EA often celebrates individuals who give a lot of money, without recognising where that money comes from. We don’t openly acknowledge how much money Britain and America have gained from the Global South, both in the past and right now
Have you asked EAs what they think about economic history? Why don’t you do that before making presumptions about others’ attitudes towards it?
Of course some (not nearly all) of America and Britain’s wealth comes from interactions with the global South, and furthermore of course some comes from unfair interactions (though the magnitude of this is less clear). There, I openly acknowledge it, because it is banal. Presumably other EAs generally know about it too, so why would you demand it to be preemptively “acknowledged”?
Such demands are unproductive and silly. Otherwise we may as well demand that everyone “acknowledge” animal farming, and governance, and urbanization, and technological advances, and human cognition, and slavery, and everything else that has contributed to economic growth. But there are books for those things: if someone wants to know why the economy has turned out this way, they can go read those books. Or they can ask us, and we can tell them what we think or what sources to read. There’s no reason to preempt this healthy intellectual process with a political game of collective atonement.
why are the rich rich, and why are the poor poor? EA is always very quiet about that
Because (a) that question has already been largely addressed, there is extensive economic and historical literature examining the issue, and (b) it’s not really important for answering most of the questions that we have to answer.
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.
Have you asked EAs what they think about economic history? Why don’t you do that before making presumptions about others’ attitudes towards it?
Of course some (not nearly all) of America and Britain’s wealth comes from interactions with the global South, and furthermore of course some comes from unfair interactions (though the magnitude of this is less clear). There, I openly acknowledge it, because it is banal. Presumably other EAs generally know about it too, so why would you demand it to be preemptively “acknowledged”?
Such demands are unproductive and silly. Otherwise we may as well demand that everyone “acknowledge” animal farming, and governance, and urbanization, and technological advances, and human cognition, and slavery, and everything else that has contributed to economic growth. But there are books for those things: if someone wants to know why the economy has turned out this way, they can go read those books. Or they can ask us, and we can tell them what we think or what sources to read. There’s no reason to preempt this healthy intellectual process with a political game of collective atonement.
Because (a) that question has already been largely addressed, there is extensive economic and historical literature examining the issue, and (b) it’s not really important for answering most of the questions that we have to answer.
Edit: less rude now.
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’.
Downvoted because this is rude
Downvoted because you’re not engaging with my arguments.