I haven’t had my caffeine this morning, so I’m not being very charitable, “effective altruism is just asking how to best promote global welfare, that’s not controversial!” sounds a lot like some other claims about ideologies that you see around tumblr and other social media.
Yeah I never understood why people liked to make the definitional argument for feminism until I started reading critiques of EA and found that my first thought was “But you’re just disagreeing on what’s effective, not disagreeing with effective altruism! Effective altruism is literally just the idea that we should use evidence and reason to make the world a better place! What kind of terrible person could disagree with that?”
I think the situations are pretty similar; EA, like feminism, is not a one-sentence proposition but a diverse movement founded on a kind of weird, not at all obvious framework for thinking about the world. And the “but it’s obvious, look at the definition” is not only totally unhelpful for promoting productive engagement with critics, but at least when it’s done to me it really pisses me off so I’m gonna try not to do it to other people.
When people are like “EA is philosophically trivial” I wonder about the sort of bubble they’re living in … I guess the thinnest possible version of EA is trivial if you’re consequentialist (although you could still think that the EA movement is doing it wrong enough not to be worth anyone’s time) but most people aren’t consequentialist and can’t be convinced to become consequentialist.