Synopsis
Effective Altruism is not a philosophy that accidentally borrowed mathematical tools. It is a mathematical programme that borrowed the vocabulary of ethics. Expected value calculations, QALY ratios, temporal discount rates, and existential risk probabilities are not instruments that serve EA’s moral commitments; they constitute them. The result is the purest expression of this book’s central argument: when you build a moral system inside an objective function, the choice of function is everything, and the people who define it acquire extraordinary power without accountability. EA begins with Peter Singer’s 1972 “drowning child” thought experiment — the argument that geographic distance does not diminish the moral obligation to prevent suffering — and operationalises it, through GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, into a systematic ranking of charitable causes by cost per life saved or DALY averted. The QALY is Bentham’s util with a medical gloss: one year of perfect health equals 1.0; one year with a chronic condition, a decimal fraction determined by a questionnaire administered to people who do not share the affected person’s circumstances. The longtermist turn, developed in MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future (2022), applies a near-zero discount rate to future generations and concludes that preventing civilisational catastrophe produces expected moral value many orders of magnitude larger than alleviating present poverty. The living poor are not wrong in the arithmetic; they are negligible. The chapter closes with Sam Bankman-Fried, whose “earning to give” strategy — maximise income by any means, donate later to the highest-expected-value causes — was the logical conclusion of consequentialist expected-value reasoning unconstrained by deontological limits. The fraud was not a betrayal of EA’s mathematics. It was an application of them.
In This Chapter
- How Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus became the QALY and how the QALY, developed in post-war health economics, built the measurement infrastructure that EA later claims as its scientific foundation
- How Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” replaces visceral, proximate moral response with a calculative one, and what this substitution costs in terms of the particular person who needed help
- How GiveWell’s charity rankings perform MacKenzie’s performativity thesis: the metric reshapes the sector it claims to measure, directing resources toward the quantifiable and away from the structural
- How the longtermist turn applies Parfit’s population ethics and a near-zero discount rate to make the living poor arithmetically negligible, and how each assumption required is a political choice presented as a mathematical parameter
- How the FTX collapse reveals what expected-value reasoning without deontological constraint produces when the financial instrument connecting means to ends is a crypto exchange
Connection Forward
Chapter 9 examines venture capital’s portfolio logic — power-law return distributions, monopoly as objective function, and the political philosophy encoded in the portfolio — as the mechanism by which the ideology of optimisation becomes material: the same network that funded EA funds the companies that built the automated poorhouse.