Effective Altruism Is Evil

A moral indictment of effective altruism argues that its core commitments - maximizing altruistic impact through evidence and consequentialist calculation - collapse into a deeply dangerous longtermist calculus. By treating suffering as a quantifiable utility that includes non-human animals and by refusing to discount the value of far-future minds, the movement privileges tiny probabilistic reductions in existential risk (especially from AI) over immediate, substantial benefits to living people. Concrete examples offered include published welfare-range estimates that put shrimp welfare in numerical relation to humans and the Shrimp Welfare Project funded by a major EA funder, and a thought experiment showing an obligation to press a button that marginally lowers AI extinction risk rather than end all current human suffering.

The critique traces unsettling policy implications: some proponents endorse actively reducing wild-animal populations if that lowers long-term suffering, and influential philosophers associated with the intellectual foundation of the movement have defended secrecy when consequentialist calculations favor concealment. Combined with a rhetorical tendency to deflect criticism by denying a single, orthodox EA position, the result is characterized as an ideology that can rationalize extreme, opaque means in pursuit of speculative future benefits - dangerous even if many adherents are personally well-intentioned.