Should EAs influence corporate giving?

tyleralterman13 Jul 2015 2:28 UTC
12 points
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EDIT: As commenters below point out, my post was poorly named! The question my post actually addresses is something closer to “Should we spread the brand and philosophy of the EA movement to corporate giving?” (To which my answer is “not yet.”) There is a separate question, which is, “Should we make corporate giving more effective?” that I do not tackle. (The answer to this question is probably, “Yes, as long as we err on the side of caution in our use of the EA brand. The Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, and the GiveWell sub-brands might be more appropriate here.”)

Some time ago, I set off on a plan to use this year’s EA Global to improve corporate giving. This plan included the sketch of a corporate engagement model aimed at steering billions of dollars to the best bets for saving and improving lives. The thought was that we’d get a half-dozen high-level people in corporate giving to publicly support this model.

I now think this plan was not well-considered, and have since put it on pause. Here’s why.

There are a number of reasons why the EA movement should be careful about large-scale attempts to influence giving in general, and corporate giving in particular at this early stage of the movement. The first two reasons detail why instituting truly EA giving policies may be intractable at this point in the movement’s development. The last reason details why it might be net negative to influence large-scale corporate giving at present.

1. EA conclusions are idiosyncratic

As Helen Toner put it best, EA is principally about asking the question, “How can I do the most good?” (Or, less controversially, but somewhat less accurately, “How can I save and improve the most lives?”) This question regularly yields answers that likely feel too weird for the public at present, such as “Support meta-charity” or “Prevent existential risks.”

Since much of corporate giving is understandably tied to PR, I suspect that many corporate philanthropists will feel constrained in their ability to sync their giving policies with off-beat giving opportunities, even if they believe that those opportunities are the best ones.

Three caveats to this conclusion:

  1. The public’s sense of what’s weird can change quite rapidly. (See, e.g., gay rights.) In the future, if EA is successful as it currently seems on track to be, many EA conclusions may lose their stigma. In fact, it may become the case that not having an EA-based giving policy is a PR problem for many companies.

  2. There are some companies for which seeming innovative at the cost of controversy might be the right tradeoff. For example, let’s say SpaceX wants to attract visionary employees who have critical thinking abilities. It might make sense for SpaceX to support more unusual EA conclusions in its public giving policy.

  3. If GiveWell/​Open Philanthropy Project increase dramatically in status over the next few years, it might become permissable for a company to outsource its corporate giving policy to these initiatives. Outsourcing giving policies to another org might give companies a PR shield, since the giving decisions become one step removed. For instance, it would be hard to imagine a company publicly backing a charity which creates more pleasurable condoms to encourage birth control in developing countries. However, you can imagine a company contributing their funds to the Gates Foundation, even if the Gates Foundation decides to fund a few controversial initiatives (such as the condoms one).

2. Prioritization itself is controversial

The question, “How can I save and improve the most lives?” practically entails the assumption that there are some ways of saving/​improving lives are better than others. From there, you get the importance of cause prioritization. This is still a controversial idea. E.g., a company might get flack for matching GiveWell/​Open Phil-recommended donation while declining to match donations to unsupported nonprofits.

3. EA is still young and fragile

If we think global coordination on the world’s best do-gooding opportunities is important, then we better do a good job of protecting some of the best things about the EA movement.

EA is currently one of the best bets out there for creating global coordination. This is because:

  1. EAs approximately agree on ethics. E.g., that we should focus on saving/​improving lives rather than on maximizing other things as ends-in-themselves. (For example: I’d guess 99% of EAs would agree that they don’t support maximizing something like, “cultural richness” if specific ways of maximizing that richness don’t significantly improve lives.)

  2. EAs approximately agree on methodology (incl. standards of reason and evidence) when answering the question, “How can I save/​improve the most lives.”

This approximate agreement on values and methodology makes it possible for the words “effective altruism” to entail something quite substantive. It also enables EAs to coordinate even across dramatically different cause areas.

However, given that the EA movement is still at an early stage, it is still possible for the words “effective altruism” to be co-opted and lose their current substance. My sense is that the ethical and intellectual core of EA needs much greater fortification before EA should be spread too widely, including via corporate giving reform. (At EA Outreach, we’ve become fond of saying that we’re currently in the “movement-development” business, rather than in the “movement-building” one.)

For instance, it would be a really bad scenario if Twitter announced that they are adopting an EA-based giving policy if that giving policy lacked pieces like cause-prioritzation or focused too much the public’s attention on a narrow definition of EA (e.g. that EA is only about charitable giving). Twitter has a bigger megaphone than we do, and can probably influence the meaning of the words “effective altruism” to a greater degree than we can.

If you weaken the ethical and intellectual core of EA, you run the risk of undermining the community’s ability to reach consensus on the best world-improvement opportunities, and then coordinate resources toward those opportunities.

All that said, I still think people should take on the mission of improving corporate giving. However, they should practice the utmost care while doing so!

Thoughts? Questions? Rebuttals?

tyleralterman13 Jul 2015 2:28 UTC
12 points
12 commentsEA link