The Sudden Return of Effective Altruism

The Silicon Valley elite went all in on the movement because it created a justification for the weath-hoarding, antisocial oligarchy they wanted to build for themselves.

After briefly fading into the background following the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX under the weight of its own accounting fraud, effective altruism, or E.A., is back in the news in a big way. This time, the philosophy’s adherents have found themselves in a sudden-onset blood feud with the Trump White House. Given the administration’s unceasing hostility to both effectiveness and altruism, the spat has a certain intuitiveness to it, but this conflict is not driven by Trump’s hatred of the global poor. Instead, it was the Department of Defense posting, seemingly unprompted, a pronouncement of “Americanism, not Effective Altruism” that ignited the conflict. Since then, there has been a major struggle over “AI safety” policy between E.A. adherents and the techno-fascist right—two groups that do, confusingly, overlap as well.

It’s hard to remember as the world burns around us, but there was a moment when E.A. (and its sister philosophies rationalism and longtermism) was ascendent. It was quickly amassing capital, adherents, and political power. In just a few short years, it went from a few quirky thinkers and writers trying to logic their way to solving morality to a coalition with substantial financial, media, and lobbying capacity. 

While Bankman-Fried may have become effective altruism’s most notorious adherent, he was far from alone. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn remain firmly in the E.A. camp, and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have both publicly embraced and funded parts of the movement (although their overall giving doesn’t graft as cleanly onto the philosophy). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has also described his approach to philanthropy similarly to E.A.  

That ascendence was, in no small part, fueled by Silicon Valley titans’ patronage and proselytization. And a key reason for that is that the central premise of (especially longtermist) E.A. is just a hop, skip, and a jump from a moral permission structure that nakedly celebrates wealth and excuses opulence as steps on the path to a more just future. Bankman-Fried himself admitted as much in a candid exchange with a journalist after his business empire imploded; the altruism he championed was all about cloaking the scramble for wealth and power as something noble. 

This is in no way true of everyone who takes interest in or subscribes to E.A., and it’s important to remember that those who are able to season their effective altruism with a dose of epistemic humility do often fund worthy projects. But the totalizing moral structure that shields the machinations of the powerful is a crucial dynamic to make sense of how we got to our current political moment, with tech oligarchs running amok, major financial realignment, and all-encompassing AI storylines. Because while the impulse to do altruism, and make it effective, can help galvanize works rooted in good intentions, our would-be overlords took that to start paving the proverbial road to hell.

At its core, effective altruism posits that, given scarce resources, the most ethical course of action is the one that maximizes the “returns” that can be generated from those scarce resources. Usually, the “returns” in question are measured in things like lives saved, disease incidences avoided, people educated, or other noble goals. But the returns can also be monetary, which is part of why E.A. is extremely useful to the ultrarich seeking to amass power. 

The obvious assumption here is that there is an objective way of accounting for those returns and an objective way to “weight” doing good that benefits different people. One of the more common instincts among effective altruists is to consider all human lives equal. On its face, that sounds obviously correct! But it can quickly lead to counterintuitive conclusions. 

Take for instance a charity that runs a program integrating ex-cons into communities’ workforces at an expense of $10,000 per week. An E.A.-style analysis could take this program and compare it to a famously cost-effective intervention like bed nets to fight malaria and mosquito-borne disease—which costs around $2 to $5 per net and can save a child’s life for every 600 nets distributed—and conclude that this facially worthy cause is actually bleeding resources away from more effective forms of altruistic intervention. And in that framework, career development to integrate people back into their communities is not only suboptimally moral but could even be immoral because that work takes on the opportunity cost of children’s lives. In the hypothetical above, that $10,000 a week could instead be spent on malaria nets and save as many as eight lives a week.

So, to a stickler E.A. analysis, community service missions can be actively harmful because it would be more moral to spend the money elsewhere. This sort of thinking is not universal among the movement’s adherents; it is entirely possible to recognize the limits of this economics-style optimization problem as a philosophy. But when that possibility is pushed out of mind, or........

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