intragenerational justice
In the new collection, The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, activists and scholars address the deeper problems that EA poses to social justice efforts. Even when EA is pursued with what appears to be integrity, it damages social movements by asserting that it has top-down answers to complex, local problems, and promises to fund grass-roots organizations only if they can prove that they are effective on EA’s terms.
Despite the liberating intentions of many of its advocates, EA is, irredeemably conservative. It favors welfare-oriented interventions that increase countable measures of well-being and both neglects and diverts funds from social movements that address injustices and agitate for social change, particularly in marginalized communities both in the US and in the Global South.
It is also related to the EA movement in that, despite no official relationship between SFF and EA, despite the person who runs SFF not considering himself an Effective Altruist (Although he definitely believes, as I do, in being effective when being an altruist, and also in being effective when not being an altruist), despite SFF not being an EA organization, despite the words ‘altruist’ or ‘effective’ not appearing on the webpage, at least this round of the SFF process and its funds were largely captured by the EA ecosystem. EA reputations, relationships and framings had a large influence on the decisions made. A majority of the money given away was given to organizations with explicit EA branding in their application titles (I am including Lightcone@CFAR in this category).
Indeed. Because the people funding it think like that. They are in a given worldview.
Whether or not they would consider themselves EAs as such, the other recommenders effectively thought largely Effective Altruist frameworks, and seemed broadly supportive of EA organizations and the EA ecosystem as a way to do good. One other member shared many of my broad (and often specific) concerns to a large extent, mostly the others did not. While the others were curious and willing to listen, there was some combination of insufficient bandwidth and insufficient communicative skill on our part, which meant that while we did get some messages of this type across on the margin and this did change people’s decisions in impactful ways, I think we mostly failed to get our central points across more broadly.
+1.