Hello there! First post in the forum, so I apologize in advance for the probable mistakes and overall clumsiness. I have checked the forum writing guidelines but am pretty sure there's a high probability of my screwing up something or somewhere, so if that proves to be the case, "I am sure you have a waste basket handy".
The case is, I was just checking Amazon today for some books on Effective Altruism with which to supplement the digital EA Handbook I am reading when I found this volume which will be made available exactly a month from now: The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, by Carol J. Adams, Lori Gruen and Alice Crary. I haven't seen any post mentioning it, and I thought it might be interesting to share.
As stated, the book hasn't been published yet, but one can look inside. I have been browsing the introduction, and in line with its title, it is pretty harsh in its wording. For example, from page xxv of the introduction:
"In addition to describing how EA can harm animals and humans, the book contains critical studies of EA's philosophical assumptions and critical studies of organizations that set out to realize them. It invites readers to recognize EA as an alluring and extremely pernicious ideology, and it traces out a number of mutually reinforcing strategies for submitting this ideology for criticism".
From the tone of the introduction I can suppose the general tone will be pretty scathing and hostile, as well as its general orientation. Still, I imagine the arguments it makes will profit from some attention, discussion and counterargument when it comes out.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm not too optimistic, though, as the editors' introduction on the OUP blog doesn't inspire confidence. E.g. they write:
This seems conceptually confused. Any kind of injustice or injury could, in principle, be associated with an estimated welfare cost. (Unless it was literally harmless, but that's surely not what they intend.)
I know there have been past methodological critiques of the particular vein of classic (GiveWell-style) EA that was addressed to aid skeptics and focused on just the most robustly-evidenced global health interventions. But obviously there's nothing in utilitarianism (or EA more broadly) that rules out making use of more speculative evidence and expected-value reasoning.
It sounds to me like their real complaint is something like: How dare EA/utilitarianism prioritize other things over my pet causes, just because there's no reason to think that my pet causes are optimal?
E.g.: "To grasp how disastrously an apparently altruistic movement has run off course, consider that... covering the costs of caring for survivors of industrial animal farming in sanctuaries is seen as a bad use of funds."
Note that they don't even attempt to offer reasons for thinking that animal sanctuaries are a better use of funds than existing EA priorities. Indeed, they don't seem to acknowledge the reality of tradeoffs at all. It's just supposed to be obvious that refusing funding to them and their allies is "grievous harm".
Hopefully some of the papers in the volume will offer some actual arguments that are worth engaging with.
The comment I replied to sounds like you're critiquing the main academic work rather than a description of it, so I wanted to check if you had read an advance copy or something.