Re: Misanthropic Altruism (Philosophy)

On 8/1/2026 9:37 AM, dart200 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
>   >>
Fate. A natural or divine force that guides the world and decides what 
will happen before it occurs.