Effective altruism is one of the most influential philosophical movements of our time, including in its ranks celebrity philosophers like Peter Singer and Nick Bostrom, and funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But Effective Altruism is in serious trouble, argues Jonathan Anomaly. It has fallen prey to group think, corruption, and now reflects a perverse reality that Nietzsche warned about in his Genealogy of Morals. The effective altruists have become the high priests, powerful gatekeepers of the truth and manipulators of society.

The effective altruism (EA) movement arose from an innocuous idea: if we are going to give to charity, we should invest in causes that pass a cost-benefit test. We could allow ourselves to be pulled by our heart strings when we see a starving child in Ethiopia and donate to a charity that wastes most of its money on advertising and virtue signaling. Or we could think about how Ethiopians might reduce future famines by helping them change their institutions or investing in better technology, for example.

Of course, it’s extremely difficult to change a country’s institutions from the outside – as shown by American military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it’s unclear whether our views of what good institutions look like are universally shared, and therefore whether it’s any of our business to try to change the institutions of other countries. But setting these issues aside, we can see the rationale behind EA: if you’re going to give to charity, at least try to make your gift effective.

One of the main problems with EA arises from the fact that it was always run by academics who consider themselves more educated, and therefore more rational and less biased than the average person.

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And they’re not always wrong, since EAs try to consciously confront the issue of cognitive biases, whereas many people casually succumb to them. However, when you view yourself in this way, and you are surrounded with academics who unconsciously share an increasingly rigid worldview, it’s a short step to thinking that it’s ok to lie to your patrons, your investors, or even yourself, if doing so has a big enough payoff.

Enter Will MacAskill, the young founder of the EA movement, and Sam Bankman-Fried, leader of a now defunct cryptocurrency exchange. Bankman-Fried used his crypto exchange to bilk investors and funnel tens of millions of dollars to EA, and to himself and his friends.

Armed with youth, intelligence, and a sincere conviction in the progressive ideology that permeates elite institutions in the US and UK, all it took was the promise of treasure from Bankman-Fried to transform a pimply professor, MacAskill, into the kind of self-appointed priest Nietzsche warned us about:

“So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth?”

Modern academics and medieval priests

The trouble is that professors in Anglo-American universities tend to be self-confident conformists with a pervasive faith in the latest progressive dogmas. Consider how willing many faculty are to sign onto petitions that result in the termination of prominent scholars or the fact that it’s now common to vet faculty and graduate students for their commitment to progressive politics before examining their academic accomplishments. The few free-thinking faculty that remain on campus – at least in the humanities and social sciences – are increasingly sanctioned for dissenting from orthodoxy. And the trends are only accelerating.