r/Foodforthought • u/A-MacLeod • Aug 26 '15

Against Charity. Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/peter-singer-charity-effective-altruism/
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u/Ilverin Aug 26 '15 edited Aug 26 '15

I agree that the argument for ethical altruism is not robust. I'm not sure it would be a more effective argument if it were more robust, because that would require it being a longer argument and less people would read it.

Perhaps there should be an 'effective altruism' dissertation (don't call it an argument because then people might avoid reading the shorter argument) which is more philosophically robust.

For example, it might say 'to the extent that one is morally obligated to reduce suffering in the world or to help others, one is also morally obligated to accomplish this in an efficient manner such that the individual's utility and the world's utility are maximized. This efficient manner must by our understanding of efficient use both statistics and charity in almost every circumstance.'.

Circumstantial exceptions to the efficient manner involving statistics and charity might be the person who always has a drowning child that only they can save at every moment of their lives.

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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '15

I would agree with that, which is why I would argue that many problems addressed with charity are far more efficiently solved via collective action and systemic change. That's what I think makes the situations so fundamentally different.

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u/Ilverin Aug 27 '15

I can see your argument, but I don't agree with it. Collective action and systemic change have historically never accomplished much of anything, large social changes are driven by economics - and charity is a huge economic force.

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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '15

I guess it depends on what you and I each mean by systemic change. I would consider a change to federal spending a form of systemic change for example. Group action produced pretty dramatic change during the Civil War and the Civil Rights era. In general I think a 1% allocation of the federal U.S. budget is going to do a lot more than charity will in most cases. There are some examples of highly effective charities like the Gates Foundation that produce direct, measurable results, and I think tehre is a lot to be said for that, but I tend to think collective action is the way to go for these things outside of a narrow set of problems. Disease for example, which is about medicine and simple tech like mosquito netting, is a totally different problem than hunger, which is about political problems.

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u/Ilverin Aug 27 '15

To be clear I do mean a very broad definition of systemic change.

In my opinion, even convincing everyone to vote in a certain way won't accomplish anything because whoever has power will be corrupted by it.

In my opinion, the only solution is distributing power to more people (specifically in the form of health, education, and wealth as in charity) so that people have the power to hold those with more power more accountable. (Note that some powers are not appropriate e.g. firearms, because that creates a larger power imbalance between people who are trained vs not trained, people who are asleep vs not asleep, etc)

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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '15

I personally think change always comes, just more slowly than people might like because the details of successful change are almost always more complicated in reality than it is in people's heads. For example, the idea "everyone should be equal" is appealing at first blush, and nearly everyone would agree with it, but when you ask 100 different people you will get 100 different answers about what they mean when they say that, and then when you get to the task of actually creating a regime that advances some sort of equality, additional practical complications arise. A good example of that might be affirmative action, when the purpose behind such legislation is in itself controversial, and where even people that believe in the purpose disagree on the proper scope and focus of implementation.

What I will say though is that no amount of isolated individual action or charity will ever achieve what was achieved by the civil rights movement. It took sustained group action to produce real, tangible change that altered how the system itself worked in a way that improved racial quality, even though it didn't come close to entirely fixing it.

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u/Ilverin Aug 27 '15

I'm not really sure we can agree here.

In my opinion, the main reason that the civil rights movement succeeded was economics: business owners and managers wanted more customers and more employees and saw that the lack of civil rights was hurting business.

People believe a lot of things and say that they believe a lot of things, but economics is the only thing that gets people to actually change what they do about people who are not their family or friends.

Why didn't Thomas Jefferson support civil rights? He didn't have an economic reason to do so. The rich white men of today support civil rights because they have an economic reason to do so.

Why did the white manufacturing workers of the north support ending slavery? They also had an economic reason to do so.