FTX, Effective Altruism, and Ends Justifying Means — Prindle Institute

-->
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 FTX, Effective Altruism, and Ends Justifying Means - The Prindle Institute for Ethics 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 ← Return to search results 
 ⊗ 
 
 

 

 
 

 
 
 
 Business 

 
 FTX, Effective Altruism, and Ends Justifying Means

 

 
 
 
 By Jeff Dunn 
 
 
 
 15 Nov 2022 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 SHARE
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 Until a week ago, Future Exchange (FTX) was one of the largest and most respected cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Then, in spectacular fashion, it all collapsed .

 The collapse didn’t just wipe out the billions of dollars that users had invested in the platform. It also wiped out the fortune and reputation of FTX’s billionaire CEO and philanthropist, Sam Bankman-Fried. And because of Bankman-Fried’s close ties with effective altruism , a particular kind of philanthropy championed prominently by Oxford moral philosopher William MacAskill, the shockwaves of FTX’s collapse have been far reaching.

 Effective altruism is a movement with roots in moral philosophy. In 2011 when MacAskill was a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford he co-founded the organization 80,000 Hours . The name is taken from an estimate about the number of working hours a person will have over the course of their career. Its goal is to advise people about how to make the biggest impact in their careers to address the world’s most pressing problems. In practice, the advice is often to earn as much money as possible and then donate that money to causes that are effective at doing good. MacAskill himself describes the movement as follows :

 The effective altruism movement consists of a growing global community of people who use reason and evidence to assess how to do as much good as possible, and who take action on this basis. 

 If you want to do as much good as possible, there are two main things to think about: (1) what distribution of resources makes the biggest difference, and (2) how do we get a lot of resources to distribute? On that second question effective altruists have advised each other and outsiders to pursue careers that will generate significant financial resources. On the first question, effective altruists have advised others to give (and have, themselves, given ) to causes such as mosquito nets for areas subject to malaria (because the cost of the nets is so low compared to the life-saving potential), and to minimizing global risk such as pandemic preparedness, AI risk mitigation, and nuclear nonproliferation (because in these cases, the potential upside of lowering risk is so great).

 Effective altruism is not an ethical theory per se , but it does have connections to the ethical theory known as utilitarianism . According to utilitarianism the sole way to evaluate actions morally is based on their consequences. For each action you could perform, you consider the 

... (truncated, 10 KB total)