A cocktail of elite arrogance and naivete across the Anglophone world, combined with the support of billionaires like Sam Bankman-Fried, produced effective altruism. The result has been reactionary, often racist intellectual defenses of inequality.
According to Karl Marx, a combination of arrogance and ignorance incubated in elite institutions was to blame for the worst excesses of British moral philosophy. The same holds true for effective altruism.
:marx-hi:
Academics are fond of giving lofty names to their research institutions. But the Future of Humanity Institute, a research body based at Oxford University, is grandiose even by the standards of an elite institution that takes it for granted that many of its graduates will go on to walk the halls of power.
The combination of a forward-looking outlook and a universalist perspective would suggest that the institute would at the very least be home to cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideas. For this reason, it came as a surprise to some when a racist email written by Nick Bostrom, a professor at the institute, resurfaced. In the email, sent in 1996 to a transhumanist mailing list of which Bostrom was a member, the future Oxford don writes that “blacks are more stupid than whites” and then later doubles down enthusiastically on this statement by telling the forum’s members, “I like that sentence and think it’s true.”
In the email, Bostrom cites as evidence for his assertions “scientific” views about IQ differences between racial groups. Predictably, he suggests that fear of being accused of bigotry prevents honest talk about these important issues: “For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with: ‘I hate those bloody n——!!!,’” he wrote.
Given this concern, he concludes there’s a need for caution in communicating the “facts” about relative mental inferiority in ways that don’t invite accusations of racism and therefore result in “personal damage.” He is adamant that he’s not racist, and he seems to sincerely believe this claim.
We might think that, given the incident took place decades ago, it is hardly relevant. This may have been the case were it not for the fact that, in an apology circulated by Bostrom earlier this month, he did little to challenge the central claims of his previous racist rant. “I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago,” Bostrom writes:
It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
The main problem, according to Bostrom, was the use of a racial slur and not, his statement suggests, his commitment to pseudoscientific ideas about racial difference.
Bostrom is an advocate of longtermism, a once-niche concept now in vogue thanks to a bestselling 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill, a pioneer of the effective altruism (EA) movement. The gist of longtermism is that future people, however distant, have equal moral value to people alive today. Though seemingly innocuous, this view has drawn support from reactionary conservatives and tech gurus who flood Bostrom and MacAskill with millions in research grants.
What is it about effective altruism and offshoots like longtermism that make them so appealing to tech billionaires who flood MacAskill and his pals with grants, book endorsements, and invitations to California retreats?
The short answer is that effective altruism, for all the hype about being a novel, game-changing approach, is at heart a conservative movement, which attempts to present billionaires as a solution to global poverty rather than its cause. The effective altruism movement has parasitically latched onto the back of the billionaire class, providing the ultrarich with a moral justification of their position.
In a 2015 conference hosted by Google, organizers enthused that “effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.” A deeply implausible statement, of course, but one that has managed somehow to serve as a rallying cry for the idealistic rich.
Rooted in a worldview that stretches from philosopher Peter Singer to the grandaddy of consequentialism, Jeremy Bentham (“Bentham’s bulldog” is the title of one effective altruism fan’s Substack), proponents of effective altruism champion the belief that measurable effects in terms of lives saved is the only rational way to make decisions about philanthropic expenditures.
In many ways, their interest in measurement is not particularly objectionable, nor new. Gilded Age robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller drew upon Taylorist management principles to insist that their giving was more scientific than earlier philanthropists. In every age, we see apologetics for extreme, concentrated wealth, and while the charitable causes shift, the rationales tend to be pretty much the same: my extreme wealth is good — no matter how concentrated and disproportionate — because others will inevitably benefit from it — if not today, then certainly tomorrow.
“Earn to give” is the most recent instantiation of the supposedly rational justification of inequality. It’s the idea that people are morally beholden to maximize wealth however possible so they have more to give, leading in its most extreme interpretation to the insistence there may be no moral “good” after all in trying to save poor lives, because rich people are more “innovative” and thus more worthy.
“It now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal,” wrote Nick Beckstead in his 2013 Rutgers PhD, which he completed before joining the Future of Humanity Institute as a research fellow and then going on to work as CEO of the FTX Foundation before leaving in the wake of Sam Bankman-Fried’s recent disgrace.
Certainly, not everyone in the effective altruism movement agrees with Beckstead’s claim that saving rich lives is worthier than saving poor ones. It is, however, those like him with the most extremist, pro-rich takes on trickle-down policies who seem to get the plum jobs at effective altruism research centers. On EA forums, meanwhile, hoi polloi frustration is mounting. There is growing realization that a hierarchical movement spearheaded by a handful of mediagenic men and the billionaires they worship might not be the world’s saviors after all.
Many onetime enthusiasts who read books like MacAskill’s first one, Doing Good Better, and were inspired to “give what we can” are frustrated. They earnestly wanted to help poorer groups and feel cheated. They are right to feel that way. Given their sincerity, it feels almost cruel to break the news: no, you’re not the last social movement humanity will ever need. Indeed, many seem to have little knowledge of previous ones, a problem I encountered when I worked as a research fellow in Oxford and met EA leaders in the early days of the movement.
At first, I thought we shared a common cause. Before reaching Oxford, I’d been a journalist and activist, reporting on movements calling for reform to global trade policies that hindered poor nations from acquiring pharmaceuticals, domestic tax revenue, and the policy freedom they deserved. Many of the effective altruism proponents I met, meanwhile, spoke about ending global poverty but had never heard of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This ignorance seemed not to perturb but to embolden them to make grand claims about the “facts” of the global economy.
“The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods,” a chapter in MacAskill’s first book, hails sweatshop labor as an unalloyed advantage, even a beneficent gift, to poor nations: “Among economists on both the left and the right, there is no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor nations.” The authorities he cites are Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs. His main empirical material appears to be drawn from Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns. “I’d love to get a job in a factory,” one Cambodian woman says to Kristof.
To be sure, you can find some economists across the spectrum to defend sweatshops. But you can also find reams of Global South scholarship on tax drain and the bullying of nations to accept draconian IMF loan conditions. MacAskill’s book entirely ignores any viewpoint that does not affirm his own conservative priors — perhaps because confronting alternative views might force a rethinking of his philosophical stance, which is predicated on exhorting the world’s 1 percent to engage in as much economic predation of poor groups as possible as long it generates private wealth to then disburse.
MacAskill’s strategic ignorance is not unusual; it is in fact hardwired into the history of the branch of Anglophone philosophy out of which effective altruism emerged. James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, published a history of India in 1817 that helped him to be upheld as a key global authority on the nation, later taking up senior positions in the East India Company. Incredibly, he purposely chose not to visit India while writing his three-volume history because he didn’t want to be biased by local norms. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen put it, “Mill seemed to think that this non-visit made his history more objective.”
This sort of insipid, purposeful blindness tended to enrage later anti-utilitarian thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx. It’s probably why Marx voiced sharp criticism of Bentham, who he called that “arch-philistine . . . that soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle of the ‘common sense’ of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.”