No problem, thank you for your response. What I meant to say was this: "The lumping together of outcomes in roughly two boxes, while also discarding informati

No problem, thank you for your response. What I meant to say was this: "The lumping together of outcomes in roughly two boxes, while also discarding information about the specific actions that lead to the outcomes." Once this has been done, there is no longer a line back from the outcomes ("buying food") to the actions that led to it ("receiving a salary"). Or "finding a job for some or other purpose", which leads to "working for company X", and then "receiving salary from company X", and then assuming part of the responsibility for the actions of "company X" by spending the money earned there. I know almost no one who considers where their money comes from, and then actually implements steps to make their spending habits congruent with that. Ethical use of money does not just involve spending it at the right places, it also involves earning it in a way congruent with where you spend it, e.g. keeping track of where the money originates from. Companies do not create money and everyone who works for them knows this. For instance, if I receive money from place A which is involved in studying agriculture, if I then spend it in a place which is agriculturally underdeveloped, anything I accidentally reveal about agriculture to the place where I spend my money is well placed. In the same vein, if I'm part of a criminal underworld involved in child trafficking and prostitution, I should not be spending it on schools, even if it were possible to keep the two worlds completely isolated in all my other actions. Thinking such a total isolation is implementable by hand without actually knowing you can do it and how, is highly unwise and a sure sign of an overgrown ego. Taking money from one place and moving it to another just creates an undeniable and indestructible trace from place A to place B. If you are not a perfect filter to things which are at place A and should never be at place B, you are responsible for any and all harm caused, through willful ignorance of the fact that companies make money in cooperation with the society they function in. To give you a simpler example, if I'm developing software that pushes some kind of social frontier, it makes sense for me to import my food from the most socially backwards countries, so that I don't accidentally mistake the actual problem space for "just my backyard". Because then I literally owe my food to the support of a country which has bigger social problems than I do personally. Ideally this makes the software I develop less complex, I get a wider picture of the problem which makes it harder to even consider complicating the solution, and it helps aim my attention more precisely in ways which are known-good. However, if I only were to consider the outcomes of my actions, such as great software or great tasting food, I may be effective at producing sharp weapons but not so much at producing tools for peaceful ends.