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Thanks for your thoughts on this.

I would note that Moral Ambition did mention catastrophic risk, specifically mentioning risks from Artificial General Intelligence, as a potentially promising area for morally ambitious people to make an impact.

Also, work on systemic change is consistent with core EA principles (doing the most good with the resources we can). Some areas could be a strong speculative bet, similar to the reasoning supporting some projects associated with longtermism.

I think there's a very high degree of complementarity and compatibility with core EA philosophy, even if actual SMA conclusions in terms of cause areas differ in some ways from the cause areas EA tends to focus on. I think, however, core EA philosophy is about the fundamental principles, not the downstream cause areas, and if different people's epistemologies proceeding from those principles lead them different places than where the current EA community is, I don't think they are any less EAs.

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The EA's guide to Moral Ambition

by OGTutzauer🔸

Jun 37 min read 13

85

Cause prioritizationCommunityPhilosophySchool for Moral AmbitionMoral philosophyResearch summaryValue of movement growth

Frontpage

Epistemic status: An email thread with a representative for Moral Ambition, consumption of Rutger Bregman's and Moral Ambition's book and social media. A year of leading my local EA group, deep understanding of EA ideas.

Introduction

In early 2025, historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman published his book Moral Ambition, urging readers to "stop wasting talent and start making a difference." The book serves as a compliment and guide to the movement he's founded ^[1] called The School for Moral Ambition (SMA). In less than a year, they've grown to more than 9000 members and over 1000 people have completed their Circles Program, which corresponds to an intro fellowship.

Is this just EA with the serial numbers filed off? Or the successor to our stumbling community? To make sense of this new movement and its relationship to EA, I've corresponded with Marijn Scheltens who works as Community Manager at SMA. Her response is summarized here, meant to guide people with an EA background.

Comparison of Principles

To start, we can compare what the two movements consider to be their guides in attempts to do good.

CEA lists four Core EA principles

Scope Sensitivity
Impartiality
Scout Mindset
Tradeoffs

SMA lists 7 founding principles

Action
Impact
Expansion of moral circles
Open Mindedness
Radical Kindness
Enthusiasm
Perseverance

To my eye, three of the core EA principles map onto at least one SMA founding principle. The exception is Tradeoffs, which shows a focus in SMA on strong action today as opposed to carefully deliberated and evaluated action proposed in EA. ^[2] I'd prefer for Collaborative Spirit to also be part of CEA's core principles, and if it were then that'd also map onto SMA's idea of Radical Kindness.

My impression is that part of EA's pitch has been that you don't have to do radical things to do radical amounts of good. 10% of your income is something you can survive without, but others will literally die without that money. Over time we've shifted to be a more demanding community, taking us closer to SMA's explicit ideas of Perseverance and Action.

Similarities

Some chapters in the book Moral Ambition have names like

"No, you're not fine just the way you are"
"Learn to weep over spreadsheets"
"Expand your moral circle"

The world sucks, we should fix it

In our intro talk at EA Lund, we have a slide that looks like this:

Westeuropeiamemes world on fire Memes & GIFs - Imgflip

SMA agrees, and acknowledges that this simply cannot stand. We don't want the world to be like this, so we should take strong action to fix it. In fact, if I Google "quit your bullshit job," the fourth result is Rutger Bregman's article in The Guardian where he promotes Moral Ambition. What he means is that traditional ideas of prestige should be discarded in favor of considering what's actually valuable for society.

Cause Prioritization

The ITN framework has made it into SMA, but they talk about problems being Sizable, Solvable and Sorely Neglected - an SSS framework. Marijn reported that this has been "incredibly useful for identifying impactful causes." So when deciding which problems to solve, one core tool is shared between EA and SMA.

Cause Areas

In concrete terms, the protein transition has become one of the biggest cause areas within SMA. Another is combating the tobacco industry, which has been talked (a little) about in EA as well. In fact, I personally think that this is one of the key causes where SMAs and EAs can and should collaborate more.

Differences

I'll list these in descending order by how much I agree about them being core differences.

Criticism Culture

EA is about evaluating causes and actions to do the most good. This is part of why we're so focused on receiving/seeking feedback and criticism - we want to improve! Part of the project is questioning if what we're doing is working, how to evaluate that and how to increase cost-effectiveness.

This varies locally, my impression is that it's more common in the Bay Area or Oxford. Scandinavian EAs, for example, are often content doing the 5th most impactul thing they could be doing, celebrating the gains they've made by not just doing some random thing. This is highly anecdotal.

SMA is more similar to the second type of EAs, focusing more on emotional intelligence, inclusivity and showing support for each other's projects. This is the principle of Radical Kindness, and Marijn explicitly contrasts it to EA's "hyper-rationalist, longtermist vibe."

Impact

SMA evaluates impact differently from EA. Since Impact one of their founding principles, I'll let that text speak for itself.

We don’t aim for change alone, but for truly transformative impact. We know we must prioritize, and we choose to focus on the world’s biggest, most neglected, yet fixable problems.
At the same time, we’re wary of the measurability bias because not everything that counts can be counted. In cases that aren’t quantifiable, we do our best to construct a robust theory of change.

While measurability has been discussed, critiqued and celebrated in EA, most EAs would advocate doing things with outcomes you can clearly notice. EAs rarely tolerate their efforts wasted on things with low EV, and prefer being sure that they're achieving the original goal of doing as much good as possible.

SMA is less rigorous. A clear example is Systemic Change, where most EAs have simply deemed it too intractable and/or immeasurable to be relevant. (I did this myself recently when I spoke to a new member of our group who was excited about educational reform in Europe - instead I recommended he check out J-PAL's work on the topic.) SMA considers this an advantage as it frees their hands to focus on things that "might seem less straightforward but are still massively important."

This is the difference I'm most worried about personally. First off, I think the we should focus on less straightforward but potentially important things if they have high EV, which doesn't seem to be the way SMA makes these calls. Secondly, given the landscape of interventions being so heavy-tailed, there's a high risk of failing to have an impact if you're not measuring the effect of your actions.

SMA still uses the ITN framwork (SSS framework) and care about having an impact. Where EA says we should err on the side of quantifying too much, SMA would say we should err on the side of trusting good qualitative arguments.

Motivations

Many had their first experiences in EA be about learning how truly awful and unjust the world is, and then concluding that we should act more strongly based on that. SMA tries to emphasize this aspect less, and more the aspect of how great we can make the world, building enthusiasm and vision.

I don't think this is as big a differences as some (especially SMA) may think. I don't see that many community builders in EA put emphasis on guilt or moral obligations, because they don't need to. Everyone and their grandma already wants to improve the world. If you're a community builder finding this guilt-based outreach to work well, feel free to reach out to me for a chat, I'd love to understand more about it.

I do concede that some parts of the traditional intro fellowship syllabus push this idea. I also observe that EA is more philosophically inclined, so I understand where the impulse to assume EAs are guilt-driven comes from.

Ethics

EA and SMA are both explicitly consequentialist. What matters most is the outcomes of our actions, rather than why we do them or how we do them. However, EA has a bigger focus on utilitarianism - making us discuss things like population ethics or which animals' welfare ranges we should figure out first. This shows most strongly in SMA not being as hype about longtermism, not fazed by the (potentially literally) astronomical amount of people in the future. Instead, they consider things like fairness significantly, for example having a fellowship focused on taxing billionaires.

Personal thoughts

Below are some thoughts I personally have about this new movement and what it means for our movement and the world at large.

Novelty

When I first discussed thoughts on SMA with others in EA, we recognized that novelty can be a strength. I don't think many of the 9000 members of SMA are EAs, which means the world now has more do-gooders! However, if I were strict about impact evaluation, I would argue that they only count as ~90 EAs unless they do their cause prioritisation homework and end up on the fat tail of impact.

Baggage

Being detached from EA is also nice reputationally. It means SMA can take new risks, like being much more political with things like lobbying. If this fails, EA won't be to blame.

Conversely, those who were put off by earlier corrupt EAs like SBF now get a chance to improve the world without associating with EA. Likewise for those who've been put off by rationalist vibes or criticism culture discussed above.

Should you join SMA?

It depends on what you like about EA. When I first found EA, it was the only movement of its kind. Now there's a spiritual sibling.

If you want more philosophy, more prioritization & analysis, more effectiveness & rationalism, more longtermism & x-risk, then I think you should lean further into EA.

If you want more focus on altruism, warmth, "just doing something", pluralism, mainstream ideas, optimism, or novelty, then I think you should join SMA.

Personally, I'll keep building the effective altruism community because it's probably more impactful on the margin, but I'll start hanging around SMA spaces when I get the chance because they seem fun and inspiring. That I was already aiming to work on one of their cause areas (protein transition) is a bonus.

Collaboration

With literal thousands of new people trying to improve the world, if all goes right there should be a lot of new projects popping up to address pressing issues. I expect the coming months to be extraordinarily exciting for anyone doing work adjacent to or in one of SMA's core cause areas, and recommend that you keep your ear to the ground for ways in which you can aid them. This is also a good time for people to go back and check out how to collaborate effectively and consider things like networking with others in mind.

Acknowledgements

Marijn Scheltens for answering with great honesty and clarity.
Toby Tremlett from The EA Forum Team, Arthur Zeuner and Bjarke Almer Frederiksen for proof-reading and feedback.

^{^}
Bregman has since stepped down from the board to avoid conflict of interest since he's giving away all the proceeds from his book to the movement.
^{^}
The 80000 Hours career guide says: “Even if you only improve your impact by 1% as a result of spending 100 hours carefully thinking through your career, that’s equivalent to spending 800 hours on direct work — several months of full-time effort.”

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Joris 🔸Jun 415

Thanks for writing this!

I wanted to add some personal observations, from interacting with a bunch of people around the School in person, attending some SMA events, and following them quite closely online:

Many founders / early joiners of the organization are very sympathetic to EA ideas, and think hard about how to have the most impact
Those who have entered something like the 'core' group more recently (e.g. fellows, new employees) seem to catch on to some key ideas, but not others. Specifically, I was surprised how much they care about donating effectively, but don't seem to have thought much about cause prioritization
And finally, 'moral ambition' has entered mainstream discourse, but in return has become a bit of a watered-down catchphrase. I've heard it used to refer to vaguely do-goody things - nothing about the ITN/SSS framework, for example

I also think James from EA Netherlands left some useful thoughts here

NickLaingJun 3*15

"When I first found EA, it was the only movement of its kind. Now there's a spiritual sibling.'

I like the "spiritual sibling" framing, I think it captures all in a could of words the relationship you've outlined.

One thing I find interesting is that SMA seems more openly critical (even quite savage) of people's life choices outside the movement than EA is, while being less critical of competing causes within the movement like EA is. As criticism needs to"pay rent", a movement can't afford to be critical everywhere, so criticism tradeoffs so have to be made. We'll see how the SMA approach goes there.

Brad West🔸Jun 311

It always has been somewhat odd that EA never seemed to go on the offensive against the normies... Everyday people have the power to save multiple people's lives, prevent obscene amounts of suffering of nonhuman animals and choose not to do so... and EA is on the defensive?

Your observation about the criticism tradeoffs is spot-on. EA has traditionally directed its criticism inward - endless debates about cause prioritization, effectiveness metrics, and optimization - while being remarkably gentle with those outside the movement who aren't trying at all. Meanwhile, SMA seems to flip this: they're saying "quit your bullshit job" to the broader public while maintaining more internal harmony through their Radical Kindness principle.

There's something refreshing about Bregman's willingness to say what many EAs think but rarely voice: that choosing prestige over impact when you have the resources to help is a moral failure. The average professional in a developed country could prevent multiple deaths through effective giving, yet spends that money on lifestyle upgrades. We've somehow normalized this as acceptable while agonizing over whether we're supporting the 3rd or 5th most effective intervention.

I wonder if EA's reluctance to criticize outward stems from: (1) a desire to seem welcoming rather than judgmental, (2) an intellectual culture that prizes nuance over bold claims, or (3) a strategic calculation that gentle persuasion works better than confrontation. But maybe SMA is showing us that there's room for both approaches - and that being morally ambitious means being willing to challenge societal norms more directly.

The real test will be which approach ultimately creates more impact. Does EA's internal rigor and external diplomacy attract more committed effective altruists? Or does SMA's external boldness and internal supportiveness mobilize more people to action? Perhaps we need both spiritual siblings playing different roles in expanding humanity's moral ambition.

Chris LeongJun 49

EA used to lean more into moral arguments/criticism back in the day, but most folks, even those who were part of the movement back in the day, seem to have leaned away from this.

It's hard to say why exactly, but being confrontational is unpleasant and it's not clear that it was actually more effective. OGTutzauer makes a good point that a movement trying to raise donations has more incentive to leverage guilt, whilst a movement trying to shift people's careers has more incentive to focus on being appealing to be part of.

It might also be partly due to the influence of rationalist culture norms, whilst Moral Ambition seems to have been influenced by both EA and progressivism. (My experience has been that the animal welfare folks, who tend to lean more into progressivism, are most likely to lean into confrontationalism).

OGTutzauer🔸Jun 36

EA’s goal is impact, not growth for its own sake. Because cost-effectiveness can vary by 100x or more, shifting one person’s career from a typical path to a highly impactful one is equivalent to adding a hundred contributors. I agree with the EA stance that the former is often more feasible.

This doesn’t fully address why we maintain a soft tone outwardly, but it does imply we could afford to be a bit less soft inwardly. I predict that SMA will surpass EA in numbers, while EA will be ahead of SMA in terms of impact.

Brad West🔸Jun 312

I think this creates a false dichotomy between growth and impact. If 1% of the global middle class gave effectively, that would dwarf all current EA funding - even at 1/100th the per-person impact.

More crucially, broad movements create the conditions for high-impact work to succeed. Try getting AI safety regulation or pandemic prevention funding in a world where altruism remains niche. The abolitionists needed both William Wilberforce and a mass movement.

Your prediction may be right - perhaps SMA will have numbers and EA will have impact per person. That's precisely why both are valuable. SMA normalizes caring about important problems; EA ensures the most dedicated people are optimally deployed.

Jeffrey KursonisJun 43

I think the reluctance toward confrontation may also be because of collective personality traits of STEMs, they tend to work in the backroom developing stuff. The frontroom people who are more creative and social and do sales and marketing are the one's more willing to be confrontational or persuasive. Tech has both rooms, EA only has a backroom to its diminishment (which you can notice by the utter absence of art/creativity/marketing). I wonder what the personality spectrum is in SMA? You can tell by the contrast of their focus and culture in the article they are likely more of a blend of science & humanities, while EA is pure science.

Brad West🔸Jun 3*11

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

AndeanCondorJun 59

I find the Big Think article surprisingly nasty towards EA. Does Bregman see it as "a misguided movement that sought to weaponize the country’s capitalist engines to protect the planet and the human race"?

I was also not aware that EA's "demise" has apparently already occurred: "Bregman saw EA’s demise long before the downfall of the movement’s poster child, Sam Bankman-Fried (...)"

EA still seems to have a pulse and much more.

OGTutzauer🔸Jun 61

The first quote you mention sounds more like a dog whistle to me. I actually think it's great if we can "weaponize capitalist engines" against the world's most pressing problems. But if you hate capitalism, it sounds insidious.

The rest I agree is uncharitable. Like, surely you wouldn't come out the shallow pond feeling moral guily, you'd be extatic that you just saved a child! To me, Singer's thought experiment always implied I should feel the same way about donations.

Esben KranJun 35

Thanks for the overview! I agree with decorrelating this movement for a few reasons:

EA's critique culture has destroyed innovation in the field and is often the reason that a potentially impactful project doesn't exist or is super neutered. Focus on empowering each other towards moral ambition here is great.
The name Effective Altruism is very academic and unrelatable for most people discovering it for the first time. And the same is true for its community. It's rare that the community you enter when you enter EA is action-oriented, innovative, and dynamic.
EA has indeed been hit by a few truckloads of controversy recently which is good to try to give other options for down the line.

On another note, just noticed the reference to Scandinavian EAs and wanted to give my quick take:

This varies locally, my impression is that it's more common in the Bay Area or Oxford. Scandinavian EAs, for example, are often content doing the 5th most impactul thing they could be doing, celebrating the gains they've made by not just doing some random thing. This is highly anecdotal.

I think the Copenhagen EAs have consistently been chasing the most impactful thing out there but it is true that the bets have been somewhat decorrelated from other EA projects. E.g., Danes now run Upstream Policy, ControlAI's governance, Apart Research, Snake Anti-Venom, Seldon, Screwworm Free Future, among others, all of which have ToCs that are slightly different from core EA but that I personally think are more impactful than most other projects in their category per dollar.

I'm uncertain where the "5th most impactful" thing comes from here, and I may just be under-informed about our neighbors.

Vasco Grilo🔸Jun 5*2

Thanks for the post!

My impression is that part of EA's pitch has been that you don't have to do radical things to do radical amounts of good. 10% of your income is something you can survive without, but others will literally die without that money. Over time we've shifted to be a more demanding community, taking us closer to SMA's explicit ideas of Perseverance and Action.
[...]
SMA agrees, and acknowledges that this simply cannot stand. We don't want the world to be like this, so we should take strong action to fix it. In fact, if I Google "quit your bullshit job," the fourth result is Rutger Bregman's article in The Guardian where he promotes Moral Ambition. What he means is that traditional ideas of prestige should be discarded in favor of considering what's actually valuable for society.

I think both EA and SMA underestimate the impact of donating more and better, and that this is the best strategy to maximise impact for the vast majority of people:

Benjamin Todd thinks “it’s defensible to say that the best of all interventions in an area are about 10 times more effective than [as effective as] the mean, and perhaps as much as 100 times”.
Donating 10 % more to an organisation 10 to 100 times as cost-effective as one one could join is 10 (= 0.1*10/0.1) to 100 (= 0.1*100/0.1) times as impactful as working there if the alternative hire would be 10 % less impactful.

In concrete terms, the protein transition has become one of the biggest cause areas within SMA.

I think decreasing the consumption of animal-based foods is harmful due to effects on wild animals. I estimate School Plates in 2023, and Veganuary in 2024 harmed soil animals 5.75 k and 3.85 k times as much as they benefited farmed animals.

SummaryBotJun 31

Executive summary: This reflective comparison explores the relationship between Effective Altruism (EA) and the emerging Moral Ambition (SMA) movement founded by Rutger Bregman, noting both philosophical overlap and significant differences in culture, methodology, and emphasis, and offering guidance for EAs curious about SMA as a complementary or alternative community.

Key points:

Shared foundations but distinct emphases: Both EA and SMA promote consequentialist ethics, moral circle expansion, and impactful careers, but SMA prioritizes enthusiasm, action, and emotional intelligence over EA’s analytical rigor and focus on tradeoffs.
Cultural divergence around feedback and ambition: EA is rooted in critical evaluation and cost-effectiveness, often tolerating hard truths, while SMA emphasizes "Radical Kindness" and avoids hyper-rationalist or guilt-based approaches, aiming for inclusivity and emotional resonance.
Differing approaches to impact measurement: While both movements use variants of the ITN framework (SMA’s version is Sizable, Solvable, Sorely Neglected), SMA is more comfortable with qualitative reasoning and systemic change than EA, which tends to prioritize measurable, high-EV interventions.
Cause areas and collaboration potential: SMA’s focus includes causes like protein transition and anti-tobacco efforts, some of which overlap with EA interests and present opportunities for cooperation between the communities.
Strategic considerations and personal choice: The author suggests EAs who value rigor, philosophy, and longtermism may prefer EA, while those drawn to warmth, pluralism, and direct action may find SMA inspiring; she personally intends to engage with both.
Novelty and reputational dynamics: SMA’s distinct branding allows it to reach new audiences and sidestep some of EA’s reputational baggage, making it a potentially valuable and politically flexible ally in doing good.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.