This is a linkpost for https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/in-print/volume-21-special-issue-2023/
A collection of articles on the ethics of EA.
H/t to @jeffsebo, who has an article with the catchy title "Esoteric Altruism: Does Effective Altruism Require Its Own Destruction?". It draws on the parallels of the difficulties of applying utilitarianism and EA-thinking in practice.
Thanks for posting, these look super interesting!
I'm hoping to read (and possibly respond to) more, but I ~randomly started with the final article "Saving the World Starts at Home."
My thoughts on this one are mostly critical: I think it fundamentally misunderstands what EA is about (due to relying too heavily on a single book for its conception of EA), and will not be persuasive to many EAs. But it raises a few interesting critiques of EA prioritization at the end.
Summary
What I liked best
I think the "status" and "politics" critiques of EA prioritization are useful and probably under-discussed.
Certain fields (e.g. AI safety research) are often critiqued for being suspiciously interesting / high-status / high-paying, but this makes the case that even donating to GiveWell is a little suspicious in how much status it can buy. (But I think there are likely much more efficient ways to buy status; donating 1% of your income probably buys much more than 1/10 the status you'd get from donating 10%.)
I also think it's reasonably likely that there are some conservative-coded causes that EAs undervalue for purely political reasons (but I don't have any concrete examples at hand).
Critiques
There are a few fundamental issues with the analysis that cause this to fail to connect for me.
(this is a bit scattershot; I tried to narrow it down to a few points to prevent this from being 3x longer)