Using a crisis – perhaps even a crisis of one’s own devising – as a pretext to seize power? It is a very old trick. Hitler and his National Socialists were once accused of using the Reichstag fire in such a way, and now the Effective Altruists (or EAs) stand accused of something similar.
The theory within the Trump administration is that EA and EA-aligned figures such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are whipping up fears of AI doom. They are doing so in order to scare governments into regulating technology – regulations that the EAs would themselves design. Amodei’s recent essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” called on AI companies to accept the oversight of a group called Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an AI safety NGO. It was soon noticed that METR was led entirely by EAs.
EAs present their ideas as simple good sense, a rational ordering of society
Who are the EAs and what do they believe? Effective Altruism is an intellectual and lifestyle movement that came out of Oxford University in the late 2000s. It is premised on the idea that our actions and the institutions we live under should chiefly be judged by their effects on total global happiness – or “utility.”
Though not of the Oxford milieu, the philosopher Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about a child drowning in a pond was foundational to EA-dom. Suppose you were walking to work and came across a small child thrashing around in a pond, struggling to stay afloat. You could easily wade into the pond to save the child, but in doing so you would ruin your new pair of shoes. How could anyone prioritize their new shoes over the life of a child? You can’t, says Singer – and this same logic should apply to, among other things, poverty in Africa. People from rich countries have a moral obligation to forego luxuries like concert tickets or vacations, because the relatively small sums spent on these things could save the lives of dozens of children living in Third World countries – by buying them measles vaccines or mosquito nets.
You might recognize this as Utilitarianism; EA’s novel bolt-on to old-fashioned Benthamism is the idea of “longtermism” – that the welfare of future humans matters as much as that of those currently living. Hence the preoccupation with AI: a future superintelligence might one day kill or enslave billions of humans, and so those of us living in the present have a moral obligation to put certain safeguards in place – even if it could be shown that we would maximize our own pleasure by simply letting AI rip.
Because of the drowning child parable, Effective Altruism is necessarily a lifestyle as well as a theory of ethics. One of the first EA organizations to come out of Oxford was “Giving What We Can,” a “giving society” whose members each pledged to give a minimum of 10 percent of their lifetime earnings to charity. To EAs this is the only honorable course – anything else would be akin to walking on by and letting the little tyke sink.
It also follows that an EA should aim to maximize those lifetime earnings, so that they have more to give. To its left-wing critics, this line of thinking has led to a devil’s bargain between EA and free market capitalism: Effective Altruists will often pursue lucrative careers in banking or consultancy and simply donate all the proceeds. Indeed, some suspect that the trillion-dollar IPOs currently being planned for AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI will simply be donated, an EA heist of the century that will give them the financial resources to remake the world in their own image.
Communal living is another feature. Peer pressure; a certain ascetic spirit; the feeling of having access to higher mysteries beyond the ken of ordinary people – these are all impulses towards compound life. The original Oxford EAs lived in “group houses” around the city, and Sam Bankman-Fried maintained a 600-acre gated community in the Bahamas for his fellow EAs to live and work in. The squalor, backbiting, charismatic authority, and – inevitably – partner-sharing, seen in several of these communities have led some to describe Effective Altruists as a cult.
EAs present their ideas as simple good sense, a rational ordering of society. Many even style themselves as “rationalists.” As is often the case, such labels are a way to smuggle in some highly contested moral ideas. As a theory of ethics, “the greatest good for the greatest number” relies on the premise that all human lives are of equal value.
Is that really the case? The English Utilitarians were one of Nietzsche’s heels; to him, finding and cultivating the next Beethoven would be a better use of finite resources than maintaining millions of people at subsistence level. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, a John the Baptist figure to the EAs, wrestled with the “repugnant conclusion” of these Benthamite ideas – that a massive global population of humans with lives barely worth living would be morally preferable to ten billion flourishing humans. Parfit rejected the idea but couldn’t quite articulate why.
EA tends to be deferential towards society’s ruling institutions – they are working reasonably well and toppling them might cause chaos and harm: it is, then, conservatism at its most obnoxious. EA is a communitarian idea with a stronger sense of the “common good” than J.D. Vance; to call any of this technocratic, managerial, or rationalistic is to unduly flatter it.
In a sense we already live under Effective Altruism. Much like EA, the “Third Way” politics as practiced by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair maintained free market economies in order to cream off an ever increasing share of the proceeds to spend on various moral causes, mostly to do with the perpetuation of life for life’s sake. Like EAs, our current rulers are communitarians – the British civil servant Gus O’Donnell once justified mass immigration on the basis that he had an obligation to maximize total global utility. A future governed by EAs would look rather a lot like the present.
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