Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This post is my attempt to take stock of the effective altruism movement (EA), which has made major inroads into the popular mind over the past several years, and with which most readers are likely already familiar. The twentieth century Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani once wrote that a consequence of the modern scientific interpretation of nature solely as matter and extension was that “[t]o the self-centered ego of man, the world came to look like so much raw material.” Within the domain of ethics, we could imagine that this perspective might express itself in the form of a totally amoral—or perhaps even openly immoral—form: when all former horizons of moral evaluation cease to make a claim upon our reasoning, we might conclude, no good remains but that of the selfish individual. But something less straightforward—and, to me, much more interesting—has occurred in the case of effective altruism (and this is closer to what Nishitani was getting at): Rather than defending a kind of moral egoism, the movement draws deeply from what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called a “rich moral background” which lies behind many modern deployments of instrumental reason, and, far from rejecting ethics as a mere hangover from a more naïve epoch, EA understands itself as a supremely selfless and humane initiative that is possible precisely because human-centered values have finally been able to claim their rightful centrality within the field of ethics.

What first drew my interest in effective altruism was what seemed to be its unique influence on the modern tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley. I wondered about how ethical questions came to be understood so comfortably in the technical and scientific terms in which both EA and Silicon Valley see the world, and to what extent the movement’s close relationship with modern technology was a consequence of their shared intellectual sources. In this essay, I try to provide readers with a sense of the landscape of the effective altruism movement: these specifics are important because a major part of my argument is that the actual words and actions of modern-day effective altruists are remarkably clear expressions of the theoretical sources which the movement shares with the general orientation of modern technology: In both cases, the common theme is the conviction that the world can and must be set right by means of human control.