• corbin@awful.systems
    ·
    1 year ago

    At risk of going NSFW, it's obvious that none of these folks have read Singer 1971, which is the paper that kickstarted the EA movement. This paper's argument has a massive fucking hole right in the middle.

    Without cracking open the paper, I seem to recall that it is specifically about Oxfam and famine in Africa. The central claim of the paper is that everybody should donate to Oxfam. However, if one is an employee of Oxfam, then suddenly the utilitarian arithmetic fails; his argument only allows for money going from non-Oxfam taxpayers to Oxfam employees.

    Can't help but notice how the main problem with EA charities is the fucking nepotism. Almost as if the EA movement rests on a philosophical foundation of ignoring when charities employ friends of donors.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
      ·
      1 year ago

      there was a while I was working at an org that would occasionally do things with the wikimedia foundation

      for similar reasons as what you remark on here: when the walesbegging banners would pop up on wikipedia, I'd only chuckle and move on

    • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I don’t see how this works.

      On one point:

      The utilitarian argument construes the relevant ethical concerns, unsurprisingly, as utilitarian: the starting point doesn’t matter so long as the right results get over the line. This can be both one of utilitarianism’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses, and in this case the strength is that utilitarianism is highly accommodating of the fact that some but not all people are employees of Oxfam (or indeed any relevant charity or similar organisation). The obvious point to make is that If you’re not an employee of Oxfam then the utilitarian argument goes through, because giving to Oxfam is your means of getting those results over the line. If you are an employee of Oxfam, then perhaps you don’t need to give, because working for Oxfam is your means.

      On another:

      The sentence “his argument only allows for money going from non-Oxfam taxpayers to Oxfam employees” doesn’t include the important premise “the role of an Oxfam employee is to convert that money into good deeds done for the poor, for example by using it to pay for food in a famine”. The intended result is the same whether you are an employee of Oxfam or not (viz. paying for food in a famine). You want us to quibble about the wording (or rather: the wording as you have summarised it here) on grounds (which you leave implicit, so correct me if I’m wrong) that it is incoherent to say “everybody” when some people are already employees of Oxfam.

      This seems to drastically confuse Singer’s actual aim (to convince the vast majority of people who are not Oxfam employees to give to Oxfam) for something not only very odd but plainly non-utilitarian, something like: “it is a deontological requirement that everybody give money to Oxfam”.

      • corbin@awful.systems
        ·
        1 year ago

        I was incorrect; the paper is about famine and aid in Bengal.

        NSFW

        Here is a PDF of Singer's paper. On p4 you can see the closest he gets to actually doing arithmetic. At that point he does not notice the problem I pointed out; he only notes that we can contribute labor instead of money, without considering that money is what compensates laborers. On p7 he admits that utilitarianism does not give a complete analysis, because it cannot predict a time when charity will no longer be necessary; however, he does not note that many charities are set up to provide eternal grift, including some of the biggest humanitarian-aid charities in the world.

        Bonus sneer! Quote from Singer's paper (p9):

        Another, more serious reason for not giving to famine relief funds is that until there is effective population control, relieving famine merely postpones starvation. … The conclusion that should be drawn is that the best means of preventing famine, in the long run, is population control. It would then follow from the position reached earlier that one ought to be doing all one can to promote population control (unless one held that all forms of population control were wrong in themselves, or would have significantly bad consequences). Since there are organizations working specifically for population control, one would then support them rather than more orthodox methods of preventing famine.

        Isn't Singer so polite to leave us an escape hatch just in case we happen to "[hold] that all forms of population control [are] wrong in themselves"? But we have enough experience to know now that sterilization (USA), rules against too many children (CCP), and straight-up forced starvation (USSR) are inhumane. So while his ignorance could be acceptable in the 70s, I think that our half-century of intervening experience shows that he was, uh, naïve.