I am curious where you think it stops. What standard of living are people "obligated" to sink to in order to help strangers? I don't deny any of this is good or praiseworthy, but it doesn't seem to have any limiting principle. Should everyone live in squalor, forego a family/deep friendships, and not pursue any passions because time and money can always be spent saving another stranger?

Yes but I think it's significant that one is morally entitled, not just legally entitled. In other words, imagine replacing pressing the button with actually doing the work to earn 6k. Do you think you are, for example, obligated to drive 12 hours each way in order to pull a drowning child out of a lake? The amount of money in your bank account is endogenous to how much work and effort you put into filling it, whereas I think the way this thought experiment is framed makes it sound like that money fell from the sky.

If you think you are in fact obligated drive 24 hours/increase your own risk of death by taking on a risky job/give up time with your children in order to save a stranger, then I am more sympathetic to the idea that you are obligated give up money for that stranger. However I do not share that intuition.

The difference is that property is distributed based on morally significant, non-random, voluntary activities. See Governing Least by Dan Moller for a moral defense or property. This implies that a) you are entitled to your property because you earned it through morally legitimate means and b) It is a good thing for society more broadly to accept the moral legitimacy of property that is earned through creation, discovery, etc., so the norm that people in general are entitled to their property in most cases is pro-social.

In contrast to most forms of property, accepting money for murder is not a defensible basis for property. This means that a) you are not entitled to that money, and b) supporting such a norm would be bad.

There are of course cases in which you might acquire property in a non-morally-legitimate way. I think the distinction there is far more tenuous, but that is not the case for the bulk of most people's money.

There are many reasons for choosing not to have kids that are in no way similar to concerns in the poor meat eater problem.

However, I disagree that choosing not to have children specifically because you think humans are a net moral bad is so vastly different from choosing not to actively expend resources to save an existing human in terms of the logic underlying the motivation.

The two actions have different consequences but the two beliefs imply roughly the same sorts of things that JWS finds uncomfortable when followed to their logical conclusion.

My only point was that these beliefs both stem from a similar kind of misanthropy that is not unique to ea/utilitarianism/the meat eater problem/ poor people.

Some people think humans are on net bad and want to see fewer of them, future or existing. People who think that having a child is any way wrong because humans are on average a net moral bad are in my opinion pretty ideologically aligned with people who think it's wrong to donate to human-focused charities for the same reason.

A lot of people in animal advocacy circles (inside and outside ea) choose not to have children and report that this is because humans tend to be meat eaters. There are far larger numbers of environmentally minded (mostly non-ea) people who claim to choose not to have children because their children will contribute to global warming or general environmental harms. Most such environmentally minded people are not particularly animal-welfare focused. Further, most such people are not committed utilitarians.

I am not defending this view, nor even claiming that these reasons are true drivers of personal decisions. However the frequency with which I hear similar suggestions about how having children is a moral wrong for the planet suggests to me that this sort of idea is not directed toward poorer people in particular, nor is it the result of considering animals as moral patients nor is it idiosyncratic to EA not does it stem from any strict interpretation of utilitarianism.

For better or worse, a certain type of misanthropy runs deep in modern culture.

Why are private conclusions about moral dilemmas anyone else's business? Not saying it's good to be private about that (necessarily) or that there aren't contexts where it would be relevant to disclose but I really don't understand why it would be sleezy or manipulative.

I think your first point is totally fair and agree that those are separate things.

As to your second point, I feel similar hesitation strongly associating with most movements for the same reason. In fact the example you give of feminism stands out to me as perfect because I probably agree with most "feminists" about most issues around gender and gender-associated rights but the term feels loaded and opaque. I don't know what people mean when they use it, and there are people who use it to mean pretty uncontroversial things as well as people who mean something quite distinct. With respect to feminism, I generally don't use the word to describe myself but am happy to have a longer conversation about my beliefs on the topic, which is pretty similar to how I approach EA in conversation.

I have no issue being transparent about the various ways I am involved with EA organizations, institutions, and ideas but I find a lot of people want to identify me as "an EA", literally in introductory emails and stuff like that. I am very put off by this for two reasons:

One, the label applied to me as a person strikes me as incredibly arrogant; it seems to imply I consider myself more effective and more altruistic than people outside this community, which I absolutely do not. I'm doing my best just like every one else.

Two, after many years of engagement including being a cause-area organizer for my local chapter, going to EA global, reading every major book about EA and associated ideas, and spending countless hours on the 80k website and podcast, I still don't think I could fairly summarize some of the key principles in EA. I don't think it is particularly well-defined and those sources that aim to define it are often quite vague and inconsistent with one another. When I object that I do not commit to being fully non-particularist or accepting all the tenets of utilitarianism or some similar gripe, I hear from one corner that I misunderstand EA and EA doesn't demand that and from another corner that objecting to those things does in fact mean I am not aligned with EA. Thus, I don't feel comfortable identifying with the movement.

On the other hand, I am happy to acknowledge the quote positive influence various EA orgs have had on my work, my thinking, and even my values. I have a lot of appreciation for the EA movement (which I will readily tell my network) but I am not "an effective altruist."

I'm a bit confused as to whether you are trying to make an empirical point (i.e. that even from a standard utilitarian-ish perspective, protecting ecosystems is a cost-effective but often ignored intervention for the sake of hunan and animal welfare) or a philosophical point (i.e. that we should value ecosystems for their own sake rather than for the sake of human and animal welfare). These are very different claims but I find it hard which you are trying to get at here. Could you please clarify?

How do you think about the trade-offs (or "moral weights") between species, including humans? If you believe that what matters is primarily hedonistic pleasure/pain and you believe anything on the order of magnitude of the rethink priorities weights (e.g. humans have merely twice the capacity of suffering as pigs and three times that of chickens), then it seems issues like the "poor meat eater problem" or even just opportunity costs make human poverty alleviation efforts actively bad. It also leaves open the possibility that, say, shrimp or insects should actually be the top priority and our concern for their welfare should overwhelm all concerns for human welfare. If you believe that animals matter, but humans matter much more (say, orders of magnitude more than the rethink weights), then it seems like that might undermine some of your positions on factory farming. Do you have any rough relative moral weights in mind? If not, do you think developing such weights is a top priority?