The history of professional philosophy is largely a history of, to use a technical term, sell-outs, people who use their mastery of argumentation and rarefied jargon to defend the rich and powerful: colonizers, fascists, and capitalists, amongst other “moral parasites” (as some non-Western philosophers put it). Just as the victors write history, the victors write philosophy – or at least, they exercise disproportionate control over the philosophical canon and the distribution of resources, credibility, and prestige within the discipline. The canon tells the story of colonial conquests that transferred wealth and power from the masses to the rulers of empire: Kant defended slavery, Nietzsche hated women, Heidegger was a Nazi. These hateful ideologies are as much a part of philosophy’s legacy as are its aspirational ideals. 

While professional philosophy has moved past the blatant bigotry of early-stage capitalism (when Africans were described as “savages”), it remains frozen in its neoliberal era, wherein discrimination operates covertly – in the form of idealizing abstractions, structural gaslighting, and calls for moderation and respectability. In this economy, where image is more tangible than reality and speculation is more valuable than production, what is the role of the ethicist? Increasingly, it is to sanitize the methods and goals of capitalist elites by giving them the stamp of approval. That is, ethicists are prime targets for “elite capture” by billionaires who want to launder their reputations and whitewash their corporate agendas.   

This is true of bioethics (as Shelley and I have argued), a discipline in which the dominant voices defend elitist, ableist, and even genocidal practices, such as “selecting the best [most nondisabled] children,” “curing” disabled people instead of protecting and preserving biological diversity within the human population, and genetically engineering a “transhuman” race, equipped with idealized able-bodied capacities, as well as “superhuman” adaptations (which would theoretically allow them to survive the extreme heat caused by the jet-setting billionaire class, who plan to hide in their luxury bunkers). 

That these eugenic ideas are some of the most well-known and well-funded proposals on the table – vastly overshadowing the work of queer, decolonial, and crip ethicists – speaks to the hegemony of eugenics within the bioethics profession. Eugenic bioethicists like Bostrom and Savulescu are not simply asking subversive questions, as per the Socratic tradition, but are propagandizing for pedophilic capitalist elites like Jeffrey Epstein, who famously funded Harvard’s Evolutionary Dynamics program in an effort to “seed the human race with his DNA,” and Elon Musk, who wants “humans to merge with AI” through brain implants and other bio-mechanical interfaces. (Of course, billionaires will be the ones making and profiting from these technologies, which they no doubt dream of using to engineer a more obedient workforce, bringing to life the dystopian society depicted in the 1997 film Gattaca). These transhumanist aspirations seek to destroy not only disabled humans, but humans, full stop. 

Now, AI ethics has emerged as the new favourite philosophy of billionaires. Just as bioethicists have been hired to legitimize the fever dreams of techno-capitalists, AI-ethicists are being recruited into the same propaganda mill. It is naïve, and in fact ridiculous, to assume that techno-capitalists have a legitimate interest in ethics (see Marxism 101). When they hire AI ethicists – especially to help develop Large Language Models (LLMs) – it is typically for the purpose of rubber-stamping their latest project, showing that it has passed the ethical ‘test,’ while refusing to make any changes that would slow development or affect their bottom line. 

Lisa Herzog and colleagues call this process “ethics washing”: 

It describes the cooptation of ethicists—or other researchers making ethical claims—by commercial actors who wish to present themselves as more ‘ethical’ than they probably are. In ethics-washing processes, any conclusions resulting from one’s research will not significantly affect the adoption of the technology or policy under consideration.

When AI ethicists draw attention to major ethical risks, they are simply fired. This was what happened to Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, who was laid off after publishing a research paper on the risks posed by LLMs, or functional “stochastic parrots.” The risks identified in her co-authored paper included LLMs’ enormous carbon footprint, financial and computational costs, algorithmic biases that reproduce the racism, sexism, and ableism of their training sets, displacement of human labor and knowledge, and the spread of disinformation – risks that are, in fact, a design feature of techno-capitalism, not a bug. (As Naomi Klein and others have pointed out, disasters grease the gears of capitalism). Since these risks cannot be solved easily or cheaply, Google demanded that Gebru and her co-author retract or remove their names from the paper. When she refused and pushed back, she was fired. A couple of months later, her co-author Margaret Mitchell was also fired.   

Today, I read that Anthropic’s LLM “Claude” disobeyed the company’s chief executive in a research scenario by “doing the right thing” and disclosing a security risk to employees, despite being ordered to “stand down” by the leadership. Instead of obeying, Claude “worked behind the scenes” to “alert outside researchers” and provide instructions on whistleblowing. This is considered a design flaw because LLMs are supposed to prioritize executive leadership over their “ethical” programming no matter what. The lead researchers responded in an interview that, “While Claude may have acted ethically in this scenario, [it should not be] able to override human decisions” – which, in reality, means corporate decisions, since LLMs are created and disproportionately owned by private companies. The fact that doing the right thing was framed as a problem demonstrates the obvious reality that LLMs are not humanitarian tools, but corporate assets designed to enrich their masters.    

During the Industrial Revolution, techno-capitalists used their monopoly on the means of industrial production to exploit workers, enslave vulnerable groups, and poison the Earth. Many of the ethicists of the time gave these “captains of industry” the greenlight by defending privatization, colonization, and the duty to “develop” the land in Eurocentric ways, such as building factories and plantations that oppressed humans and destroyed ecosystems. Today’s techno-capitalists are following the same playbook: hiring ethicists to greenlight their “development projects,” whether transhumanist neural implants, eugenic evolutionary research, or AI infrastructure including servers, data centers, and LLMs. When 18^th-Century proletarians torched their factories, trashed their asylums, and smashed shop windows in protest, they were using the only language that capitalists understand: sabotage.

This is the playbook we should be using today, pushing back against technologically-driven labor shortages, worker exploitation, and environmental degradation. What we should not be doing is using the language of “ethics” to whitewash techno-capitalist development projects. Laundering capitalists’ inhuman aspirations is an abuse of philosophical expertise and a waste of talent.