Andrew Critch defines a conflationary alliance as a situation where multiple groups deliberately use the same term to describe different concepts or behaviors, because the shared terminology helps each group advance their distinct goals. E.g., people have different notions of justice, but they agree that something-called-justice is very good, so they can agree to team up and fight for justice.
In my view, the term "charity", as used in 2024, represents an example of this pattern. As is often the case, the conflationary nature of the term occasionally leads to confusion or conflict, and this underpins many of the debates and public criticism of effective altruism.
When we say ”charity" or “charitable giving", we're actually talking about at least three distinct behaviors:
- Funding public goods through donations
- Supporting one's in-group or collective agency through partial philanthropy
- Pursuing genuinely impartial benefit for others
Each of these behaviors has different motivations, mechanisms, and moral foundations. Yet they all benefit from being labeled as "charity" - gaining tax advantages, social status, and moral legitimacy from the association.
This conflation isn't necessarily bad. In fact, it's likely emerged because it serves useful purposes for all involved. The public goods funders get tax benefits, the partial philanthropists gain broader legitimacy, and the impartial philanthropists can leverage existing infrastructure and moral intuitions.
Understanding this conflation is useful for thinking more clearly about different types of prosocial behavior. Also, it explains part of the debates and confusions about effective altruism.
Let's examine each of these meaning in detail.
Public Goods Funding
Let me share two examples of how “charitable giving” often means funding public goods directly beneficial to donors.
First, I pay dues to national climbing association. These fees maintain protection in climbing routes and access paths that anyone can use, whether they pay or not. Although I could access these improvements without contributing, paying is socially responsible. Also, I get more value than my dues cost.
Second, consider wealthy donors supporting a local concert hall. Rather than pure philanthropy, this can be viewed as donors collectively funding a public good they personally value: they likely receive more benefit from the venue than ticket prices alone reflect. While alternative funding methods exist (like taxes or higher ticket prices), structuring this as charitable giving offers advantages: tax benefits, social recognition and social incentives to maintain the cooperative equilibrium.
Funding through donations may often be more sensible than purely through taxes - in this example, classical music is more popular among more intelligent and more educated people, and tax funding may mean social transfer from the poor to the elite.
In both cases, donors coordinate to support services they use, even though the benefits extend beyond themselves. The behaviour is socially beneficial and it is nice that people are often able to coordinate in this way.
Partial Philanthropy
By partial philanthropy I mean supporting other members of some collective “we". In hierarchical agency frame, this may mean a superagent redistributing resource among its members. In more common language, this is giving focused on some in-group.
Common examples include religious groups supporting their members or the religion as an institution, alumni donating to their universities, or sports teams helping injured members. While the giving supports “others” if we look just at the interactions of individuals, it often supports some collective “we” both the giver and receiver are part of.
For example, if you think about the broader Harvard University community as collective agency, alumni donations make Harvard stronger, while being part of the community provides various benefits to members, like prestige and influence.
Again, the behavioral pattern of supporting communities or superagents one is part of is often prosocial and beneficial, and collective agencies sometimes create positive spillover effects for broader society.
Impartial Philanthropy
Truly impartial philanthropy represents the rarest and perhaps most ambitious form of charity - attempting to benefit all others, regardless of their connection to the donor.
As far as I know, only two major movements have seriously pursued this ideal: some forms of Buddhism, focusing on reducing suffering for all sentient beings in all worlds and all times, and more radical forms of longtermism, taking seriously topics like possible vast populations of digital minds, acausal trade, acausal moral norms, and so on. Mahayana Buddhism mostly arrived at the conclusion that suffering of sentient beings is caused by ignorance, and the most effective way to help them is by spreading wisdom and means to get to better mental states. Longtermism often concludes that the most effective interventions involve reducing existential risks, spreading better decision-making frameworks or study of moral uncertainty.
More common forms of ostensibly "impartial" giving, like supporting global health initiatives or animal welfare, are probably better understood as examples of partial philanthropy with extended notions of “we", like “we, living humans" or “we, mammals".
Impartial philanthropy benefits from the conflationary alliance and traditional charitable giving. When labeled as "charity," these efforts tap into existing moral instincts and social norms. While partial philanthropy (helping family or community) likely has strong evolutionary roots, these same cultural mechanisms can be redirected to support broader, impartial charitable goals.
Similarly, the infrastructure and social acceptance (like tax deductions and charitable foundations) can be utilized for more ambitious philanthropic aims. This "piggybacking" on existing systems and intuitions helps impartial philanthropy achieve greater impact than it likely could in isolation.
The distinction between these three forms of charitable giving - public goods funding, partial philanthropy, and impartial philanthropy - helps explain why debates about effective altruism often generate confusion and resistance. Different participants may be operating from entirely different frameworks about what charity fundamentally means.
Tensions and Dynamics
The alliance between these different forms of “charity" creates both benefits and challenges. Each type gains advantages from the association, for example tax benefits for public goods, moral standing for partial philanthropy, and access to existing infrastructure and goodwill for impartial efforts, but the conflation also generates significant costs and tensions.
Many public debates and conflicts about effective altruism originate in the conflationary alliance, where someone wants to reclaim the meaning of the term, exclude some faction, or feels threatened, and defends some faction.
For example, consider how the classical effective altruist argument about “pet shelters” attacks the alliance. The argument hinges on cost-effectiveness - while pet shelters do valuable work in helping companion animals, the same resources could potentially prevent much more suffering if directed toward farm animal welfare initiatives.
However, other factions of the alliance may have different reasons to donate to pet shelters. For example, I prefer not to be harassed by stray dogs while walking on streets, and I'm happy to pay for the public good "safety from stray animals." This can be achieved in different ways, like killing the animals, but if I don't want that, donating to a local shelter may make sense. Alternatively, pet owners as a group may want to coordinate on problems like "what happens with a pet if the owner dies or can't care for it" - and shelters may be a reasonable mechanism.
A large part of backlash against effective altruism comes from people worried about EA ideals being corrosive to the “paying for public goods" or “partial philanthropy" mechanisms. I think the usual EA responses - we can have classical music halls when they become effective on the margin, and also effective philanthropy is extremely small part of charitable giving - mostly miss the point. The steelman of this criticism is that if effective altruists weigh just “impartial impact” and don't donate to local causes and charities, and don't support various collective agents they are part of, it means defecting on useful coordination mechanisms. Rule based consequentialism and virtue ethics suggests that one should not defect, and also should not engage in the local marginal calculation, for similar reasons why it is bad to have a habit of doing local marginal calculation to determine when to lie.
Implications and Moving Forward
At least for me, understanding "charity" as a conflationary alliance helps to understand what are people arguing about.
In my view, attempts to establish one "true" meaning of charity, or arguments that certain forms aren't "real charity" because they involve self-interest, are unwise. When effective altruists try to do that, the other factions have obvious way how to retaliate - “impartial" caring of most people is largely based on extending partial caring and cultural norms supporting partial charity to broader moral circles.
Each version of “charity" serves important functions - funding public goods, supporting communities, and pursuing impartial benefit. A pragmatic approach is to treat these as distinct but complementary behaviors, funded from separate mental "buckets." Rather than trying to optimize across categories using a single metric, we can recognize the value in maintaining all three mechanisms.
(Co-written with Claude Sonnet 3.6)
I think this is a good point. I don't think it's a particularly strong argument against EA, not least because EA doesn't appear to be having any discernible impact on people's willingness to fund climbing organizations or conference halls, but it certainly comes up a lot in critical articles.
But I don't agree with this. Giving anonymously to unknown recipients in a faraway country via an unconnected small NGO doesn't have any of the typical benefits associated with supporting a "collective we" (anticipated reciprocity, kin selection, identity, chauvinism against perceived enemies etc) making it about as impartial as it gets, and I don't think people care about chicken welfare out of collective identity, never mind a stronger sense of collective identity than with potential future humans. Indeed it would be far easier to class many longtermist organizations under your definition of "partial philanthropy" as recipients are typically known members of a community with shared beliefs (and sometimes social circles), and the immediate benefit is often research the donor and the donor's community find particularly interesting.
I think the factors you've highlighted that apply to some types of charity like access to public goods overlap with other motivations for giving like sense of duty, feelings of satisfaction and signalling which apply to all types of charity.