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Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection

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Abstract

Effective Altruism (EA) encourages affluent people to make significant donations to improve the wellbeing of the world’s poor, using quantified and observational methods to identify the most efficient charities. Critics argue that EA is inattentive to the systemic causes of poverty and underestimates the effectiveness of individual contributions to systemic change. EA claims to be open to systemic change but suggests that systemic critiques, such as the socialist critique of capitalism, are unhelpfully vague and serve primarily as hypocritical rationalizations of continued affluence. I reformulate the systemic change objection, rebut the charges of vagueness and bad faith and argue that charity may not be worth doing at all from a purely altruistic perspective. In order to take systemic change seriously, EA must repudiate its narrowly empiricist approach, embrace holistic, interpretive social analysis and make inevitably controversial judgments about the complex dynamics of collective action. These kinds of evidence and judgment cannot be empirically verified but are essential to taking systemic change seriously. EA is thereby forced to sacrifice its a-political approach to altruism. I also highlight the importance of quotidian, extra-political contributions to perpetuating or changing harmful social practices. Radical efforts to resist, subvert and reconstruct harmful social practices, such as those involved in economic decision-making, could be just as effective and demanding as charity. But such efforts may be incompatible with extensive philanthropy, because they can require people to retain some level of affluence for strategic reasons but to repudiate both the acquisition of significant wealth and charity as is currently organized. The wealth and status of some critics of charity may indeed be incompatible with effectively contributing to social change, but the altruistic merits of charity are neither as obvious nor as easily demonstrated as EA believes.

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Notes

  1. Key recent texts on EA are MacAskill 2015 and Singer 2015. Carey 2015 provides a helpful overview of the movement’s ideas and activities.

  2. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism/. Accessed: 9/24/2018.

  3. Wiblin 2015.

  4. Chappell 2016.

  5. See, for example, Srinivasan 2015 and, for a complete list of references see footnote 7 in Berkey 2017.

  6. Snow 2015.

  7. Wiblin 2015.

  8. Chappell 2016.

  9. Most prominantly by the organization Open Philanthropy.

  10. Singer 2010, p. 36.

  11. Chappell 2016.

  12. Chappell 2016.

  13. Berkey 2017, p. 28. See also MacAskill 2013 and McMahan 2016.

  14. Ashford 2018, p. 141.

  15. This argument generalizes and expands significantly on a points made separately by Kuper 2002, Gabriel 2017, Rubenstein 2016 and Kissel 2017. See also Teles and Schmitt 2011, for a narrower formulation of a similar argument.

  16. Chappell 2016, for example, endorses charity only because of its ‘flow-through effects.’

  17. McMahan 2016 and MacAskill and Singer 2015

  18. Albeit often in terms of ideology and false-consciousness rather than cognitive bias.

  19. Jost and Banaji 1994, p. 3.

  20. Levy 1991, p. 61.

  21. Levy 1991, p. 63.

  22. See e.g. Klandermans and Roggeband 2010 and della Porta and Diani 2015,

  23. See e.g. Pogge 2014

  24. Gomberg 2013, p. 55.

  25. Gomberg 2013, p. 61. Gomberg 2013, p. 63.

  26. See e.g. Mason 2015

  27. Singer 2010, chapter 5.

  28. Singer 2010, p. 77.

  29. Singer 1972, p. 241.

  30. Ashford 2018, p. 106.

  31. Ashford 2018, p. 114.

  32. Ashford 2018, p. 116.

  33. Singer’s early paper does include some brief remarks on slowing economic growth and on population control but these vague comments do not amount to a proper analysis. Singer 1972, pp. 241–242.

  34. See Schervish 1994 and Burlingame 1992 for historical overviews.

  35. Karnofsky 2013.

  36. Syme 2017

  37. Rubenstein 2016, p. 15.

  38. Gabriel 2017, p. 12.

  39. Haslanger 2016, discusses this example.

  40. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy. Accessed: 9/24/2018.

  41. McMahan 2016, p. 4.

  42. Berkey 2017, p. 12.

  43. Alexander 2015.

  44. Hunt 2009, p. 182.

  45. See Kagan 2011 and related literature.

  46. I ignore the possibility that individual actions really are causally irrelevant to collective outcomes and that only institutional agents like the state can ever change social systems. This is implausible, given that individual actions are the necessary components of collective actions, and especially so when we are concerned only with causal impact rather than moral obligations. Plus, of course, the state itself acts only through individuals, so the question of how individuals contribute to collective actions does not disappear simply by shifting focus to collective agents. Individuals may not be proper subjects of moral requirements to do things that only groups can do, but this does not mean that they are causally irrelevant to collectively produced outcomes.

  47. See MacAskill 2015, chapter 6, which also applies this analysis to ethical consumption.

  48. Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012, p. 6.

  49. See Gilabert 2011. Such changes can also happen as part of broader patterns of social change that can be predicted and exploited by activists.

  50. Gabriel has also argued that the need for long-term commitment is in tension with EA’s current methods. Gabriel 2017 pp. 12–13.

  51. Berkey 2017, p. 12.

  52. Diani 1992.

  53. Ashford 2018, p. 119.

  54. McMahan 2016.

  55. Srinivasan 2015.

  56. See Radzik 2012, for a useful general discussion of the virtue of minding your own business.

  57. These tactics are often associated with radical movements but they are actually used by all kinds of social movement; norms and practices can be reformed as well as revolutionized using similar methods. The more harmful current practices are, the more likely it is that individuals could do more good by resisting, subverting and reconstructing them than by participating enthusiastically and giving to the needy.

  58. Srinivasan 2015.

  59. Srinivasan 2015.

  60. Ashford 2000, p. 430.

  61. Engels enjoyed some aspects of bourgeois life, but he also despised ‘accursed...filthy commerce’ and the ‘facade of painful propriety’ he had to maintain so much that ‘the contradiction between public commitments and personal beliefs eventually sent Engels spiralling toward illness, depression, and breakdown.’ Hunt 2009, p. 201.

  62. E.g. MacAskill 2015, and Pummer 2016.

  63. MacAskill 2014.

  64. Ashford 2018, p. 139.

  65. Singer 1972, p. 229.

  66. Singer 1972, p. 232.

  67. Singer 1972, p. 232.

  68. Ashford 2018, pp.126–127.

  69. Nair 2017.

  70. The service programs established by the revolutionary Black Panther Party in the USA in the 1960s are a prominent example of revolutionary charity. See Hilliard 2008.

  71. https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/a-flowchart-for-focus-area-selection: accessed 11/4/18

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    Timothy Syme

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Syme, T. Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 22, 93–120 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-09979-5

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