Which causes deserve priority?
The framework I find most useful for thinking about cause prioritisation is ITN: Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness. Importance asks how much suffering or flourishing is at stake. Tractability asks whether additional resources can realistically make progress. Neglectedness asks whether the problem is already receiving substantial attention and funding. What I find valuable about the framework is that it forces me to separate questions that are often blurred together. A cause can be hugely important and still be a poor target for marginal donations if progress is extremely difficult or if enormous resources are already flowing into it.
Applying this framework has gradually shaped how I think about giving. Global health still receives the largest share of my donations because the evidence base is unusually strong and the impact is measurable in a way that inspires relatively high confidence. At the same time, I remain persuaded by the importance and neglectedness arguments for areas like AI safety and animal welfare, even where the uncertainty is much greater. None of these allocations feel final or perfectly resolved to me. Cause prioritisation ultimately requires making provisional judgements under real moral and empirical uncertainty, and being willing to update them as new evidence emerges.
Most charity evaluation measures the wrong thing
Singer's argument answers the whether question. It does not answer the how. Once I accepted that giving substantially was both morally sensible and practically required, I found myself facing a different and considerably harder problem: how do you know whether a charity is actually worth giving to?
My first instinct was to look for external validation. Charity watchdogs exist precisely for this purpose: Charity Commission filings in the UK, Charity Navigator in the US, assorted rating schemes that purport to separate responsible organisations from careless ones. What I found was a methodology built almost entirely on the wrong question.
I gave to charity for eight years before asking if it worked
In 2007, the year our first child was born, I set up a direct debit to Cancer Research UK. It felt meaningful. I had no way of knowing whether it was. That question would take me the better part of a decade to begin answering properly.
Over the years that followed, the portfolio grew the way most people's giving grows: incrementally, emotionally, and without much strategy. A colleague mentioned a charity. A news story prompted a one-off donation. Each choice felt right at the time of making. None were made on the basis of any clear idea what the money was actually achieving. This is, I suspect, how most people give. The intention is genuine. The method is essentially nonexistent.
What changed things was a single short essay, written in 1972, that I heard mentioned on a podcast at roughly the right point in my life.