Effective Altruism and the Ministry of Love

Why Moralizing Names Are Always Misnomers

Gamma Male: I consider myself an effective altruist.

Gene: Then you’re neither effective nor altruistic. And you’re trying to screw someone.

I. The Problem of Moralizing Names

Virtue declared is virtue foregone.

When a movement names itself after a virtue, suspicion is warranted. There is something about the words Hope Not Hate, Anti-Defamation League, or Effective Altruism that suggests protest too much. The names ring with the crispness of marketing, not the humility of truth. They serve not as descriptors but as declarations of moral territory—claims staked in language, not in conduct.

What’s odd is that these names don’t merely obscure a failure to live up to their ideals. More often, they correlate with behavior that subverts them entirely. Movements founded in the name of love make war. Groups sworn to defend against defamation wield it. Networks built to maximize human good act with ruthless abstraction. The name does not prevent contradiction. It predicts it.

This isn’t about hypocrisy in the usual sense. The issue is deeper than individuals failing to live up to their mission. These groups believe they are the mission. And that belief, that identification with the good, is precisely what renders them so dangerous.

The misnomer is not an accident. It is structural. And it follows a simple pattern: the more loudly a movement claims moral clarity, the less capable it becomes of moral restraint. Naming becomes a ritual of self-absolution. The name says, “We are not like them.” And once that conviction is in place, almost anything can be justified.

II. The Psychology of Moral Immunity

Those convinced that they’re clean stop washing their hands.

To name your organization after a virtue is to assume it by default. The members come to see themselves not as agents navigating moral complexity, but as embodiments of moral truth. And when that identification takes hold, it creates something more insidious than hypocrisy. It creates moral immunity.

Moral immunity is the belief that one cannot be guilty of what one condemns. It begins with selective self-trust and ends in blind righteousness. A group that believes itself anti-hate becomes blind to its own hatreds. A group that defines itself against defamation will rationalize its own libels. It doesn’t need to lie to itself. It only needs to believe that its side cannot lie.

This is why the worst behavior often flourishes inside movements built on moral language. They attract individuals who believe they are already virtuous. And those individuals stop policing themselves because they believe the mission has already been internalized. They see enemies everywhere except in the mirror. The watchdog becomes the wolf.

This isn’t a failure of principle. It is what happens when principle is replaced by identity. Once goodness is declared intrinsic to the group, the need for accountability disappears. Why would saints need rules? Why would truth-tellers need to verify?

In this state, the usual safeguards—deliberation, humility, internal dissent—are seen as threats. Questioning the group becomes treason to the cause. And so moral immunity becomes moral impunity.

III. How Safeguards Die in Righteous Hands

The walls go down when you think the barbarians are gone.

Every powerful organization begins with structure. Checks, balances, procedures, codes. These are not signs of distrust but signs of wisdom. They exist precisely because people, regardless of their ideals, are corruptible. But groups that define themselves by their own moral excellence tend to see these safeguards as unnecessary. They believe they have evolved beyond the need for restraint.

So they begin to dismantle them.

Internal review becomes an obstacle. Procedural fairness becomes “platforming harm.” Appeals to due process are recast as sympathies for the enemy. Even the concept of neutrality is condemned as cowardice or complicity. The result is a self-righteous machine that no longer tolerates its own brakes.

This collapse of safeguards doesn’t require conspiracy or malice. It happens naturally when a group believes that its internal goodness will guide it better than any written rule. But what guides it, in the end, is power. Power masked as justice. And once the safeguards are gone, the group loses its ability to notice when it becomes the thing it claimed to fight.

That transformation is always slower than it seems from the outside. The group doesn’t declare its descent. It insists, at every step, that it is growing more virtuous, more faithful, more exacting in its mission. But what it’s really doing is excusing more violence, more dishonesty, more contempt.

Moralizing names are always the first to demand trust. They are also the last to deserve it.

IV. The Function of the Name: A Shield and a Sword

Language becomes both armor and weapon in the service of self-deception.

Moralizing names serve two purposes. Outwardly, they intimidate. Inwardly, they sanctify. They create a rhetorical force field that repels criticism and rewards aggression. Once a group has claimed the name of a virtue, any opposition to it can be framed as an attack on that virtue itself.

This is why critics of “Hope Not Hate” are accused of fomenting hate. Why criticism of the “Anti-Defamation League” is dismissed as defamation. Why questioning “Effective Altruism” is treated as a sign of selfishness or stupidity. The name does the work before the argument begins. It rigs the conversation.

Internally, the name works like a sacrament. It makes the members feel holy. It binds them to a cause they can invoke without having to live. Even as they act in ways contrary to the name, they interpret their actions through it. They’re not silencing dissent—they’re protecting hope. They’re not slandering opponents—they’re safeguarding the truth. They’re not optimizing for power—they’re maximizing good.

This is the genius of the moralizing name. It converts behavior into virtue by linguistic fiat. It baptizes strategy in the language of love. And it prevents the group from ever admitting error, because to do so would be to admit that the name might not be true.

Which means the name must be defended at all costs. Even if that means betraying everything it claims to stand for.

V. Case Studies: Effective Altruism and Hope Not Hate

Hope Not Hate learned to hate in the name of hope.

Effective Altruism is the most pristine example. Its aim is to do the most good for the most people using reason and evidence. The goal is utilitarian, rational, empirical. But the moralizing name transforms that calculation into a claim of superior character. The word “effective” no longer describes the method. It becomes an identity.

This has consequences. The movement’s leaders dismissed conventional ethics as sentimental and inefficient. They embraced hypotheticals that dissolved personhood into utility. And when the movement’s most prominent donor turned out to be a fraud, the group’s infrastructure failed to restrain him. It had trusted its own moral clarity. It had stopped auditing itself.

Hope Not Hate, meanwhile, began as an anti-racist group. Over time, it evolved into an intelligence operation targeting political dissent. It smeared opponents as extremists, pressured platforms to deplatform them, and issued reports meant more to damage than to inform. All in the name of hope.

The question isn’t whether these groups do some good. The question is whether their names blind them to their own contradictions. They believe their righteousness exempts them from the norms they would impose on others. Their critics are held to the strictest interpretation of the name. They themselves are held to none.

Once that asymmetry sets in, the movement cannot course-correct. Every error is excused. Every abuse is rationalized. And every new failure is rebranded as success.

VI. The Tragic Logic of Self-Anointed Virtue

The collapse begins the moment the name is believed.

There is no need to assume these groups are cynics. On the contrary, the tragedy is that they mean what they say. They believe in their cause. They trust their reasoning. They think the name fits. And that is what makes them dangerous.

The moralizing name operates like a spell. It seals the group in a permanent presumption of virtue. It removes the need for self-examination and replaces humility with performance. Over time, it makes repentance impossible. How can the embodiment of good repent?

This structure repeats across ideologies. It is a feature, not a bug. Whenever a group proclaims itself the guardian of a moral absolute, it begins its own descent into contradiction. And the louder it proclaims its virtue, the more it must repress the evidence of its fall.

The only cure is structural modesty. Not performative disclaimers or public rituals of humility, but real constraints. Real rules. Real internal critics. But these are precisely what such movements cannot tolerate. The name will not allow it.

There is no easy resolution. What begins as virtue ends in vice. What starts as hope ends in hate. The very attempt to corner the moral market ensures its collapse. And those who cling to the illusion most tightly will fall the farthest when the spell breaks.

If it ever breaks at all.