With increasing coverage of EA, I’m seeing many critiques on Twitter along the line of “EA billionaires should just pay more taxes” and “philanthropy bypasses democratic processes”.
A key value which EAs share and most people do not hold (or at least do not adhere to in practice) is internationalism and the idea that people matter equally, regardless of nationality.
I think it’s very important to emphasise this when communicating about EA.
Internationalism explains why paying taxes isn’t better than funding EA charities and projects (because governments typically spend <1% of tax revenue on improving things for people in other countries, while EA spending values everyone equally).
Internationalism also justifies philanthropists using their influence to promote policies which improve things for people around the world (because the policies of powerful governments can have large impacts on foreigners, but foreigners are excluded from the democratic processes which determine the policies).
(Also, side note, but I think when EAs observe that people don’t care as much about people who are far away from them, the reason is more about nationality and nationalism than physical distance)
I guess the question is, is internationalism something worth pointing out or having a concept for, or is it just a byproduct that naturally follows from"impartiality"?
After all, many boundaries are crossed as a consequence of some degree of "impartiality" (e.g. the act of people helping others might cross family, social circle, neighborhood, town, city, region, province/state/territory/intranational division, class, ethnicity/race/ancestry, hemisphere, time zone, generational, and in the case of animal activists, even species, boundaries).
But it's not like every time any of these boundaries (which in principle are too numerous and too arbitrary to count, even if some are enforced, legally, socially etc. and others not so much) are crossed by would be do-gooders, they get flagged as noteworthy (e.g. we don't always call out helping people in a different city, inter-regionally or inter-ethnically as too strange, unless, perhaps you're living in a society of strong cross-city, region or ethnic tensions and then, crossing over to help the "other" marks you as unusually heroic or a "good Samaritan").
Naming "internationalism" as a special kind of boundary-crossing would seem to imply it's a particularly significant one, among many others, because the barriers are exceptionally high.