I think you make a couple of good points, and overall I updated a fair bit into the direction of “accepting functionally anonymous donations is ~always OK, even if you know the money has morally questionable origin”.
I’m still not fully convinced, and suspect there are realistic cases where at least initially I’d be fairly strongly opposed to taking such donations.
I’m not sure if I can fully justify my intuition / if the things I’m going to say are actually its main drivers, but at first glance I see two reasons to be hesitant:
I’d guess that in practice it can be very hard to implement the level of anonymity you suggest. E.g. relationships to large donors in practice are often handled by senior staff who do have influence over the org’s strategic direction.
This is partly due to common (actual or perceived) donor preferences.
But it also makes sense from the org’s perspective: e.g. knowing the details about the relationships to large donors is fairly relevant when doing risk management. But for a holistic risk management you also need to look at other information that’s quite dispersed throughout the org; certainly org leadership needs to be involved. So the org has an incentive that might preclude setting up the kind of “firewalls” you advocate—and when they are in place, there will be incentives to subvert them, which seems like a bad/risky setup.
I think that outside perceptions are a quite significant obstacle, for reasons that go beyond “PR risks” in a narrow sense. My sense is that the stakes in the arena of “moral/political signaling” are quite high for many actors, in particular if you rely a lot on informal cooperation based on perceptions of hard-to-verify shared interests. And whom you take money from will often be quite significant in that arena.
One issue here is that the level of anonymization / protection from adverse incentives you advocate will often be hard to verify from the outside.
If I know that charity X has received a substantial donation from Y, my prior will be that Y has significant influence over X. In typical cases, it would be quite costly (in terms of time, but potentially also inside/sensitive information that would need to be shared) to convince me that this is not the case.
Another significant issue is a kind of “contagion” due to higher-order social reasoning: Suppose I know that charity X has received a substantial donation from Y. Suppose further that I know that X’s relationship to Z is relevant for X’s ability to achieve its mission (think e.g. X = MyAISafetyOrg, Z = DeepMind). Even if I’m personally not that concerned about accepting donations from Y, I might still be concerned that X made a bad move if I think that Z would disapprove of getting funded by Y. “Bad move” here might refer to a narrow sense of competence, but also again to “moral”/influence issues: if it seems to me that X is willing to accept the cost that most others are going to worry if Y has influence over X, this makes it seem more likely that Y in fact has influence over X.
Consider also that if it would be costly for X to publicly acknowledge it accepted a donation from Y, then in virtue of this very fact accepting an anonymous donation from Y gives Y influence/leverage over X (because Y can threaten to disclose their donation).
My impression is that related concepts like “virtue signalling” are often discussed in a derogatory fashion in the EA sphere. I’d like to therefore add that when I said “moral/political signalling” I’m not thinking of arguably excessive/pathological cases from, say, highly public party politics as central examples. I’m more thinking of the reasons why “integrity” (and, for philosophers, Strawsonian “reactive attitudes”) is a thing / an everyday concept, and of credibility/”improving one’s bargaining position”.
(Similarly, note that “follow the money” is a common heuristics.)
My very quick take:
I think you make a couple of good points, and overall I updated a fair bit into the direction of “accepting functionally anonymous donations is ~always OK, even if you know the money has morally questionable origin”.
I’m still not fully convinced, and suspect there are realistic cases where at least initially I’d be fairly strongly opposed to taking such donations.
I’m not sure if I can fully justify my intuition / if the things I’m going to say are actually its main drivers, but at first glance I see two reasons to be hesitant:
I’d guess that in practice it can be very hard to implement the level of anonymity you suggest. E.g. relationships to large donors in practice are often handled by senior staff who do have influence over the org’s strategic direction.
This is partly due to common (actual or perceived) donor preferences.
But it also makes sense from the org’s perspective: e.g. knowing the details about the relationships to large donors is fairly relevant when doing risk management. But for a holistic risk management you also need to look at other information that’s quite dispersed throughout the org; certainly org leadership needs to be involved. So the org has an incentive that might preclude setting up the kind of “firewalls” you advocate—and when they are in place, there will be incentives to subvert them, which seems like a bad/risky setup.
I think that outside perceptions are a quite significant obstacle, for reasons that go beyond “PR risks” in a narrow sense. My sense is that the stakes in the arena of “moral/political signaling” are quite high for many actors, in particular if you rely a lot on informal cooperation based on perceptions of hard-to-verify shared interests. And whom you take money from will often be quite significant in that arena.
One issue here is that the level of anonymization / protection from adverse incentives you advocate will often be hard to verify from the outside.
If I know that charity X has received a substantial donation from Y, my prior will be that Y has significant influence over X. In typical cases, it would be quite costly (in terms of time, but potentially also inside/sensitive information that would need to be shared) to convince me that this is not the case.
Another significant issue is a kind of “contagion” due to higher-order social reasoning: Suppose I know that charity X has received a substantial donation from Y. Suppose further that I know that X’s relationship to Z is relevant for X’s ability to achieve its mission (think e.g. X = MyAISafetyOrg, Z = DeepMind). Even if I’m personally not that concerned about accepting donations from Y, I might still be concerned that X made a bad move if I think that Z would disapprove of getting funded by Y. “Bad move” here might refer to a narrow sense of competence, but also again to “moral”/influence issues: if it seems to me that X is willing to accept the cost that most others are going to worry if Y has influence over X, this makes it seem more likely that Y in fact has influence over X.
Consider also that if it would be costly for X to publicly acknowledge it accepted a donation from Y, then in virtue of this very fact accepting an anonymous donation from Y gives Y influence/leverage over X (because Y can threaten to disclose their donation).
My impression is that related concepts like “virtue signalling” are often discussed in a derogatory fashion in the EA sphere. I’d like to therefore add that when I said “moral/political signalling” I’m not thinking of arguably excessive/pathological cases from, say, highly public party politics as central examples. I’m more thinking of the reasons why “integrity” (and, for philosophers, Strawsonian “reactive attitudes”) is a thing / an everyday concept, and of credibility/”improving one’s bargaining position”.
(Similarly, note that “follow the money” is a common heuristics.)