped, not out of altruism, but an enlightened selfishness: this way we all have a chance… Mateship wasn’t a code of friendship. It was a code of survivors. It demanded you help those who are not your friends but who are your mates… Is that a convict idea? Is it an Indigenous idea? Is it both things merged? It’s not a European or an American idea. It is, though, a deeply old, serious idea of humanity.”
Enlightened selfishness starts by recognising we’re all far more connected than it appears on the surface. Whether we choose to ignore it or not, the trenches of human existence extend far beyond tribal and national borders. That was Peter Singer’s powerful insight which inspired the effective altruist movement. If we see a child drowning in a pond, we don’t wait for someone else to jump in; we instinctively try to help. He points out that in today’s global system, there are kids ‘drowning’ all over the world and we have a responsibility to help them.
But effective altruists have taken the wrong lesson from Singer. Rather than motivating us to act by thinking more about kids in poverty, his truly transformational work was getting us to feel connected to their suffering. We jump into the water not because we think about it and decide to act, but because we’ve developed an impulse to care. And caring feels good.
This makes effective altruists uncomfortable. When it comes to massive global challenges, they worry that feelings are too fuzzy, and so the only way to figure out what’s right is thoughtful, data-driven analysis.
To help them, Bregman presents a model that makes scaling morality seem achievable. He argues that moral progress starts when “zeros” (people who ignore conventional morality and do what they know is right), convince “ones” (people who only need a little encouragement), who then convince “twos”, and this is what catalyses big moral shifts. It’s a great reminder that our small, courageous actions can have big consequences. But his framework only highlights positive “zeros”. It could also be used to describe other figures who’ve disregarded societal norms like Sam Bankman-Fried, Trump and Hitler.
The problem isn’t that our moral intuitions break down at scale. The problem is they struggle with complexity. Moral decisions, big and small, can be hard. There’s never enough time to reason through every dilemma from first principles, so we rely on moral heuristics, simple guiding principles like ‘the ends rarely justify unethical means’. But heuristics don’t deal well with tricky, unfamiliar situations. For those really important decisions, our thinking and feeling both intensify and the challenge becomes aligning our rational 'rider' and emotional 'elephant'.
That’s what I experienced working at Goldman Sachs. Early effective altruist logic was to take a job in finance and donate as much of your income as you could. To my brain, that had merit. But in my body, working on Wall St never felt right. Nobody I worked with was driven by a passion for investment banking, just status anxiety. I was so stressed when I got home at 1am, I’d need to walk around Brooklyn for an hour to calm my nervous system down before I could sleep.
In contrast, when I donated to GiveWell, a charity optimised to give to the most effective global causes, I felt nothing. Trying to conjure up empathy for abstract recipients made me feel detached from reality. EAs criticise programs like Sponsor a Child for wasting too much on overheads. Yet I’ve always found that frustrating, because after heart-numbing effort trying to imagine a real kid being saved by my signing bonus, I know it takes a lot of work getting people to genuinely feel like their moral circle is expanding.
Effective altruism has been awesome for neurodiverse people who grew up being told their brains were weird, thinking and feeling things in non-typical ways that weren’t validated or accepted by those around them. But the most valuable thing the movement offers them isn’t clearer thinking – it’s psychological safety. By finding other minds that think like theirs, effective altruists get community, and through community, they work their way back to being able to feel their feelings again.
But this strength is also its weakness. Effective altruism is gaining influence among wealthy donors, think tanks and corporate elites, who like me, admire their intellectual rigour and commitment to live according to their principles. But it will never succeed as a movement while it remains emotionally disconnected from broader human experience.
One night, while working for an EA-affiliated research institute, I went to dinner with my colleagues. In a small townhouse, we sat down to share a meal together; six guys drinking cold Huel (human-fuel) in a dimly-lit room. I respected their willingness to sacrifice their own happiness for people and animals they’d never meet. But I also remember feeling that something vitally human was missing and having a sense this would never catch on.
I’m now convinced the way forward is for people to rediscover that a moral life is the good life. Caring about people beyond our family, community and country is hard. Even caring about the people closest to us is hard – I certainly haven’t always treated the people around me as well as they deserve. Sometimes reflecting on my biggest moral mistakes makes me want to turn off my feelings and become a robot. But facing that emotional discomfort head-on and embracing the complexity within us is the only way to grow as a person.
Rob Mather achieved remarkable things, but what if he’d only helped Terri? Would that have been enough for Rutger Bregman? What if my biggest moral achievement is simply to reconnect with my feelings, so I can move with kindness through the world?
Enlightened selfishness – becoming deeply aware of our connection to all people and life – isn’t everything, but it’s a healthier foundation than detached analytical altruism. Moral ambition shouldn’t be measured by effective outcomes. It should be measured by our courage to deeply connect to our emotions, and as we find better ways to connect with others, allowing it, but not forcing it, to explode out from there. Living a moral life isn’t just the right thing to do – it can also feel really, really good.
I was just thinking about this the other day