Quick follow-up that I hope isn’t too pedantic (but maybe is, despite my hope?). I just had a chance to check the correction itself on my computer (my phone wouldn’t take me to the link for some odd reason) and noticed that, while the unwarranted criticism has been retracted, the misattribution itself has not. The set-up for the quotation still seems to read, “Another author tells us (p. 81), ‘it is morally ill-advised to invest tens of millions...’, which isn’t technically true. I don’t “tell” readers that “it is morally ill-advised...” by observing that “One might object that it is morally ill-advised...” any more than I would have told them “Keith kills it at Scrabble” had I written “One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble.” Maybe that seems like a small quibble, but if my work is going to be used as Exhibit B in a section of a book review titled “The Bad,” I want to be guilty of the alleged wrongdoing, ya know? :)
Thanks Matthew for engaging, particularly given that this post may not have been written in the most friendly way!
I don’t assert the claim in question… what I’m trying to do in this context is to get behind why someone skeptical of certain EA cause-prioritizations might be worried that it is morally ill-advised given other considerations that you don’t mention in your review.
I feel confused about what your chapter is asserting then? Your chapter starts off with your two reservations about EA:[1]
It isn’t always clear that we really can do more good by supporting EA-preferred causes
Doing the most good might have opportunity costs (e.g. making the world less just)
These reservations seem pretty clearly consistent with the fragments that Richard excerpted. And in both cases, you go on to give additional argumentation about why these excerpted objections are correct.
For example with the “morally ill-advised” one you go on to say: “To make this worry more concrete in the context of the animal-focused applications of EA discussion in this book, consider the disproportionate toll that the ascendance of industrial animal agriculture has taken on communities of color in the United States, and on Black communities in particular.” You then elaborate on these inequalities for several paragraphs, without using the “one might…” voice.
The excerpted fragments are also consistent with what I took the point of your chapter to be (EA should diversify away from food tech into outreach to black vegans, higher ed, and religious people). But maybe I am completely misunderstanding your point?
I don’t “tell” readers that “it is morally ill-advised...” by observing that “One might object that it is morally ill-advised...” any more than I would have told them “Keith kills it at Scrabble” had I written “One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble.”
I am very sympathetic that readers will see meanings that writers didn’t intend, but for what it’s worth: yes, if you wrote “One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble”, gave many pages of evidence supporting the claim that Keith kills it at Scrabble, and then concluded your chapter with a suggestion that we should send Keith to the Scrabble world championship, I would, in fact, think you are telling me that Keith kills it at Scrabble.
[TL; DR: I’m a little confused too, and this essay was an attempt (maybe a failed one?) to try to work out a “both/and” that would synthesize my fledgling sense that EA has something important to offer in spite of methodological idiosyncrasies, hermeneutic blindspots, and demographic challenges that seem seriously to limit its appeal and reach; and that grassroots advocacy work in various culturally influential communities that seem positioned to do great good (but are often lacking the resources to scale it and viewed with skepticism by some EAs) could benefit from EA-channeled resource-infusions.]
Hi Ben! That you have carried on with the “Keith kills it at Scrabble” thing gives me joy. An occupational hazard of doing philosophy is time sacrificed to fashioning examples calculated to seem like the effortless progeny of a rapier wit when in fact one struggles mightily and usually fails. I confess to lingering over Keith for a minute before I cut him loose, and to witness him flourishing in this comment thread even unto the Scrabble world championships...I am moist-eyed!
Before I go any further, let me confess in humility that I am a relative newcomer to thinking about EA and not very well versed in the lingua franca, so I hope that at least some of what I say is intelligible even if the words “priors”, “counterfactual”, and “expected value” are nowhere to be found! :)
Truthfully, I’m a little confused myself as to exactly what I’m trying to do in this essay (which is why there’s all that hedging language throughout: one might this, one could that, “worries” and “reservations” rather than “objections” and “refutations,” etc.). I think it’s one of those “both/and” sorts of projects where I’m hoping—maybe too optimistically? maybe in vain?--that if EA diversifies the ol’ methodological and cause-prioritization portfolios a bit, the whole movement and the world, too, will get more of what it wants and needs? Something like that? (By “movement” here, I’ve got animal advocacy in mind (the main focus of the volume), but given that my activist’s imagination has been greatly shaped by the work of Carol Adams, Aph and Syl Ko, Christopher Carter and others, it’s a holistic pro-flourishing/anti-oppression movement more than just a one-issue focus on animal advocacy).
Here’s how I frame this “both/and” gesture in the first few pages:
“In what follows, I’ll explain each of these reservations and then suggest some exciting new initiatives—institution-building in Black vegan advocacy, higher education, and religious communities—that could mitigate these reservations, energize and diversify the movement, and remain true to the EA method of supporting underexploited but potentially high-impact causes that produce non fungible goods otherwise unlikely to be funded.” (77)
If this conversation is to continue, it might help for me to fess up to a couple of idiosyncrasies in my background that really complicate my outlook on these matters and have prompted me to search for a “both/and” in a situation where some seem to think we must choose between EA and grassroots approaches.
My methodological worries about EA are largely rooted in my training as a hermeneutic phenomenologist. Though I studied analytic philosophy in both undergrad and graduate school, I ended up doing some coursework in both places that raised serious concerns about Enlightenment approaches to method in the humanities and social sciences, especially in cases where science-envy in these fields generates overconfident appeals to objectivity and fixation on measurement as ways to try to corral the unpredictable vicissitudes of human history (or, worse, to dominate and exploit others (e.g., colonization (society/reason vs. nature/savagery), eugenics, etc.). Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method convinced me that there are many pre-reflective and ultimately immeasurable forces at play in the interpretive contexts that are always already shaping our understanding of things, and that—as a result—staying in touch with reality requires ongoing dialogue with others whose different hermeneutic situations and life experiences offer us a clearer vantage point than even the most rigorous self- or communal reflection could leverage on the hidden blindspots and unwitting exclusions of our own limited perspectives. After reading thinkers in the hermeneutic phenomenological tradition (like Beauvoir and Fanon) who extended these insights into their implications for matters of gender, race, and systemic/institutional injustice, I became a lot more sensitive than I had been before to the risks associated with methodologically and demographically homogenous communities (not just the risks of exclusion and oppression, but the risks of falsely presumed supremacy, impoverished thinking, and cultural stagnation and decline into which homogenous cultures can unwittingly descend—maybe some of the recent events around SBF could be viewed as cautionary tales in this register?).
One might think, given all of this, that I’d be an anti-capitalist. But it turns out my Dad is an economics professor who devoted his career to arguing that capitalism, while woefully imperfect, is the best approach we’ve found so far to meeting human needs and curbing human suffering in a world of scarcity (he did a lot of advisory work in the former Soviet Union and had a front row seat to some of the other approaches on offer in contrast to which capitalism, warts and all, looked much better to him). Dad was always beating the drum that the problem isn’t capitalism per se, but the fact that—as a citizenry—we’ve failed to develop and evolve the moral sentiments and fellow feeling that would enable us to demand the proper things and create markets that deliver on those demands. He always said that the invisible hand would do a very bad job without a very good citizenry to set the parameters of its field of play, citing Adam Smith’s claims that one could not understand The Wealth of Nations or pull off the project described therein without enacting the world of The Theory of Moral Sentiments first as the foundation.
So, despite having read a bunch of stuff (and having a bunch of corroborating experiences of those insights in the philosophical, religious, and advocacy communities of which I am a part) that inclines me to think we’re all doomed if we don’t become significantly more methodologically and demographically diverse in our approaches to social problem solving, I’ve also been heavily shaped by the beliefs that capitalism is the best we human beings have done so far in terms of providing systemic solutions to scarcity and that capitalism might be able to do much, much better if our methodological and demographic diversification efforts expand our consciousness and our problem solving skills so that we can demand better things from new and better markets. These experiences are obviously in some tension with one another, and I guess the cageyness of my paper is rooted in that tension. That tension also explains why I’m excited about organizations like Afro-Vegan Society, CreatureKind, and GFI, even though they’re doing very different sorts of things.
Gosh. That was way, way too long and rambling. Better add a TL;DR before I sign off. Thanks again, Ben, for getting me to think harder about what’s going on here! I hope it’s a little clearer what I was trying to carry off.
Quick follow-up that I hope isn’t too pedantic (but maybe is, despite my hope?). I just had a chance to check the correction itself on my computer (my phone wouldn’t take me to the link for some odd reason) and noticed that, while the unwarranted criticism has been retracted, the misattribution itself has not. The set-up for the quotation still seems to read, “Another author tells us (p. 81), ‘it is morally ill-advised to invest tens of millions...’, which isn’t technically true. I don’t “tell” readers that “it is morally ill-advised...” by observing that “One might object that it is morally ill-advised...” any more than I would have told them “Keith kills it at Scrabble” had I written “One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble.” Maybe that seems like a small quibble, but if my work is going to be used as Exhibit B in a section of a book review titled “The Bad,” I want to be guilty of the alleged wrongdoing, ya know? :)
Thanks Matthew for engaging, particularly given that this post may not have been written in the most friendly way!
I feel confused about what your chapter is asserting then? Your chapter starts off with your two reservations about EA:[1]
It isn’t always clear that we really can do more good by supporting EA-preferred causes
Doing the most good might have opportunity costs (e.g. making the world less just)
These reservations seem pretty clearly consistent with the fragments that Richard excerpted. And in both cases, you go on to give additional argumentation about why these excerpted objections are correct.
For example with the “morally ill-advised” one you go on to say: “To make this worry more concrete in the context of the animal-focused applications of EA discussion in this book, consider the disproportionate toll that the ascendance of industrial animal agriculture has taken on communities of color in the United States, and on Black communities in particular.” You then elaborate on these inequalities for several paragraphs, without using the “one might…” voice.
The excerpted fragments are also consistent with what I took the point of your chapter to be (EA should diversify away from food tech into outreach to black vegans, higher ed, and religious people). But maybe I am completely misunderstanding your point?
I am very sympathetic that readers will see meanings that writers didn’t intend, but for what it’s worth: yes, if you wrote “One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble”, gave many pages of evidence supporting the claim that Keith kills it at Scrabble, and then concluded your chapter with a suggestion that we should send Keith to the Scrabble world championship, I would, in fact, think you are telling me that Keith kills it at Scrabble.
I’m paraphrasing lightly, hopefully this is still accurate
[TL; DR: I’m a little confused too, and this essay was an attempt (maybe a failed one?) to try to work out a “both/and” that would synthesize my fledgling sense that EA has something important to offer in spite of methodological idiosyncrasies, hermeneutic blindspots, and demographic challenges that seem seriously to limit its appeal and reach; and that grassroots advocacy work in various culturally influential communities that seem positioned to do great good (but are often lacking the resources to scale it and viewed with skepticism by some EAs) could benefit from EA-channeled resource-infusions.]
Hi Ben! That you have carried on with the “Keith kills it at Scrabble” thing gives me joy. An occupational hazard of doing philosophy is time sacrificed to fashioning examples calculated to seem like the effortless progeny of a rapier wit when in fact one struggles mightily and usually fails. I confess to lingering over Keith for a minute before I cut him loose, and to witness him flourishing in this comment thread even unto the Scrabble world championships...I am moist-eyed!
Before I go any further, let me confess in humility that I am a relative newcomer to thinking about EA and not very well versed in the lingua franca, so I hope that at least some of what I say is intelligible even if the words “priors”, “counterfactual”, and “expected value” are nowhere to be found! :)
Truthfully, I’m a little confused myself as to exactly what I’m trying to do in this essay (which is why there’s all that hedging language throughout: one might this, one could that, “worries” and “reservations” rather than “objections” and “refutations,” etc.). I think it’s one of those “both/and” sorts of projects where I’m hoping—maybe too optimistically? maybe in vain?--that if EA diversifies the ol’ methodological and cause-prioritization portfolios a bit, the whole movement and the world, too, will get more of what it wants and needs? Something like that? (By “movement” here, I’ve got animal advocacy in mind (the main focus of the volume), but given that my activist’s imagination has been greatly shaped by the work of Carol Adams, Aph and Syl Ko, Christopher Carter and others, it’s a holistic pro-flourishing/anti-oppression movement more than just a one-issue focus on animal advocacy).
Here’s how I frame this “both/and” gesture in the first few pages:
“In what follows, I’ll explain each of these reservations and then suggest some exciting new initiatives—institution-building in Black vegan advocacy, higher education, and religious communities—that could mitigate these reservations, energize and diversify the movement, and remain true to the EA method of supporting underexploited but potentially high-impact causes that produce non fungible goods otherwise unlikely to be funded.” (77)
If this conversation is to continue, it might help for me to fess up to a couple of idiosyncrasies in my background that really complicate my outlook on these matters and have prompted me to search for a “both/and” in a situation where some seem to think we must choose between EA and grassroots approaches.
My methodological worries about EA are largely rooted in my training as a hermeneutic phenomenologist. Though I studied analytic philosophy in both undergrad and graduate school, I ended up doing some coursework in both places that raised serious concerns about Enlightenment approaches to method in the humanities and social sciences, especially in cases where science-envy in these fields generates overconfident appeals to objectivity and fixation on measurement as ways to try to corral the unpredictable vicissitudes of human history (or, worse, to dominate and exploit others (e.g., colonization (society/reason vs. nature/savagery), eugenics, etc.). Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method convinced me that there are many pre-reflective and ultimately immeasurable forces at play in the interpretive contexts that are always already shaping our understanding of things, and that—as a result—staying in touch with reality requires ongoing dialogue with others whose different hermeneutic situations and life experiences offer us a clearer vantage point than even the most rigorous self- or communal reflection could leverage on the hidden blindspots and unwitting exclusions of our own limited perspectives. After reading thinkers in the hermeneutic phenomenological tradition (like Beauvoir and Fanon) who extended these insights into their implications for matters of gender, race, and systemic/institutional injustice, I became a lot more sensitive than I had been before to the risks associated with methodologically and demographically homogenous communities (not just the risks of exclusion and oppression, but the risks of falsely presumed supremacy, impoverished thinking, and cultural stagnation and decline into which homogenous cultures can unwittingly descend—maybe some of the recent events around SBF could be viewed as cautionary tales in this register?).
One might think, given all of this, that I’d be an anti-capitalist. But it turns out my Dad is an economics professor who devoted his career to arguing that capitalism, while woefully imperfect, is the best approach we’ve found so far to meeting human needs and curbing human suffering in a world of scarcity (he did a lot of advisory work in the former Soviet Union and had a front row seat to some of the other approaches on offer in contrast to which capitalism, warts and all, looked much better to him). Dad was always beating the drum that the problem isn’t capitalism per se, but the fact that—as a citizenry—we’ve failed to develop and evolve the moral sentiments and fellow feeling that would enable us to demand the proper things and create markets that deliver on those demands. He always said that the invisible hand would do a very bad job without a very good citizenry to set the parameters of its field of play, citing Adam Smith’s claims that one could not understand The Wealth of Nations or pull off the project described therein without enacting the world of The Theory of Moral Sentiments first as the foundation.
So, despite having read a bunch of stuff (and having a bunch of corroborating experiences of those insights in the philosophical, religious, and advocacy communities of which I am a part) that inclines me to think we’re all doomed if we don’t become significantly more methodologically and demographically diverse in our approaches to social problem solving, I’ve also been heavily shaped by the beliefs that capitalism is the best we human beings have done so far in terms of providing systemic solutions to scarcity and that capitalism might be able to do much, much better if our methodological and demographic diversification efforts expand our consciousness and our problem solving skills so that we can demand better things from new and better markets. These experiences are obviously in some tension with one another, and I guess the cageyness of my paper is rooted in that tension. That tension also explains why I’m excited about organizations like Afro-Vegan Society, CreatureKind, and GFI, even though they’re doing very different sorts of things.
Gosh. That was way, way too long and rambling. Better add a TL;DR before I sign off. Thanks again, Ben, for getting me to think harder about what’s going on here! I hope it’s a little clearer what I was trying to carry off.
Understandable! I’ve cut the passage entirely, since as you say it isn’t really fair to exhibit your work in that section of the review.