Sublime

“I still get surprised. When people allow the well-being of others to become their motivation, the results are simply …”

The famed champion of legal and social reform Clarence Darrow once said, “The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” The Self has the courage to do both.

The man who wrote in Meditations that doing the right thing today was far more valuable than posthumous fame managed to get both. This is more than irony. It is the point. He was good for so long that he became great.

In the course of everyday life we are bombarded in a thousand ways with messages to the effect that “service” is the highest mark of virtue, that morality consists of living for others. We are told that personal happiness, self-interest, and the profit motive are ignoble. We are told that the enlightened, the able, the competent, the strong must

One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to