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defective altruism's poster boy [1]

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Date: 2023-11-02  

Bad Madoff. Faulty neoliberal capitalism where corruption and theft get rationalized.

Is Sam Bankman-Fried now the exemplar for the excesses of the Effective Altruism movement, especially when he tried to front end his legal defense with a rebranded capitalist prosperity doctrine, now confabulated with the A.I. panic of longtermism.

The first thing that should raise your suspicions about the “Effective Altruism movement” is the name. It is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly.

We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity. It is as if one were to label a movement the Better And Smarter People Movement—indeed, when the Effective Altruists were debating how to brand and sell themselves in the early days, the name “Super Hardcore Do-Gooders” was used as a placeholder. (Apparently in jest, but the name they eventually chose means essentially the same thing.)

Effective Altruism can be defined as a “social movement,” a “research field,” or a “practical community.” The Center For Effective Altruism says it’s about “find[ing] the best ways to help others, and put[ting] them into practice,” and is now “applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries.” It has received coverage in leading media outlets (e.g., the New Yorker, TIME, and the New York Times), and $46 billion has apparently been committed to Effective Altruist causes, although most of that appears to be pledges from the same few billionaires.

[...]

Put this way, it sounded rather compelling. Some Effective Altruists started an organization, GiveWell, that tried to figure out which charities were actually doing a good job at saving lives and which were mostly hype. I thought that made plenty of sense. But I quickly saw qualities in EA that I found deeply off-putting. They were rigorously devoted to trying to quantify moral decisions, to decide what the mathematically morally superior course of action to take was. And as GiveWell says, while first they try to shift people from doing things that “feel” good to doing things that achieve good results, they then encourage them to ask, “How can I do as much good as possible?” Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer’s 2015 EA manifesto is called The Most Good You Can Do, and EA is strongly influenced by utilitarianism, so they are not just trying to do good, but maximize the good (measured in some kind of units of goodness) that one puts out into the world.

www.currentaffairs.org/...

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