A familiar pattern: EA organizations promote charities that help people in the developing world. A critic accuses EA of forcing people to be rationality robots. EA defends the use of rationality in altruistic decisions. But both sides miss the point: it demonstrates at best a lack of imagination and at worst coldheartedness to think that only a rationality robot would believe that African lives matter. I'm guilty of this too: it reveals my own prejudices when I think about helping people in the developing world (or livestock) as “giving from the head”, rather than “giving from the heart”. Promoting EA will require changing values, not just making people more rational.
People are not malfunctioning utilitarian robots
Frequently, EA outreach starts from the implicit assumption that, deep down, people value all lives equally. In this narrative, the reason that people don't give to GiveWell-recommended charities is Kahneman-style irrationality. For example, supposedly people have biases such as scope neglect that prevent them from implementing their consequentialist values.
A typical EA example is the comparison between paying for a guide dog to help a blind person in the developed world versus curing many people of blindness in the developing world. To a utilitarian, choosing the former could only result from irrationality. But it's plausible that most people aren't utilitarians and don't care very much about people in the developing world. Even in surveys of philosophers, who would be expected to be more utilitarian than the general population, only a quarter are purely consequentialist.
Rationality alone probably won't lead to EA
Some people might argue that non-utilitarians will become utilitarian if they become more rational. This argument relies implicitly on a belief in moral convergence, which is difficult to defend if one rejects moral realism, as many EAs do. These are very complex debates, which I'll discuss more in a followup post, but the idea that EAs can be created through rationality training alone should be viewed with skepticism. (This is another reason I'm skeptical of the ability of CFAR and similar organizations to have a positive effect outside of some very specific populations.)
A comes before E
In short, people can't optimize for values that they don't have. For the majority of ordinary people, who don't share the egalitarian, utilitarian-ish values of EA, “the most good you can do” is meaningless. This means that we need to start by spreading our values, before talking about implementation. Though rationality exercises won't be useful for this, countless social movements have proven that it is possible to change people's values, typically by combining various types of emotional appeals. Research into the causes of changes in values will be extremely important for the future of EA.
Expanding the circle of compassion
Instead of “the most good you can do”, a better message for some audiences may be “expanding the circle of compassion”. The idea that human culture has become more enlightened by being compassionate to those different from ourselves is catchy, emotionally appealing, and tends to approximate utilitarianism in practice. It may be particularly suited to some audiences, such as religious organizations.
During the holiday season, it's nice to return to the compassionate roots of effective altruism. As Julia Wise says in this excellent post, there's no shame in giving from the heart.
I very much agree that it is key to use emotional appeals in order to promote effective giving. I talk about this topic here and elsewhere. Here's one way to do so I found effective.
The phrase "expanding the circle of compassion" might be nice one to use, and I agree with Tom about the benefit of test-marketing it. I suspect the Unitarian Universalist religious movement would be a good target audience for that concept, for example. So might Sunday Assemblies and various humanist groups.
I do want to caution about the benefit of separating promoting effective giving from Effective Altruism. Promoting the ideas of Effective Altruism to a broad audience is very worthwhile, but we should be way of promoting the movement itself by using the phrase "expanding the circle of compassion.” Doing so has some dangers to getting newcomers into the movement who might not be value-aligned with the movement itself.
To prevent that, I suggest using the concept of "effective giving" when we do outreach to people who are not the typical head-oriented audience of EAs, to whom we use emotional appeals, content marketing strategies, etc. to promote EA ideas as opposed to the movement itself.
Thanks again for raising this point, Lila!