The Moral Vanity of FTX

"The Covid-19 pandemic may have ended in the U.S., but there is no vaccine yet for this country's pandemic of moral vanity. Its latest victim is FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

As his cryptocurrency company's value soared into vaporous billions, Mr. Bankman-Fried said he wasn't in it for the money. He described himself as a proponent of "effective altruism," or high-return charity, an idea he learned while at MIT from a philosophy graduate student. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, said he might keep 1% for himself and give the rest away through his FTX Foundation.

What interested me about Mr. Bankman-Fried's commitment to effective altruism is his notion of what qualified. As this newspaper reported on the FTX founder's philanthropy, "Sam Bankman-Fried said he wanted to prevent nuclear war and stop future pandemics." It gives new meaning to thinking big. It's also delusional, which has become a political characteristic of his generation.

During Elon Musk's pursuit of Twitter, Mr. Bankman-Fried's effective-altruism mentor, Will MacAskill, texted Mr. Musk on behalf of Mr. Bankman-Fried, who he said "has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing it [Twitter] and then making it better for the world."

And that is the telling point here -- not make the social-media platform better, but make it better for the world.

There was a time when people engaged in doing good addressed problems that, so to speak, you could get your arms around, such as improving school performance, providing potable water or preventing malaria. But at some point, the impulse to do good transformed into a combination of moral tendentiousness and grandiosity.

Remember "save the whales"? That morphed into "save the planet." Don't blame Mr. Bankman-Fried's generation entirely for its credulousness. No-longer-serious teachers -- the so-called adults in the room -- told them repeatedly they needed to save the planet. The Ford Foundation's homepage announces, "We're building a world where everyone has the power to shape their lives." It's no surprise Mr. Bankman-Fried would think his cryptocurrency profits could prevent nuclear war.

Still, inside the Bankman-Fried fairy tale rests a smaller tipping point, which suggests his generation senses that their preachy elders may have led them down a moral garden path.

In an exchange with Mr. Bankman-Fried, a writer for Vox asserts, "You were really good at talking about ethics." He replied that "I had to be" because of "this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us."

He is describing what has come to be known in our time as virtue signaling, which is the current version of moral vanity -- the presumption that doing good deserves the public's support and esteem. But why has this urge to assert public virtue in outsize ways become a mass movement? People who did good used to be humble. Now they won't get out of our faces.

One inevitably cynical answer is politics. The political left embraced the technique known as "controlling the narrative," which is a euphemism for propaganda. The new element in our time is that these "narratives" always include sweeping, if vague, claims of moral certitude and superiority.

"Environmentalism" wasn't getting the job done, so it became "the climate crisis." Reducing racial inequality gave way to "social justice." During the Covid-19 pandemic, the citation of "science" became a moral cudgel.

The purpose of this moral grandiosity isn't to engage one's opponents but to marginalize them, to place them beyond the pale of what the new gatekeepers of virtue define as acceptable discourse.

The pity in this is that there remains much good to be done, if the left's insistence on politicizing virtue doesn't discredit the idea.

Overlooked in the Bankman-Fried saga is the implicit admission inside the idea of effective altruism that capitalism -- for-profit enterprise -- is the indispensable means to good ends. It's a recognition that capitalism is the most dynamic force in American life. That's progress. What is left to debate is the role of the U.S.'s least dynamic sector -- government.

The U.S. has the world's biggest private economy and biggest government. Something new is needed, such as more effective intermediating institutions, to fill the space between those two poles, which is filling up with seemingly unsolvable problems like opioid addiction, the violent mentally ill and chronic public-school underachievement. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is in a wheel-spinning battle with mayors over what to do about the state's epidemic of homelessness.

There are thousands of family foundations in the U.S., often supporting specific nonprofit projects. The traditional criticism of such efforts, whether charter schools or private-school voucher programs, is that it is too hard to scale them up to the magnitude of something like educating millions of students. Only government, they say, has the capacity.

I recognize that argument, but it's time to get past it. Charters and choice, which are succeeding, should be seen not as a threat but as a natural evolution away from aging public systems and toward more entrepreneurial, focused alternatives. Call it effective altruism. But hold the moral vanity." [1]

1. The Moral Vanity of FTX
Henninger, Daniel. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Dec 2022: A.17.