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After my article on the Phoebe Gates scandal yesterday, some readers have asked for more analytical detail of my objections to Effective Altruism. I provide that below—but, be forewarned, this is more philosophy than journalism. If you’re not interested in analytic philosophy, you should just skip this. Even so, some of you will find this interesting, so I share it here. TED ON EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM Effective Altruism is a consequentialist ethical system, unlike deontological approaches which are primarily rule-driven. You may assume that judging a moral action by its consequences is obviously the right thing to do, but the reality is that no religion, government, or community has ever made ethical decisions in this way. If you commit murder, the judge pronounces sentence on your violation of the law, but the judge NEVER says: “Let’s wait ten years and determine the consequences of the murder you committed—maybe it was okay.” This never happens and never will, and for a very good reason. Chaos would ensue if actions could be justified by long-term consequences. But that is precisely the kind of chaos that Effective Altruism allows, and willingly embraces. Its practitioners are extreme in this way—they focus on the most long-term and geographically distant consequences. This is dangerous, much like driving without looking at the road in front of you, but instead imagining what’s happening on the road a mile ahead. This inevitably results in crashes. That’s why I can accurately predict that Effective Altruists will be recognized by the chaotic short-term impact of their efforts. And this is precisely what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, Catherine Ellison, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and now Phoebe Gates. None of this is coincidence. The chaos is hard-baked into their philosophical assumptions. So I can safely predict that the same thing will happen again in the future. Effective Altrusim, if it continues to retain its influence, will lead to more fiascos, meltdowns, and criminal actions. That’s why I describe it as a moral philosophy for Bond villains. And even if we did attempt to justify actions by consequences, how can you begin to implement such a methodology? Do we need to wait a year to measure consequences? Or ten years? Or a lifetime? Or several generations? And how can you even begin to separate the impact of other factors or counterfactuals? If you kill a baby because you know it will grow up to be Hitler, how can you ever prove that fact? The only certainty is that you just killed a baby. So this adds a second problem to Effective Altruism—not only does it embrace chaos, but it operates in a perpetual mist of vagueness. This, too, is exactly what we see in the public statements of Sam Bankman-Fried and others. Here, too, the connection between their philosophy and their malfeasance is evident at every step. Just look and see the many grand (but ambiguous) pronouncements that come out of their lips. It’s almost a trademark of the cult. The next problem of consequentialist ethics is that the bad things its practioners do are REALITIES—happening immediately—while any positive consequences of their actions are merely POSSIBILITIES. So from a chronological perspective, the chaos precedes benefits. From an ontological perspective, the negatives have total existence while the positives merely possess possible existence. And because chronology can’t be reversed, the perpetrators can’t undo actions if the positive consequences never ensue. These are significant problems with Effective Altruism. I won’t even go into the psychological make-up of people who act this way—who tend to display a narcissistic savior complex that runs counter to everything we know about the character of ethical people. I’m dealing here with philosophy, not psychology. But you could write an entire book on the psychological profile of Effective Altruism—and it would be a devastating takedown of the cult. So you can cite names like Peter Singer, but that doesn’t change any of this. At best, Singer can say that he is so super smart he can understand consequences better than any of us. But that’s exactly what Sam Bankman-Fried thought, and Leopold Aschenbrenner, and all the others. (By the way, Stalin, Mao and other mass killers would inevitably make this same kind of Effective Altruist argument to justify their murders—because crimes on that magnitude inevitably demand consequentialist justifications. They were super-smart people too.) After you consider this, you start to understand why the most powerful ethical systems are built on something stronger than possible longterm consequences. Take your pick—Kant’s categorical imperative, Thomistic natural law, Aristotelian virtue ethics, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Code of Hammurabi, Rawlsian justice, or whatever. They are all superior to Effective Altruism, and it’s not even close.