Misanthropic Altruism

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).