The Vitalist Critique Of Effective Altruism Is Terrible

Vitalism isn't a serious moral philosophy

1 Introduction

I blame

Richard Hanania

.

My exposure to a lot of the weird (this article has been sponsored by Tim Walz) right-wingers who write on substack began with Richard. Richard is smart, thoughtful, and interesting—a fellow who lives in reality and thinks lots of true things. He’s just basically a libertarian with right-wing vibes, who makes lots of funny tweets that left-wingers find offensive.

But from reading his blog,2 I became exposed to many far more insidious characters—

John Arcto

,

John Carter

,

Walt Bismarck

, and many more. These guys, while interesting once in a blue moon, are far less interesting than Hanania, much less likely to make any remotely interesting commentary, more likely to aggressively troll and wax eloquently in defense of quite thoroughly reprehensible ideas. They have Hanania’s trollishness but lack what makes him interesting.

One of the ideas that these folks have begun writing about is called vitalism. Now, it’s not clear that it’s really a comprehensive philosophy—much more of a vibes thing, a fancy name to justify hating obviously desirable altruistic actions. These guys tend not to be very clear—writing in quasi-poetry resembling a typical piece of continental philosophy, so I’ll quote Scott’s summary of the idea.

Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism.

We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength.

These people have the philosophy I was criticizing in my piece on slave morality. They’re the sorts of people to belittle those who make sacrifices in the name of doing the right thing—who give to charities or refrain from eating animals, calling it cucked, or debased. They’re assholes who write eloquently in defense of being assholes, reminiscent of the sorts of people who write in incomprehensible jargon to justify flagrant mistreatment of men in the name of combatting sexism. I refute them thus: