Is it ironic that someone specialized in ethics would have a son so adept in using them to his advantage? Seems like a natural conclusion to me.

Effective altruism seems like a weaponization of morals to support wealth hoarding.

Exactly. A professional ethicist giving a complicated justification for why what they did was OK even though everyone else thinks it was wrong isn’t ironic, it’s apt.

In this article she pushes a navel gazing argument that, essentially, culpability can't exist because people lack free will: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...

If I assume that she authored the piece sincerely rather than as some navel gazing intellectual and virtue signaling exercise, then it isn't a shock that her child has a defective comprehension of right and wrong (or at least was atypically vulnerable to having one installed by others-- e.g. utilitarian consequentialism and 'effective altruism').

It's also not surprising that such a person would strive to get themselves placed in a position of authority on the subject-- not in spite of a psychopathic, ethically defective, or just overly rationalized worldview but specifically because of it.

What is a “republican free?”

I think they mean Republicans would be in jail