Basically, people will retreat to obvious platitudes (the motte) when defending their position, when in fact they’re actually trying to promote more controversial ideas (the bailey). The motte for EA is “doing the most good” and the bailey is, well, everything else we promote. Ideally the place to launch criticism is the bailey. Unfortunately, a lot of the criticism has been directed to the motte, which leads to bizarre statements like “well maybe suffering isn’t bad, we don’t want everyone to be happy all the time” or “it’s impossible to know which things are better than others”. This may be part of the reason much of the criticism has fallen flat so far.
Scott Alexander writes about the motte and bailey doctrine: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/
Basically, people will retreat to obvious platitudes (the motte) when defending their position, when in fact they’re actually trying to promote more controversial ideas (the bailey). The motte for EA is “doing the most good” and the bailey is, well, everything else we promote. Ideally the place to launch criticism is the bailey. Unfortunately, a lot of the criticism has been directed to the motte, which leads to bizarre statements like “well maybe suffering isn’t bad, we don’t want everyone to be happy all the time” or “it’s impossible to know which things are better than others”. This may be part of the reason much of the criticism has fallen flat so far.