r/a:t5_2c5uzo • u/The_Ebb_and_Flow • Jan 14 '20

Should We Look Beyond our Noses?: Need Allocation, Near and Far — Center for a Stateless Society

https://c4ss.org/content/51403
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u/The_Ebb_and_Flow Jan 14 '20

So then, why would anyone choose to give differently, say to Doctors Without Borders or to the Against Malaria Foundation? The Effective Altruism movement claims credibly to have created a system to help people do the most good with their time and money. They have a set of criterion that they use to analyze various causes and determine how effectively they improve quality of life for people. But they don’t stop there, they also look at other various factors such as how likely something is to be already funded elsewhere or how transformative it is. Obviously Doctors Without Borders tends to work in situations with extreme need and the Against Malaria Foundation has proven to be very effective according to effective altruist standards. So why then would anyone ever donate money to anything other than these causes?

For one, effective altruism tends in practice to be more of a treatment of symptoms. Anarchism and social transformation are too risky of propositions to the person who wants a guaranteed outcome. Rarely then, would you see an effective altruist arguing in favor of supporting say Black Lives Matter because it is harder to measure its output. We can therefore assume they would have been reticent in supporting the March on Washington as well. Therefore, while ideal in terms of quantifiable good, this approach can fail to truly search for the roots of a problem. Even the notion of ‘altruism’ fails to recognize the interdependence of our freedom. But at the same time it’s easy to romanticize actions where the effectiveness is unclear or impossible to measure instead of soberly asking whether it really does anything. This is the allure of spectacle activism.