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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?
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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!