If you want to be persuaded of the positive interpretation, or at least pulled back from the negative one, I recommend reading Scott Alexander’s recent essay defending effective altruism. Or pick up MacAskill’s recent longtermist manifesto, “What We Owe the Future,” which works very hard — and sincerely, I hope — to ground the movement’s utilitarian inclinations within a constraining framework of thou-shalt-nots.
Obviously, the career of Bankman-Fried is now grist for the darker interpretations of E.A.’s underpinnings and trajectory. But contemplating all this while wandering Harkness State Park led me to a slightly different set of thoughts — about more ineffective reasons for philanthropy, and about contingency or providence rather than pure calculation as a force for altruistic good.
I’m not equipped to assess the entirety of the Harkness family’s philanthropic endeavors, but clearly, they included a strong emphasis on causes that wouldn’t pass muster with the most utilitarian versions of effective altruism. Edward Harkness’s three great passions, according to the Philanthropy Roundtable, were “fine arts, health care and top educational institutions.” The second one did seem to lead him into E.A.-approved territory, via research into “the causes of hypertension, the treatment and prevention of pneumonia, and the causes of tooth decay.” The first and third, though, were aesthetically driven and intellectually elitist. Like any good…
