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The Trouble with Algorithmic Ethics and Effective Altruism | Sierra Club
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An environmental organization's critical perspective on EA and AI ethics; useful for understanding mainstream progressive critiques of the AI safety community's priorities and framing, though not a technical resource.
Metadata
Importance: 28/100opinion piececommentary
Summary
A Sierra Club critique of Effective Altruism and its influence on AI ethics discourse, arguing that EA's utilitarian, quantitative approach to moral reasoning is reductive and potentially dangerous. The piece challenges the framing of AI risk through an EA lens, questioning whether 'algorithmic ethics' adequately addresses systemic social and environmental harms. It raises concerns about the concentration of power and ideology within tech philanthropy shaping AI governance.
Key Points
- •Effective Altruism's utilitarian calculus oversimplifies complex moral questions by reducing ethics to quantifiable outcomes.
- •EA's influence on AI safety discourse may divert attention from present-day harms toward speculative long-term existential risks.
- •The piece critiques the outsized role of wealthy tech donors in shaping AI ethics and governance agendas.
- •Algorithmic ethics frameworks risk ignoring structural inequalities and environmental impacts of AI systems.
- •The Sierra Club perspective grounds AI concerns in environmental justice and community-level impacts rather than abstract risk calculations.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Centre for Effective Altruism | Organization | 78.0 |
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# Here's What's Wrong with Effective Altruism
## Effective altruism has no room for wolves or mountain climbing
By
[Emma Marris](https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/authors/emma-marris)
Illustrations by [Ellen Weinstein](https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/authors/ellen-weinstein)
May 16, 2023
First, the good news: The much-maligned tech bros want to be ethical. But, being tech bros, they want a shiny, new ethic—one that’s iconoclastic, counter-intuitive, and algorithmic. Their ideal system is one that allows them to keep making lots of money as long as they give some of it away. The latest philosophical trend, called effective altruism, hits the spot nicely.
Effective altruism is an ethical approach based on figuring out the best way to reduce suffering in the present and future. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz is a proponent; Elon Musk has dabbled. Last year, Oxford philosopher William MacAskill published a book-length argument for effective altruism, _What We Owe the Future,_ which immediately hit the _New York Times_ best-seller list and was greeted by (mostly) glowing reviews. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt said the book made him weep. Bill McKibben blurbed it. Before he lost his fortune and got slammed with a raft of criminal indictments, former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was the poster child for “earning to give” as he amassed a huge fortune that he said he planned to give to charities.
The bad news is that effective altruism is flawed—and not just because its most prominent adherent is an alleged con man. Effective altruism doesn’t play well with most environmental ethics theories, in part because in the universe of effective altruism, only entities that can suffer matter. Trees, rivers, species—none of these are intrinsically valuable. Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering. And that fatally oversimplifies the many ways in which the living world can be valuable. Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.
Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a "good life," and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.
Effective altruism (EA to devotees) tr
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