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The End of Effective Altruism?
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The End of Effective Altruism?

Success has many philosophical bedfellows; frauds have none

Nov 18, 2022 · 13 min readUpdated Jun 26, 2026

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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.

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