The problem with doing the most good

Why the calculation sounds right and goes wrong

There is an ethical idea that sounds almost impossible to argue with: you should try to do the most good you can do.

The most good. For the most people. Measured carefully, allocated efficiently, optimized relentlessly. Put your resources — your money, your career, your life — toward whatever produces the biggest measurable improvement in the world.

This is effective altruism in a sentence. The logic is hard to fault. If you’re going to give, give where it does the most. If one charity saves ten times more lives per dollar than another, choose the effective one.

The math checks out. It always checks out. That’s not the problem.

The calculation

The core idea is utilitarian. Greatest good for the greatest number. This isn’t new — it’s been around since the 1800s. What effective altruism adds is rigor. Don’t just aim for the greatest good. Measure it. Compare interventions. Be honest about what works and what doesn’t.

This is genuinely useful. A lot of charity is performative. People give to whatever makes them feel good, not to whatever helps. Effective altruism pushes back on that, and it should.

But something breaks the moment you apply “greatest good for the greatest number” as a rigid rule rather than a useful guideline.

The problem with bean counting

If there are ten people and sacrificing one of them saves the other nine, the math says do it. Nine is more than one.

Most people feel immediately that something is wrong with this. And they’re right. But what’s wrong isn’t the math — nine IS more than one. What’s wrong is that the calculation has been mistaken for the whole of ethics.

“Greatest good for the greatest number” is a useful tool for evaluating situations. It helps you think about impact, scope, and consequences. But when the calculation becomes the ethics instead of informing them, you end up justifying things that violate your own sense of what’s right.

This isn’t hypothetical. Every system that has ever used “the greater good” to justify crushing individuals has used this exact logic. Religious orders have used it to demand total sacrifice from members. Revolutionary movements have used it to justify purges. Tech-adjacent philanthropists have used it to rationalize fraud on a historic scale, because the “expected value” of their future donations outweighed the harm. The reasoning always sounds the same: your personal needs don’t matter because the mission is bigger than you are. Your sleep, your family, your autonomy — these are small things compared to the cause.

And the people enforcing this always believe they’re right. That’s what makes it dangerous. The math does check out. The problem is that the math is missing something.

What the math is missing

The calculation leaves out scope.

You don’t exist on one dimension. You exist across several spheres simultaneously. Your physical survival. Your family and intimate relationships. The groups you belong to. Humanity as a whole. All living things. The physical world itself. And — whether you call it spiritual, creative, or something else — there’s a dimension of existence that has nothing to do with material survival and everything to do with meaning, purpose, or consciousness.

These aren’t abstractions. When your body is falling apart, it affects your relationships. When your relationships are in chaos, it affects your ability to function in groups. When the groups you belong to are toxic, it grinds down your sense of yourself. They’re all connected. They’re all real. They’re all happening at once.

Here’s the part that sounds counterintuitive: you can’t treat any one of these spheres as if the others don’t matter.

Surely the survival of all humanity matters more than your personal comfort. In a crude calculation, yes. But in practice, solutions that injure one sphere to benefit another create chaos. They don’t produce the stable, lasting good that the calculation promised. The system rots from the inside.

I’ve watched this play out. Smart, idealistic people in their twenties grinding themselves into the ground for impact-focused organizations. Not sleeping. Not seeing their families. Calling it “cost-effective” because their labor was going toward high-value causes. Within two years, most of them were burned out, depressed, or gone. The organization kept churning through people because the mission was more important than any individual. The math said so.

A person who destroys their health and family for a cause eventually burns out and produces nothing. An organization that grinds through people for the mission eventually collapses or becomes something ugly. A philosophy that demands you sacrifice yourself for the aggregate creates guilt, resentment, and eventually the opposite of what it intended.

The optimum solution benefits as many spheres as possible without seriously injuring any of them. This is different from maximizing one at the expense of others. The math isn’t wrong — the scope of the math is too narrow.

The measurement problem

Effective altruism runs on measurement. Lives saved. Dollars per outcome. QALYs. DALYs. Numbers.

To be fair, thoughtful people within the movement know that not everything fits in a spreadsheet. They talk about radical uncertainty, moral circle expansion, the limits of quantification. They’re not idiots and they’re not unaware of the problem.

But in practice, when you build a culture and funding ecosystem around measurable impact, the unmeasurable gets systematically sidelined. It has to. The machinery runs on numbers, and things without numbers don’t get funded, don’t get prioritized, don’t get taken seriously. The stated philosophy may include nuance. The incentive structure doesn’t.

Can you measure the value of someone’s spiritual growth? Can you measure what it’s worth for a person to understand themselves — to go from being run by their conditioning to seeing it clearly and choosing differently? Can you measure the effect of wisdom passed from one person to another, rippling outward through years of choices and conversations?

You can’t. And so it gets underweighted. Or treated as a luxury — something you earn after the “real” problems are solved.

But ask anyone who’s done it — who’s gone from being a puppet of their own patterns to someone who can see them and choose — whether that transformation was valuable. They won’t hesitate.

The things that change people at the deepest level are exactly the things that resist measurement. That doesn’t make them less real. It makes the measurement tools insufficient.

Survival is not just “not dying”

This is the one that matters most.

Effective altruism is oriented away from something. Reduce suffering. Prevent death. Eliminate disease. Noble goals, every one. But the ceiling of this orientation is zero. If you solved every problem effective altruism cares about, you’d have a world where nothing bad is happening. No malaria, no extreme poverty, no existential risk.

That is not the same as a world where something good is happening.

The absence of suffering is not the presence of life.

Survival isn’t just not dying. That’s the floor. Below zero, you’re fighting to stay alive. Zero is where nothing is threatening you. But above zero is where life happens — growth, creation, understanding, capacity, aliveness.

Most modern philanthropy and policy frameworks stop at zero. They’re optimized for moving from negative ten to zero — preventing harm, reducing suffering. And that matters. But nobody has a framework for zero to positive ten.

A doctor who cures your illness brings you to zero. A teacher who shows you something true about yourself takes you above it. Both matter. But only one of them has an answer to the question of what we do once nothing’s broken.

If your entire ethical system is about moving away from pain, you have no framework for moving toward anything. You’re running from suffering rather than running toward something worth running toward. A person or a culture oriented purely away from pain eventually stagnates, because there’s no direction built in. Just avoidance.

The question isn’t just “how do we reduce suffering?” It’s “what does it look like for a life to go well?” That’s a much bigger question — one that involves creation, growth, connection, purpose, and the kind of understanding that only comes from doing the work on yourself.

The decay pattern

Here’s the thing that keeps showing up across history, in religions, revolutions, companies, and now in the effective altruism movement.

Someone starts with a genuine ethical impulse. They want to do good. They see suffering and want to reduce it. They develop a framework — a calculation, a set of principles, a methodology for maximizing impact.

At first, the framework is a tool. It helps them think clearly about how to help. It sharpens their judgment.

Then the framework becomes a code. Instead of informing judgment, it replaces it. People stop asking “what feels right here?” and start asking “what does the calculation say?” The difference is subtle but it matters.

Then the code gets imposed on others. If you’re not following the calculation, you’re doing it wrong. You’re wasting resources. You’re being selfish. The guilt machinery starts running. The 22-year-old who feels bad about buying coffee because that $4 could have bought a malaria net — that guilt isn’t a bug. It’s the system working as designed.

Then people who don’t comply get pushed out or pushed down. The mission is too important for individual concerns. Your needs are small compared to the cause. You become a resource to be allocated, not a person to be respected.

This is how well-intentioned ethical systems become their opposite. Not because the starting impulse was wrong, but because the calculation replaced the judgment. The map replaced the territory. And anybody who pointed out that the map was incomplete got told they just weren’t committed enough.

Any ethical framework — including whatever alternative you build — is vulnerable to this pattern. The only protection is building in a principle that the framework itself cannot override: the person doing the evaluating matters as much as the thing being evaluated. You are not a resource. You are one of the spheres.

What works instead

The answer isn’t to abandon the calculation. “Greatest good across the widest scope” is useful for thinking about consequences and priorities. The problem isn’t the idea. The problem is treating it as the whole of ethics rather than one tool among several.

A complete ethical framework accounts for all the spheres of your existence, not just the ones you can put in a spreadsheet. It protects individuals from being ground up by aggregate calculations — not as a nice-to-have, but as a structural requirement. It points toward something. Growth, creation, understanding. Not just away from suffering.

And most importantly, it trusts you to judge. The goal isn’t to follow a code. The goal is to develop the capacity to evaluate situations clearly and act well, moment by moment, with full awareness of the consequences across every sphere of your existence.

The math is a tool. When the tool starts running you instead of you running the tool, something has gone wrong.

Look at your own life. Are your choices being made from genuine ethical judgment — your own sense of what’s right, informed by understanding and experience? Or are they being driven by obligation, guilt, or someone else’s calculation of what you should be doing?

Big difference.