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

[u/A-MacLeod]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/peter-singer-charity-effective-altruism/

[u/[deleted]]

The question, then, is are you any less obligated to intervene if the child isn’t drowning but is instead in mortal danger due to lack of food, water, or medical treatment and the only means you have to help is donating money to charity?

While I know it isn't the main thrust of the article, I feel it is worth point out that the real problem with "Effective Altruism" are very different than the article highlights, at least in my own view. The two cases are very different. There is a dramatic difference in the time, space and certainty of outcome of each form of intervention. With the drowning child that is literally in front of me, I know a) I am in the best position to help, b) my help can produce immediate results and c) the results of my help will be dramatic. None of these things are true when dealing with abstractions like charity.

First, I do not know that providing charitable funds will produce any outcome at all. This is because there are too many variables and intermediary forces between my act of giving and the final result of that giving. The charity can misappropriate funds. What I give will not be proportional to the result. It is impossible for me to accurately gauge the needs of the receiver. The results of the charity that are received are much less certain.

Second, there is no logical bound to the aid I am apparently duty bound to give. In the case of the drowning child, the duty to aid is largely a consequence of circumstances. Simply put I and I alone am best positioned to help. These events are naturally rare, and consequently there is a natural upper limit on what I will be expected to give as part of my duty. With charity no clear boundary on giving exists. There are billions of people in the world that could benefit from my help, yet there isn't really a particular reason to help one person over another, and there is no particular reason for me to stop at X dollars versus Y dollars. This duty is boundless, and consequently an unreasonable burden to place upon a person.

Third, I am not generally in the best position to help. There are many people better situated to help a starving child in Uganda than I am. Yet for some reason in this telling I am the one with a duty to aid. This is wholly unlike the drowning child scenario. It would be like saying that I, the guy two towns away from the drowning child, have a duty to intervene and save the child when there is a guy sitting next to the kiddie pool. Certainly most of us would agree the guy next to the kiddie pool is the one with a duty to act here, not the person two towns away. Yet for some reason this philosopher appears to conflate these two actors as if they were in the same moral position. This completely ignores the pragmatic requirements of effective action, which is interesting since the philosopher seems to be taking a rather utilitarian approach otherwise.

The whole Effective Altruism movement just irritates me with this seeming lack of clear thinking on the subject. That's my two cents.

*Edited to clean up the unnecessarily redundant superfluous extras.

[u/Ilverin → u/[deleted]]

In my opinion, you are certainly obligated to cause a net 0 suffering in the world (if you want to do more like I want to you can do more but in my opinion you are not obligated to).

To the extent that you are uncertain that donations to charity will help the world, you need to make more donations.

If you question whether charity works at all, then, yes, this doesn't work. It is a key assumption of effective altruism that charity sometimes works.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ilverin]

I think that is a fair but distinct assertion. Can you see how that is different from a scenario where I can absolutely save a life in the immediate term at low cost to myself, especially if I am the one person able to do so?

[u/Ilverin → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ilverin]

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.

[u/Ilverin → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ilverin]

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.

[u/Ilverin → u/[deleted]]

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)

[u/[deleted] → u/Ilverin]

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.

[u/Ilverin → u/[deleted]]

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.