Thanks for posting. I endorse a subset of these, another subset is quite alien to me.
I want to zero in on
I feel guilty about my privilege in the world and I can use EA as a tool to relieve my guilt (and maintain my privilege)
Because I find it odd that you conflated relieving guilt and maintaining privilege into a single point, and the idea that installing oneself as an altruist in a cruel system (economic, ecological, or otherwise) is hedging against losing relative status or power within that system is a claim that needs to be justified.
As an example, surely many of us will have at least glanced at leftist comments to the effect that donating to AMF is a convenient smokescreen, keeping us blissfully ignorant of postcolonial mechanisms which are the true root cause of disvalue for the people AMF is (ostensibly) helping, and that if we were real altruists we would be anti imperialism activists. These comments, with whatever level of quality we find them, often point at this very claim.
Those of us who have taken substantial paycuts for (ostensibly) altruistic purposes may simply be trading cash for intra-community status—this observation can justify arguments that we’re not genuine altruists (whatever that is), but they do not on their own point to a bid at maintaining privilege.
Obviously Joe Ineffective Philanthropy Schmoe, who donates to the opera for tax breaks and PR, can be accused of using the polite fiction of philanthropy to shore up their privilege. If Joe is laundering money for the paperclip mafia by starting an alignment foundation (via some inscrutable mechanism), this accusation only increases.
But such a line of attack seems orthogonal to actually existing effective altruism.
Moreover, I may be right about the orthogonality but wrong about the emotional substructure. The emotional substructure may not make 100% sense, it may be a voice that assimilates guilt about privilege into some monologue about how you’re falling short of franciscan altruism or some self-sacrifice emphasizing notion of altruism. This, however, is I think a mistake, because having an emotional substructure of guilt may not relate at all to the merits of franciscan altruism or mechanisms by which philanthropy fails to think systemically or etc.
My two cents: guilt is a reasonable mechanism to draw one’s attention to the stakes and the opportunities of their privilege, but is not “emotionally competitive” with responsibility. You, a member of the species that beat smallpox, are plausibly alive at a hinge of history. Who knows what levers are lying around under your nose. You, in a veil of ignorance sense, would prefer people of your privilege to do a minimum of try. There’s a line in an old jewish book about not being free to abandon it, nor obligated to complete it (where it is presumably the brokenness of the world, etc.), which is emotionally very effective for me.
Guilt seems like it wants to emphasize my feelings about the unjust, from a cosmopolitan point of view, situation we find ourselves in. My subjective state, my inner monologue. It seems indifferent to arguments that making myself suffer as much as the people I want to help may not help those people as much as possible. In other words, it is negative. Responsibility is positive, it asks “what actions can you take?” This is at least a reasonable place to start.
I think the correct steelmanning of dotsam’s point is:
1. As a member of <group>, I have a great deal of privilege. 2. In order to remove this privilege, we need sweeping societal changes that upend the current power structures. 3. EA does not focus on upending current power structures in a radical way. 4. EA makes me feel less guilty about my privilege despire this. 5. Therefore, EA allows me to maintain my privilege by relieving my guilt by taking actions that doesn’t actually require overthrowing current power structures, i.e, the actions that would affect me personally the most.
Under this set of assumptions, most people find ways to maintain their privilege not by actively reinforcing power structures, but by avoiding the moral imperative to overthrow them. EA’s are at least slightly more principled, because their price for this is something like “Donate 10% of your income” instead of “Attend a protest”, “Sign a petition”, or “Decide that you’re inherently worthy of what you have and privilege doesn’t exist.”
Personally, I don’t agree with this chain of logic because I disagree with Point 2 above, but I think the chain of logic holds if you agree with points 1 and 2. (And I suppose you also need to add the assumptions that one can tractably work on upending these power structures, and that doing so won’t cause more harm than good.)
Thanks for posting. I endorse a subset of these, another subset is quite alien to me.
I want to zero in on
Because I find it odd that you conflated relieving guilt and maintaining privilege into a single point, and the idea that installing oneself as an altruist in a cruel system (economic, ecological, or otherwise) is hedging against losing relative status or power within that system is a claim that needs to be justified.
As an example, surely many of us will have at least glanced at leftist comments to the effect that donating to AMF is a convenient smokescreen, keeping us blissfully ignorant of postcolonial mechanisms which are the true root cause of disvalue for the people AMF is (ostensibly) helping, and that if we were real altruists we would be anti imperialism activists. These comments, with whatever level of quality we find them, often point at this very claim.
Those of us who have taken substantial paycuts for (ostensibly) altruistic purposes may simply be trading cash for intra-community status—this observation can justify arguments that we’re not genuine altruists (whatever that is), but they do not on their own point to a bid at maintaining privilege.
Obviously Joe Ineffective Philanthropy Schmoe, who donates to the opera for tax breaks and PR, can be accused of using the polite fiction of philanthropy to shore up their privilege. If Joe is laundering money for the paperclip mafia by starting an alignment foundation (via some inscrutable mechanism), this accusation only increases.
But such a line of attack seems orthogonal to actually existing effective altruism.
Moreover, I may be right about the orthogonality but wrong about the emotional substructure. The emotional substructure may not make 100% sense, it may be a voice that assimilates guilt about privilege into some monologue about how you’re falling short of franciscan altruism or some self-sacrifice emphasizing notion of altruism. This, however, is I think a mistake, because having an emotional substructure of guilt may not relate at all to the merits of franciscan altruism or mechanisms by which philanthropy fails to think systemically or etc.
My two cents: guilt is a reasonable mechanism to draw one’s attention to the stakes and the opportunities of their privilege, but is not “emotionally competitive” with responsibility. You, a member of the species that beat smallpox, are plausibly alive at a hinge of history. Who knows what levers are lying around under your nose. You, in a veil of ignorance sense, would prefer people of your privilege to do a minimum of try. There’s a line in an old jewish book about not being free to abandon it, nor obligated to complete it (where it is presumably the brokenness of the world, etc.), which is emotionally very effective for me.
Guilt seems like it wants to emphasize my feelings about the unjust, from a cosmopolitan point of view, situation we find ourselves in. My subjective state, my inner monologue. It seems indifferent to arguments that making myself suffer as much as the people I want to help may not help those people as much as possible. In other words, it is negative. Responsibility is positive, it asks “what actions can you take?” This is at least a reasonable place to start.
I think the correct steelmanning of dotsam’s point is:
1. As a member of <group>, I have a great deal of privilege.
2. In order to remove this privilege, we need sweeping societal changes that upend the current power structures.
3. EA does not focus on upending current power structures in a radical way.
4. EA makes me feel less guilty about my privilege despire this.
5. Therefore, EA allows me to maintain my privilege by relieving my guilt by taking actions that doesn’t actually require overthrowing current power structures, i.e, the actions that would affect me personally the most.
Under this set of assumptions, most people find ways to maintain their privilege not by actively reinforcing power structures, but by avoiding the moral imperative to overthrow them. EA’s are at least slightly more principled, because their price for this is something like “Donate 10% of your income” instead of “Attend a protest”, “Sign a petition”, or “Decide that you’re inherently worthy of what you have and privilege doesn’t exist.”
Personally, I don’t agree with this chain of logic because I disagree with Point 2 above, but I think the chain of logic holds if you agree with points 1 and 2. (And I suppose you also need to add the assumptions that one can tractably work on upending these power structures, and that doing so won’t cause more harm than good.)