This raises an interesting, and possibly unsolvable, point for organizations in GiveWell’s shoes.
GiveWell was created as a donor-advisory service, and to a significant degree still is (albeit most donors now entrust their money to GiveWell to disburse, so its recommendations can be executed in a timely and efficient manner). Almost by definition, GiveWell and its donors are aligned as to the primary purpose of the organization. But it’s unsurprising that the donor base may have differing opinions on secondary issues like animal welfare. (By secondary, I mean that animal welfare is not the animating concern behind GiveWell’s existence.)
If my memory serves, GiveWell’s moral weights are mostly derived from the views of its donors, although staff views and beneficiary preferences also get some weight. I recall a sentiment that beneficiary preferences should get more weight than they do, but also a recognition that they are difficult to measure. In my estimation, there’s no sound reason to defer to staff views on this issue, and I suspect beneficiary views would end up close to GiveWell’s current position. As far as donor views, I speculate that they are somewhat bimodal ~ a number of donors would not really care, and a number would care a lot. So using some sort of amalgamation of donor views is likely to make very few donors happy
In a usual charity, the practical solution might be to have separate buckets for “all livelihoods work, including animal-aid” and “livelihoods excluding animal-aid” programs. But people in this community know about fungibility, and the fungibility problems on that setup would probably be significant.
Conditional on a universe in which GiveWell would recommend an animal-aid programs to livelihoods donors absent an animal-welfare adjustment, I think it may be impossible to avoid a significant problem for one subgroup of livelihoods donors.[1] If it discloses the situation, then the donors who don’t favor considering animal welfare (or apply only a minor downward adjustment) are going to preferentially fund the animal-aid program. This doesn’t look much different than the two-livelihoods-bucket approach as far as funging effect.
But suppressing the information deprives other donors of the ability to make the highest-impact choice by their own values. And the lack of transparency would be problematic for an organization whose value proposition is helping donors make effective choices with their own monies.
For various reasons, I don’t think fungibility between livelihood-focused buckets and lifesaving/health-promoting buckets at GiveWell is a major concern here.
This raises an interesting, and possibly unsolvable, point for organizations in GiveWell’s shoes.
GiveWell was created as a donor-advisory service, and to a significant degree still is (albeit most donors now entrust their money to GiveWell to disburse, so its recommendations can be executed in a timely and efficient manner). Almost by definition, GiveWell and its donors are aligned as to the primary purpose of the organization. But it’s unsurprising that the donor base may have differing opinions on secondary issues like animal welfare. (By secondary, I mean that animal welfare is not the animating concern behind GiveWell’s existence.)
If my memory serves, GiveWell’s moral weights are mostly derived from the views of its donors, although staff views and beneficiary preferences also get some weight. I recall a sentiment that beneficiary preferences should get more weight than they do, but also a recognition that they are difficult to measure. In my estimation, there’s no sound reason to defer to staff views on this issue, and I suspect beneficiary views would end up close to GiveWell’s current position. As far as donor views, I speculate that they are somewhat bimodal ~ a number of donors would not really care, and a number would care a lot. So using some sort of amalgamation of donor views is likely to make very few donors happy
In a usual charity, the practical solution might be to have separate buckets for “all livelihoods work, including animal-aid” and “livelihoods excluding animal-aid” programs. But people in this community know about fungibility, and the fungibility problems on that setup would probably be significant.
Conditional on a universe in which GiveWell would recommend an animal-aid programs to livelihoods donors absent an animal-welfare adjustment, I think it may be impossible to avoid a significant problem for one subgroup of livelihoods donors.[1] If it discloses the situation, then the donors who don’t favor considering animal welfare (or apply only a minor downward adjustment) are going to preferentially fund the animal-aid program. This doesn’t look much different than the two-livelihoods-bucket approach as far as funging effect.
But suppressing the information deprives other donors of the ability to make the highest-impact choice by their own values. And the lack of transparency would be problematic for an organization whose value proposition is helping donors make effective choices with their own monies.
For various reasons, I don’t think fungibility between livelihood-focused buckets and lifesaving/health-promoting buckets at GiveWell is a major concern here.