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Effective Altruism’s central message can be summarized as the moral imperative to do the most good you can. As it exists, effective altruism currently struggles most with the "can" part of that call.
Moral Imperative
Most people already believe we "ought" to try to do good or live a good life. This is moral imperative, and what effective altruism has to offer beyond just having something to say about the metaphysical world. Effective Altruists consider themselves driving force for shaping the world to how it ought to be.
Do
We have power as moral agents and can do good. So we should, through charity, vocation, or evangelization.
The Most
We should pay attention to scope-insensitivity, biases, trade-offs, and try to maximize impact when we can. This is where the effectiveness mindset comes into play. The idea that we are all equal, there is a lot of inequality, and there are many ways to spend time and money outside of just ourselves means that there are massive opportunities to spend time and money not just doing a little more good, but a lot more good. One of the especially clearest and most powerful messages of effective altruism turns out to flow from this insight in evaluating charities that try to save lives. It turns out helping those most in need in the poorest parts of the world is far more useful than helping those in the richest parts of the world.
Good
What is a good life? Expansion of our moral circle and moral reasoning to include those outside our inner circle to those who we don't meet or may have less power or influence is a compelling imperative as well. Once again, the call to send money to those in the most need despite never being able to interact with them is a challenging call. The recognition of the power that wealth has can be humbling. Giving consideration to the even less powerful, sentient creatures beyond humanity and beyond our short time on earth can help to cultivate a thoughtfulness in living as well.
Can
Effective Altruism is most compelling in illuminating the insight that "can implies ought" especially to the most powerful of humanity in the world. Giving a framework for those of us in rich and powerful countries that we can do a lot of good in the world and so we must try to do as much good as we can.
But ought also implies can. And effective altruism has no answer, or very few, for when people have no power. Effective altruism has very little answer for recognizing lack of power and how to live a good life in that lack of power. Or aspects of people's lives where they are broken and unable to do the most good they can. This means EA has very little to offer or include for the least powerful of society.
And in not inviting in or grappling with answers for the less powerful, this leads to a second problem for EA. EA is in danger of institutional value drift and not calling the powerful to support the least powerful in the most effective ways. From someone outside looking into EA it likely looks like AI safety or earning to give is much more "warm fuzzies" than "utilons." Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems conveniently easy to justify becoming a powerful person as the recipe for morally upright living.
“Do the hard thing” is a thing my spouse says to herself a lot. This mantra is a reminder that it is often easy to find some justification that the easy thing is also the right thing to do. It would be very convenient if it just so happened that a lot of very smart people discovered the way to do the most good is to become more powerful people through work in AI or earning to give. And powerful people just so happen to be able to do a lot of good while also enjoying comfortable lives without interacting with suffering or poor people.
But this is not at all the hard thing. This is an easy thing that allows Effective Altruism to become a network of rich, powerful people that need not talk to others to find out that maybe the giving and serving isn’t all that powerful for people most in need who won't find a place in Effective Altruism.
I believe in the moral imperative to do the most good you can. But in order to do that, you might just have to do the hard thing.
