[JamesBarney]

I don't understand how Effective Altruism says that you can't treat systemic causes. I think that given the large increase in utility that systemic changes would cause they would be precisely in favor of these changes most of all.

I am not aware of any research that says that charity has net negative expected utility. No charity to my knowledge forces any recipients to take the charity. So you would expect any individual who would receive negative utility from charity would choose to turn it down.

[philh]

To pick a contrived example, I suspect that if you offered unlimited free heroin for personal use! that would make the world a worse place.

More subtly, charity could make one person better off and others worse off. You could go around to every doctor in the world and ask them if I gave you a million dollars, what would you do?. Then you could give a million dollars only to the ones who say they would retire and spend it on bribing law enforcement officers to overlook the murder spree that they can now afford to finance.

Those are both pretty actively evil, but it's at least plausible that well-intentioned but poorly-thought-out charities could have negative effects.

[JamesBarney]

You could also accidentally save Hitlers life. I'm sorry if I misspoke, I didn't mean to imply it's theoretically impossible to do harm by giving people money.

You're right that it's plausible that their have existed in the world at some time charities that have accidentally done harm. I don't think that it's plausible that it's a significant problem facing charities, specifically large charities advocated by 'Effective Altruists'.