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This is profitable goodness. This is what we should strive for as a society. I imagine it was quite a battle for the people who suggested this strategy against

This is profitable goodness. This is what we should strive for as a society. I imagine it was quite a battle for the people who suggested this strategy against the naysayers. Listen to them here in this thread. I hear envy. Envy of the good. I applaud the insurance company and the employees. It's so hard to do good things in the world today and they found a way in this capitalist mess we have created.

altacc 7y ago
> This is profitable goodness. This is what we should strive for as a society. Many people, including myself, would like society to take action because it's the right thing to do in of itself, not because it's profitable. We shouldn#t be having to find a profit motive for what should be a charitable act.
- tathougies 7y ago
  But if there is a profit motive towards what would be an act of charity then we should be relieved because profit means this will exist without the need to rile up public morality which is way more fickle than profit.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  First, just to get this out of the way, I feel that taking action due to a profit motive is better than not taking action at all. Do we at least agree on that? Second, getting people to take action is all about incentives. Those incentives might be profit motive, internal motivation (e.g. feeling righteous), etc, etc. It seems like our job, as a society, is to construct incentives that lead to the actions we want to see. There are various ways of doing that, and profit is definitely one of them that has the nontrivial benefit of being broadly applicable: lots of people are at least somewhat incentivized by money. Now there are all sorts of ways incentives can go awry, and that includes profit incentives, so we do need to watch out of that. But apart from that it doesn't seem like there's anything inherently wrong with using a profit incentive to produce the action we want.
  - altacc 7y ago
    I don't dispute that action due to profit is much better than no action at all. The sentiment in the post I replied to seemed to be that our society should be striving towards "profitable goodness". I think a good action should be taken because it is the good and right thing to do. Not every good act or charity can be profitable, so if we pick "profitable goodness" as our society's goal then what happens to all the actions that aren't profitable?
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      I agree that not every good act or charity can be profitable. I guess my take on it is that _if_, all else being equal, we can make charitable acts profitable, we should do that, because that's a more reliable incentive than relying on people to do the good and right thing, unfortunately. In practice, "all else being equal" is often a very strong constraint!

altacc 7y ago

> This is profitable goodness. This is what we should strive for as a society. Many people, including myself, would like society to take action because it's the right thing to do in of itself, not because it's profitable. We shouldn#t be having to find a profit motive for what should be a charitable act.

tathougies 7y ago
But if there is a profit motive towards what would be an act of charity then we should be relieved because profit means this will exist without the need to rile up public morality which is way more fickle than profit.
bzbarsky 7y ago
First, just to get this out of the way, I feel that taking action due to a profit motive is better than not taking action at all. Do we at least agree on that? Second, getting people to take action is all about incentives. Those incentives might be profit motive, internal motivation (e.g. feeling righteous), etc, etc. It seems like our job, as a society, is to construct incentives that lead to the actions we want to see. There are various ways of doing that, and profit is definitely one of them that has the nontrivial benefit of being broadly applicable: lots of people are at least somewhat incentivized by money. Now there are all sorts of ways incentives can go awry, and that includes profit incentives, so we do need to watch out of that. But apart from that it doesn't seem like there's anything inherently wrong with using a profit incentive to produce the action we want.
- altacc 7y ago
  I don't dispute that action due to profit is much better than no action at all. The sentiment in the post I replied to seemed to be that our society should be striving towards "profitable goodness". I think a good action should be taken because it is the good and right thing to do. Not every good act or charity can be profitable, so if we pick "profitable goodness" as our society's goal then what happens to all the actions that aren't profitable?
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    I agree that not every good act or charity can be profitable. I guess my take on it is that _if_, all else being equal, we can make charitable acts profitable, we should do that, because that's a more reliable incentive than relying on people to do the good and right thing, unfortunately. In practice, "all else being equal" is often a very strong constraint!