Re: Misanthropic Altruism (Philosophy)

On Sat, 1 Aug 2026 09:37:27 -0700, dart200
<[email protected]> wrote:

>On 8/1/26 9:01 AM, Wilson wrote:
>> 
>> "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, 
>
>no
>
>> or is it better to value all human life equally?
>
>yes
>
>> 
>> Is it even /possible/ to value all lives equally?
>
>yes
>
>> 
>> 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)?
>
>no
>
>> 
>> What about the lives of those who oppose the idea of seeing all life as 
>> morally equal?
>
>  > subethical beliefs self-resolve in fate

So it seems.  Somewhere in the depths of the human psyche is the
potential to do better than that.  Maybe.

>  > #god
-- 
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian  shrinks in horror and warns others away