I think effective social justice would focus much more than conventional social justice on
1) cause prioritization: there are lots of oppressive power structures and lots of people impacted by them. It seems like the kinds of oppression that get the most attention are going to be those that impact relatively privileged people (because they’re best at discussing in social justice terms the ways that they’ve been harmed, they have access to SJ discourse and SJ spaces, etcetera). See in particular the underdiscussion of class and education privilege in SJ communities. But it’s not as simple as ‘which oppressive system does the most harm’ because of:
2) tractability: A big effective altruist principle is that you don’t tackle the problem that kills the most people, you tackle the problem where you can take strides most rapidly. That often means looking at underserved groups and understudied problems. Heart disease kills tons of people, but it’s not a good EA cause because it mostly affects older Western adults and as a result already has lots of money being thrown at it. Schistosomiasis mostly affects poor children in Asia, Africa and South America, so there’s not much money being spent on it.
Similarly, in social justice, some problems seem much more tractable than others. Abortion is an incredibly important problem, but a very intractable one - we’ve been fighting for fifty years and the landscape has barely changed. Gay rights affects fewer people but turned out to be way more tractable - we’ve achieved a mass shift in public opinion. Which causes are tractable and which aren’t, and how does this affect where we ought to spend our energy? I don’t know, but I’d be really excited for some people to start researching/thinking/writing about this.
3) healthy community norms: when you’re trying to change the world, it’s worth explicitly building a community you expect to be strong enough to handle the blowback, support and protect its own members, and learn from and correct its own mistakes. Effective altruism tries to do this by talking about what has worked for us in building successful communities, practicing good discourse habits and by rewarding and circulating good criticisms of effective altruism. Some ways in which we fail to do this, I think, are by expecting very high standards of argumentation from critics, by getting tied up in nonproductive discussions, and by politicizing some disagreements.
I think effective social justice would need drastically different community norms from standard social justice. It would need to find the balance between welcoming people who disagree with it on some points while also being a space whose members don’t feel like their right to exist is questioned. It would need to figure out how to exclude the toxic and abusive people who thrive in tumblr social justice while not ostracizing anyone who makes a mistake. It would need to manage lots and lots of competing access needs. The best way to do this would be to start small, with communities aspiring to being kinder, intellectually careful, effective spaces, and to report back frequently on what challenges we’ve encountered and how we’ve reasoned about them and how we expect to learn and improve.
4) checking whether what you’re doing works: A while ago, when the protests were happening in Baltimore, several of my friends posted that they felt helpless and were wondering ‘what works?’ I didn’t have anything to tell them. Because the thing is, we don’t really know. Do TV ads change minds? Does door-to-door canvassing? Does confronting your bigoted friends and relatives? Sharing information on Facebook? Donating directly to people in need? We don’t know. All of these things are good, but if you’re poor or have limited free time and want to do the thing that matters most, we have no idea where you can make your voice heard the loudest.
Effective altruists are currently conducting a mass double-blind randomized trial on the effect of Facebook ads on changing peoples’ behavior and beliefs. I want to see effective social justice doing the same thing. I want to be able to say, “the best thing you can do if you live in the U.S. is show up in your Senator’s office” or “we expect that if you share this on your Facebook feed, ten more people will read this article and people who read this article express, a month later, 5% more support for anti-discrimination laws”.
