Why Does Wall Street Hate Effective Altruism?
Kids and grown ups can be stupid and cruel, especially when someone who set out to do something good — perhaps even with an air of superior benevolence — goes wrong. We love to pile on people who preach good works when they eventually and inevitably prove themselves fallible just like the rest of us. As if none of us should ever aspire to something better than ourselves until we are better than ourselves. But that means none of us should ever aspire to a higher level of service or conscience. As though if we ever caught Henry David Thoreau eating a burger from Five Guys we should toss out all that he might have said about vegetarianism as a higher form of living. Something like that.
Anyway, a few Wall Street buzzards are circling in anticipation of the prison sentence that is likely to be given to San Bankman-Fried. Here is some of what was said in a WSJ commentary last week:
In their 100-page sentencing memo, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers offer a raft of bad arguments for letting their client off lightly, citing everything from his autism to his veganism. The dominant theme is the most damning: Mr. Bankman-Fried thinks he should get off lightly because he wants to make the world a better place. At least 10 times, the lawyers refer to their client’s supposed strategy of “earning to give,” or what Mr. Bankman-Fried termed “effective altruism.” They quote his father as saying that “Sam started FTX as a way to earn to give”; they laud his “commitment to the world” and his “great gifts to offer the world”; they describe him as a man “who can still have a significant, positive impact on this world.”
I could go on, as they do, at great length. But here’s the thing: Mr. Bankman-Fried’s commitment to his utilitarian mission of making the world “better” is what led him into fraud and criminality in the first place. Far from making the case for leniency, his legal brief’s emphasis on his good intentions and larger purpose demonstrates that he has learned nothing, or the wrong lessons, from his convictions for fraud and conspiracy. He acted as if he were above the law. He played fast and loose with customers’ assets because he thought he knew better. He lied to customers about the safety of their assets, lent them to himself to speculate with in his hedge fund, and concealed the resulting losses by “borrowing” still more from his unwitting clients. This is the stuff of garden-variety Ponzi schemes.
His lawyers would have us believe that because Mr. Bankman-Fried “never valued or desired great personal wealth or status,” he lived frugally, he is “unable to experience joy or pleasure,” his guilt is mitigated. In fact, his moral arrogance drove his crimes. And although federal prosecutors have so far declined to pursue the campaign-finance charges on which Mr. Bankman-Fried was indicted last year, he allegedly brought the same utilitarian outlook when he spent at least $100 million in stolen customer funds to influence the 2022 elections.
By arguing that he deserves a lighter sentence because his motives were supposedly altruistic, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s legal team is asking Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to endorse the same twisted moral calculus that led the defendant into criminal activity in the first place. It doesn’t matter if you agree with Mr. Bankman-Fried about how to make the world better, whether you support his veganism, his global-warming alarmism or his priorities for spending his ill-gotten gains. History teaches us that the greatest crimes are committed by those who believe they are mankind’s benefactors.
It just sounds like “let’s punish him even worse because he walked around here like Jesus, thinking he was gonna save everyone.” I am not saying that Sam is Jesus. But setting aside the spirituality of it all, that’s why Jesus was crucified. The people hated him because he came to help and in his “arrogance” he said so. The instinct to punish the hell out of anybody who ever sets out to do something good only to expose their own faults — or what we think are faults — is an old one. Maybe we hate “goody two shoes” because in their quest to help they further expose our own faults. I think capitalist hate altruists for that very reason.
darryll k. jones