by Stephen Soukup
Utilitarianism may be “logical” and mathematical, but it is also destructive and tyrannical.
Almost exactly a month ago—about a fraction of a second before the issue exploded into the public consciousness—I attempted to address the moral peculiarities of “Effective Altruism,” the philosophy-based behavioral code that animates and governs the lives of the tech elites who dominate AI. In retrospect, that column was not my finest. It was a bit of a mess, criticizing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his family for their connections to Effective Altruism, Effective Altruism for its foundation in the consequentialist/utilitarian tradition, and Pope Leo XIV for appearing to lend Anthropic the backing of the Catholic Church by inviting Chris Olah, the company’s head of interpretability research, to the public unveiling of Magnifica Humanitas, the Pontiff’s encyclical on AI. In short, in an attempt to discredit the entirety of the Effective Altruism movement, I failed to pick a single target and, as a result, failed to make a particularly effective case against any of it.
Given that, I want to take a second bite of that apple today, focusing specifically on consequentialism/utilitarianism, which, by traditional Western standards, is a moral abomination. Utilitarianism provides the ethical foundations of Effective Altruism, which should profoundly concern the rest of us, particularly at this moment, when the Effective Altruists are trying to enlist the support of the federal government to slow the development of AI and to put them and their allies in charge of what does or does not constitute “responsible” progress moving forward. Even without tying utilitarianism to Peter Singer, the best-known contemporary utilitarian ethicist and a lightning rod for monstrous ideas, the moral code it produces can be demonstrated to be grotesque.
What follows here is an illustration I have used before and that long-time readers of mine will surely recognize. Nevertheless, it addresses the moral flaws in the utilitarian scheme more effectively than any other argument I’ve seen, making its repetition amazingly useful.
In 1973, the science-fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin penned a short story titled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The story is inarguably one of her best—haunting and enduring. In it, Le Guin describes the city of Omelas, a utopia filled with laughter, music, love, and, above all, happiness. Everyone in Omelas is joyous. They are content, absolutely, completely, and undeniably fulfilled. Well, almost everyone….
Le Guin also describes a setting far away from the joy and happiness of the rest of the city, far away from the light, the happiness, and the love:
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room, a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.
In this room lives a child. “It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become an imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.” The child lives in squalor, scared to death, nearly starving, and with no human contact or support. Le Guin writes, “The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.”
Why is the child there?
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery….
There is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.
I first used the Omelas analogy just over 10 years ago, in a piece for the now-defunct (and badly missed) Culture of Life Foundation on the trials, travails, and death of British baby Charlie Gard. In that piece, I noted that the story of Omelas and its suffering child was Le Guin’s critique of consequentialist ethics, specifically, the morality of utilitarianism, the brainchild of the Enlightenment-era English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a proto-Progressive, a perpetual reformer, someone who (as I noted in my previous column on AI) did not believe in natural rights and was unconcerned about the risks associated with the tyranny of the majority—one of the most obvious and unavoidable consequences of the utilitarian calculus.
In that calculus, the measure of an act’s righteousness is its outcome. Consequentialist/utilitarian morality is not measured by an action’s consistency with Creator-endowed rights or, for that matter, with any of the commands of a higher authority; it is not assessed by an action’s adherence to an eternal truth, a responsibility, or a duty; it is, rather, measured by its effect on society as a whole, by the “greatest happiness principle.” Acts that produce greater happiness and greater pleasure and that decrease aggregate suffering are moral, while those that do the opposite are immoral.
In the case of Charlie Gard—who had a mitochondrial defect that most doctors considered fatal but which some doctors thought could be improved by new treatments—the greatest happiness principle demanded that Charlie be taken off life support, lest other infants with borderline fatal conditions get the wild idea that they too could bleed the British National Health Service of its precious funding.
Sadly, Charlie was hardly the last child to be killed “euthanized” using utilitarian logic. I won’t say it happens all the time, but it does occur far more frequently than most people think. Just this past week, for example, the Dutch government publicly confirmed that late last year, a two-year-old was put down, “despite independent doctors initially concluding that the child was ‘not continuously suffering unbearably’ and that reasonable alternatives remained.” Such is life in the Netherlands, where “Infant euthanasia has been practised…for many years” and “before a recent law change, only newborns and children over twelve” could be euthanized.
The utilitarian ethical scheme that undergirds Effective Altruism contradicts both the foundations of Western morality and the foundations of the American experiment.
In 1984, not long after he survived an assassination attempt, but decades before he would suffer from the pain and indignity of Parkinson’s disease, Pope Saint John Paul II penned an apostolic letter titled Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering) in which he explained that in the Christian tradition, suffering is both unavoidable (a relic of man’s sinful nature) and spiritually valuable. Suffering enables people to become “sharers in the sufferings of Christ.” Personal suffering, offered in faith and love, participates in the redemptive work of the Cross. As a result, suffering is not meaningless. It can purify souls, draw victims closer to Christ, foster solidarity, and contribute to the salvation of others. Suffering can and should be tempered where it can be by compassion and justice, but it must also be acknowledged as an integral part of the human experience.
Ironically, even though Bentham’s utilitarian “reforms” were widely influential and widely adopted and were introduced at the same general historical moment as the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the two schools of thought could not be more opposite. Bentham’s rejection of natural law and his tacit embrace of the tyranny of the majority both place him—and utilitarianism, by extension—into direct conflict with the American founding principles. Utilitarianism may be “logical” and mathematical, but it is also destructive and tyrannical. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 51:
It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure….
Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger;
I could go on, I suppose, but already I risk making the type of mess I made in my last attempt to address Effective Altruism. Just know that, in sum, it and its moral foundation are cruel, potentially ugly, and contravene the moral traditions of both Western Civilization and the great American experiment.
Photo: AI company Anthropic 06 May 2026, USA, San Francisco: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appears at an event organized by the AI company. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa (Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/21/those-who-walk-away-from-ai/
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