“Effective Altruists, then, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. In the words of C. S. Lewis’s criticism of anti-monarchists, they are people who view stones in a line as better than those in an arch. Heir apparent to Bentham’s reductive credo, they aspire to prize apart the rib cage of eudaimonia to feast on its entrails of utility.
When I see them casually dismiss poetry, the opera, the Iliad, the School of Athens, as outrageous luxuries instead of funging them into varying increments of common utility, to be sacrificed if expedient to satisfy items lower on Maslow’s hierarchy, I feel like the character in Plato’s famous cave metaphor, returning to the prisoners still shackled in the wall, obsessed with the procession of the shadows. The human condition demands more of us all than to chase these simulacra of a moral life.”
— Gregory Lewis parodying critiques of effective altruism