Can You Be Morally Ambitious? What Is Rutger Bregman’s School for Moral Ambition?

TLDR:

• Moral ambition asks why so many talented, motivated people aren’t using their abilities to serve society, and invites them to take on big problems directly.
• In response, Bregman co-founded the School for Moral Ambition in 2024. It runs a free community, with its own networking platform and member-run meetups, to help people act on the idea.
• In my view, it’s a counterpoint to the strand of effective altruism that says earn well and give it away: here you go and do the work, make the decisions and be brave.
• Within that community, a Moral Ambition Circle is a free, peer-led group of six to eight people who work through eight sessions over about sixteen weeks and finish with a personal commitment.
• By getting involved with Moral Ambition, I’ve met a bunch of interested, motivated people who really are trying to have an impact on the world.

Can you be morally ambitious?

In 2025 I went to hear Rutger Bregman speak at one of his BBC Reith Lectures. The series was called Moral Revolution, and the lecture I saw was the third, A conspiracy of decency, recorded live here in Edinburgh. The BBC’s summary has Bregman asking how we counter the moral decay of an elite that isn’t being serious. You can listen to all four lectures on BBC Sounds:

• A Time of Monsters
• How to start a moral revolution
• A conspiracy of decency (the one I went to)
• Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine

For me, the question at the core of all this is simple: can you be morally ambitious? We have a load of bright, talented, motivated people out in the world. Why aren’t more of them applying themselves in ways that really serve society?

The Idea

Bregman’s book, Moral Ambition, makes the case. Most of us already have ambition. We want to get on, do well, be good at something. His suggestion is to measure that by the good it does rather than by pay or status. I feel a bit of that myself, and I think there’s something interesting in it. Of course, it’s also super important and worthwhile to earn well and support yourself and your family.

In 2024 Bregman co-founded the School for Moral Ambition to put the idea into practice. The royalties from the book go to the School, according to its FAQ. Its flagship is a funded, full-time career fellowship, and over its first two years more than 1,400 people applied, according to the School’s December 2025 impact story. Its current cause areas are tax fairness, a tobacco-free future, food system reform and AI in Europe.

The community casts a wider net. When you set up a profile on its platform, you’re asked what you care most about, and the options are:

• ending animal suffering and transitioning our food system
• ending extreme poverty and preventable diseases
• tackling wealth inequality and a fair tax system
• healthy democracies
• humane migration
• meta impact
• pandemic resilience
• racial justice and equal opportunities
• safe AI
• a stable climate and thriving biodiversity
• a tobacco-free future
• (youth) mental health

There are also options for “figuring out which issue I should focus on” and “another aligned cause”, so there’s room for projects that aren’t on the list. The Circles themselves ask you to look at some of the biggest challenges in the world, using the School’s test of sizable, solvable and sorely overlooked.

That matters, because we’ve all read an inspiring book, felt great for about a week, and then Monday turned up. As I’ve written before, information doesn’t change behaviour by itself.

Doing the Work Yourself

I read it as a bit of a counterpoint to effective altruism. That’s my own take, not anything the School says. One well-known strand of effective altruism says to earn as much as you can and give it away. The movement also carries some baggage: its association with Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder later convicted of fraud, and, to my ear, a bit of a Silicon Valley, sovereign-individual accent. That’s a bit of a caricature of a broad movement, but it’s part of the flavour.

The School’s test for choosing a problem will sound familiar if you know that world. The emphasis is different, though. The invitation here is to go and do the work yourself, take the decisions, be brave and challenging along the way, and do it alongside other people.

I like that. There’s something about purpose in it too. I feel a pull towards using what I’m good at for something that matters, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Where the Circles Come In

The School runs free, peer-led groups called Moral Ambition Circles: six to eight people working through a structured programme together, eight sessions over about sixteen weeks. The School’s founding story describes them as a way for professionals to learn together and take a first step, and says the idea was modelled on Lean In Circles. The programme runs in three stages:

• First, what moral ambition means to you, who your role models are, which global problems to prioritise, and which approach suits your strengths.
• Then you picture the future you want, map who’s involved in the problem you’ve picked, and find your angle through a theory of change (jargon for a plan showing how what you do leads to what you want).
• Finally you help each other through the obstacles, then take the Moral Ambition Pledge and set a clear next step.

Circles don’t run themselves. The School trains people to lead them: volunteers go through Circle Starter training (about three hours, according to the School), become what it calls movement builders, and are then asked to go out and create circles themselves, with guidance and resources from the School. A starter posts their circle on the platform once they’ve done the training and a live session. Anyone can then find it in the Open Circles space, filtered by city, continent or online, and message the starter to join. Every session comes with a guide and slides, there’s reading, a challenge and some outreach to do between sessions, and the host role can rotate. There are five ground rules: confidentiality, commitment, curiosity, courage and challenge. The last two suit the idea of being brave and challenging.

I’ve done the Circle Starter training and joined the community. When I looked, the School’s community page listed more than 200 circles in over 130 countries. As of November 2026, when I wrote this, the platform’s member directory showed about 9,300 people. There are a few circles in Scotland now, and I’ve talked to some of the people involved in person here in Edinburgh.

One thing the Circles steer you towards is coming with a project you want to work on, and that’s a bit of a challenge. In the circle conversations I’ve been part of, some people have something they want to do, and others have broader skills and want to support people working in the space. It’s been interesting to speak to different people, whatever their goals are.

The People Involved

The people I’ve met through it are pretty great: motivated, hardworking, engaged, and really keen to make the world a better place, in lots of different ways. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most is meeting a range of people and building relationships with others who want to make a difference. There are some I’d like to stay in touch with, and perhaps collaborate and work with.

I’ve enjoyed connecting with a more diverse group than I usually would as well, through the school. What all the members seem to share, though, is a nice bit of interest in doing something useful.

In Edinburgh, people have started a bit of a meetup on the back of it: just socials, getting together to chat once a month. The School calls these Member Meetups, community-run events that it will post and share on its platform if they fit. Other cities are doing the same: when I looked, the platform’s events page listed Member Meetups coming up in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Switzerland.

The School also has its own networking tool, which is a bit like a mini LinkedIn built around moral ambition. You write a profile, say what you’re interested in, where you are and a bit about your background, then browse the member directory, which has a map and filters for location and tags, connect with people and message them. It also has a feed, events, chats on particular causes, and a board of opportunities at vetted organisations (more than 70, says the School). The numbers are much smaller than LinkedIn, of course. The functionality is there, but it’s hard to get network effects at that size.

A Few Reservations

Some people will wince at the phrase “moral ambition”. I get it. It does sound a bit grand. A bit “do-goodery”. But it’s also nice to be ambitious and set a clear direction, which I think the name does.

I sense the school also runs the risk of being a little idealistic and, sometimes, a bit naive. People can assume they’ll be able to do things that a dose of real-world pragmatism will get in the way of. That’s okay. I think we can acknowledge it and celebrate the fact that people are out there doing it anyway, trying to make a difference, pushing on hard boundaries. Plenty of people in the voluntary sector have been doing this hard work for decades.

The School’s principles seem to know this. They lean on perseverance, noting that of the 68 women involved in the 1848 Seneca Falls convention on women’s rights, only one lived to see women win the vote. They also say the motivation should come from enthusiasm and a full, balanced life rather than guilt. That helps, because moral ambition could easily turn into a contest over who’s the most worthy.

Give It a Go

If you’re curious, sign up to the free community at moralambition.org and have a look around. You don’t have to start with a Circle or doing any training. Send a few messages to folks around you and see what comes up. Get along to a meetup if there’s one near you. Or get a few people together, get to know each other and see what comes out of it. It’s a good way to connect with some interesting people.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• Information Doesn’t Change Behaviour. Here’s What Does.
• A Personal Leadership Vision
• Self-Determination Theory
• How Does Climate Change Make Us Feel?
• What We Learned From Our First Walk, Talk & Connect