Many of Silicon Valley’s elites adhere to the ethic of effective altruism, the notion that one should do the most good as effectively as possible. “Effectively” in this case means optimizing how one uses one’s resources.

That might mean, for example, doing humanitarian efforts to scale — if you can help more people by doing X rather than Y, then you should do X. Thus X is quantifiably better.

For example, giving funds to provide mosquito nets in sub-Sahara Africa will save more lives than giving the same amount of money to cancer research. Whether you are supporting cancer research because your mother/friend/loved one had that cancer is irrelevant. The most effective way to use your money is to support malaria nets because your dollar-per-life saved ratio is better.

What’s Good About Effective Altruism

Ari Schulman writes in The New Atlantis that there are some good things about effective altruism, like appropriately allocating funds from charitable giving so that it goes to those in need. Effective altruists argue that most of the $2.3 trillion people have given to charitable causes is wasted because rather than giving to causes or organizations that are measurably doing the most good, people give to feel-good causes with low impact.

This critique has some merit, because low-impact feel-good giving focuses on the giver rather than the need. However, as we will see, effective altruism has a similar giver-centric problem.

Also, there is something reductionistic about quantifying something like “goodness” as though it is measured in the same way a tech company’s profits are. More is not necessarily better, in the moral sense, and ethics is not necessarily quantifiable (or optimizable), no matter how much computer engineers might want it to be.

Another good thing about effective altruism is that it encourages radical giving. Some effective altruists pledge to give 10% of their income for life. Others give upwards of 50% of their income. The mantra “earning to give” is bandied about by effective altruism’s adherents, such as Oxford philosopher professor William MacAskill, author of What We Owe the Future (Basic Books 2022). This, too, is a laudable notion, and a refreshing perspective in a hyper-consumeristic culture.

Sam Bankman-Fried and the Problem with Good Intentions

Stewardship and generosity are surely good things. However, good ends do not justify using any means whatever. The way you do good matters. But according to effective altruism, ethics is a calculation, and one way to optimize doing the most good is to consider the ethical tradeoffs  of doing bad things to get to good ends.

The most high-profile example of this problem is Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison last March for committing one of the largest  financial frauds in U.S. history. He also owes upwards of $11 billion in financial penalties.

Bankman-Fried founded FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that he used to acquire funds from investors, which he then funneled into his hedge fund company, Alameda Research. He also used investors’ money to fund a lavish “tech-bro” lifestyle. Bankman-Fried founded Alameda with MacAskill as an explicitly effective altruism endeavor that sought to calculate where to invest funds to make the greatest impact.

However, noble intentions do not make a Ponzi scheme any less illegal. According to the WSJ, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, told the judge that that Bankman-Fried wasn’t a “ruthless financial serial killer” who sought to hurt people. “Sam Bankman-Fried does not make decisions with malice in his heart,” Mukasey said. “He makes decisions with math in his head.”

And that is the problem: making decisions with the head and leaving out the heart.

Maaike E. Harmsen writes of Silicon Valley’s effective altruists,

…their motivations and solutions are informed by a techno-optimism that often reduces the world’s problems to technical issues requiring technical solutions. In doing so, they end up neglecting the underlying causes behind some of these global concerns—which can’t be fixed by more money or better technology but only by a change of the human heart. 

 “What Silicon Valley’s New Ethical Thinking Gets Right—And Wrong” by Maaike E. Harmsen Christianity Today, June 2024

Techno-Optimistic Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism by any other name, still faces the same problems. No one has the ability to truly calculate whether something would be the greatest good for the greatest number of people. That would require God-like omniscience that even the brightest engineers do not have. Even with the technological abilities of artificial intelligence it is impossible to truly know whether something is the most good.

Utilitarianism ignores the priority and proximity of relationships. Peter Singer, the popularizer of pragmatic utilitarianism, likes to use the “drowning child problem” as an example. It is similar to the example of funding cancer research versus funding mosquito nets: If saving the child who is drowning in front of you costs you time and money that could be used to save 10 children halfway around the world, then it would be quantifiably better to go write a check to save those 10 children than to stop and save the drowning child in front of you.

It requires some mental gymnastics to train yourself out of doing what is instinctive, which is to save the drowning child. Furthermore, Singer’s example smells an awful lot like a sophisticated way of cloaking cowardice with a veneer of generosity. Dealing with the abstract is easier because it is less messy and more quantifiable than sacrificing in small, invisible ways. It is the difference between loving the person in front of you and loving humanity.

To put it more concretely, why bother getting your clothes wet saving a child, when you could write a check (or sell some cryptocurrency stock) and still make your dinner reservations? Net “happiness” in the universe has increased at the cost of living in a universe where people do not save drowning children.

Of course, the lives of children half-way around the world are of the same moral worth as the child in front of you. One’s country of origin does not convey one’s moral worth. However, it is profoundly egotistical to assume that you are the arbiter of moral worth and you have the power to know what decisions will increase net happiness in the world, however they may define happiness.

As Schulman points out, effective altruism is a kind of therapy, a type of self-help for the angst-ridden techno-elites trying to grapple with existential questions, like why some people suffer more than others, as well as the reality of human limitations.

To listen to a podcast discussion on effective altruism, check out The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s recent bioethics news podcast where we discuss effective altruism and faith in AI.