Many people find that thinking about effectiveness rapidly makes local giving seem a less attractive option. The thought processes I can see that might lead someone to give locally in pursuit of effectiveness are quite complex ones:
Trading off being able to do more good per dollar in poorer places against the difficulty of ensuring that useful things actually happen with those dollars. Requires careful thought about just how severe the principal/agent problems, lack of visibility, etc, are.
Giving explicitly higher weighting to the importance of people and causes located near to oneself, and trading off effectiveness against closeness. Requires careful thought about one’s own values, and some sort of principled way of mapping closeness to importance.
Those are both certainly possible but I think they take more than a “small amount of thinking”. Of course there are other ways to end up prioritizing local causes, but I think those go in the “without reflecting much” category. It seems to me that a modest amount of (serious) thinking about effectiveness makes local giving very hard to justify for its effectiveness, unless you happen to have a really exceptional local cause on your doorstep.
I’m afraid I completely disagree, and in fact find this view somewhat ridiculous.
“Giving explicitly higher weighting to the importance of people and causes located near to oneself” (the other clause in that sentence strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate…) is not, in fact, complex. It is a perfectly ordinary—and perfectly sensible—way of thinking about, and valuing, the world. That doing good in contexts distant from oneself (both in physical and in social/culture space) is quite difficult (the problems you allude to are indeed very severe, and absolutely do not warrant a casual dismissal) merely turns the aforementioned perspective from “perfectly sensible” to “more sensible than any other view, absent some quite unusual extenuating circumstances or some quite unusual values”.
Now, it is true that there is a sort of “valley of bad moral philosophy”, where if you go in a certain philosophical direction, you will end up abandoning good sense, and embracing various forms of “globalist” perspectives on altruism (including the usual array of utilitarian views), until you reach a sufficient level of philosophical sophistication to realize the mistakes you were making. (Obviously, many people never make it out of the valley at all—or at least they haven’t yet…) So in that sense, it requires ‘more than a “small amount of thinking”’ to get to a “localist” view. But… another alternative is to simply not make the mistakes in question in the first place.
Finally, it is a historical and terminological distortion (and a most unfortunate one) to take “effectiveness” (in the context of discussions of charity/philanthropy) to mean only effectiveness relative to a moral value. There is nothing at all philosophically inconsistent in selecting a goal (on the basis, presumably, of your values), and then evaluating effectiveness relative to that goal. There is a good deal of thinking, and of research, to be done in service of discovering what sort of charitable activity most effectively serves a given goal; should someone who thinks and researches thus, and engages in charitable work or giving on the basis of the conclusions reached, be described as “giv[ing] money locally to things that feel good, without reflecting much”? That seems nonsensical to me…
Many people find that thinking about effectiveness rapidly makes local giving seem a less attractive option.
The thought processes I can see that might lead someone to give locally in pursuit of effectiveness are quite complex ones:
Trading off being able to do more good per dollar in poorer places against the difficulty of ensuring that useful things actually happen with those dollars. Requires careful thought about just how severe the principal/agent problems, lack of visibility, etc, are.
Giving explicitly higher weighting to the importance of people and causes located near to oneself, and trading off effectiveness against closeness. Requires careful thought about one’s own values, and some sort of principled way of mapping closeness to importance.
Those are both certainly possible but I think they take more than a “small amount of thinking”. Of course there are other ways to end up prioritizing local causes, but I think those go in the “without reflecting much” category. It seems to me that a modest amount of (serious) thinking about effectiveness makes local giving very hard to justify for its effectiveness, unless you happen to have a really exceptional local cause on your doorstep.
I’m afraid I completely disagree, and in fact find this view somewhat ridiculous.
“Giving explicitly higher weighting to the importance of people and causes located near to oneself” (the other clause in that sentence strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate…) is not, in fact, complex. It is a perfectly ordinary—and perfectly sensible—way of thinking about, and valuing, the world. That doing good in contexts distant from oneself (both in physical and in social/culture space) is quite difficult (the problems you allude to are indeed very severe, and absolutely do not warrant a casual dismissal) merely turns the aforementioned perspective from “perfectly sensible” to “more sensible than any other view, absent some quite unusual extenuating circumstances or some quite unusual values”.
Now, it is true that there is a sort of “valley of bad moral philosophy”, where if you go in a certain philosophical direction, you will end up abandoning good sense, and embracing various forms of “globalist” perspectives on altruism (including the usual array of utilitarian views), until you reach a sufficient level of philosophical sophistication to realize the mistakes you were making. (Obviously, many people never make it out of the valley at all—or at least they haven’t yet…) So in that sense, it requires ‘more than a “small amount of thinking”’ to get to a “localist” view. But… another alternative is to simply not make the mistakes in question in the first place.
Finally, it is a historical and terminological distortion (and a most unfortunate one) to take “effectiveness” (in the context of discussions of charity/philanthropy) to mean only effectiveness relative to a moral value. There is nothing at all philosophically inconsistent in selecting a goal (on the basis, presumably, of your values), and then evaluating effectiveness relative to that goal. There is a good deal of thinking, and of research, to be done in service of discovering what sort of charitable activity most effectively serves a given goal; should someone who thinks and researches thus, and engages in charitable work or giving on the basis of the conclusions reached, be described as “giv[ing] money locally to things that feel good, without reflecting much”? That seems nonsensical to me…