Recently I did some research on impartiality in which I showed that, in my sample, leftwing respondents were (seemingly) more likely to display ethical impartiality. This morning, I thought of another source that could illuminate this topic: the percentage of people in the Slate Star Codex reader’s survey (2019) who identify as effective altruists by political position.
My first thought is that self-identified "rightists" among the SSC/ACX readership might be poorly representative for the overall "rightist" populations of our countries wrt an ethical consequentialist application like EA, because strongly deontological forms of libertarianism are more common and charity-promoting Christian right views less common.
Is "effective" relevant here? I'd have thought rightwingers were opposed to altruism in general at least outside some narrowly defined notion of family loyalty.
I'm surprised you're surprised by this. EA is an elite academic movement, and elites and academics lean strongly left wing in current US culture. They also have a disproportionally high fraction of trans people, even for left-wing movements. And EA leadership has taken some explicitly and strongly left-wing positions on certain things like the Nick Bostrom scandal, and the forums are constantly engaged in drama over whether sexual harassment allegations are being treated serious enough.
I'm kinda confused how anyone could look at them and think they'd be just as loved by the right as the left. Their sort of dispassionate analysis and dismissal of the importance of local community and tradition is anathema to the religious right. EA's only real right-wing feature I can think of is their desire to work within the capitalistic system rather than rebel against it, but that also describes like every big company that's still staffed by left-wing elites.
If I'd answered the survey question in 2019 I wouldn't have known the term had a specific meaning. I'd have been like "altruism" is good and it's surely better if it's effective, so why not?
Now I understand it, thanks to reading about the SBF imbroglio, as libertarian (in the sense of "a conservative who smokes weed", reactionary but afraid of being uncool)--a way of justifying extreme inequality (the conservative principle that never changes), this time on the grounds that very rich individuals are more "effective" at doing good than collectives (such as governments) can be.
But now that the conservative pendulum has swung in a big way from libertarian to authoritarian, the tendency on the hard right is to absolutely reject altruism of any kind, as Quiggin suggests.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0
the secret ingredient is locality.
My first thought is that self-identified "rightists" among the SSC/ACX readership might be poorly representative for the overall "rightist" populations of our countries wrt an ethical consequentialist application like EA, because strongly deontological forms of libertarianism are more common and charity-promoting Christian right views less common.
Is "effective" relevant here? I'd have thought rightwingers were opposed to altruism in general at least outside some narrowly defined notion of family loyalty.
I'm surprised you're surprised by this. EA is an elite academic movement, and elites and academics lean strongly left wing in current US culture. They also have a disproportionally high fraction of trans people, even for left-wing movements. And EA leadership has taken some explicitly and strongly left-wing positions on certain things like the Nick Bostrom scandal, and the forums are constantly engaged in drama over whether sexual harassment allegations are being treated serious enough.
I'm kinda confused how anyone could look at them and think they'd be just as loved by the right as the left. Their sort of dispassionate analysis and dismissal of the importance of local community and tradition is anathema to the religious right. EA's only real right-wing feature I can think of is their desire to work within the capitalistic system rather than rebel against it, but that also describes like every big company that's still staffed by left-wing elites.
If I'd answered the survey question in 2019 I wouldn't have known the term had a specific meaning. I'd have been like "altruism" is good and it's surely better if it's effective, so why not?
Now I understand it, thanks to reading about the SBF imbroglio, as libertarian (in the sense of "a conservative who smokes weed", reactionary but afraid of being uncool)--a way of justifying extreme inequality (the conservative principle that never changes), this time on the grounds that very rich individuals are more "effective" at doing good than collectives (such as governments) can be.
But now that the conservative pendulum has swung in a big way from libertarian to authoritarian, the tendency on the hard right is to absolutely reject altruism of any kind, as Quiggin suggests.