Effective Altruism—which comes from the Greek “effectos” meaning utilitarianism and “alte” meaning utilitarianism—is a utilitarian theory of utilitarianism according to we should maximise utility by stealing attention from progressive causes to promote utilitarianism.
According to EAs, it’s possible to make “interpersonal utility comparisons”, meaning the “utils” I get from enjoying Picasso are exactly the same as the “utils” you get from eating a sandwich—unless the filling is shrimp, in which case you should be cryopreserved for being a “normie” by a jury of GPT-5.
Early on, EAs thought it was a good thing to save drowning children. Recently, however, they realised that most children eat factory farmed eggs, which, according to figures from effectivealtruism.org, means saving children is, on average, worse than a million, billion holocausts.
Nowadays, EAs focus on “longtermism”, an avant-garde philosophy of the nouveau riche invented by Elon Musk which says that since there will be so many people in the future, we should focus on them at the expense of everything else, including supporting open and independent journalism.
Things are not as sunny as they seem, however. EA has an uncomfortable history of racism, with Nick Bostrom (who co-founded the movement alongside Elon Musk) having recently been caught wearing blackface on board his already controversial “slave ship”, which was bankrolled by Sam Bankman-Fried—the movement’s current poster-boy.
Can all of human history, art, culture, literature, Bollywood, love, polyamory, poetry, music, capoeira, spirituality, cooking, and emancipatory, anti-capitalist struggle be weighed against the aggregated utility of 30,000 shellfish? EAs have an answer: the former is 694,000x less valuable.
(Originally posted on my Substack, Going Awol https://amoswollen.substack.com/?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile )
