11 highlights
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I’ll let you read the paper yourself, but essentially, the central argument that Singer makes is that if individuals are in a position of relative affluence, then they must donate to those who find themself in a position without food, medical care or shelter. He takes this one step further, and states that inaction is as immoral as not saving a drowning child in front of you. In other words, Singer’s argument is that if you are relatively affluent, charity isn’t just optional, it’s obligatory.
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Singer’s Famine, Affluence and Morality changed all that. The article wasn’t just thought-provoking; it was revolutionary. To this day, it remains one of the most influential articles ever written in ethics.
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We’ve all read pompous op-ed articles and ranty Twitter threads that say similar things, but Singer’s bar is much higher. He’s an academic. So, he structures it as an argument, and proceeds to prove it, starting from foundational ethical assumptions, building on it step by step, until Singer’s conclusion stares at the reader.1
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Musk and SBF are representative of the core beliefs of many successful tech and business CEOs all over the world, even in India. The world is broken. It needs to be fixed. And the only way to do it is to leverage their vast financial resources and influence. Pick a cause. Study it well. Invest time and money into it. Measure outcomes. Create impact. If you trace back how people like SBF and Musk got here, you’ll end up at Peter Singer.
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Essentially, MacAskill nudged SBF towards effective altruism through an idea called ‘earn to give’—which argues that the best way to do the most good to the world is by making lots of money. SBF took this quite seriously, and apart from founding a multibillion dollar crypto company, he spent a significant amount of time championing the cause of effective altruism at multiple forums. Sequoia Capital, one of FTX’s early investors even wrote a massive (and somewhat bizarre) 14,000-word profile about SBF on their website titled, “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too” (the article has since been deleted).
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Kelsey Piper, the reporter, reminded him of what SBF had said in that interview about how effective altruism had a moral line. He was a disgraced man now, and under criminal investigation. Did he mean what he’d said back then? SBF didn’t even remember what he’d said back then. After being informed about it, he seemed amused. “Man, all the dumb shit I said.” And then. “It’s not true. Not really.”
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Businesses have simple, deterministic ways to decide if they are doing well or doing badly. If they are winning or losing. Revenue. Valuation. Profits. Costs. NPS. If something goes up, you are winning. If it goes down, you are losing. Simple. And easily understood. For companies and their CEOs, there’s only one incentive—winning.
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And because winning and losing is measured using a balance sheet, ethics is also measured using the same yardstick. It gives you the justification to do some bad things, as long as you do more good things.
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The biggest limitation is that nobody wants to say that they didn’t create an impact. Either you say you succeeded. Or you say you wildly succeeded. Nobody will honestly say that sorry, we tried our best and failed. In fact, even saying that we partially succeeded is rare. That’s the culture. There needs to be more space and comfort for underperformance and how underperformance is relevant to impact measurement & management. Without that, it would be hard for this scenario to change.
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An overwhelming majority of respondents reported meeting or exceeding both their impact expectations and their financial expectations (99% and 88%, respectively; Figure 47). Respondents were also asked to share what benchmarks they use to determine their performance relative to expectations by asset class. Just under 20% of investors responded to that question
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Peter Singer witnessed the Bengal famine and argued that doing good for the world wasn’t just optional. It was obligatory. Then came effective altruism which advocated that if you need to have a big impact, you need to make lots of money. So billionaires and businesses chose causes based on their perception of what was wrong in the world. Like fixing free speech. Or rescuing crypto companies. Or making lots of babies. And to measure its effectiveness, they used the only tool they understood well, i.e., numbers. Numbers that were either incorrect, incomplete, or inaccessible. Numbers that helped justify doing bad, because you could use it to quantify good. And those numbers assured you that net-net, you were positive, so you were doing the right thing. Everyone who wants to change the world deludes themselves into believing that they are changing the world. And now you know why the world remains unchanged.
Footnotes
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This is a good view of what an academic must do, to use Suketu Mehta’s frame, THIS is what is an academic’s dharma. To be a good academic one must feel this drive and be willing to fight against the established norms, the “system” in an institution if necessary as a means to THIS end. ↩