By pretending to be two contradictory things, this much-vaunted approach to public policy and personal choices is less of a moral philosophy than an intellectual scam.
Defective altruist.
Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Effective Altruists, it seems, aren’t always effective altruists. Whether guilty or innocent of the charges brought against him, Sam Bankman-Fried was a really bad altruist. But he was a champion of Effective Altruism, a vaunted approach to public policy and personal conduct that judges people and their choices by daring to ask 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 – but they might argue that Bankman-Fried is irrelevant to their own moral and intellectual standing. Maybe he just talked up Effective Altruism for purely cynical reasons to market his products more effectively. (Questioned on his ethical commitments in a notorious exchange with a Vox reporter, he confessed that he’d said a lot of “dumb shit.”) Or maybe he was just an utterly incompetent manager. (This promises to be his main line of defense.) In either case, the movement’s argument goes, Bankman-Fried has nothing to do with Effective Altruism, correctly understood.
