Edit: This comment makes some good points - I now think the term carries enough intellectual baggage that it is probably unhelpful as an addition to EA discourse.
This is a quick, low effort post about the idea of ‘intersectionality’, a theoretical lens which is common is the social justice sphere, and less known about in EA. I’ve probably spent less than three hours thinking about this, so there’s a good chance I’m missing some crucial considerations. Nonetheless, I want to write about it for three reasons:
- A lot of EAs implicitly endorse the idea of intersectionality already. In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, I think it would be helpful for EAs to understand what is meant by the term.
- Community builders in EA often mention diversity, equity and inclusion as an important part of community building strategy. I think that active engagement with intersectionality could make DEI initiatives in the community more effective.
- A lot of social justice-style critiques of EA explicitly or implicitly touch on intersectionality, particularly when arguing against the EA approach of optimising for one thing at a time. I think it’s important that EAs understand and engage with our critics, and this post might help some members of the community to do so.
I’m only going to cover issues (1) and (2) in this post, but I’m hoping it will also help readers to understand what is going on when they read critiques under (3). So, without further ado:
What is intersectionality?
Intersectionality is the idea that ‘the overlap of various identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual’. That is to say, the disadvantages faced by an individual[1] cannot be understood simply by totting up the separate reasons they might be disadvantaged. Instead, it's important to understand how multiple facets of an individual's social position interact to create novel problems that are greater than the sum of their parts.
The archetypal example of this phenomenon is the case of DeGraffenried v. General Motors (summarised in this Vox article), an employment law case concerning a last-hired, first-fired policy used by GM. The policy didn’t discriminate against either women or Black people but Black women, a group that was late to enter the automotive sector. Intersectional discrimination legislation would have protected the unique employment rights of Black women as Black women - as it was, DeGraffenreid lost the suit and her job.
How can we apply intersectionality to EA?
The key EA-relevant insight of the theory is that you can’t always deal with policy issues one-by-one. In fact, some important societal challenges sit right at the intersection between several separate issues, requiring an understanding of how different facets of a problem interact. This is surprisingly easy to miss, meaning there is value in using an explicitly intersectional approach as one of the tools to analyse important questions.
To flesh this out a little, I've written a few examples of intersectional approaches to EA issues below. I think intersectionality can be a helpful tool to apply at both the ‘meta-EA’, community building level, and also at the object level when trying to solve difficult, real-world problems, so I've considered one of each.
Object-level intersectionality:
Non-human animals are treated horrendously worldwide, because many humans don’t see them as worthy of moral consideration. A highly effective way to improve animal welfare in the short-term might be advocacy around moral circle expansion to animals in factory farms. At the same time, the interests of future beings are systematically ignored, because many humans don’t see them as worthy of moral consideration. An effective way of promoting their interests might be the development of plant-based meats which minimise resource use and protect the environment for the future. However, it's not clear that a highly effective way to protect non-human animals over the long-term future is either (a) to promote the consumption of plant-based meat or (b) to promote moral circle expansion. In fact, there’s a plausible argument that either policy could increase animal suffering in the long-term future, with our increased care for non-human animals and our healthier climate increasing the number of suffering wild animals.
That's because this is an intersectional issue - we are dealing with two separate axes of disadvantage (species, time of existence) which interact in unpredictable ways, meaning that approaches which perform well on either axis won't always perform well overall. Longtermist animal advocates might recognise this explicitly look for intersectional solutions to the problem. Perhaps EAs should abandon farmed animals altogether, and go all-in on long-term wild animal welfare? Perhaps EA should publicly espouse a suffering-focused ethics, trying to move the needle towards a world where we rid the world of animals altogether? I'm dubious about either option, but an intersectional approach is nonetheless a useful way to think about these questions in depth.
Meta-level intersectionality:
A majority of EAs are WEIRD, white, male STEM and philosophy grads who went to top universities. Given this, it’s unsurprising that much of EA messaging isn’t readily convincing to folks that fall outside of this (tiny) demographic. Taking an intersectional approach to messaging in EA seems like an effective way to change this. For example, more than a few EA people of colour I’ve spoken to have expressed discomfort about only donating to maximally effective charities, and this relates directly to their intersectional identity. Being both a part of the wealthy global elite and people of colour, they feel a special obligation to help people within their own communities who are not blessed with the same advantages. Whether or not this feeling of obligation cashes out in concrete ethical positions, the emotional force of the obligation has a real effect on their donation decisions, and this tension makes them feel uncomfortable when discussing donations in EA spaces.
More explicit communication from organisations like GWWC and 80k that it’s okay to donate some of your money or career-time to effective charities which are closer to home - just like it’s okay to have kids, and okay to take the day off, or okay to have more than one goal - seems like it could broaden EAs appeal to smart, effective people who fall outside of EA’s main demographic without diluting our message. As above, a good understanding of intersectionality might thus help improve the effectiveness of the community overall.
Why might intersectional approaches be a waste of time?
I can see two strong objections to EAs making an active effort to consider intersectionality.
First, at the meta-level, taking an intersectional approach to EA messaging could reduce the fidelity of our message. Considering the issue coldly, it seems reasonable to argue that yes, it is wrong to help out closer to home when you consider the opportunity cost in lives saved. Trying to deny this fact or encouraging doublespeak by EA orgs could seriously harm the epistemics of the broader community. It might also be a losing game - talking about cause prioritisation clearly implies that some causes are more important to work on than others, and no amount of sugarcoating can hide the fact that EA thinking implies that close-to-home cause areas could be astronomically less important to work on than the most important EA causes.
Second, at the object-level, saying we should 'employ an intersectional lens' might just be another way of saying we need to consider the complex interactions between different factors when we make decisions. If EAs are doing this already, then adding a layer of jargon on top might just make discussions harder to understand for the uninitiated. I don’t completely buy this criticism - I think it’s plausible that using a specific term could help to clarify EA discourse - but it’s a fair response all the same.
Conclusion
Intersectional approaches to social issues are really common outside of EA, and almost never mentioned within it. I think that intersectionality is a useful idea that EAs could readily adopt to help explain and understand phenomena both within the movement, and when working on real-world problems.
In any case, hopefully, this post has helped a few EAs engage with the topic in more detail.
- ^
As I've noted in the rest of the post, intersectionality isn't just to do with race or gender, and can be applied to both issues and individuals. For that reason, you might find it more helpful to understand intersectionality as a useful tool for understanding social problems.
An uncharitable tone? Perhaps I should take it as a compliment. Being uncharitably critical is a good thing.
When I first became an EA a decade ago and familiarized myself with (blunt and iconoclastic) EA concepts and ideas, in the EA handbooks and other relevant writings, there was no talk of diversity, righting historic wrongs with equity, inclusion, and intersectionality. These were not the values the community sought to maximize or the domains of knowledge meant to be understood. They had nothing to do with increasing utility and combating disutility. Granted, not every EA was utilitarian. But EA grew out of utilitarianism and utilitarian philosophers like Singer and MacAskill. The consequentialist focus was on maximizing good via high-impact philanthropy, how one do good better, relative to QALYs and DALYs. EA wasn’t very inclusive either- it was (necessarily) harsh towards those any and all who rejected an evidence-based, quantifiable, doing good better approach, irrespective of their backgrounds.
There was extreme methodological, data-driven rigor. If you suggested that there was a pressing need to follow in the footsteps of inter-sectionalist activists and fight racial discrimination injustice in the US, adopting the jargon and flawed ideas of the intersectionalists, you’d be laughed at… or at least critiqued at an EA meeting. That cause, whilst noble, was far from a tractable priority. People, animals, and countless other sentient beings were out there dying in the world and suffering. What are 300 or so people that die at the hands of American police brutality annually compared to the 300 kids in Africa who die every hour…
Things like seeing eye dog campaigns, giving to art museums were deemed ineffective. Today we have DEI campaigns and other sorts of ineffective altruism that have crept up and infiltrated the main EA sphere. Perhaps, today we should replace the give $1 to AMF or the seeing eye-dog experiment with give $1 to AMF or a DEI educational or instructional-based campaign. One is effective, the other not so much.
DEI would be fine if there was evidence that maxing DEI was good for EA ends, but frankly, I see no evidence of that being the case. The focus on community building in EA shifted from “Growing the EA community” to complaining the EA community was somehow inherently in the wrong or discriminatory or evil for ending up mostly male, white, secular, tech based etc. Now that couldn’t stand so there was a push to turn EA more diverse and open and inclusive.
Which is great and had my initial support. But it comes with risk that those who might not share EA values and methodologies will become EAs and overtime shift EA’s values/priorities as these individuals become more numerous, influential, and rise to leadership positions. EA became increasingly big tent, in part because of this.
I initially supported this outreach, but didn’t expect the epistemic baggage and prioritized non-EA values of others to in turn infiltrate and alter EA from the inside out. Whereas previously, I found EA had a stronger ideological unity and sense of purpose. No one cared about what gender/race you were— that wasn’t important. Only your beliefs, values, epistemologies and deeds mattered. And what mattered more was discourse-driven consensus among EAs but consensus and what we all share has given way to inclusion and relativistic diversity of thought. Look at the criterion of what it means to be an EA, look how vague and non-specific it has become :(
Today the EA community is one where diversity and “equity” and “justice” became innate, disseminated values, rather than potential or circumstantial instrumental ones for prior lauded ends. I’ve watched the sad and slow evolution of this take place. And it saddens the inner utilitarian in me.
So DEI has become a cause area within a cause area, and we are all aware of it.
Intersectionality is not just a flawed, unquantitative epistemology. It is the very means by which DEI initiatives are maximized and implemented.
After all, if your goal is to maximize diversity then you need intersectionality to draw up the dozens of (imo irrelevant) demographic categories (racial, religious/lacktherof, ethnic, gender, sex, health status, socioeconomic, sexual, age, lvl of education, citizenship status, etc.) then try to make sure you have people that match all the combinations and criteria. Then you have to make sure equity is there, so all historical wrongs have to be accounted for. Then you have to shame people for making assumptions or holding beliefs about those who are part of other categories.
For ex., intersectionalists claim it’s pointless for a male to study female psychology because a male will never understand what it’s like to be female and should instead have no voice in the conversation.
These obligations, if they exist, are not EA. Period. They are not effective. Yes, they may be forms of altruism, but they are ineffective ones based on kinship, greenbeard effects, localism, etc. They aren’t EA. They aren’t neutral. We as a community used to take a harsher stance against these, because the money goes further overseas. Has that been lost?
I’m White and Asian, and I’ve experienced discrimination and dislike from humans who adopt tribalistic mentalities. I’m no stranger to racism, but I realize that culture and history can turn people into the opposite of what EAs strive for- cause neutrality.
Having spoken to plenty of PoC intersectional activists, there is often an emphasis on color and I find it delusional to deny it.
One such campaign (for example) is the “Buy from this business it is Black-owned etc” or support this charity because it is run entirely by PoC and is fully diverse etc. These campaigns argue there is a moral obligation to support charities or businesses based on the demographic characteristics of their owners or leaders. I find this not justifiable, relative to other charities or initiatives.
While you are not wrong in pointing out that (today) one doesn’t have to be a utilitarian to be an EA, back in the day, it was rare to find an EA who wasn’t utilitarian or an adherent to the utilitarian moral prescriptions of Singer and the like.
I agree but Ea’s strength is its focus on what is quantifiable
Humans are utility maximizing machines, though we are often very bad at it. You can get a good and workable approximation of someone based on their values, beliefs and actions.
Gonna have to disagree there. The perspective of those training seeing eye dogs or caring about art or volunteering at the local theater are not worth considering. What I like about EA was that some perspectives are more important than others, and we can hone the perspectives that matter over those that are not morally or epistemically relevant.
This seems to assume that people from from underrepresented gender/ethnicity/culture/class are incapable of generating the same ideas and that they somehow have different ideas that differ from the homogenous majority.
Or at minimum, if these ideas are in fact different, it assumes those ideas are better than what the majority has come up with (which I find unlikely, given the rarity of EA methodological rigor).
Frankly (for ex), I can’t tell the difference between a female/white/American/working class hedonistic utilitarian than a male/Black/French/middle class hedonistic utilitarian.
As far as I’m concerned, both are hedonistic utilitarians with the same (or highly similar) hedonistic utilitarian ideas. Their sex or gender or race doesn’t change that.