The End of Effective Altruism?

Rationality and effective altruism brought us to this:

How could this happen? This is exactly what philosophy is supposed to fix. Ethics is the search for a system of rules that can’t be used by stupid people to do terrible things. lf you are looking for candidate ethical systems that seem least likely to be co-opted to do bad things, it’s reasonable to pick something like effective altruism and rationality. 

The ideas behind them are:

• You can use reason and quantitative evidence to figure out what it means to do good.
• You should put that knowledge into practice by doing as much good as you can.

Except, in this case, those principles seem to have failed spectacularly.

This is an existential moment for effective altruism and the rationalist community writ-large. Its adherents need to look themselves in the mirror and ask: how did this happen? How did someone who seemed to be so grounded in its principles end up a fraud? How did he cause so many true believers to wittingly or unwittingly assist him in committing it?

It’s also a pivotal moment for ethics and philosophy in general. How much good is it if it keeps being co-opted by stupid people to do bad things? Can we make a philosophy that doesn’t have those problems?

Let’s explore.

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Despite his protests to the contrary, I think Sam Bankman-Fried actually is an effective altruist. Yes, I know in his most recent unhinged Vox interview he seems to claim that it was all a grift and he never really believed it:

But let’s take a step back and look at the facts. 

He was raised as a utilitarian. His parents are Stanford Law professors who studied it. His father said this to the New York Times: “It’s the kind of thing we’d discuss in the house.”

In college, he was a vegan who was about to devote his career to animal welfare when he had lunch with William MacAskill, a philosopher and leading Effective Altruist. MacAskill convinced him to pursue earning to give: deliberately pursuing a high-paying career in order to donate most of the reward to charity. So after graduation he joined Jane Street, and gave away half of his salary. 

Unless you think everyone from MacAskill to Sam’s parents to the fact checkers at the New Yorker are lying, then you have to believe he started out steeped in ideas that lead to effective altruism, and acted for many years like someone committed to its principles even before it brought him any sort of public acclaim.

And yet somehow he ended up a fraud along the way. How? Could it be that the philosophy itself is to blame? It’s important to find out.

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Socrates started all of this. To him, the job of philosophy seemed to be about arriving at correct definitions: a rule or set of rules that helps us cleave the world at its joints, to separate the good from the bad, the true from the false, just from the unjust, and the holy from the unholy. He says this in a famous dialogue called Euthyphro:

“Teach me about…about what it might be, so that by fixing my eye upon it and using it as a model, I may call holy any action of yours or another’s, which conforms to it, and may deny to be holy whatever does not.”

Rationality, utilitarianism, and effective altruism are all attempts—in one way or another—to understand the world through that tradition. There’s a lot of terminology here so let me briefly explain:

Rationality is the idea that you can systematically improve the accuracy of your beliefs and decision-making, and that you should.

Utilitarianism is the idea that morally good actions are ones that produce good consequences for the most people.

Effective altruism is a modern movement of utilitarians. Many of them are rationalists. 

The place to start here is utilitarianism. It’s the middle layer where rationality becomes effective altruism. Maybe if we examine utilitarianism we’ll figure out why it got co-opted, and then how to fix it. 

Utilitarianism starts with the idea that we all have a moral obligation to do good, and that to judge an action as good requires looking at the consequences of that action relative to the consequences of alternatives. Your moral obligation is to do the action that does the most good for the most people. This way of looking at things is nice because it transforms doing good into something like a math problem: you can find ways to measure “goodness”—like the number of lives saved—and doing that will help you make the right decisions. Very rational.

Effective altruists comprise a movement of utilitarians who can trace their roots to the philosopher Peter Singer. In a 1972 essay, “Famine Affluence, and Morality,” Singer argued that your calculations of what is good should not take into account considerations of proximity to suffering.