”Socrates contemplating ethics, medium shot, waist and torso shot, golden hour, warm glow, muted, bleak, somber, melancholic, gloomy, sad, desaturated, dull, dim, digital painting trending on artstation HQ”
Rationality and effective altruism brought us to this:
How could this happen? This is exactly what philosophy is supposed to fix. Ethics is the search for a system of rules that can’t be used by stupid people to do terrible things. lf you are looking for candidate ethical systems that seem least likely to be co-opted to do bad things, it’s reasonable to pick something like effective altruism and rationality.
The ideas behind them are:
You can use reason and quantitative evidence to figure out what it means to do good.
You should put that knowledge into practice by doing as much good as you can.
Except, in this case, those principles seem to have failed spectacularly.
Want the full text of all articles in RSS? Become a subscriber, or learn more.
### Summary
- Sam Bankman-Fried was steeped in effective altruism before he was publicly known for it.
- His fraud appears to have been committed with the belief it would do the most good for the most amount of people.
- This illustrates a problem with utilitarianism known as "repugnant conclusions", where doing the most good for the most people can logically justify extremely bad acts.
- However, the effective altruist community has largely rejected SBF, showing that the problem may not be with utilitarianism, but instead from someone who got high on their own virtue.
- SBF followed a long tradition of rationalists who believed they could use philosophy to escape human flaws, but ended up instead using it to rationalize bad actions.
- Philosophy and rationality are good! But so far, the search for a perfect ethical system has not born fruit, and it may be time to accept that we should simply try to do our best.
- You can subscribe to theiterator.com for more content like this.
#### By Dan Shipper / Superorganizers
