Why Impartial Ethics Requires a God You Cannot Be

Effective altruism and classical utilitarianism present themselves as rigorously secular, yet they harbor a concealed theological structure: the demand that moral agents adopt a perfectly impartial, disembodied perspective — what Thomas Nagel called "the View from Nowhere." This perspective treats all suffering as fungible and equally weighted regardless of relational proximity, embodied context, or personal history. But this is precisely the God's-eye view that bounded rationality research, Embodied Cognition, and enactivism have progressively dismantled. The supposedly rational ideal turns out to be a secularized omniscience.

Autopoethics takes this critique as its starting point. If subjectivity is not an epistemic defect but a structural feature of living agency — as first-person phenomenology and autopoietic theory both suggest — then partiality is not bias. Caring more for those within your relational web is not irrationality leaking into your moral calculus; it is the expression of a finite, self-maintaining system operating coherently within its actual conditions. To demand otherwise is to demand that the agent act as though its boundedness doesn't exist, which produces systematic normative distortions.

The reframing is sharp: what effective altruism treats as the central ethical problem — optimal resource allocation across impartially weighted outcomes — is actually the easy problem of ethics. The hard problem is maintaining the living system whose coherence makes moral reasoning possible at all. Self-care, relational investment, and contextual prioritization are not concessions to weakness. They are preconditions for any sustainable ethical agency. Ethics that ignores its own enabling conditions is not rigorous — it is structurally incoherent.