Effective Altruism: ethical stance or favorite moral loophole for plutocrats?
Related: "Future humans" sound an awful lot like "the unborn" to me--mythical beings who prolong actual human suffering in the here and now.
I hadn’t planned on writing another installment of this blog before the new year, but two things have occurred.
First of all, I made it back home to Baltimore after 33 days in California—only the first 5 of which were planned—having handled a dozen contingencies, crises, and reversals as my mother slips closer toward her final breath. Next week I’ll update everyone on that situation when I complete the third and last video of “An atheist gins up some Grace.” The past month has forced me a bit off-course from my original narrative plan but it has also created an unexpectedly elegant ending. (FYI I remain staunchly anti-supernatural even when it feels as if a divine screenwriter has turned the last eighteen months of my life into a three-act heroine’s journey. A solid tale, greenlight-ready. I’ll be the writer/director and I suppose I’ll cast Sarita Choudhury as the daughter and Shohreh Aghdashloo as the mother, even though she’ll need to age 15 years via makeup artistry.)
The second reason I decided to pipe up today: As I consider making a few modest, habitual, year-end donations to two of my longtime favorite charities, Planned Parenthood of Maryland and The Maryland Food Bank, I find myself mildly enraged again at the entire notion of “philanthropy”—a form of late-capitalist noblesse oblige that would hardly be necessary if we lived in a society built to address the basic human needs of many instead of the wealth-hoarding of a few.
This, of course, was part of the critique leveled most famously by Peter Buffett, Warren’s son, in his op-ed essay, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex,” published in The New York Times in July 2013. Buffett wrote:
Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.
As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.
But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.
Around that time, I was an occasional freelancer for The Chronicle of Philanthropy and already leaning in the direction of Buffett’s indictment. I had often interviewed small, community-oriented nonprofit leaders bristling at the way they were expected to use corporate and capitalistic benchmarks such as “scalability” or “repeatability” to be considered worthy of support. What if a program wasn’t repeatable at all? What if it was highly idiosyncratic, based on the effort of one charismatic founder or group of founders to help a few dozen people at a time in a small city neighborhood? Why was a fast-food-chain, expansionist attitude about helping a few needy humans the only way to win a major donor’s dollars?
Into these thoughts intrudes the timely story of the high-end crypto fraudster and brand-new prison inmate Sam Bankman-Fried, his once admired Stanford law professor parents, and “Effective Altruism,” sometimes identified simply as EA, a philosophy broadly popular among Silicon Valley tech socialites.1 I’m not well-versed in this particular flavor of utilitarianism (itself a highly critiqued ethical premise), so what I’m about to say here is more along the lines of a squicky intuition, albeit grounded in what I know for certain about human behavior. Effective altruism seems to be the plutocratic equivalent of Scientology for Hollywood stars: a fairytale-based belief system designed to let insanely rich people assuage their guilt and justify the inequities that enabled their wealth.
Today’s ubiquitous prosperity gospel—a revival of Calvinist predestination, the convenient belief that worldly success is an indicator of heavenly favor—falls into the same category of laughable deflection/self-justification. If you’re rich, it means God loves you! So you go on with your bad ol’ self and prove God loves you by grabbing all the cash you can! Joel Osteen approves of this divine message.
Based on the utilitarian dictum to do the greatest good for the greatest number, it’s easy to see how self-styled world-improvers might conclude that employing their skills and talents to make tons of money is a moral imperative. The trick is to grab that cash and then be “effective” in solving major problems. This presumes that you’ll use goals, strategies, and assessments in a data-driven manner that smells awfully like corporate efficiency.
These terms may sound unimpeachable to those of us—meaning almost all of us—steeped in the quasi-religion of corporate business. But effectiveness and efficiency are not innocently good values. Efficiency is what’s invoked when we allow monopolies and monopsonies to flourish. Efficiency entails prioritizing low consumer cost and high shareholder value at the expense of living wages and fair, competitive prices to wholesale producers. Since most of us are both consumers and wage-earners in some kind of production chain, efficiency means we get the chance to run on a treadmill of downward mobility while we delight in buying cheap breakable crap from the company store that is our nation. This is not the joyful and fulfilled life to which Peter Buffett refers. (I’m not one to valorize Warren Buffett simply for being less personally greedy than most of his billionaire compatriots, but I do admire the guy for raising his three kids in an ordinary-seeming middle-class household, for demanding they earn their own livings, and for promising not to leave them much in the way of inheritance.)
Effectiveness in the arena of charitable giving, meanwhile, turns the desire to help fellow humans into a matter of cost-benefit analyses and algorithms. (Not just my opinion—pretty much what I was hearing from small nonprofit founders back in the early 2010s.)
The Center for Effective Altruism states the following:
Philanthropy can take on pressing challenges that other actors in society cannot, or will not. Given the unique opportunity to deploy tax-advantaged dollars for good, individual and institutional givers alike have an imperative to maximize their effectiveness, and therefore, their impact.
Oy, I love that right there in the mission statement is the term tax-advantaged. That whole paragraph is some truly tortured word-smithing right there. The consultant got paid many thousands for that ugly bit of prose, no doubt. The use of the word deploy, too. These people fancy themselves an army of do-gooders. Or rather—five-star generals of societal betterment.
The most famous proponent of EA is a 35-year-old Scottish philosopher named Will MacAskill,2 who has recently written a book called What We Owe The Future. It seems that part of assessing one’s actions for ethical “effectiveness” includes the idea that future humans matter as much as those alive today. Indeed, Bankman-Fried’s mother once waxed on how much she admired her husband’s and son’s utilitarian approach as “a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person—alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us—as one.”
There is obviously a need to consider future generations when it comes to matters such as the global climate crisis and all its ripple effects. (Of course, in a month characterized by violent, deadly, unprecedented storms across the continent, it shouldn’t be too hard to see that in this matter, the future is
right now.) But when taken just a bit further, the concept that future humans matter is what helps a moral midget like Elon Musk obsess over the alleged need to populate Mars3 and puts him in league with the white supremacist branch of pro-birthers.
With apologies to Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a billionaire to understand something if his criminally low effective tax rate depends on not understanding it. There was a long stretch of time in our history, and there are still democratic-socialist countries today, where the greatest good for the greatest number means ensuring that citizens *actually alive* can share in and benefit from the wealth they create and that corporations are required to temper their expansionist natures with social-welfare imperatives. This requires the majority of a democratic society—and its legislative representatives—to push back against the greed and hoarding instincts of robber-baron types through tax policy, regulations, collective bargaining, and cultural norms to enact and enforce the idea that we’re all in this together.
With apologies to Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a billionaire to understand something if his criminally low effective tax rate depends on not understanding it.
It was the Reagan Revolution, perpetuated by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, and only somewhat mitigated by Obama, that reversed the values of the Great Society and killed off the last of FDR’s and LBJ's commitments to a robust general-welfare state. (The fact that federal social programs and public school systems were popular before black people were allowed to use them is of no small significance in this reversal, of course.) The specific mechanisms of the undoing included drastically slashing the top marginal tax rate for the wealthiest families and implementing the religious-conservative belief that tax-deductible private donations should replace federal taxpayer-funded programs.
Few people acknowledged in advance, or even later when the evidence was clear, that a mere “thousand points of light” leave almost everybody in the dark. But it was an open secret. Here’s a passage from The New York Times in early 1982, Reagan’s second year in office (and my junior year in high school, when I was lucky to be educated enough to despise the man and the movement both).
As the second year of the ''Reagan revolution'' begins, business leaders and Government officials find themselves in surprising agreement on one point: The private sector cannot fill the gap left by the withdrawal of Federal money from social welfare programs, education and scientific research.
In the year before President Reagan took office, said C. William Verity Jr., chairman of Armco Inc., the Government spent $128.2 billion for programs that may be cut under the new budget. In the same year, he said, industry raised $2.3 billion for philanthropy, ''so it is unrealistic to expect us to fill what is not just a gap, but a chasm.''
Mr. Verity, the chairman of the President's Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives, says that businesses now give on the average 1 percent of their pretax income for philanthropic purposes. Thus, he said, an increase to 5 percent, the target suggested by some analysts, would mean $11.5 billion of giving, or less than one-tenth what the Federal Government had been spending.4
For more insight on this topic, I highly recommend The Hartmann Report, historian Thom Hartmann’s prolific blog, which currently features several interrelated pieces on Reaganism’s ongoing damage to our economy and our democracy. Here I will simply assert what has been found again and again in the past 50 years: Privatization is one big scam. Deciding to run the government “like a business” has resulted everywhere in higher costs, shittier outcomes, and more corruption and waste in crucial public functions.
But furthermore, in tossing out any sense of collective, mutual responsibility along with the tax structure and programs that embodied such a value, we’ve let super-wealthy individuals and households come to believe that they are uniquely equipped to decide what exactly is the greatest good, without consulting the vast populations who allegedly stand to benefit. Couple that with the notion that future people count as much as actual living humans, and we’ve given them a lovely utopian excuse for being money-grubbing, tax-avoiding assholes. We’ve let them pretend there’s no way to create an equitable, humane, and long-term survivable society right now, or that it’s somehow not as important as some utopian vision for several generations down the line. We’ve afforded them moral loopholes as big as their elephantine egos.
Some billionaires and multimillionaires think future humans are an urgent ethical priority; other people think “the unborn” have greater rights than pregnant women. Both of these are convenient abstractions and moral enfeeblements; they let people ignore individual suffering and systemic injustices in the here and now. And not to put too fine a point on it, but it occurs to me that both future humans and fetuses, to the extent they might eventually come to matter as actual people, will do so only because an existing woman has done the work to, um, manifest what’s merely a potential.
(Truth be told, if we really cared about our future, we’d put most of our resources into global female liberation—another argument I’ve made and will continue to make until my last breath. Educating girls is the most effective way we have to lower the global birth rate, increase household savings, raise the overall average school attainments of both boys and girls, and boost a community’s overall ability to survive and thrive. But I digress.)
On the cusp of Christmas—the holiday upon which a certain Dickens character was forced by some ectoplasmic intruders to question his commitment to extreme monetary efficiency—I will mention a public figure who lives a truly effective altruistic life. Dr. Willie Parker is a self-described born-again Christian and an abortion doctor who advocates for reproductive rights and travels the South performing the procedure for poor women without access, mostly women of color. Or at least, he used to do this. I sincerely hope that the end of Roe v. Wade has not destroyed his Life’s Work, as he labeled it in a very worthwhile and persuasive best-seller. Parker justifies abortion—which he is not afraid to describe in stark medical detail— on religious grounds as a Christlike service to women in need.
That’s it. That’s his entire focus. Trying to make things a bit better for actual people, living actual hard lives, far outside the concern of data-driven plutocrats who flatter themselves as saviors of a world they’ve so effectively pillaged.
Well, now…If it’s not too passive-aggressive of me to swerve toward hopefulness and cheer for a moment…Happy holidays and here’s to the new year. Thank you so much for joining me in 2022. I look forward to sharing a new focus and some added features in 2023, including (possibly) a tip jar for ad hoc appreciation and (definitely) exclusive bonuses for my paying subscribers. Enjoy some time with your favorite people and get some rest. 2024 promises to be…interesting.
I’ve ranted about Musk’s (and his father’s) narcissistic obsession with making babies in a piece called “Incest and the royal We”.