Sins of the Mother: How the $8B FTX Scam Flowed From Barbara Fried’s Anti-Humanist Ethics

Barbara Fried's die-hard determinist utilitarianism ultimately fueled Sam Bankman-Fried's Effective Altruism - and his crimes.

Barbara Fried in court for her son Sam’s criminal trial, at SDNY on October 17, 2023. Edited from author’s sketch.

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Sins of the Mother: The Heritable Nihilism of Barbara Fried

The crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried remain fascinating because they implicate so many powerful forces and groups in our society – and because the extent of that entanglement isn’t yet entirely clear. One major entanglement is via Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried: not just professors at elite Stanford University, but professors of business and legal ethics. His parents’ Stanford colleagues Larry Kramer and Andreas Paepke contributed to Bankman-Fried’s bail, purportedly out of simple support for Barbara and Joe as friends. Stanford Law professor David Mills advised on Sam’s (notably hapless) defense.

Joe and Barbara were also directly implicated in their son’s crimes. In court, we saw Joe included in chats between insiders in the final days of FTX. According to Anthony Scaramucci, Joe seems to have known FTX was insolvent by November 7 of 2022, weeks before that information was public, and during a time when his son was still lying to the public about FTX’s state. Barbara, according to messages published in a civil lawsuit from the FTX estate, directed the use of straw donors to illegally conceal the source of campaign donations.

The question of Joe and Barbara’s culpability is newly relevant. On Friday December 29, U.S. prosecutors announced they would not pursue a second trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, previously set for March, on charges including campaign finance and bribery. As I explained this week, that decision is sensible on its face, because a second trial wouldn’t really impact Sam’s punishment.

But it does mean reduced scrutiny for Barbara’s role in the campaign finance fraud in particular. Along with politicians who may be getting out of jail free, that has triggered a swell of public outrage at a perceived travesty of justice.

Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried leaving the SDNY courthouse in October. Photo by the author.

Malthusian Progressivism: From “Beyond Blame” to “Facing up to Scarcity”

My focus today, though, is on a subtler but more profound kind of culpability. How much responsibility to Joe and Barbara bear for the way they raised a son who turned out to be an inveterate manipulator, bully, liar, and thief?

In particular, Barbara’s work as an ethical philosopher appears to be surprisingly central to the broader story of Sam Bankman-Fried. Joe Bankman’s scholarship appears largely policy-oriented. But Barbara advocated a radical vision of ethics, and even of what it means to be human – a vision based above all on her firm belief that humans lack free will, and that millennia of conventional human ethical judgment should therefore be trashed.

Barbara Fried’s mechanistic view of humanity is tied to her die-hard utilitarianism, the belief that all ethical judgment should be oriented to the goal of maximizing total well-being, rather than on specific ethical rules. In particularly, Fried devoted much of her work to attacking John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice argued for a fair distribution of rights in society – very roughly, a stance that prioritizes ethical standards over outcomes.

Fried’s opposition to Rawls is I’m sure quite a nuanced thing, but it renders down to a simple fact: Barbara Fried is a legal scholar who doesn’t regard “justice” as an important value. At least not as any normal person would understand the word.

Despite her opposition to Rawls’ deeply progressive stance, though, Fried viewed her own utilitarianism and determinism as progressive. She deployed it, as we’ll see, to argue for things like better treatment of prisoners. But her views also displayed a strange tendency to horseshoe around to rather authoritarian sentiments: her most recent book, for instance, is titled “Facing Up to Scarcity,” a grim Malthusian dictum that conjures visions of ration cards and work camps.

Finally, implicit in Fried’s worldview is rationalism – the assumption that the world is fully knowable. Rationalism is effectively a precondition of utilitarianism, since the latter relies on the objective measurability of total well-being.

This rationalist plank of Barbara Fried’s worldview, though often implicit, may have been the most significant influence on her son. It would logically have led him to his fairly obvious belief that the world was a place where odds could be calculated confidently based on knowable facts. Some have characterized Sam Bankman-Fried as a gambling addict, but that image shifts slightly when you consider he was raised to think of the world as a place where the gravest risk, the risk of the truly unknowable, simply does not exist.

Barbara’s utilitarian, determinist, and rationalist view of human existence also appears to have made Sam receptive to “Effective Altruism,” which increasingly seems best understood as a dangerous and abusive cult. As we heard Caroline Ellison testify in court last October, utilitarianism informed Sam’s belief that prohibitions against lying and stealing were not grounded in reason – and therefore optional, as long as one’s broader intentions were good.

They’re Coming to Blame You, Barbara

Before we dive in, though, we have to deal with a thorny question – why are we looking at Bankman-Fried’s parents at all? Sam, after all, is the criminal here.

But there are extremely compelling reasons that the case of Barbara Fried is an exception, and then some: Her beliefs were extreme, they were aggressively imposed on her son, and they substantially contributed to his crimes. Finally and most importantly, though, they have much in common with a much larger set of beliefs that have become extremely influential among the most powerful people in the technology industry.