A possible response to such people is to ask (or, better, elucidate) how much more they value other lives relative to the lives of those who AMF or SCI save or help, and to then see if donating to AMF or SCI still does more good according to their non-cosmopolitan values.
I think people wouldn’t be honest about how much they value people in the developing world if asked directly. Instead, they would give euphemistic responses like “charity begins at home”. To elucidate how much they value people in the developing world, we can look at how much the typical person donates to developing world charities or advocates for causes relevant to the developing world. Every result indicates that they value these people very little.
We could try to shame people for letting their stated values contradict their true values. But shaming is a risky strategy, and I’m not sure how effective it would be.
Not all of the developing world is in dire shape, but most charities recommended by EA organizations are in the developing world.
So far EA outreach hasn’t been focused on people in the developing world. There are a number of reasons for this, both good and bad. But consider the fact that the richest 5% of Indians are poorer than the poorest 5% of Americans. I’d feel pretty uncomfortable asking the poorest 5% of Americans to donate to charity, so I suspect this is one reason that there haven’t been widespread efforts to ask Indians to donate (though some EAs are Indian).
Okay, I think this account is going to rage-quit, but for any witnesses, I want it to be clear that this person is obviously being disingenuous and is purposely distorting what I’m saying. It should be clear that EA is not excluding people from the developing world. The main reason we haven’t done more outreach there is probably inertia—few current EAs are natives of the developing world. One reason that there hasn’t been a huge impetus to recruit in the developing world is the far lower average incomes. But EAs have no intention to exclude anyone.
A possible response to such people is to ask (or, better, elucidate) how much more they value other lives relative to the lives of those who AMF or SCI save or help, and to then see if donating to AMF or SCI still does more good according to their non-cosmopolitan values.
I think people wouldn’t be honest about how much they value people in the developing world if asked directly. Instead, they would give euphemistic responses like “charity begins at home”. To elucidate how much they value people in the developing world, we can look at how much the typical person donates to developing world charities or advocates for causes relevant to the developing world. Every result indicates that they value these people very little.
We could try to shame people for letting their stated values contradict their true values. But shaming is a risky strategy, and I’m not sure how effective it would be.
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Not all of the developing world is in dire shape, but most charities recommended by EA organizations are in the developing world.
So far EA outreach hasn’t been focused on people in the developing world. There are a number of reasons for this, both good and bad. But consider the fact that the richest 5% of Indians are poorer than the poorest 5% of Americans. I’d feel pretty uncomfortable asking the poorest 5% of Americans to donate to charity, so I suspect this is one reason that there haven’t been widespread efforts to ask Indians to donate (though some EAs are Indian).
Deleted.
Okay, I think this account is going to rage-quit, but for any witnesses, I want it to be clear that this person is obviously being disingenuous and is purposely distorting what I’m saying. It should be clear that EA is not excluding people from the developing world. The main reason we haven’t done more outreach there is probably inertia—few current EAs are natives of the developing world. One reason that there hasn’t been a huge impetus to recruit in the developing world is the far lower average incomes. But EAs have no intention to exclude anyone.
Lila, thanks for handling this in such a mature manner :-)
(deleted the comments )