I do not like this. One of the fundamental premises of EA is to be neutral about who we are helping—people here, people there, people now, people later, all get weighted the same. Specifically setting out to help only Muslims therefor seems non-EA. If Muslims want to do it, I guess they have that right, but EA shouldn’t be touching it.
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!
I would object to a self-identified EA only giving money to help Muslims, but I don’t object to self-identified EAs making it easy for Muslims to give money to help poor Muslims.
I would object to a self-identified EA only giving money to help Muslims and claiming it as an EA activity. How people choose to purchase their fuzzies (as opposed to utilons) isn’t really my concern.
I agree with this in spirit, but think that in this case it’s completely fine.
a) Presumably, for some people, being zakat compatible has important cultural meaning. I generally think that the EA thing to do is to act within your constraints and belief systems and to do as much good as you can, not to need to tear down all of them.
b) In my opinion, the point of impartiality is “find the most effective ways of helping people”. I do not personally think that GiveDirectly is the most effective way to give, but it’s not at all clear to me that the Yemeni recipients are more or less deserving than any other. Being partial between equivalent categories of doing good effectively seems obviously fine
c) On a meta level, emotional and cultural factors really matter! I think it is a significant mistake for an EA to think that just because something is irrational you need to ignore it (though there are many scenarios where it is high value to try to get past it). If a certain form of giving is more motivating or sustainably or acceptable to your friends and family, it seems likely that you’ll continue to engage with effective giving and be giving in several years, which is a very big factor! People are not fully rational, no matter what they pretend or strive for, and I think that trying to ignore this is a common EA mistake
d) As noted below, this probably just funges with all other GiveDirectly donations and so just doesn’t matter
For what it’s worth, I do agree with your point in principle! Effectiveness is important and valuable and it’s a mistake to lose sight of it. But I don’t agree in this specific context, at least of this donation vs general GiveDirectly
I take it that, at least at this stage, the recipients would be GD recipients anyway and the directed giving is replacing “secular” monies that would have been given to the same people. There’s some extra overhead for getting these new donors on board, but that’s the nature of fundraising.
I sympathise with this position. Impartiality is a key tenet of EA. At the same time, EA already tolerates outright speciesism (people, including a number of high-status individuals within the community, who explicitly say that they value non-humans less than humans not because of sentience, but because they are simply members of a different species). Moreover, as Jason says, these people would have still been recipients anyway.
I’m not aware of high status individuals in the community justifying prioritizing humans on the mere basis of species membership. Usually I see claims about differences in capacities and interests. Are there public examples you can share?
And the charity is going to poor Muslims no matter what we do—we’d only be harming poor people by declining to offer a more effective way to do good because of our disapproval of the donor’s religious restrictions.
I do not like this. One of the fundamental premises of EA is to be neutral about who we are helping—people here, people there, people now, people later, all get weighted the same. Specifically setting out to help only Muslims therefor seems non-EA. If Muslims want to do it, I guess they have that right, but EA shouldn’t be touching it.
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.
I would object to a self-identified EA only giving money to help Muslims, but I don’t object to self-identified EAs making it easy for Muslims to give money to help poor Muslims.
I would object to a self-identified EA only giving money to help Muslims and claiming it as an EA activity. How people choose to purchase their fuzzies (as opposed to utilons) isn’t really my concern.
I agree with this in spirit, but think that in this case it’s completely fine. a) Presumably, for some people, being zakat compatible has important cultural meaning. I generally think that the EA thing to do is to act within your constraints and belief systems and to do as much good as you can, not to need to tear down all of them. b) In my opinion, the point of impartiality is “find the most effective ways of helping people”. I do not personally think that GiveDirectly is the most effective way to give, but it’s not at all clear to me that the Yemeni recipients are more or less deserving than any other. Being partial between equivalent categories of doing good effectively seems obviously fine c) On a meta level, emotional and cultural factors really matter! I think it is a significant mistake for an EA to think that just because something is irrational you need to ignore it (though there are many scenarios where it is high value to try to get past it). If a certain form of giving is more motivating or sustainably or acceptable to your friends and family, it seems likely that you’ll continue to engage with effective giving and be giving in several years, which is a very big factor! People are not fully rational, no matter what they pretend or strive for, and I think that trying to ignore this is a common EA mistake d) As noted below, this probably just funges with all other GiveDirectly donations and so just doesn’t matter
For what it’s worth, I do agree with your point in principle! Effectiveness is important and valuable and it’s a mistake to lose sight of it. But I don’t agree in this specific context, at least of this donation vs general GiveDirectly
I take it that, at least at this stage, the recipients would be GD recipients anyway and the directed giving is replacing “secular” monies that would have been given to the same people. There’s some extra overhead for getting these new donors on board, but that’s the nature of fundraising.
I sympathise with this position. Impartiality is a key tenet of EA. At the same time, EA already tolerates outright speciesism (people, including a number of high-status individuals within the community, who explicitly say that they value non-humans less than humans not because of sentience, but because they are simply members of a different species). Moreover, as Jason says, these people would have still been recipients anyway.
I’m not aware of high status individuals in the community justifying prioritizing humans on the mere basis of species membership. Usually I see claims about differences in capacities and interests. Are there public examples you can share?
And the charity is going to poor Muslims no matter what we do—we’d only be harming poor people by declining to offer a more effective way to do good because of our disapproval of the donor’s religious restrictions.