Thanks for raising this, I am definitely pretty sympathetic to this concern.
My view here is that a muslim person giving in this way is not acting in accordance with the principles of effective altruism, because they are displaying extreme partiality. However, facilitating GiveDirectly to be Zakat compliant could be a valuable EA project. There are a lot of poor muslims in the world, and a lot of Zakat giving in the world also, so improving its efficiency could be quite valuable.
In this regard I actually think this proposal comes out looking a lot better than most ‘what is the EA way to do X or help Y’ posts, which typically imply the author wants their own partial donations to be counted as EA, not that they just want to make other people’s donations better from an impartial perspective.
Although most of us display extreme partiality with a large portion of our spending—e.g., I think of what I end up spending to keep my dog happy and well in an urban environment!
Thanks for raising this, I am definitely pretty sympathetic to this concern.
My view here is that a muslim person giving in this way is not acting in accordance with the principles of effective altruism, because they are displaying extreme partiality. However, facilitating GiveDirectly to be Zakat compliant could be a valuable EA project. There are a lot of poor muslims in the world, and a lot of Zakat giving in the world also, so improving its efficiency could be quite valuable.
In this regard I actually think this proposal comes out looking a lot better than most ‘what is the EA way to do X or help Y’ posts, which typically imply the author wants their own partial donations to be counted as EA, not that they just want to make other people’s donations better from an impartial perspective.
Although most of us display extreme partiality with a large portion of our spending—e.g., I think of what I end up spending to keep my dog happy and well in an urban environment!
Yeah I don’t think partiality is wrong in general, it’s just that your dog (like most things) is not an EA project.