Utilitarianism and Autism

Published on October 10, 2026 3:34 PM GMT This is a crosspost from my substack. Effective altruism has received a lot of media attention since the Department of War CTO of the United States declared that there follow “Americanism, NOT Effective Altruism.” One of the main critiques of effective altruists is to accuse them of being utilitarians. It’s an especially tiring criticism, especially from other academics, who should know better than to spread disinformation. As one of the founders of the movement put it: “Many take effective altruism to be synonymous with utilitarianism, the normative theory according to which an act is right if and only if it produces no less well‐being than any available act. This is a category mistake. Effective altruism is not utilitarianism, nor is it any other normative theory or claim. Instead, effective altruism is the project of using evidence and reason to try to find out how to do the most good, and on this basis trying to do the most good” - William MacAskill and Theron Pummer Ironically, one of the main reasons I’ve been reluctant to call myself an EA (instead of say EA-adjacent) is that I am a utilitarian, and I wish EAs would be much more utilitarian. But amid all the justified counters by EAs emphasizing that they are not utilitarians, I think it is time to defend utilitarianism itself and call out the shameful criticisms of utilitarianism I’ve seen in recent weeks, lest it be assumed they are good ones or valid. The Quillette founder Claire Lehmann, for instance, seems to have gone down an anti-EA rabbit hole in the last two weeks, trying to come up with any justifications she can find to reject the arguments made by effective altruists without having to engage with them, resulting in a series of ad hominem attacks and other logical fallacies. Fellow Substack philosopher and utilitarian Bentham's Bulldog recently got into a back-and-forth with Lehmann about her dismissal of AI safety research, that I won’t repeat here, but see his excellent blog post. But what stood out to me, as a philosopher on the autism spectrum, was a recent tweet in which she tried to dunk on utilitarianism by shaming Jeremy Bentham for plausibly being autistic. Now that strikes me as shameful in itself, using the autistic lifestyle and mindset of a philosopher to disregard their views. That Bentham thought the mind is a machine or that he tried to systematize the law are hardly objections of course. These are mainstream positions. Claire Lehmann promptly responded by unfollowing me and insisting that Bentham really was autistic, as if that was the reason I challenged her a tweet. I found that quite disappointing given Lehmann’s professed motto of Quillette to be guided by “reason, science, and humanism as our guiding values.” Refuting one of the most influential ethical theories by shaming its founder for being autistic is not reasoned, scientific, or humanistic. I’d rather focus on the issue of why it seems justifiable for a major public figure to call a view into question on the grounds that its proponents are autistic, but not, I take it, if they were Black, Asian, or members of some other minority. Effective altruists and utilitarians are frequently described as high-IQ and autistic, as if that were enough to tarnish their opinions. Why is it not seen as obviously discriminatory to reject a view based on the neurodiversity of those who hold it? The obvious answer one can give at this point is that there is no causal connection between one’s philosophical views and one’s ethnicity, but there are such connections when it comes to differences in brains or cognitive styles. I am happy to grant this position. More than most, even. Indeed, in a module on the philosophy of psychology that I designed for the University of Reading, I’ve explicitly tied together research on psychological differences and how they influence one’s philosophical views, such as aphantasia and high and low decoupling, alongside many other dimensions along which human minds vary. Much like surrounding culture of philosophers will influence the views of philosophers, such as the Prussian culture which is reflected in Kant’s philosophy, so we can see differences in minds reflect different philosophical outlooks. The perhaps most obvious case here is Derek Parfit, who unfortunately also received dismissals of his views based on his peculiar lifestyle and possible autism. I will note, that no one would dare to question scientific results if it turned out that the scientists behind them turned out to be autistic. If anything, people would probably be more likely to think that their results are accurate. If one wants to seriously Lehmann’s charge that we should evaluate views based on who hold them, than the increased probability of autistic folks is actually good evidence that autism is right. For there is now ample scientific data to support the view that high-functioning autistics are better reasoners, less likely to cogni