Misanthropic Altruism (Philosophy)

"Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a 
world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so 
are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over 
many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and 
dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the 
adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in 
every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy 
is known as Effective Altruism (EA).

Scandals in the EA world, most notably the downfall of the 
cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, prompted many effective 
altruists to renounce the name in recent years. But the ideas endure. In 
2025, six EA-aligned grantmakers deployed $1.25 billion, and this number 
is set to grow along with the success of the world’s leading artificial 
intelligence company, Anthropic, which was founded on EA principles. The 
firm’s founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth upon 
the firm’s IPO. These wealth pledges, combined with the company policy 
of matching employee donations, will create billions in philanthropic 
capital, channeled through EA’s entrenched institutions.

Effective Altruism is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that 
Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into Silicon 
Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar 
balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a 
civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving America 
in the name of humanity.

Several historical developments help explain EA’s success. One is the 
rise of mass media, which widened the circle of concern that once might 
have encompassed only family and neighbors. By the beginning of the 
1970s, televisions were present in nearly every American home. Footage 
of people suffering abroad became a regular fact of American life. In 
1972, the philosopher Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence, and 
Morality," the essay that would become EA’s foundation. His argument was 
simple: If we can prevent suffering at little cost to ourselves, we 
must, and it makes no moral difference whether the person we help is "a 
neighbor’s child ten yards from me" or a stranger on another continent.
Another precondition for EA’s rise was the modern pathologization of 
traditional sources of identity — nation, religion, family, tradition. 
Especially after World War II, such particular loyalties were recast as 
the wellspring of fascism. Later generations, whose education 
dispossessed them of everything particular, were prepared to receive the 
EA program.

In his 1981 book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that every 
culture is defined by its stock of "characters," the social roles that 
embody its moral ideals. "Characters," he wrote, "are the masks worn by 
moral philosophies." The twentieth century’s main character was the 
bureaucrat, whose authority was derived from a seemingly scientific 
knowledge of human affairs, grounded in the supposed incommensurability 
of facts and values. The bureaucrat administers according to facts, 
while values are condemned to the private sphere. His expertise cannot 
be challenged. The standard of his authority is effectiveness.
He flattens all goods into a single quantifiable dimension, converting 
them into units like lives saved, suffering averted, and dollars per 
outcome. The units’ apparent neutrality conceals a range of ideological 
assumptions. The human "good" becomes a function of EA’s calculus. Then, 
pretending value-neutrality, EA denounces defection as backwards, 
unscientific, and immoral. Any challenge appears to spurn both science 
and human dignity.

More recently, EA’s impartiality has expanded far beyond those currently 
living, to what "longtermists" envision as 10^58+ potential future 
beings — human and digital. These future beings’ existence depends on 
the avoidance of human extinction. The longtermists consider AI the 
dominant existential risk, and frontier development is concentrated in a 
few American labs.

Some have taken the argument to its violent conclusion. Eliezer 
Yudkowsky, the most influential of the doomsayers, wrote in Time that 
nations should "be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike," 
nuclear war notwithstanding. And since 2022, the Zizians, a cult that 
splintered off from the same Bay Area rationalist scene, have been 
linked to six killings.

Congress must treat the philanthropic apparatus of frontier AI as it 
treats any concentration of unaccountable power. Lawmakers should demand 
disclosure of the grantmaking networks that fund labs with national 
security implications. They should condition federal contracts on terms 
any defense contractor would recognize: Disclose the instructions and 
value systems trained into the models, certify systems sold to the 
government will execute lawful orders without an engineer’s veto, and 
reserve the government’s right to audit.

The machines our government buys must serve the American people, not 
some present or future humanity. And procurement standards should favor 
open-weight models, which anyone can download, run, and test, so that 
the nation never depends on intelligence a handful of labs can withhold.
—William Thibeau

https://www.compactmag.com/article/misanthropic-altruism/

The philosophical and ethical question is, is it beneficial to value 
those close to us more highly than others, or is it better to value all 
human life equally?

Is it even /possible/ to value all lives equally?

Does attempting to see all life as equal inevitably lead to placing a 
lower value on the lives of those close to us (both temporally and 
physically)?

What about the lives of those who oppose the idea of seeing all life as 
morally equal?