Yes, I am claiming that when Effective Altruism is defined as “trying to find the best ways” what it really means is “trying to find the most effective ways”. As far as I can tell the reasons for using “the best” are to avoid a circular definition (“Effective Altruism is trying to find the most effective ways to perform altruism”) and as a rhetorical device to deflect criticism (“Surely you can’t object to trying to find the best ways of helping others?!”).
Despite protests to the contrary EA is a form of utilitarianism, and when the word effective is used it has generally been in the sense of “cost effective”. If you are not an effective altruist (which I am not), then cost effectiveness—while important—is an instrumental value rather than an intrinsic value. Depending on your ethical framework, therefore, what you define as “the best way” to help people will differ from the effective altruist.
Thank you for replying, although I admit to being equally puzzled by your puzzlement.
What Goldring is paraphrased as saying is that “For a certain cost, the charity might enable only a few children to go to school in a country such as South Sudan, where the barriers to school attendance are high, he says; but that does not mean it should work only in countries where the cost of schooling is cheaper, such as Bangladesh, because that would abandon the South Sudanese children.”
Goldring is not “implying that so long as we help some children in each country, it does not matter how many children we end up abandoning”. I simply don’t see where you get that from. It’s just not the argument that he’s making. His argument is that the needs of children in South Sudan and Bangladesh are equally important, that the foundation for Oxfam’s work is needs rather than costs, and that the accident of birth that placed a child in South Sudan and not Bangladesh is thus not a justification to abandon the former.
What Goldring does imply is that applying “EA principles” would require Oxfam to abandon all the children of South Sudan—and probably for every aid organisation to abandon the entire country, since South Sudan is a difficult and costly working environment. In this case “quantity has a quality all of its own”—the argument that justifies abandoning 100 children in one country in favour of 1000 children in another looks markedly different when it’s used to justify withdrawing all forms of assistance from an entire country.
This highlights the conflict between EA’s approach—which takes “effectiveness” (specifically cost-effectiveness) as an intrinsic rather than instrumental value—and the framework used by others, who have other intrinsic values. That conflict is the reason why we may be talking past each other—I recognise that you probably won’t agree with this argument, and may continue to be puzzled. I would suggest to you that this is the fundamental weakness of the paper—that you are not taking these criticisms of EA in good faith, and in some cases are addressing straw man versions of them.