Many social movements involve attempts to improve the welfare, rights or status of the movement’s own members. For example:
- Nationalist Parties: try to support the people in the country, and are generally mainly supported by people in that country. It’s rare to very actively support another country’s nationalist movement, unless as a proxy in a war.
- Labor Unions: at least initially, these were formed of working class people trying to benefit themselves.
- Feminism: though there is considerable debate about the definition, this is generally considered to be about supporting women, and has over twice as many female supporters as male supporters. This is especially unusual when you realize that most social movements (including effective altruism) are primarily male.*
In other examples, the people in the movement are closely related to but distinct from the supposed beneficiaries:
- Home-schooling: the parents who lobby for the legality of home-schooling are too old to benefit from it themselves, but do hope to benefit their children.
- Soup Kitchens: people donating to soup kitchens probably have enough to eat themselves, but they hope to benefit others in their community.
- Upper-class socialists, straight LGBT activists, male feminists and so on would also fit into this category.
Effective Altruism takes this one step further, however. Not only do most EAs care about people with little regard for nationality, most of our causes have beneficiaries extremely remote from ourselves:
- Third World Hunger/Health: Virtually all EAs are part of the middle classes of the developed world. Few have ever been to Africa, and fewer still have ever met a beneficiary of GiveWell. Yet EAs continue to send large amounts of money to them, motivated only by abstract benevolence.
- Animal Rights: Very few EAs have been to a factory farm, and the animals won’t reciprocate our concern. I guess everyone has seen animals in person, but rarely the intended beneficiaries.
- Existential Risk: Here, the benefits mainly accrue to people so remote they don’t even exist yet.
I wonder if this is related to the typical backgrounds of effective altruists: physics, math and philosophy, all of which are extremely abstract, and rely on generalizing ideas from the specific to the general. Perhaps only those with a case of memetic immune disorder are capable of forgetting the original purpose of ethics was reciprocal altruism and kin selection, and instead generalize it to include people they have never met and never will.
I can think of only a few examples of other social movements with beneficiaries as remote:
- Anti-Slavery in northern England: the Manchester cotton mill workers supporting abolition, even though they had never met a slave, and actually directly personally benefited from slavery.
- The Pro-Life Movement: pro-life activists can hardly be said to be directly benefiting, and nor have they ever met an unborn child (though they may have seen ultrasounds, EAs have seen pictures of third world hunger). Pro-abortion people would argue that this case is almost identical to the Existential Risk case, as the beneficiaries aren’t yet people.
These examples do not seem to support my memetic immune disorder theory: Lancaster mill workers were not well-known for their educational level. But England as a whole was very well educated, and banned the slave trade for apparently largely altruistic reasons.
*I realize there is much debate on these points; some people argue that feminism is good for men, some that it is bad for women, and the YouGov article even argues there is little gender difference in support, though I think they have made the motte and bailey error. But you are welcome to substitute your own examples.
Effective Differentials 