I have noticed the following distasteful motivations for my interest in EA surface within me from time to time. I'm disclosing them as they may also be reasons why people are suspicious of EA.
- I feel guilty about my privilege in the world and I can use EA as a tool to relieve my guilt (and maintain my privilege)
- I like to feel powerful and in control, and EA makes me feel I am having an impact on the world. More lives affected = more impact = I feel more powerful. I'm not so small and insignificant if my effective actions can have outsized impacts
- Affiliation with EA aligns me with high-status people and elite institutions, which makes me feel part of something special, important and exclusive (even if it's not meant to be)
- If I believe that other people's suffering can be reduced I believe that there is hope for my own potential suffering to be reduced too
- I'm fragile and EA makes me feel that other people are more fragile by drawing attention to all of the suffering in the world. I must be stronger than I feel if I'm in a position to be an EA, so it makes me feel good about myself
- EA helps satisfy my need to feel like what I do matters and that an almighty judge would pat me on the back and let me in to heaven for my good deeds and intentions (despite being an atheist I was socialised with Christian values)
- EA is partly an intellectual puzzle, and gives me opportunities to show off and feel like I'm right and other people are wrong
- It is a way to feel morally superior to other people, to craft a moral dominance hierarchy where I am higher than other people
- EA lets me signal my values to like-minded people, and feel part of an in-group
- I don't have to get my hands dirty helping people, yet I can still feel as or more legitimate than someone who is actually on the front line
Thanks for posting. I endorse a subset of these, another subset is quite alien to me.
I want to zero in on
Because I find it odd that you conflated relieving guilt and maintaining privilege into a single point, and the idea that installing oneself as an altruist in a cruel system (economic, ecological, or otherwise) is hedging against losing relative status or power within that system is a claim that needs to be justified.
As an example, surely many of us will have at least glanced at leftist comments to the effect that donating to AMF is a convenient smokescreen, keeping us blissfully ignorant of postcolonial mechanisms which are the true root cause of disvalue for the people AMF is (ostensibly) helping, and that if we were real altruists we would be anti imperialism activists. These comments, with whatever level of quality we find them, often point at this very claim.
Those of us who have taken substantial paycuts for (ostensibly) altruistic purposes may simply be trading cash for intra-community status-- this observation can justify arguments that we're not genuine altruists (whatever that is), but they do not on their own point to a bid at maintaining privilege.
Obviously Joe Ineffective Philanthropy Schmoe, who donates to the opera for tax breaks and PR, can be accused of using the polite fiction of philanthropy to shore up their privilege. If Joe is laundering money for the paperclip mafia by starting an alignment foundation (via some inscrutable mechanism), this accusation only increases.
But such a line of attack seems orthogonal to actually existing effective altruism.
Moreover, I may be right about the orthogonality but wrong about the emotional substructure. The emotional substructure may not make 100% sense, it may be a voice that assimilates guilt about privilege into some monologue about how you're falling short of franciscan altruism or some self-sacrifice emphasizing notion of altruism. This, however, is I think a mistake, because having an emotional substructure of guilt may not relate at all to the merits of franciscan altruism or mechanisms by which philanthropy fails to think systemically or etc.
My two cents: guilt is a reasonable mechanism to draw one's attention to the stakes and the opportunities of their privilege, but is not "emotionally competitive" with responsibility. You, a member of the species that beat smallpox, are plausibly alive at a hinge of history. Who knows what levers are lying around under your nose. You, in a veil of ignorance sense, would prefer people of your privilege to do a minimum of try. There's a line in an old jewish book about not being free to abandon it, nor obligated to complete it (where it is presumably the brokenness of the world, etc.), which is emotionally very effective for me.
Guilt seems like it wants to emphasize my feelings about the unjust, from a cosmopolitan point of view, situation we find ourselves in. My subjective state, my inner monologue. It seems indifferent to arguments that making myself suffer as much as the people I want to help may not help those people as much as possible. In other words, it is negative. Responsibility is positive, it asks "what actions can you take?" This is at least a reasonable place to start.
I think the correct steelmanning of dotsam's point is:
1. As a member of <group>, I have a great deal of privilege.
2. In order to remove this privilege, we need sweeping societal changes that upend the current power structures.
3. EA does not focus on upending current power structures in a radical way.
4. EA makes me feel less guilty about my privilege despire this.
5. Therefore, EA allows me to maintain my privilege by relieving my guilt by taking actions that doesn't actually require overthrowing current power structures, i.e, the actions that would af... (read more)