| > There's many sources arguing you give what you can afford while a utilitarian approach would be to give beyond that if you can save more lives A misunderstanding of utilitarianism. If telling people to give everything makes them give nothing, then it is a bad approach. The utilitarian aims to maximize the amount given, which may entail telling them to give less. You treat utilitarianism as if we are philosophers considering it in theory, not practitioners who have accepted its logic. >SBF would be championed as a hero, not a villain, for his ponzi scheme. A terrible approach for similar reasons. Telling people you intend to scam them is a good way to get them to not give you money. >No money would be going to animal welfare or modern healthcare worries because longtermism would have won the argument. Treated similarly: EA is like a funnel. They draw you in by saying "you give to charity anyways, shouldn't you do so 'effectively'?" Then, instead of telling you which local homeless shelters are best, they tell you "effective" means curing diseases in africa. Once you accept that, then they have another style of charity to sell you. They carefully avoid pushing you too far, to avoid having you throw out the whole project. > EA is very simply the idea that one should check the efficiency of charities and try get the best bang for their dollar. "Effectiveness" is not defined, and any concrete definition is carefully buried. In practice, it usually means "maximizing human welfare" or something to that effect (ie utilitarianism), but they will carefully avoiding forcing that definition on anyone. "Oh, you want to donate to a local foodbank," they might say, "better make sure its an effective food bank" - this for reasons explained above. But every EA organization knows exactly what it means by effective, which is always some variant of utilitarianism. Importantly, they never refer to it as such, because utilitarianism is a ideology, and thus open to criticism. Instead, they always describe it in terms of platitudes that seems sufficiently obvious as to be impossible to question. In this way, they prevent anyone from falling off the ramp. |