Actually, on reading the passage you quote Goldring again I think you have been uncharitable to him. The passage says ‘Goldring says it would be wrong to apply the EA philosophy to all of Oxfam’s programmes because it could mean excluding people who most need the charity’s help.‘
That could be read as expressing not the idea that more people in total get abandoned on EA views, which is indeed confused, but rather the (fairly philosophically mainstream!) prioritarian idea that all things being equal it is better to help people the worse off they currently are. That is the claim is “don’t abandon the worst off to help more in all cases, because the worst off have priority’, not some confused claim that you help more people by distributing help more evenly across countries.
That doesn’t fit well with his concern for “abandonment”. It would imply instead that Prioritarian-Oxfam should instead pour all of their resources into South Sudan (abandoning Bangladeshi kids entirely). But yeah, probably worth mentioning this explicitly! It’s part of a more general lesson I’d like the paper to bring out, namely, that one can of course optimize for things other than prima facie utilitarian impact, but even so the results are going to look very different from the (thoroughly unoptimized) old-fashioned approaches to philanthropy.
Actually, on reading the passage you quote Goldring again I think you have been uncharitable to him. The passage says ‘Goldring says it would be wrong to apply the EA philosophy to all of Oxfam’s programmes because it could mean excluding people who most need the charity’s help.‘
That could be read as expressing not the idea that more people in total get abandoned on EA views, which is indeed confused, but rather the (fairly philosophically mainstream!) prioritarian idea that all things being equal it is better to help people the worse off they currently are. That is the claim is “don’t abandon the worst off to help more in all cases, because the worst off have priority’, not some confused claim that you help more people by distributing help more evenly across countries.
That doesn’t fit well with his concern for “abandonment”. It would imply instead that Prioritarian-Oxfam should instead pour all of their resources into South Sudan (abandoning Bangladeshi kids entirely). But yeah, probably worth mentioning this explicitly! It’s part of a more general lesson I’d like the paper to bring out, namely, that one can of course optimize for things other than prima facie utilitarian impact, but even so the results are going to look very different from the (thoroughly unoptimized) old-fashioned approaches to philanthropy.