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The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does is the first book-length volume to critically engage with Effective Altruism (EA). It brings together writers from diverse activist and scholarly backgrounds to explore a variety of unique grassroots movements and community organizing efforts and reveals the weakness inherent within the readymade, top-down solutions that EA offers in response to many global problems.
List of contents
- Foreword: Amia Srinivisan
- Introduction: Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen
- Acknowledgements
- 1 How Effective Altruism Fails Community-Based Activism
- Brenda Sanders
- 2 Effective Altruism's Unsuspecting 21st Century Colonialism
- Simone De Lima
- 3 Anti-Blackness and the Effective Altruist
- Christopher Sebastian
- 4 Animal Advocacy's Stockholm Syndrome
- DeCoriolis, Aaron S. Gross, Steve J. Gross, and Joseph Tuminello (Farm Forward)
- 5 Who Counts? Effective Altruism and the Problem of Numbers in the History of American Wildlife Conservation
- Michael D. Wise
- 6 Diversifying Effective Altruism Longshots in Animal Advocacy: An Invitation to Prioritize Black Vegans, Higher Education, and Religious Communities
- Matthew C. Halteman
- 7 A Christian Critique of the Effective Altruism Approach to Animal Philanthropy
- David L. Clough
- 8 Queer Eye on the EA Guys
- pattrice jones
- 9 A Feminist-Ethics-of-Care Critique of Effective Altruism
- Carol J. Adams
- 10 The Empty Promises of Cultured Meat
- Elan Abrell
- 11 How 'Alternative Proteins' Create a Private Solution to a Public Problem
- Michele Simon
- 12 The Power of Love to Transform Animal Lives: The Deception of Animal Quantification
- Krista Hiddema
- 13 Our Partners, The Animals: Reflections from a Farmed Animal Sanctuary
- Kathy Stevens
- 14 The Wisdom Gained from Animals Who Self-Liberate
- Rachel McCrystal
- 15 Effective Altruism and the Reified Mind
- John Sanbonmatsu
- 16 Against 'Effective Altruism'
- Alice Crary
- 17 The Change We Need
- Lori Gruen
- Coda: Future-oriented Effective Altruism: What's wrong with longtermism?
- Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen
About the author
Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Lori Gruen is William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University where she founded and coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies.
Carol J. Adams is a feminist scholar and activist whose work explores the cultural construction of overlapping and interconnected oppressions, as well as the ethics of care.
Summary
The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does is the first edited volume to critically engage with Effective Altruism (EA). It brings together writers from diverse activist and scholarly backgrounds to explore a variety of unique grassroots movements and community organizing efforts. By drawing attention to these responses and to particular cases of human and animal harms, this book represents a powerful call to attend to different voices and projects and to elevate activist traditions that EA lacks the resources to assess and threatens to squelch. The contributors reveal the weakness inherent within the ready-made, top-down solutions that EA offers in response to many global problems-and offers in their place substantial descriptions of more meaningful and just social engagement.
Additional text
This is a collection of works that embodies the both/and approach: that there can be a unity in purpose, divergence in how that is achieved, and an acknowledgment of the value and legitimacy of all those efforts.
