The Conscience Has a Special Offer

Diego’s worldview on altruism and Effective Altruism

Welcome to the room where the conscience has abandoned its customary robes, acquired a suspicious coat, and begun offering merchandise.

Diego described the arrangement in 2025:

My good conscience is always bribing me like hey, psst, kid, I got some really cheap altruism here, I know you want it....¹

The next sentence explains the business model:

He's like a drug dealer.

For Diego, helping can be a temptation. He notices an opportunity to make somebody’s life substantially better at comparatively little cost, and suddenly his conscience has an irresistible offer. His altruism contains affection, arithmetic, ambition, pleasure, and the delighted recognition that the universe occasionally leaves a very large lever somewhere one can actually reach.

This room brings those elements together. We will meet the lives he wants to improve, the moral theory he once escaped, the movement he helped build, and the evolutionary machinery he would like humanity to stop obeying quite so helplessly.

People are entire worlds

Diego’s moral attention keeps returning to the inside of a life. In his 2025 essay on Schindler’s List, he describes people as:

People, unfolding cascades of mesmerizing depth and experience running for 90 years, worth to themselves almost as much as you are worth to yourself.²

That is what his arithmetic is counting. A saved person gets more mornings, irritation, discoveries, meals, friendships, terrible jokes, and moments whose importance nobody outside that person could have anticipated. The number represents an entire unfolding world.

The film offers him a way of seeing ordinary resources differently. He writes that:

I saw that the world can be utilized as a life-saving machine, and you can trade resources, of all kinds, time, money, etc… for actual people.

A possession becomes both itself and a possible intervention. Money can turn into medicine, prevention, rescue, or the continued existence of somebody who would very much like to remain available for tomorrow.

He wants this perceptual shift to feel exciting. In the same essay, he invites a reader to try helping someone without immediately pledging a lifetime of penitence:

Do one. See how you feel. Then do another.

His interest extends across familiar social boundaries. In a 2019 exchange about whether poor people deserve their circumstances, he insists that “being a moral patient is independant of production ability.” His short formulation deserves a place near the entrance:

If it suffers, it matters.

And:

If it experiences joy, it matters.³

A being’s capacity to accomplish things and its capacity to have a life worth caring about occupy different columns in his mind. He can regard particular people as unusually important to the future while continuing to count the suffering of somebody who will never be influential. Animals also belong within his concern. So do possible future minds whose bodies, intelligence, and forms of enjoyment may be very unlike ours.

The guest list is extensive. The admissions criterion does not require a CV.

The altruist who resigned from morality

Diego’s altruism becomes particularly revealing when he tries to leave it.

In a reflection written in 2013 and published alongside a later reconsideration in The Inescapability of My Altruism, he describes what happened when he took utilitarian demands with complete seriousness:

Utilitarianism, for me, was a prison made of stress, math, and the end of freedom of choice.⁴

Every activity encountered a counterfactual superior. Travel, philosophy, games, friendship, good food: somewhere there was a calculation under which something else helped more. Even relaxation could become an optimization problem about the minimum rest necessary to resume serving the calculation.

He wanted his pleasures back. He wanted emotions to matter as experiences, rather than requiring each one to submit a productivity report.

The result was not the disappearance of concern:

I want to help other people and beings because that is awesome.

He also wrote:

I want to be kind because kindness makes my life good, and makes others lives good.

By 2016, he had separated two things he had previously allowed to run together: a conviction about what morality commands and his own preference that other minds have good lives. Philosophical criticism could change the first without erasing the second.

Maybe I’m not a utilitarian, and I just want the most minds to be happy.

His thought experiments then pushed the distinction further. If a moral theory and his desire for better lives disagreed, he discovered that he could prefer the better lives. The famous trolley lever survives his departure from philosophical respectability:

But I’d still pull that goddamn lever.

Followed by:

So much the worse for Morality.

This is the inescapability in the title. He can dismiss the supervisor; the desire continues turning up for work.

His later writing again uses utilitarian language and discusses obligations. The history matters. He has not spent every subsequent year repeating a permanent 2013 resignation. What persists is his resistance to giving an abstract demand complete ownership of his life, alongside his strong preference for a world containing more flourishing minds.

In 2022 he puts the practical relationship plainly:

We are thrown in the World and have no ultimate cosmic obligation to be nice. Not my point. My point is, IF YOU CHOOSE to be nice, being nice in an Effective Altruist way is the way to go.⁵

A very nice animal

Diego approaches altruism as a biological anthropologist as well as a participant. He wants to understand how creatures capable of genuine concern came to exist.

His 2013 From Capuchins to AI’s sequence travels through social learning, culture, cooperation, inheritance, reputation, reciprocity, and the relationship between individuals and groups. Its opening announces several respectable academic purposes, followed by the one he considers decisive:

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in the way most likely to save the World.⁶

Apparently even a semester essay has strategic responsibilities.

He does not take the selfishness of a replicating element to imply the psychological selfishness of every organism it helps construct. Genes, cultural learning, and social arrangements can combine to make beings who care. Explaining how they arose does not dissolve their concern.

In the second installment he writes:

Cooperation evolves, and altruism evolves.⁷

His analysis distinguishes several mechanisms through which cooperation can arise and persist. A behavior may help relatives, invite reciprocation, preserve a reputation, satisfy social expectations, or help a group survive. The creature performing it need not experience all of those evolutionary consequences as its personal motive. An animal can want another animal to be okay.

This distinction animates his exuberant writing about people. Watching the team captains in Beast Games refuse a financial offer that would eliminate their teams, he sees a display of loyalty, trust, leadership selection, and human social perception. His conclusion is characteristically celebratory:

We are altruistic, team players by nature, and that's one of the many things that makes our species the coolest one around.⁸

The post ends:

So go humans! Love you guys :)

His view of humanity contains anger, but it also contains this unabashed fondness. He notices people who help, protect, cooperate, and keep faith. The capacity is precious partly because he understands it as a specific achievement of living systems, with a history and conditions of survival.

His dissertation’s title, Altruism: Past, Present, Propagation, gives the investigation its temporal shape: where caring came from, how it works, and how to keep it going.

The method must be allowed to move

Diego encountered organized Effective Altruism as a natural home for an existing project. He already cared about transhumanism, the far future, and finding unusually consequential ways to help. His involvement grew through early organizations, conversations, writing, and communal life.

The movement supplied collaborators and machinery. In his conception, the machinery must remain responsive to the task.

His 2015 explanation of EA as an intensional movement is a central piece of the architecture. The technical term concerns a way of finding something. Effective Altruism, in this account, is held together by methods and questions whose present answers may change. A favored cause, institution, or career is one possible answer.

He states the consequence explicitly:

I do not lose my EA identity by changing my core beliefs about what matters or what should be done.⁹

A discovery that redirects effort can therefore express the commitment that brought someone into EA. Disagreement with the present agenda need not place that person outside the project.

Diego wants this flexibility in the institutions too. Which work matters? What happens because of this particular contribution? Could somebody else accomplish it? Is the important obstacle a lack of money, skill, attention, coordination, or willingness to act?

His 2010 manifesto had already made the counterfactual question explicit:

¿What is the difference between our world in which X did what he did, and our world in case X had not done that?¹⁰

The practical implication is personal and demanding. He wants to find the thing that would remain undone without the relevant intervention. Occupying an impressive role and making a large difference are separate accomplishments.

It also changes his sense of timing. In 2022, he objects to treating the supply of valuable opportunities as if it were a uniform weekly allowance:

I fear sometimes EAs want to work in EA and they get all "busy" as if any given week has the same amount of effective opportunity to allocate resources to max happiness and minimize suffering as any other week.⁵

He describes his own participation as episodic: years of knowledge, relationships, observation, and occasional decisive openings. He can value being ready without believing that every day needs an equally impressive altruistic timesheet.

Caring needs infrastructure

For Diego, cooperation is something to design, improve, and fund.

In 2014 he proposed that effective cooperation captured an important aspect of what EAs were doing. His distinction was between maximizing others’ welfare and maximizing the combined welfare of everyone involved. The latter includes the helper. A good shared outcome need not contain an extra debit merely because one of the beneficiaries happens to be you.¹¹

Moral Economics, the field he proposed in 2015, develops this practical interest. Its opening declares:

Economics for altruists doesn’t operate under the same rules as regular economics.¹²

People who care about others’ outcomes have additional reasons to coordinate. If two donors value the same improvement, the relevant benefit can occur whichever donor makes it happen. If their priorities differ, there may be exchanges that satisfy both more effectively. His proposed field gathers moral trade, donation coordination, impact recognition, direct funding, and related ideas into a common framework.

The ambition is to give generosity better plumbing. Resources should reach valuable work; compatible efforts should reinforce one another; people should be able to cooperate across differences in ultimate commitments.

His attention to incentives also makes him particular about praise. In a 2016 post he separates the value someone creates from the compensation they receive, criticizing the habit of counting a highly paid role again as if all its work were an uncompensated gift. This is a dated, unusually stringent formulation of a recurring question: what contribution is actually being rewarded?¹³

Yet demanding work and secure human attachment have different requirements. In In Praise of Tribes That Pretend to Try, developing an argument with Viliam, he distinguishes communities organized around accomplishing tasks from communities that provide belonging. A project can require performance; losing a project role need not cost someone their entire social world.¹⁴

His own formulation of the challenge asks:

how to surround effective altruists with welcoming arms even when the subset of them that is active at that moment is not doing the right things?

He thinks people contain multiple motives and pass through different levels of energy and commitment. A movement that needs capable people should also be able to welcome an exhausted person, a temporarily distracted person, or somebody whose interest this evening is a board game.

Even the rescue party needs somewhere to come home.

The mission survives the institution

Diego’s loyalty to EA has never required a uniformly pleasant opinion of its social life.

He objects to status competition, exclusion, institutional self-protection, and the replacement of useful inquiry with the business of belonging. He has written with considerable fury about these failures. In the same archive, he repeatedly reaffirms the movement’s value and his identification with its purpose.

These are distinct attachments in his account. The existence of people needing help does not depend on an organization remaining admirable.

His 2020 formulation is unusually portable:

The people are helped if you help them. Literally no one can change that. Labels have no power over your actions.¹⁵

He adds:

And you can do it alone. You can do it outside institutions. You can do it many ways.

By 2022, his retrospective again emphasized what he regarded as the movement’s achievements and its demonstrated ability to change priorities:

EAs, truly, are able to change their minds about what matters the most. And, in most cases, to begin acting on it.¹⁶

He wants the reader to keep the beneficiaries in view through enthusiasm, disappointment, disagreement, and institutional change. An institution can be useful enough to defend and flawed enough to criticize. If a structure collapses, helping remains available.

The conscience does not require permission from the membership committee to reopen its stall.

How to keep the future capable of caring

Diego’s altruistic horizon extends beyond allocating present resources. He wants to change the conditions under which future lives become possible.

This was already explicit in Altruistic Awesomeness, Your Challenge in 2010:

So you decided you want to have a life that is 1) Awesome 2) Altruistic.¹⁰

He describes technological improvement and the prevention of catastrophe as what happens when that aspiration continues reasoning:

transhumanism is iterated altruistic awesomeness.

Following the consequences leads him toward the survival of civilization, the development of intelligence, the control of destructive incentives, and the possibility of extraordinary future experience.

His 2015 writing plans make the adversary explicit. He wants to attack:

Moloch (the awful structure of incentives that, in spite of everyone’s desires to the contrary, ruins the world).¹⁷

Cooperation can produce powerful wholes. Competition can then push those wholes toward outcomes their participants never wanted. For Diego, altruism needs arrangements through which caring continues to matter after good intentions encounter selection, defection, and pressure to survive.

His concern for animals belongs within this larger temporal picture. He sees present farm animals, animals living in nature, and potentially immense future populations as part of the same moral horizon. His later dietary and agricultural conclusions depart sharply from conventional vegan advocacy, but he presents them as serving an ongoing concern for animals and for humanity’s ability to improve their future. The detailed account belongs in the existing carnivorism portrait. Here the essential point is the scale and duration of the rescue he imagines.⁵

He also retains room for deep uncertainty about whether his actions affect the total value of existence. His 2022 essay considers metaphysical possibilities under which that total is fixed, then explains why he continues:

I act ethically because I MIGHT be inhabiting one of the worlds where my actions do make a difference.

The future is an opportunity created partly by when we find ourselves alive. His phrase is:

We have a physical advantage of being in the past

For him, intelligence and unusual capacity bring opportunities that many people will never encounter. His 2024 essay about brilliant people uses a concrete analogy:

If Basketball saved lives, tall people would have a moral obligation, not just a financial incentive, to play basketball.¹⁸

He situates these responsibilities within a chosen commitment to doing good. The question becomes what that commitment asks of a person with these abilities, in this position, at this moment.

Nice things, and another person alive

The end Diego wants is abundant valuable experience: people enjoying existence, animals having better lives, future minds finding the universe worth inhabiting. Helping is attractive because those lives can improve, and because one can participate in making that happen.

His later invitation deliberately makes room for an ordinary life:

You can still have nice things; no one is coming for your stuff. But you can have nice things AND save a life. Or two.²

The pleasure, the numbers, the biological curiosity, the institutions, the enormous future: all serve that possibility.

You leave this room with a picture of an altruist whose concern survives philosophical resignation and institutional disappointment. He wants the act to work, the beneficiaries to flourish, and the capacity to keep helping to survive. He also wants the helper to remain a person with things to enjoy.

Somewhere behind you, a coat rustles.

The conscience has noticed another opportunity.

Further doors

• The Inescapability of My Altruism — the 2013 revolt against demandingness and the 2016 discovery of the desire that remained.
• Schindler’s List and Effective Altruism — his most direct invitation to experience resources as opportunities to save lives.
• Effective Altruism as an Intensional Movement — why the method can survive changes in causes, institutions, and beliefs.
• Introducing Moral Economics — how altruistic preferences create possibilities for exchange and coordination.
• Altruistic Awesomeness, Your Challenge — the early bridge from wanting to help to transhumanism and the far future.