3 ms·

This may be the most elaborate rationalization of selling out I’ve ever read.

derefr 8y ago
No, I’ve got a better one, actually! Lotteries are a net benefit for society, because they transfer money from irrational people (ticket buyers) to rational people (lottery runners.) Even if the lottery-runners are not good people†, the fact that they’re rational means that they’ll be spending more of their newly-acquired resources on “wise” (usually morally-neutral) investments, and less on things that end up benefitting evil people, like buying illegal drugs. My whole stance, here, is that you can take a graph of economic transactions, and color the vertices as being good or evil. Consequentialism would suggest doing whatever moves the most money (across the entire economy, as nth-degree knock-on reactions to your action) from evil actors to good actors. One consequence of this stance: you should never (before considering those nth-degree effects) buy from a person/company you think is evil. You’re helping them liquidate their assets! Now they have more freedom to do evil with them! (Whereas, in the opposite case, if you sell an evil person a house, now they just... have a house. It’s a mostly-illiquid asset. They can’t do much with it except live in it. If you sell evil a house—knowing they’re going to live in it, not hold it or flip it as an investment property—then you’re effectively letting evil voluntarily freeze part of its assets. Great!) The sound bite version of all this: if $dictator wants to pay all their money to be hooked up to an eternal-bliss machine, it is your moral duty to take that money. Whether or not you think they “deserve” eternal bliss, they’re getting something that doesn’t harm anyone else; and in exchange, you’re taking all the resources they’d use to harm anyone in the future away from them. This isn’t selling out: it’s a negotiated solution that satisfies both parties’ preferences (where your morals are part of your preferences.) I fully believe that this is how we’ll have to deal with any aliens we ever meet. They’ll want some things we think are evil. We’ll want some things they think are evil. The solution is to trade, as much as possible, in ways that satisfy the mutually-acceptable shared subset of our preferences—which comes, on both sides, at the expense of our resources to do mutually-unacceptable things. (I.e., not the GDP-improving kind of trade; the “money is disappearing from the economy” kind of trade, e.g. employing foreign experience-service providers where you get nothing fungible in return for your money.) —— † Lottery runners—at least in the case of state-run lotteries—are actually usually pretty okay people. They’re usually the same people who run state alcohol licensing: i.e., “temperance”/“moderation” people, the kind who wanted prohibition passed back when. The newer generations of them aren’t activists, but beuraucratic pragmatists; they know they can’t just prohibit these things, so instead they try to ensure that as few people touch them as possible. Usually the same people running a state lottery are pushing for those “Game responsibly” ads, and discouraging media coverage of casinos. But, of course, you could still do better. A lottery that donates the proceeds to charity would be an unalloyed good.

No, I’ve got a better one, actually! Lotteries are a net benefit for society, because they transfer money from irrational people (ticket buyers) to rational people (lottery runners.) Even if the lottery-runners are not good people†, the fact that they’re rational means that they’ll be spending more of their newly-acquired resources on “wise” (usually morally-neutral) investments, and less on things that end up benefitting evil people, like buying illegal drugs. My whole stance, here, is that you can take a graph of economic transactions, and color the vertices as being good or evil. Consequentialism would suggest doing whatever moves the most money (across the entire economy, as nth-degree knock-on reactions to your action) from evil actors to good actors. One consequence of this stance: you should never (before considering those nth-degree effects) buy from a person/company you think is evil. You’re helping them liquidate their assets! Now they have more freedom to do evil with them! (Whereas, in the opposite case, if you sell an evil person a house, now they just... have a house. It’s a mostly-illiquid asset. They can’t do much with it except live in it. If you sell evil a house—knowing they’re going to live in it, not hold it or flip it as an investment property—then you’re effectively letting evil voluntarily freeze part of its assets. Great!) The sound bite version of all this: if $dictator wants to pay all their money to be hooked up to an eternal-bliss machine, it is your moral duty to take that money. Whether or not you think they “deserve” eternal bliss, they’re getting something that doesn’t harm anyone else; and in exchange, you’re taking all the resources they’d use to harm anyone in the future away from them. This isn’t selling out: it’s a negotiated solution that satisfies both parties’ preferences (where your morals are part of your preferences.) I fully believe that this is how we’ll have to deal with any aliens we ever meet. They’ll want some things we think are evil. We’ll want some things they think are evil. The solution is to trade, as much as possible, in ways that satisfy the mutually-acceptable shared subset of our preferences—which comes, on both sides, at the expense of our resources to do mutually-unacceptable things. (I.e., not the GDP-improving kind of trade; the “money is disappearing from the economy” kind of trade, e.g. employing foreign experience-service providers where you get nothing fungible in return for your money.) —— † Lottery runners—at least in the case of state-run lotteries—are actually usually pretty okay people. They’re usually the same people who run state alcohol licensing: i.e., “temperance”/“moderation” people, the kind who wanted prohibition passed back when. The newer generations of them aren’t activists, but beuraucratic pragmatists; they know they can’t just prohibit these things, so instead they try to ensure that as few people touch them as possible. Usually the same people running a state lottery are pushing for those “Game responsibly” ads, and discouraging media coverage of casinos. But, of course, you could still do better. A lottery that donates the proceeds to charity would be an unalloyed good.