About this footnote:
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Carol Adams even informs us that:
Sebo and Singer flourish as academics in a white supremacist patriarchal society because others, including people of color and those who identify as women, are pushed down. (p. 135, emphasis added.)
Maybe treading on the oppressed is a crucial part of Singer’s daily writing routine, without which he would never have written a word? If there’s some other reason to believe this wild causal claim, we’re never told what it is.
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Here’s a potential more charitable interpretation of this claim. Adams might not be claiming:
”Singer personally performs some act of oppression as part of his writing process.”
Adam’s causal model might be more of the following:
”Singer’s ideas aren’t unusually good; there are lots of other people, including people of color and those who identify as women, who have ideas that are as good or better. But those other people are being pushed down (by society in general, not by Singer personally) which leaves that position open for Singer. If people of color and those who identify as women weren’t oppressed, then some of them would be able to outcompete Singer, leaving Singer to not flourish as much.”
As for the question of “what do the authors consider to be root causes,” here’s my reading of the article. Consider the case of factory farming. Probably all of us agree that the following are all necessary causes:
(1) There’s lots of demand for meat.
(2) Factory farming is currently the technology that can produce meat most efficiently and cost-effectively.
(3) Producers of meat just care about production efficiency and cost-effectiveness, not animal suffering.
I suspect you and other EAs focus on item (2) when you are talking about “root causes.” In this case, you are correct that creating cheap plant-based meat alternatives will solve (2). However, I suspect the authors of this article think of (3) as the root cause. They likely think that if meat producers cared more about animal suffering, then they would stop doing factory farming or invest in alternatives on their own, and philanthropists wouldn’t need to support them. They write:
Furthermore, they think that since the cause of (3) is a focus on cost-effectiveness (in the sense of minimizing cost per pound of meat produced), then focusing on cost-effectiveness (in the sense of minimizing cost per life saved, or whatever) in philanthropy promotes more cost-effectiveness focused thinking, which makes (3) worse. And they think lots of problems have something like (3) as a root cause. This is what they mean when they talk about “values of the old system” in this quote:
As for the other quote you pulled out:
and the following discussion:
To be more concrete, I suspect what they’re talking about is something like the following. Consider a potential philanthropist like Jeff Bezos—they likely believe that Amazon has harmed the world through their business practices. Let’s say Jeff Bezos wanted to spend $10 billion of his wealth on philanthropy. There might be two ways of doing that:
(1) Donate $10 billion to worthy causes.
(2) Change Amazon’s business practices such that he makes $10 billion less money, but Amazon has a more positive (or less negative) impact on the world.
My reading is that the authors believe (2) would be of higher value, but Bezos (and others like him) would be biased toward (1) for self-serving reasons: Bezos would get more direct credit for doing (1) than (2), and Bezos would be biased toward underestimating how bad Amazon’s business practices are for the world.
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Overall, though I agree with you that if my interpretation accurately describes the author’s viewpoint, the article does not do a good job arguing for that. But I’m not really sure about the relevance of your statement:
Do you think that the article reflects a viewpoint that it’s not possible to make decisions under uncertainty? I didn’t get that from the article; one of their main points is that it’s important to try things even if success is uncertain.