How to allocate your donations across species or charities: Let your Moral Parliament decide
We’re releasing new functionalities of our Moral Parliament Tool to help you navigate more granular end-of-year giving decisions
Sequence author: Hayley Clatterbuck
Sequence summary for this Substack: Urszula Zarosa with AI assistance1
Many of us wait until the end of the year to make our donations, when we have a clearer idea of how much money we can allocate to maximize our impact. Let’s say you have $10,000 to donate this year and you deeply care about helping others—but you’re unsure how to proceed.
The challenge comes in two layers:
First, the big picture: Should you fund global health and development? Support farm animal welfare? Invest in AI safety research? While each cause has compelling advocates and cost-effectiveness analyses to back them up, they also seem impossible to compare.
Then, the specifics: For any given cause area, which intervention deserves your resources? If your focus is global health, do you contribute to malaria prevention that saves lives, programs that treat disabilities and improve quality of life, or access to contraception that increases income and autonomy? If you’re donating to animal welfare, should you focus on chickens, fish, shrimp, or insects?
This isn’t just your problem. It’s the central challenge of thoughtful giving: How do you compare interventions with fundamentally different outcomes—both across causes and within them?
Traditional cost-effectiveness analyses can inform you about the cost per life saved or per year of suffering prevented. But they typically can’t help when you’re uncertain about things like underlying values—or when you need to make principled decisions within a cause area where the trade-offs are complex and multidimensional.
That’s where our enhanced Moral Parliament Tool comes in.
We originally developed the Moral Parliament Tool to help donors navigate uncertainty across different moral philosophies and cause areas. Now, we’re releasing new functionalities that adapt the tool to specific resource allocation problems—both the big cross-cause questions and the granular within-cause decisions that donors actually face.
The tool is now fully customizable. You can adapt it to your specific donation decision simply by editing a spreadsheet. Whether you’re choosing between cause areas or allocating within one, the Moral Parliament provides a systematic framework for navigating your uncertainty.
The four problems you can solve today
Imagine you could gather all your moral intuitions, uncertainties, and values (along with those of anyone else involved in the decision) into one room. Each perspective gets a seat at the table, proportional to how much credence you give it. Then these “delegates” debate and vote on how to allocate your charitable budget.
That’s essentially what the Moral Parliament Tool does.
The researchers at Rethink Priorities (RP) have built not just one but four specialized versions of the Moral Parliament Tool, each designed for different donor dilemmas:
1. The Bioethics Parliament: Healthcare resource allocation
Your dilemma: You want to fund global health projects, but you’re torn between different approaches.
Should you prioritize:
Emergency interventions that save people in immediate danger?
Preventive care that helps more people over time?
Programs that maximize autonomy vs. those that maximize well-being?
Helping the worst-off vs. achieving the most total good?
What it does: The Bioethics Parliament encompasses six worldviews (Rule of Rescue, Social Engineer, Capabilities, Utilitarian, Libertarian, and Redress Past Inequalities) and allows you to see how they would allocate resources across infectious disease control, maternal healthcare, or general global health projects.
Real result: A parliament with equal representation of these worldviews, using Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness, allocates most resources to vaccine projects for infectious diseases. However, switching to Maximin (protecting the least-satisfied worldview) skews the allocation heavily toward antivirals. The method matters!
[Learn more and try it here →]
2. The Animal Parliament: Chickens, fish, shrimp, or insects?
Your dilemma: You want to help farmed animals, but the numbers are staggering, and you’re uncertain about key questions.
Let’s say, per million dollars, you might help 50 million chickens, 500 million fish, 1.5 billion shrimp, or 5 billion insects.
But are shrimp conscious? What about insects? Even if they are, how much does their experience matter compared to a chicken’s?
What it does: This parliament incorporates three crucial factors:
Scale: How many animals are helped per dollar
Risk: Probability of sentience × probability of project success
Moral weights: How much each animal’s welfare matters
You can use Rethink Priorities’ welfare range estimates (which suggest shrimp and insects matter a great deal) or, e.g., neurophysiological proxies based on neuron counts (which dramatically favor chickens).
Real result: With RP welfare ranges and risk-neutral worldviews, shrimp and insects are heavily favored. With neurophysiological weights, chickens dominate across all risk profiles. In a parliament with equal representation, Moral Marketplace recommends a diversified portfolio, while Maximin puts everything into chickens (the “safe” choice).
[Learn more and try it here →]
3. The GiveWell Parliament: Beyond human-only analysis
Your dilemma: You trust GiveWell’s methodology, but you’re not sure about some of their moral weights—or you want to include considerations they don’t.
Maybe you:
Think that preventing disability deserves more weight
Believe increasing consumption matters more than they estimate
Want to include impacts on farm animals
Are uncertain and want to see how different weights change the rankings
What it does: This parliament allows you to:
Use GiveWell’s own moral weights
Try alternative weightings (years of life lost, income-focused, disability-focused)
Add animal DALY weights based on RP welfare ranges
Create your own custom weights
It evaluates four charities: Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention, MiracleFeet (clubfoot treatment), Contraception access programs, and Heifer International.
Real result: GiveWell’s weights rank Malaria SMC and MiracleFeet similarly (both cost-effective). But if you’re income-focused, Heifer International scores 2-3x better. If you include animal welfare, Heifer International becomes much less attractive—and the allocation method you choose determines whether it gets 18% of funding or nearly zero.
[Learn more and try it here →]
4. The Movement Building Parliament: Use it as a template!
Your dilemma: You want to generate more support for a movement like effective altruism, but you’re uncertain about strategy.
Should you:
Build a broad base or focus on highly-aligned elites?
Maintain cause-area diversity or prioritize AI safety?
Take big risks for potential big gains or invest in organic, steady growth?
What it does: This parliament is more speculative (the authors emphasize that it’s a template, not prescriptive). Still, it demonstrates how the tool can address strategic questions beyond direct charitable impact.
Note: The authors explicitly state that they don’t endorse the current parameter settings—this is intended to illustrate the “structure” for reasoning about movement building.
[Learn more and try it here →]
How the tool actually works
Don’t worry—you don’t need a philosophy degree to benefit from the Moral Parliament Tool. But understanding the basics allows you to use it more effectively.
Core components
1. Worldviews (your values)
Each worldview is defined by the weight it assigns to different normative dimensions.
For the Animal Parliament, dimensions include moral weights for different species. The “RP Moral Weights” worldview might assign:
Chickens: 0.46
Fish: 0.34
Shrimp: 0.2
Insects: 0.2
The “neurophysiological” worldview assigns much lower weights to smaller animals:
Chickens: 0.037
Fish: 0.00084
Shrimp: 0.00088
Insects: 0.00057
2. Projects (your options)
Each project is characterized by:
Scale: How much good it does if you fully value everything (bigger numbers = more impact)
Dimension scores: What proportion of benefits go to each category (must sum to 1)
Risk profile: Probability distribution of outcomes
For example, a choice to invest in “Resources for Chickens” (made-up organization for the purpose of this post) might help 50 million chickens with 90% confidence, have a 5% chance of helping 10x that many, and a 5% chance of failing.
3. Allocation methods (how to decide)
This is where it gets interesting. The tool offers multiple ways to aggregate worldviews:
Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness: Chooses the allocation that creates the most total utility, weighted by each worldview’s representation (like utilitarianism across worldviews)
Maximin: Chooses the allocation that makes the least-satisfied worldview as well-off as possible — prioritizing fairness and protection for minority or worst-off perspectives
Moral Marketplace: Allocates a proportional “budget” of resources to each worldview, allowing them to decide independently how to use their share
Nash Bargaining: Starts from an initial allocation and adjusts it through hypothetical “trades” between worldviews to reach a balance that benefits all relative to the starting point
Voting methods: Approval voting, Borda count, ranked choice
Different methods can yield dramatically different results—and there’s no single “right” method. The tool’s value is showing you how much the method matters for your specific decision.
[Check more instructions here →]
A worked example: Your $10,000
Let’s go back to the $10,000 example from earlier and suppose you’re considering:
Malaria prevention (strong evidence, saves young children’s lives)
MiracleFeet (corrects clubfoot, dramatically improves quality of life)
Contraception access (prevents unwanted pregnancies, increases income, complex effects)
Heifer International (provides farm animals, increases income, but creates animal suffering)
You assign 50% weight to GiveWell’s moral framework, 20% to views emphasizing disability, 20% to those prioritizing income, and 10% to perspectives that include animal welfare.
Step 1: Create a parliament with these four worldviews in those proportions (5, 2, 2, 1 delegates, respectively).
Step 2: The tool calculates how each worldview scores each project:
GiveWell weights: Malaria and MiracleFeet score ~1,100-1,300; Heifer ~826
Disability-focused: MiracleFeet jumps to 5,455!
Income-focused: Heifer jumps to 8,183!
Animal-inclusive: Heifer drops to 366
Step 3: Choose an allocation method. For example, with Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness:
~40% to Malaria
~35% to MiracleFeet
~18% to Heifer
~7% to Contraception
In the end, you’d donate roughly $4,000 to malaria prevention, $3,500 to MiracleFeet, $1,800 to Heifer, and $700 to contraception programs.
However, if you were to use Maximin (protecting your animal-welfare-conscious minority), Heifer would receive a significantly smaller proportion.
Why this beats the alternatives
You might be thinking: “Can’t I just do a spreadsheet? Or trust GiveWell’s rankings? Or go with my gut?”
Versus spreadsheets
Sure, you could build a custom cost-effectiveness model. But:
The Moral Parliament handles all the math automatically
It offers multiple aggregation methods you probably wouldn’t think to implement
It’s interactive—change one assumption and instantly see results update
It’s explicitly designed for comparing incommensurable goods
Versus expert rankings
Organizations like GiveWell do excellent work. But:
They make specific moral weight assumptions you might not share
They typically don’t include animal welfare considerations
They can’t represent your particular mix of uncertainties
The Moral Parliament can incorporate its estimates while adding its own considerations
Versus gut feelings
Your intuitions are valuable! But:
Our intuitions are often inconsistent when dealing with large numbers
We’re prone to scope insensitivity (”saving 2,000 birds doesn’t feel much different than saving 20,000”)
We struggle to weigh multiple considerations simultaneously
The tool makes your implicit reasoning explicit so that you can examine it
The Moral Parliament doesn’t replace your judgment—it clarifies and systematizes it.
Common questions
“What if I don’t know my exact credences in different worldviews?”
That’s fine! Try several configurations:
Equal weighting (agnostic)
Different distributions that feel plausible
Extreme cases (all one worldview)
Seeing how results change helps you understand what’s driving the recommendations.
“Which allocation method should I use?”
Great question! Here’s a rough guide:
If you’re one person navigating your own uncertainty start with Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness
If you want to protect minority views (including future-you who might change their mind) try Maximin
If you’re part of a couple/group and want each person to control part of the budget use Moral Marketplace
If you’re making a one-time choice between distinct options experiment with voting methods
The tool’s value is partly in showing you that the method matters—a lot.
“What if my cause isn’t covered?”
You can customize everything! The tool is fully adaptable. See the detailed instructions here.
You can modify:
In-site (quick tweaks to existing parameters)
Via spreadsheet (complete customization of worldviews, projects, dimensions)
The bigger picture
Charitable giving is one of the most important ways we shape the world. For those of us privileged enough to have resources to share, the question of where to give is both an incredible opportunity and a weighty responsibility.
The Moral Parliament Tool doesn’t necessarily make these decisions easy—ethical trade-offs are genuinely complex. But it does make these important choices clearer. It helps you:
Articulate your values explicitly
Discover implications you hadn’t considered
Navigate disagreements (with others or within yourself)
Decide with transparency about your reasoning
Explain your choices to others (family, co-donors, future you)
The question isn’t whether to think carefully about where your donations go. You’re already doing that, or you wouldn’t be reading this. The question is whether to do it systematically—with all your considerations on the table, their implications calculated, and the trade-offs made explicit.
The parliament is now in session, and your vote matters.
[Try the enhanced Moral Parliament Tool →]
Acknowledgements
The Moral Parliament Tool is a project of the Worldview Investigation Team at Rethink Priorities. Arvo Muñoz Morán and Derek Shiller developed the tool; Hayley Clatterbuck created the particular parliaments in this sequence. We’d like to thank David Moss and Urszula Zarosa for helpful feedback.
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Disclosure: This piece was drafted by Urszula Zarosa with support from an AI assistant (in line with our AI use policy). Our team reviewed it for accuracy, clarity, and tone. We use this approach to produce high-quality work while optimizing our resources.