Exploiting others makes you less virtuous, and singing the praises of rich philanthropists without acknowledging that paints an incomplete picture. If we don’t acknowledge it, it’s reasonable for leftists to assume that we don’t know or don’t care.
It might not hurt to repeat some of that economic and historical literature in an EA venue. The mere existence of books on a topic doesn’t give any indication of EAs’ opinions on those books.
But (a) it’s not clear that virtue matters, as virtue ethics is controversial (as are all moral theories) and most of us adhere to consequentialism, and (b) merely making money from interacting with someone is not sufficient for exploitation to take place, it must also be one of the unfair interactions, and (c) Khorton did not talk about where we get our own wealth: he talked about where American and British wealth has generally come from, which is something with a long history and many factors regardless of our personal behavior. These are the kinds of nuances that demands for “acknowledgement” routinely obfuscate.
singing the praises of rich philanthropists without acknowledging that paints an incomplete picture
Every picture that isn’t published in a book or journal is incomplete; saying that a philanthropist got their money from exploitation is an incomplete picture. And the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist just does a lot of good” is closer to the truth than the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist made a lot money from exploitation and oppression, and is just giving some of it back”. Because once you take all the nuances into account, the proportion of our money that we could say has some kind of moral taint or special obligation (other than that which is ordinarily implied by utilitarian/benevolent motives) is just going to be somewhere between 0 and 25%.
In any case, generally painting a complete picture about this seems unimportant in the first place: per the goals of EA, we should paint a complete picture of how to do good now and in the future, and to the extent that belaboring economic history can inform these efforts, it should be belabored specifically in the contexts where it is actually relevant (i.e. writings about how to improve economic systems, and so on), not obnoxiously inserted into all regular discourse about philanthropy per se.
Exploiting others makes you less virtuous, and singing the praises of rich philanthropists without acknowledging that paints an incomplete picture. If we don’t acknowledge it, it’s reasonable for leftists to assume that we don’t know or don’t care.
It might not hurt to repeat some of that economic and historical literature in an EA venue. The mere existence of books on a topic doesn’t give any indication of EAs’ opinions on those books.
But (a) it’s not clear that virtue matters, as virtue ethics is controversial (as are all moral theories) and most of us adhere to consequentialism, and (b) merely making money from interacting with someone is not sufficient for exploitation to take place, it must also be one of the unfair interactions, and (c) Khorton did not talk about where we get our own wealth: he talked about where American and British wealth has generally come from, which is something with a long history and many factors regardless of our personal behavior. These are the kinds of nuances that demands for “acknowledgement” routinely obfuscate.
Every picture that isn’t published in a book or journal is incomplete; saying that a philanthropist got their money from exploitation is an incomplete picture. And the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist just does a lot of good” is closer to the truth than the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist made a lot money from exploitation and oppression, and is just giving some of it back”. Because once you take all the nuances into account, the proportion of our money that we could say has some kind of moral taint or special obligation (other than that which is ordinarily implied by utilitarian/benevolent motives) is just going to be somewhere between 0 and 25%.
In any case, generally painting a complete picture about this seems unimportant in the first place: per the goals of EA, we should paint a complete picture of how to do good now and in the future, and to the extent that belaboring economic history can inform these efforts, it should be belabored specifically in the contexts where it is actually relevant (i.e. writings about how to improve economic systems, and so on), not obnoxiously inserted into all regular discourse about philanthropy per se.
Point of correction: khorton is a ‘she’, not a ‘he’.