This piece was originally published in Compact.

Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy is known as Effective Altruism (EA).

Scandals in the EA world, most notably the downfall of the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, prompted many effective altruists to renounce the name in recent years. But the ideas endure. In 2025, six EA-aligned grantmakers deployed $1.25 billion, and this number is set to grow along with the success of the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, Anthropic, which was founded on EA principles. The firm’s founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth upon the firm’s IPO. These wealth pledges, combined with the company policy of matching employee donations, will create billions in philanthropic capital, channeled through EA’s entrenched institutions.

Effective Altruism is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into Silicon Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving America in the name of humanity.