The Bankman-Frieds as Lukewarm Utilitarians

Did Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly commit one of the world’s largest crypto-frauds because he was just trying too hard to help people? SBF identified as a utilitarian and was raised by two self-identified utilitarian professors. Does the philosophy’s emphasis on doing the most good encourage people to lie, cheat, and steal to get more cash? Does the effective altruism movement, which is largely applied utilitarianism, do the same thing? Do we need future investment to read more Kant and MacIntyre and less Singer and Bentham? Is the effective altruism movement going to generate an endless stream of crypto-scandals and pyramid schemes because they read too much John Stuart Mill?

I don’t know about that. I was a teenage utilitarian- and still am sympathetic to consequentialist reasoning. But I’m not sure how utilitarian the Bankman-Fried family actually was. I’m not sure how utilitarian the effective altruism movement that Bankman-Fried was part of is either. 

In Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’s biography of SBF, Lewis says that SBF’s parents, Barbara and Joseph, never married in “silent protest of the fact that their gay friends could not legally marry, they’d joined in a civil union. And they never said a word about it to their children, or to anyone else.”

In a way that’s a super-touching and humanizing detail. Even if you hated gay marriage, it shows they were willing to sacrifice some legal advantages to stand in solidarity with their gay friends. But what an un-utilitarian thing to do!

First, state recognition of same-sex marriage is generally not considered a utilitarian priority. Second, if you’re going to avoid marriage out of solidarity with gay people, the utilitarian thing to do would be public about it as a form of public protest. This quiet, self-sacrifice which did nothing to help anybody, in utilitarian terms, is a strange choice. That’s not the only odd thing about their approach to utilitarianism.

One of the most common utilitarian positions is that factory farming is evil. That animal welfare matters  is literally the first utilitarian argument I was aware of.  Now utilitarians aren’t saints so many utilitarians condemn factory farming before they head out to a steakhouse. But Lewis makes it sound like SBF never thought seriously about not eating meat until he was in college, and his friend Adam Yedidia pushed him on the issue. It’s hard to imagine growing up the child of two utilitarian professors and not thinking eating meat was wrong- even if you couldn’t make yourself stop eating meat.

SBF wasn’t big on God. He was an atheist, in fact. But as an utilitarian he should have known better. A higher probability of infinite reward is better than a lower probability. SBF isn’t the only utilitarian who wants to argue that utilitarianism is true, but it’s okay to be an atheist. It’s a common combination. But the problem is that it’s very hard to argue that we should care about the expected amount of happiness and suffering, and not conclude that we’re obligated to try to avoid Hell- even if we’re almost certain that Hell doesn’t exist.

Some philosophers try to deal with the issue of infinitely valuable afterlifes by pointing out that combining infinity and expected value calculations has huge problems. And they’re right infinity is very tricky, but that is an argument to abandon philosophies like utilitarianism altogether, not to cling unto consequentialism in general but abandon it whenever the topic of God arises. Atheist utilitarians have tried but they have so far failed to come up with a way to square their general philosophy with a rejection of religion. It’s probably just impossible to convincingly argue that a lower probability of an eternity in Hell isn’t much better than a higher probability of an eternity in Hell. 

In practice, a lot of the utilitarians I know like the philosophy as a way to attack traditional norms and values but get annoyed when it’s pointed out that utilitarianism sometimes endorses traditional values and behavior.  The prevalence of polyamorous relationships and polyamory advocates are things you would not expect in a utilitarian or consequentialist movement. Even if you think it would be good overall for Western society to normalize or promote polyamory, adopting unconventional sexual and romantic practices obviously limits the appeal and moral authority a movement can claim. If you want to convince Iowa voters to support curbs on factory farming, you probably shouldn’t be in a polycule. EA is full of people who donate their incomes, risk their careers, or force themselves to subsist on quinoa for the greater good. Why is sex different?

Probably what happened is that effective altruism formed around people who were willing to make financial sacrifices, change their careers, and in some cases adopt veganism for the greater good. It didn’t form around people who were committed to adopting sexual restraint for the greater good. So whenever a poly-related scandal emerges from EA, people are very touchy about the idea that maximizing positive impact might require not maximizing sexual fulfillment. 

Am I trying to pull a “No true Scotsman” here by pointing out that they’re not acting like real utilitarians? I don’t think so. Sam Bankman Fried and his parents are definitely an example of how self-proclaimed utilitarians act in practice, but it would be silly to blame every crime committed by a devout Christian on the Gospel or every crime by an Orthodox Jew on the Talmud.

That Bankman-Fried was radicalized by a moral philosophy makes a good plotline for journalists, so it makes sense they emphasize it. And for effective altruists the idea that their problems come from just being too intellectually rigorous and too morally pure is actually a fairly flattering critique of the movement. And effective altruists love to worry that they might just care too much about doing the most good possible. Holden Karnofksy worries that trying to do as much good as possible might just be too dangerous! Benjamin Todd thinks that combining “aggressive optimization” with a utilitarian worldview is pretty risky!

Imagine if you asked an activist in a job interview what their weaknesses were.

“I’m too morally dedicated, too ruthlessly committed to doing the right things, and I always try to get the best outcome possible!”

Both effective altruists and their critics are making the same mistake- the movement is a lot less ruthlessly utilitarian than people think. If the movement was more utilitarian it would probably be more effective.