“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. [...]
It’s no surprise Mr. Bankman-Fried would think his cryptocurrency profits could prevent nuclear war. [...] 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. [...] 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. [...] 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.
I think this is a better article to link to https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moral-vanity-of-sam-bankman-fried-delusion-charity-morals-big-think-ftx-cryptocurrency-twitter-philanthropy-11669846009 (unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/cLPvN )