Reading through your articles, I can’t help but share your concern especially because of how potentially fragile people’s important and impactful altruistic decisions might be.
If my family is making 100k and they are choosing to designate 10% of that annually to effective charities, that represents vacations that are not had, savings that are not made, a few less luxuries, etc. I may be looking for a permission structure to eliminate or reduce my giving. This is probably even more true if I am only considering donation of a significant portion of my income.
Critics of effective giving can help people feel morally justified in abstaining from effective giving, which might be all that they need to maintain the status quo of not giving, or tilt a bit more of their budget to themselves and their families.
We do of course need to worry about the flip side: plenty of times (especially in political groups) you see people being told not to criticise the group’s positions because it will make it less likely that the public in general will buy the overall picture (which the critic probably still agrees with). This can be pretty toxic.
I don’t think Richard is advocating for that, but I think it’s a risk once you legitimize this kind of argument.
Right, that’s why I also take care to emphasize that responsible criticism is (pretty much) always possible, and describe in some detail how one can safely criticize “Good Things” without being susceptible to charges of moral misdirection.
Reading through your articles, I can’t help but share your concern especially because of how potentially fragile people’s important and impactful altruistic decisions might be.
If my family is making 100k and they are choosing to designate 10% of that annually to effective charities, that represents vacations that are not had, savings that are not made, a few less luxuries, etc. I may be looking for a permission structure to eliminate or reduce my giving. This is probably even more true if I am only considering donation of a significant portion of my income.
Critics of effective giving can help people feel morally justified in abstaining from effective giving, which might be all that they need to maintain the status quo of not giving, or tilt a bit more of their budget to themselves and their families.
We do of course need to worry about the flip side: plenty of times (especially in political groups) you see people being told not to criticise the group’s positions because it will make it less likely that the public in general will buy the overall picture (which the critic probably still agrees with). This can be pretty toxic.
I don’t think Richard is advocating for that, but I think it’s a risk once you legitimize this kind of argument.
Right, that’s why I also take care to emphasize that responsible criticism is (pretty much) always possible, and describe in some detail how one can safely criticize “Good Things” without being susceptible to charges of moral misdirection.