Spreadsheet morality

A decade ago, Critical Race Theory (CRT) seemed to be an obscure academic topic. But while Christians weren't paying attention, CRT’s axioms were hardening into policy, legislation, and cultural norms. Effective Altruism (EA) now occupies a similar pre-political space: few Christians can define it, yet its principles steer billions in philanthropy, shape major companies, and inform government legislation. If CRT smuggled a new interpretive lens into every discussion about justice, EA is installing a moral operating system for ethical decisions in technology, politics, medicine, education, and beyond.

Though unknown to many Christians, Effective Altruism’s resources and reach are substantial. Open Philanthropy, funded mainly by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, has distributed $3 billion in grants and underwrites the work of congressional fellows drafting federal statutes. Will MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future is a New York Times bestseller. Convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, once one of EA’s most visible proponents, ranked second only to George Soros in Democratic Party contributions. EA nonprofits lobby Congress, and their think tanks shaped Biden’s executive orders.

Effective Altruism emerged at Oxford when Toby Ord and Will MacAskill combined global-health metrics with utilitarian philosophy. Three organizing pillars of EA are evidence metrics that seek to quantify every moral choice, cause prioritization that ranks needs by “expected value,” and long-termism that assigns the greatest weight to potential future lives. On paper, this seems rigorous; yet, beneath the spreadsheets lie the speculative probabilities and moral exchange rates that are found in every utilitarian system of ethics.

Morality by spreadsheet has significant problems on its own, but long-termism magnifies the distortion to absurdity. EA treats our obligations to potential future persons—billions, even quadrillions of people who might possibly be born between now and the end of human history—as morally weightier than our obligations to the person next door. Thus, acting to reduce disaster risk in the year 3000 by 0.0001 percent “saves” more lives on paper than feeding today’s hungry children. This same logic even views abortion and euthanasia as societal imperatives, sacrificing millions today for a chance of a better life for hypothetical trillions tomorrow.

The theory reaches peak absurdity in the campaign for invertebrate welfare. Because impact is measured as “lives affected per dollar,” organisms that are tiny and innumerable dominate EA priority lists. A single dollar might spare hundreds of shrimp from painful slaughter, so “shrimp welfare” is rated dozens of times more cost-effective than any human-focused charity. Advocates urge donors to redirect giving toward retrofitting crustacean plants with anesthesia, claiming that even a slight reduction in the suffering of trillions of shrimp dwarfs solving any human misery. Elaborate spreadsheets assign “probabilistic pain coefficients” to crabs and beetles, translate them into “sentience-adjusted life-years,” and then—without irony—compare them to human deaths from malaria or famine.

From a Christian view, EA’s deficiencies are stark: Scripture and natural law teach concentric duties—family, church, neighbor, stranger (Galatians 6:10; 1 Timothy 5:8)—but EA flattens them, prioritizing distant future hypotheticals. EA turns human dignity into fungible “value units,” erasing the gulf between image-bearers and crustaceans. EA assumes omniscient foresight, contra Proverbs 16:9’s reminder of man’s provisional plans.

The Christian alternative to Effective Altruism is ordered charity rooted in the Ordo Amoris—the rightly ordered hierarchy of love. Scripture provides the architecture for Ordo Amoris: worship God alone (Matthew 22:37), honor parents before strangers (Exodus 20:12), provide for one’s household lest one “deny the faith” (1 Timothy 5:8), then “do good to everyone, especially to the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). Proximity matters: a neighbor in need is a providential appointment, not an interchangeable data point in a spreadsheet. The Good Samaritan would not have been good if he had walked past the bleeding man in front of him to attend to a hypothetical need that may or may not occur a thousand years later.

Properly applied, Ordo Amoris reminds us that the intrinsic worth of a human soul outweighs econometric calculation and that relationships carry non-fungible obligations. A father must not let his children go hungry to bankroll an anti-asteroid fund; a congregation must not neglect its widows while underwriting anesthesia for shrimp; sharing the gospel with a coworker out of concern for his or her eternal soul is not a distraction from something with a supposedly higher cost-benefit ratio. Metrics have value only within the Creator’s hierarchy. Love God supremely, serve assigned spheres faithfully, then extend mercy outward as providence allows.

Scripture certainly commends an orientation towards blessing future generations. Yet, unlike EA’s long-termism, when the Bible talks about our obligations towards future generations, the future good is pursued by fulfilling present, embodied duties to concrete persons: catechize your household (Deuteronomy 6:6-7), leave an inheritance (Proverbs 13:22), and plant the gospel in the next faithful pastor (2 Timothy 2:2). EA’s long-termism, on the other hand, converts “future persons” into a mathematical multiplier, detached from the God-ordained means of blessing posterity and treating future generations as fungible impact tokens.

Measured against the testimony of Scripture and the axioms of natural law, Effective Altruism collapses into absurdity: it quantifies human dignity, levels concentric duties, and elevates hypothetical future crustaceans above the flesh-and-blood neighbor God has placed in our path. By contrast, the Ordo Amoris honors the created moral order—beginning with the worship of God, extending to family and church, and then to the stranger as providence allows.

Critical Race Theory advanced because Christians underestimated an exotic idea until it had refashioned almost every institution. Effective Altruism threatens to follow the same path. This time, we should pray that Christians will stand ready to offer a faithful alternative that is anchored in reason, creation, and most importantly, the authoritative and inerrant Word of God.