‘Effective Altruism’ is as bankrupt as Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX
Sam Bankman-Fried was a champion of Effective Altruism, a vaunted approach to public policy and personal conduct that judges people and their choices by asking if they add to the sum of human happiness.
The movement’s leaders are surely embarrassed by their association with a man on trial for defrauding investors of billions of dollars. They might argue that he just talked up Effective Altruism to market his products more effectively or that he was just an utterly incompetent manager. In either case, he has nothing to do with Effective Altruism, correctly understood.
I disagree.
Could he do it?
From a moral-philosophical point of view, what’s interesting is not whether Bankman-Fried was acting in good faith or managed the company well. What’s interesting is whether as an Effective Altruist, he could legitimately do what he is accused of doing and still be doing the right thing so long as he used the proceeds to advance human happiness.
The movement’s answer to this question seems to be: No, cheating people is obviously wrong. Most sane people would agree. The problem with this answer is that it shows Effective Altruism to be something of an intellectual scam.
Effective Altruism is a form of utilitarianism. Utilitarians judge acts by comparing their effects on the global sum of happiness, and the morally right course is the one you expect to achieve the most happiness. Other moral considerations — like obligations to be honest, to be just, to be loyal, to respect property rights — count only to the extent that they help in calculating happiness.
Effective Altruists are therefore obliged to say: Yes, stealing to give to the poor might be good. The poor would probably gain more in happiness than the not-poor would lose. It depends on the numbers.
That’s ordinary lower-case effective altruism. Upper-case Effective Altruism is a whole other thing.
It deems ordinary ways of doing good timid and unprincipled. To care more than we do about the world’s poorest people isn’t enough, for example. Happiness is happiness, so we should care as much about the happiness of distant strangers as we do about that of people close to us.
Narrowing focus
It calls on people to narrow their focus. William MacAskill, an Oxford University philosopher and one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, is said to have advised Bankman-Fried while the latter was a junior at MIT, “Earn to give.” Volunteering in a soup kitchen is all very well, but getting rich and then giving everything away to the world’s poorest is more effective and therefore morally superior.
Perhaps the novice also wondered: “Why not live well at the same time? Set against the good I’ll be doing, the cost isn’t even a rounding error.”
MacAskill’s latest gloss on Effective Altruism — so-called Longtermism — vastly expands these demands by arguing that the happiness of humans 100 years from now, or 1,000 years from now, is as valuable as the same amount of happiness today. Failing to give due weight to the happiness of generations unimaginably remote in time is a kind of moral blindness.
You can see why Effective Altruism also appeals to people with personality disorders. It blends the intractable complexity of these calculations with what most might see as sociopathic simplification. Computable ethics strips out all unhelpful moral criteria, that is, moral judgment as most people understand it.
According to hard-core utilitarians, empathy is a problem, because it makes the interests of family, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens seem more pressing than those of strangers, foreigners and people who might or might not be born millennia from now. One day, with sufficient funding and adequate computing power, reason will overcome this moral idiocy.
Who knows. Perhaps it will. And granted, in the meantime, Effective Altruism might do real good merely as a fad, by persuading people to think more about what we owe others. Even so, the movement is intellectually dishonest, because it pretends to be two contradictory things.
First, it’s a fearless assault on prevailing ethical complacency, daring to challenge embedded moral intuitions, inferring strange-seeming edicts through sheer force of reason. Second, under pressure, it flips to ordinary ethical conduct, just executed more carefully. In other words, it’s both a startling philosophical breakthrough and mostly business as usual.
Flip what you say
If you head a think tank that seeks attention and cash, say that you’re shifting paradigms. When one of your associates is caught robbing banks to support future research on inter-planetary migration, talk about common sense.
The movement was already struggling with this imposture before the FTX scandal broke. In September 2022, MacAskill told an interviewer he was annoyed by the way people he talked to always wanted to push his arguments to their logical conclusion. Apparently, that’s too much to ask of a moral philosopher.