I don’t think 3e is convincing, both because it doesn’t account for other potential revenue streams for the bankruptcy estate and because partial recompense is still valuable. Also, as to much of the funds in question, the grantees are still in a position to avoid or at least manage financial loss. A grantee’s continued interest in working on a cause that is important to them just isn’t in the same category as a depositor’s interest in recovering monies stolen from them. Nor is a larger organization’s desire not to cancel initiatives that it was planning on due to the FTX money. Collasping the effect of the fraud into a binary of “financially affected” / “not financially affected” and counting noses doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
Would you be asking 3e—and would your own answer be the same—if FTX had made the grants to opera organizations and opera singers in the United States? I think there have been at least a few posts (not by you, to my recollection) that strongly suggest the author is applying a different standard to EA grantees than they would to opera grantees. I think it problematic if the answer to whether money should be returned changes much based on the nature of the charity. Such a stance will generally imply that we have some sort of right to tell crime victims that they will have to be involuntary donors because the cause is so important in our eyes as to justify them making that sacrifice.
I don’t think 3e is convincing, both because it doesn’t account for other potential revenue streams for the bankruptcy estate and because partial recompense is still valuable. Also, as to much of the funds in question, the grantees are still in a position to avoid or at least manage financial loss. A grantee’s continued interest in working on a cause that is important to them just isn’t in the same category as a depositor’s interest in recovering monies stolen from them. Nor is a larger organization’s desire not to cancel initiatives that it was planning on due to the FTX money. Collasping the effect of the fraud into a binary of “financially affected” / “not financially affected” and counting noses doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
Would you be asking 3e—and would your own answer be the same—if FTX had made the grants to opera organizations and opera singers in the United States? I think there have been at least a few posts (not by you, to my recollection) that strongly suggest the author is applying a different standard to EA grantees than they would to opera grantees. I think it problematic if the answer to whether money should be returned changes much based on the nature of the charity. Such a stance will generally imply that we have some sort of right to tell crime victims that they will have to be involuntary donors because the cause is so important in our eyes as to justify them making that sacrifice.