EAs are privileged and underrate the need for equity
How do you reconcile this hypothesis with the huge importance EAs assign, relative to almost everyone else, to causes that typically affect even less privileged beings than the victims of injustice and inequity social justice and progressive folk normally focus on (i.e. oppressed people in rich countries and especially in the United States)? I’m thinking of “the bottom billion” people globally, nonhuman animals in factory farms, nonhuman animals in the wild (including invertebrates), digital minds (who may experience astronomical amounts of suffering), and future people (who may never exist). EAs may still exhibit major moral blindspots and failings, but if we do much better than most people (including most of our critics) in the most extreme cases, it is hard to see why we may be overlooking (as opposed to consciously deprioritizing) the most mundane cases.
How do you reconcile this hypothesis with the huge importance EAs assign, relative to almost everyone else, to causes that typically affect even less privileged beings than the victims of injustice and inequity social justice and progressive folk normally focus on (i.e. oppressed people in rich countries and especially in the United States)? I’m thinking of “the bottom billion” people globally, nonhuman animals in factory farms, nonhuman animals in the wild (including invertebrates), digital minds (who may experience astronomical amounts of suffering), and future people (who may never exist). EAs may still exhibit major moral blindspots and failings, but if we do much better than most people (including most of our critics) in the most extreme cases, it is hard to see why we may be overlooking (as opposed to consciously deprioritizing) the most mundane cases.