Some of these negative beliefs I hold, others I don’t but appeal to the intellectual identities I circulate in, and thus at least register as possible negative beliefs:
(i) EA is elitist: in being largely constituted, particularly in staff, by well-to-do Oxbridge or Ivy League graduates; in being premised on, and thereby implicitly valuing people according their capacity to, earn-to-give; and in being conducted, within the movement, at a relatively technical level of discourse. There’s also a potential anti-egalitarianism in the respect in which charitable giving is normally evaluated, namely, as a percentage of net income rather than, say, relative to a generalised baseline of minimally or moderately decent living.
(ii) EA is highly individualistic, rendering everything instrumental to the aggregate utility one can discharge through impersonal donations. Structural political and social change are mostly irrelevant, and insofar as they are, it is typically as new sites for impersonal donations.
(iii) EA is overwhelmingly populated by utilitarians and utilitarian thinking, despite external pretensions of being an ecumenical movement unified by concern for charitable giving. This is self-limiting as a movement, in that it discourages those not observing, what is for most people, a highly controversial ethical theory.
(iv) From my experience, most people simply don’t accept—intellectually and/or psychologically—the demanding moralism implicit in charitably donating 10% of one’s income; they don’t see any impersonal and objective reason for doing so, and thus are not moved (the second most common response, in my experience, is for them to rationalise that charities are uniformly money-grubbing and ineffective).
(i) really gets me: I think these ideas would really take off among different groups of people if presented differently.
(ii) I think the remedy to this is just to estimate the benefits of societal change. The structural political thing is different and quite an interesting question for an EA—but the lack of analysis of power structures is certainly something to address (This isn’t Raymond Geuss is it??)
(iv) - don’t see why this is important—it’s a contraint or bias rather than a morally salient criticism?
Some of these negative beliefs I hold, others I don’t but appeal to the intellectual identities I circulate in, and thus at least register as possible negative beliefs:
(i) EA is elitist: in being largely constituted, particularly in staff, by well-to-do Oxbridge or Ivy League graduates; in being premised on, and thereby implicitly valuing people according their capacity to, earn-to-give; and in being conducted, within the movement, at a relatively technical level of discourse. There’s also a potential anti-egalitarianism in the respect in which charitable giving is normally evaluated, namely, as a percentage of net income rather than, say, relative to a generalised baseline of minimally or moderately decent living.
(ii) EA is highly individualistic, rendering everything instrumental to the aggregate utility one can discharge through impersonal donations. Structural political and social change are mostly irrelevant, and insofar as they are, it is typically as new sites for impersonal donations.
(iii) EA is overwhelmingly populated by utilitarians and utilitarian thinking, despite external pretensions of being an ecumenical movement unified by concern for charitable giving. This is self-limiting as a movement, in that it discourages those not observing, what is for most people, a highly controversial ethical theory.
(iv) From my experience, most people simply don’t accept—intellectually and/or psychologically—the demanding moralism implicit in charitably donating 10% of one’s income; they don’t see any impersonal and objective reason for doing so, and thus are not moved (the second most common response, in my experience, is for them to rationalise that charities are uniformly money-grubbing and ineffective).
Obviously these are not unrelated.
(i) really gets me: I think these ideas would really take off among different groups of people if presented differently. (ii) I think the remedy to this is just to estimate the benefits of societal change. The structural political thing is different and quite an interesting question for an EA—but the lack of analysis of power structures is certainly something to address (This isn’t Raymond Geuss is it??) (iv) - don’t see why this is important—it’s a contraint or bias rather than a morally salient criticism?