Biopolitical Philanthropy: The Antidemocratic Tendencies of Benevolent Quantification

If philanthropy means “love of humanity,” the definition of what constitutes humanity is of increasing importance as self-identified philanthropists seek out increasingly precise ways of quantifying human value. Today’s philanthropists call their gifts “investments” in social improvement, and insist on quantifiable proof that their dollars generated sufficient “returns on investment,” culminating in the growth of the Effective Altruism movement, which determines giving priorities based on “impact per dollar,” typically in the form of lives saved or years of life added to the beneficiaries of their recommended charities. This paper explores the extent to which such quantification threatens democracy at the level of the political subject, and the ability to form and maintain the thick bonds necessary for plurality, deliberation, and recognition. The financialization of giving and the treatment of giving as another form of commercial consumption now threatens solidarity even in nominally radical political initiatives, as with the demands for “receipts” and “refunds” from a bail fund that raised an unprecedented amount of money during the 2020 protests against racial injustice. This paper reads Georg Simmel, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Wendy Brown’s perspectives on valuation and neoliberalism, as well as Amia Srinivasan, Iason Gabriel, and Jennifer Rubenstein’s critiques of Effective Altruism. This set of thinkers provides a genealogy of quantifying the value of human life, and links it to the instrumental vocabularies of contemporary philanthropy, positing that contemporary giving conflates love of humanity with maximizing human labor power. These practices are juxtaposed with Aristotle and Arendt’s explorations of plurality, deliberation, and civic friendship as necessary qualities of the political realm. This comparison elucidates the antidemocratic ramifications of philanthropy’s broader paradox, reducing people to their biological and productive utility and replacing collective solidarity with political pessimism and paternalistic benevolence.