Post was not sent - check your email addresses! But that is exactly the point – often there Excessive focus on empirically-proven charitable interventions also means that the EA movement has a tendency to ignore other causes and consequences which are harder to quantify or even define with any precision, but are nonetheless no less real or important. For example, if a program’s efficacy is measured by the number of bednets placed, this produces an incentive to supply large numbers of low-quality nets to easily-accessible populations who may not necessarily need them.
”It seems that the relative benefit of a unit of investment in education and health, compared to community and culture, is based on an assessment of the current level of development of Western society in general. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Such indirect consequences are by definition hard to foresee or measure, and therefore tend to be neglected in the sort of outcome-based analyses favoured by EA advocates.Consider another example. This website uses cookies to improve service and provide tailored ads. The superficially enticing “logic” of effective altruism ultimately leads to a moralistic, hyper-rationalistic, top-down approach to philanthropy that can kill the very altruistic spirit it claims to foster.
Nor is there any clear reason for such people to accept this utilitarian viewpoint, aside of course from extended philosophical discussion, which given the past two millennia of philosophical history seems unlikely to yield much consensus anyway. Instead of allowing emotion, intuition, or brand loyalty to dictate our giving behaviour, we should think more scientifically about who and what we support.Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. What unintended consequences may this action have? The Centre for Effective Altruism describes effective altruism as the “desire to make the world as good a place as it can be, the use of evidence and reason to find out how to do so, and the audacity to actually try”.If the aim is to “do the most good” when it comes to our philanthropic endeavours, effective altruism argues that we should be unsentimental and only give to effective charities. There have been a number of critiques of effective altruism put forward, for example EA is based upon an underlying presumption of utilitarian ethical theory. But there are numerous ‘meta-level’ questions surrounding EA which simply EA supporters might respond by saying “yes but at least we’re trying to use evidence and rationality as much as we can, so our donations will James, I agree with many of your points here, especially the prescriptive nature of utilitarianism. Spreading generic (effective) altruism. Arguments about the margins cannot be just “taken to the extreme”, and I thought that was a fairly basic principle of Economics.Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:
Consider for instance GiveWell’s recommended charities: these are the charities for which GiveWell was able to find sufficient empirical evidence of cost-effectiveness. (See 1 and 2 for my previous posts.) The ‘non-recommended’ charities are such not because they have been found to be There are deeper issues with this overarching focus on the empirical. What effects does a program have on community cohesion in the long-run? Altruists do not aim only at the relief of suffering or the avoidance of harm—they also try to provide positive benefits to others for their sake. Examples such as this show that, at best, EA recommendations about cause prioritization seem to be missing a great deal of importance.This issue of the limits of empirics brings me to a final point about the impossible standards that EA sets, standards which even it is unable to meet.
Philanthropy The Elitist Philanthropy of So-Called Effective Altruism . Serving others is a central part of the Christian life. Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that advocates using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. Synopsis. This is the third post in my sequence on moral anti-realism; it works well as a standalone piece. As Christians, God requires us to consider this question too. This involves not only values but also empirical arguments for why s-risks may not be as improbable as it seems. An obsession with specific measurable outcomes inevitably leads to a focus on those outcomes to the exclusion of other considerations. Wiki definition (for want of any other) Altruism or selflessness is the principle or practice of concern for the welfare of others. How does this particular initiative alter the incentives faced by local officials, charity workers, and donors? For charities, this problem could manifest itself in other ways. See our Effective altruism is “a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to working out the most effective ways to improve the world”. : 2: 4–7 Altruism refers to improving the lives of others—as opposed to egoism, which emphasizes only self-interest. The trouble with an argument like this, however, is that taken to its natural end, it leads to the repugnant conclusion: namely that it is better to have a world comprised of a very large number of people whose lives are just barely worth living, compared to a world comprised of a much smaller population of healthier, happier, flourishing persons.