Is “altruism” the alternative to “justice” or is “wellbeing/suffering” the alternative to “justice”? I feel like the latter is something that we could aim to maximise, and that this would be consistent with EA, but not with what the majority of aspiring EAs aim to maximise. Justice seems less relevant to utilitarianism and more relevant to virtues ethics or similar (apologies, I don’t know much about philosophy).
To the extent that we consider justice as a messaging strategy, rather than something substantial that represents goals/ideology, my guess is that aspiring effective altruists should aim for non-partisanship. My guess is that alignment with established political ideologies (including “the left”, or the Democrats over the Republicans in the US) encourages increased political salience in the short term but stagnation longer term. This guess is based mostly on intuition and my research on the anti-abortion movement.
But I would agree with Zach G that, intuitively, justice messaging will have wider reach/virality than altruism messaging.
Is “altruism” the alternative to “justice” or is “wellbeing/suffering” the alternative to “justice”? I feel like the latter is something that we could aim to maximise, and that this would be consistent with EA, but not with what the majority of aspiring EAs aim to maximise. Justice seems less relevant to utilitarianism and more relevant to virtues ethics or similar (apologies, I don’t know much about philosophy).
To the extent that we consider justice as a messaging strategy, rather than something substantial that represents goals/ideology, my guess is that aspiring effective altruists should aim for non-partisanship. My guess is that alignment with established political ideologies (including “the left”, or the Democrats over the Republicans in the US) encourages increased political salience in the short term but stagnation longer term. This guess is based mostly on intuition and my research on the anti-abortion movement.
But I would agree with Zach G that, intuitively, justice messaging will have wider reach/virality than altruism messaging.