A large part of backlash against effective altruism comes from people worried about EA ideals being corrosive to the “paying for public goods” or “partial philanthropy” mechanisms.
I think this is a good observation (I think the worry highlighted is one of the weakest arguments against EA, not least because EA has very limited real world impact upon the amount spent on animal shelters or concert halls, but it definitely comes up a lot in articles people like sharing on here).
More common forms of ostensibly “impartial” giving, like supporting global health initiatives or animal welfare, are probably better understood as examples of partial philanthropy with extended notions of “we”, like “we, living humans” or “we, mammals”.
I don’t agree with this though. I don’t think people donate to anonymous poor recipients in faraway countries or farm animals out of sense of collective identity. There’s little or no reciprocal altruism or collective identity there (particularly when it comes to the animals). I don’t think donating to exploring ideas of future people or digital minds is more impartial simply because these don’t [yet] exist. (Indeed I think it would be easier to characterise some of the niche longtermist research donations as being “partial” philanthropy on the basis that the recipients are typically known and respected members of an established in-group, with shared [unusual] interests, and the outcome is often research whose most obviously quantifiable impact is that the donor and their group find it very interesting. That strikes me as similar to quite a lot of other philanthropic research funding including in academia).
I think the “types” of charity are better understood as a set of motivations which overlap (and also include others like fuzzy feelings of satisfaction, signalling, interests, sense of duty etc which can coexist with also being a user of that conference hall or a fellow Christian or someone that believes its important future humanity ). Donating to AMF is about as impartial as it gets in terms of outcome, but there’s definitely some sort of collective identity benefit to doing so whilst identifying as part of a group with a shared epistemology and understanding that points towards donating mattering and outcomes mattering and AMF being a good way to achieve this. Ditto impartial donations to mainstream charity made by people who have a sense of religious duty to random strangers, or completely impartial donations to a research funding pool made by people with strong convictions about progress.
I think this is a good observation (I think the worry highlighted is one of the weakest arguments against EA, not least because EA has very limited real world impact upon the amount spent on animal shelters or concert halls, but it definitely comes up a lot in articles people like sharing on here).
I don’t agree with this though. I don’t think people donate to anonymous poor recipients in faraway countries or farm animals out of sense of collective identity. There’s little or no reciprocal altruism or collective identity there (particularly when it comes to the animals). I don’t think donating to exploring ideas of future people or digital minds is more impartial simply because these don’t [yet] exist. (Indeed I think it would be easier to characterise some of the niche longtermist research donations as being “partial” philanthropy on the basis that the recipients are typically known and respected members of an established in-group, with shared [unusual] interests, and the outcome is often research whose most obviously quantifiable impact is that the donor and their group find it very interesting. That strikes me as similar to quite a lot of other philanthropic research funding including in academia).
I think the “types” of charity are better understood as a set of motivations which overlap (and also include others like fuzzy feelings of satisfaction, signalling, interests, sense of duty etc which can coexist with also being a user of that conference hall or a fellow Christian or someone that believes its important future humanity ). Donating to AMF is about as impartial as it gets in terms of outcome, but there’s definitely some sort of collective identity benefit to doing so whilst identifying as part of a group with a shared epistemology and understanding that points towards donating mattering and outcomes mattering and AMF being a good way to achieve this. Ditto impartial donations to mainstream charity made by people who have a sense of religious duty to random strangers, or completely impartial donations to a research funding pool made by people with strong convictions about progress.