From JSM to SBF, utilitarianism can feed humanity's worst appetites

Effective Altruism must learn from the 19th century utilitarians' failure

Each academic year at the University of Lincoln, I introduce our social science students to John Stuart Mill. He was on the ‘right side of history’ on many issues: equal rights for women, democratic participation for all, free speech, free trade, freedom of association and the abolition of the death penalty. He justified these then-radical positions using a moral theory systemized by his mentor, Jeremy Bentham: utilitarianism. This is the simple doctrine that people, and the institutions they establish, should aim to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This doctrine values the happiness of all people, regardless of their nationality or social status.

Yet Mill also spent a great deal of his working life (indeed, from the age of 17) as an official in the East India Company, a private corporation that dominated trade in spices and other commodities, participated in the global slave trade, and was, by the time Mill joined, administering large parts of India that it had conquered. It was eventually abolished with its territory absorbed into the British Empire. Mill’s roles included lobbying the British government in defence of the interests of the company, what we now recognise as a disgraceful way to make a living.

In the past, I ignored Mill’s career in favor of what I took to be his valuable liberal ideas. But this is hard to sustain when you look at his works, including his famous On Liberty, where he uses a distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarous’ peoples as a rationale to impose despotism (and foreign despotism if need be) to move barbarous or otherwise stagnant societies to a more enlightened state. By a remarkable coincidence, Mill finds that the East India Company just happened to discover the best form of government for improving the conditions of those subject to its rule. Today, we recognise the abject cruelty and sadism of imperialism and see very little evidence of any long-term benefits to societies that were ever subject to it.

How could someone so prescient about the basis for liberal democratic societies come up with such a self-serving defence of British oppression abroad? I conjecture that part of the answer is a degree of hubris in classical utilitarianism. Utilitarianism famously permits actions with some bad consequences so long as the good consequences outweigh them. The trolley problem (where an agent is invited to sacrifice one person to save five) is a classic moral dilemma that separates utilitarian intuitions from deontological constraints on moral conduct.

At least with the trolley problem, the costs and benefits are instantaneous. In the real world, costs and benefits are felt not only by different people but also at different times and places. The distinction between short-term costs and long-term benefits, however, introduces a potential slip between cup and lip. Suddenly, large speculative future benefits can weigh more heavily than instantly realised costs.

Now consider that the agent, unlike in the pure trolley problem, is seldom disinterested. They may benefit materially from one of the outcomes. Alternatively, they may derive satisfaction (and perhaps status) from their role as the decider: the person who makes a difference in other people’s lives rather than being a passive bystander. This an obvious point but one that seems to elude even the greatest moral theorists once they are put in a position of power.

Why is this important today? The Effective Altruist movement is a direct successor to the utilitarian radicals of the 19th century: keen believers in the power of rationality and empiricism to dramatically improve global wellbeing. EAs began with relatively straightforward, empirically testable schemes that have few plausible negative drawbacks: providing de-worming medicine to children in areas with poor sanitation; supplying insecticide-treated bed nets to protect people from malaria, and giving very poor people in the world cash to spend on whatever they see fit. They valorised the low-administration costs of effective causes. Their fundraising approach was positively ascetic: encouraging EA proponents to dedicate 10% of their income to well-evidenced EA causes for life. There is nothing quite like requiring a direct personal sacrifice to distinguish the committed from the self-serving.

Over the last few years, the EA movement has shifted in a way that has left it more exposed to the typical distortions of philanthropy. From preventing clear threats to life, health and well-being, EAs have turned their attention to ‘long-term’ speculative causes, such as the existential risks posed by AI. As valuable as such a cause might be, engaging with it has justified funding high-status, relatively high-income knowledge workers and professionals who are either EAs themselves or are, at least, people within their common social circle. From a laser-like focus on low costs to give more to the very poor, EA organisations now invest in statement premises for attractive conferences, with the far more speculative intention of raising the status of EA causes in the future. Rather than trying to get everyone involved to contribute no matter their income level, fundraisers try to convert billionaires who can single-handedly support major projects and, better yet, influence government to adopt policies favorable to EA causes.

This has reached what I hope is a nadir with the dramatic rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former billionaire now facing charges for astronomical fraud committed using a Ponzi scheme disguised as a cryptocurrency exchange. Mere months ago, he was the face of EA’s ‘earning to give’, a man of immense wealth who intended to give it all to charity. He cultivated a facade of an off-beat rational mastermind who was supposedly vegan and dismissive of fashionable (or even vaguely fitting) clothes as an unnecessary luxury. SBF aped some EA tropes but his intentions were self-serving and destructive. People adhering to more traditional moral, and perhaps even aesthetic, values would have been better able to resist this parody of utilitarian morality.