Sequoia Capital on Sam Bankman-Fried's upbringing

SBF is from the Bay Area—the eldest son of two Stanford law professors, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried.  His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number.  One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate.  A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder).  The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each.  The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero.  And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder.  SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion.  It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were.  He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith.

~ Sequoia Capital, "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex - And Maybe You Should Too," September 22, 2022