The order calls itself the Ledger of the Living, and its members are, by the standards of our beat, unusually admirable and unusually sincere. Grown out of the effective-altruist milieu — the movement to do the most good the numbers allow — the Ledger concluded that the largest calculable suffering in the world is inflicted on animals in industrial agriculture, and organized its members' lives around opposing it: non-violent civil disobedience, blockades, open rescues, a discipline of arrest and consequence that its members accept with a martyr's calm.
The moral seriousness is real. So, it turns out, is the problem with the money. The Ledger's rapid growth was underwritten by a single wealthy patron — a crypto founder who styled himself its philanthropic angel — and an investigation into his failed exchange has established that the fortune he gave the order was not his to give. It came from his users' deposits, moved quietly out of accounts that were supposed to be untouchable and into causes, the Ledger's among them, that he had calculated would do the most good. He appears to have believed this. That is the part that lingers.
The result is a movement caught in a trap its own philosophy built. The Ledger did real good with the money — spared real suffering, by its own rigorous count — and the money was stolen from people who never consented to fund anyone's ethics. Effective altruism's animating question is whether the ends can be totted up cleanly enough to justify the means; the Ledger is now the case study in what happens when someone answers yes and turns out to have been gambling with other people's savings. Its members, most of whom knew nothing of the source, are left to decide whether good done with stolen money stays good. It is, a scholar of the movement told me, the most rigorous ethical question the group has ever faced, and the first one it cannot solve with a spreadsheet.