Barbara Fried

Barbara Fried is an American law professor based in Stanford, California. She is the mother of Sam Bankman-Fried and Gabe Bankman-Fried, and wife of Joseph Bankman.

She is on faculty at the Stanford Law School.¹⁾

Fried received numerous degrees from Harvard University between 1977 and 1983.

Fried started her career as a clerk to Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She then worked for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City from 1984-1987.²⁾ She joined Stanford Law School in 1987.

In a 2013 interview, Fried discussed a number of topics directly related to effective altruism, particularly the subject of utilitarianism:

“Libertarians and Rawlsians agree on very little, but they share a fundamental hostility to utilitarianism,” says Fried. She explains that the goal of utilitarianism is to maximize overall well-being for society as a whole. “The strict version of utilitarianism pursues that goal by throwing everyone’s well-being into the same hopper, aggregating all gains and losses to well-being from different policy options, and then choosing the one that offers the greatest good.”

Fried questions the notion that “rights theory” makes any more sense than the above-described approach.

“However rich a country is and however much of its GDP it devotes to health care, at some point it will have to choose between allocating more money to, say, cancer research or early childhood prevention,” she says. “And before we have gotten to that particular set of hard choices, we will have made scores of others in deciding how much of our budget to allocate to health care to begin with, rather than, say, education, the military, Social Security, etc.”

But, Fried explains, the necessity for tradeoffs is hardly limited to material resources. “Every time you get in a car, reroof your house, or walk onto a crowded city bus, your conduct poses some risk of physical or psychological harm to others. The job of any ‘rules of the road,’ be they government regulation or moral norms, is to figure out how to balance your legitimate interests in pursuing your life projects against others’ interests in not being harmed in the process. And however we strike that balance, if different people will be affected differently, we will necessarily be trading off one group’s well-being for another’s.”

Utilitarians, says Fried, have faced that necessity head-on. “However unappealing one might find their answer, at least it is an answer. Rights theory, in contrast, has yet to provide one.”

• Examining Effective Altruism: Part V by Liam Sturgess

• InfluenceWatch