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Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical th

Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard. I can understand having a negative opinion of the EA movement as it exists today. But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism. Or at least the idea that being more altruistic is morally superior than being less altruistic.

notahacker 4y ago
> Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard....But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism I don't think it's the idea of giving to charity that's being criticised here. Its the idea a rich person giving an absolute sum of money poorer people cannot match is "ahead morally" on some utilitarian scale no matter what else the poorer person does, particularly in the context that the poster boy example of "earning to give" was Sam Bankman Fried...
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    The position that the virtue of SBF's actions are irrelevant, and he should be judged better than all of us because he could afford to give more money to give away to good outcomes sounds exactly like "buying indulgences" to me. Especially in Scott Aaronson's phrasing where it's the SBF's gross donation spend being ahead of all of ours that we should be impressed by, not the net impact of his actions (which I find difficult to believe is positive even on pure utilitarian grounds, given that he's not exactly inspiring others to "earn to give" right now, he's shrunk the world's balance sheet and I consider some of his [notionally] philanthropic spend pretty dubious)
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      Sure, but then the argument is "SBF was bad actually". I agree with this take - this is going to lead to bad outcomes. But note that saying so already embraces a consequentialist framework. This is a common argument for "rules utilitarianism", which is that given human psychology, getting humans to pursue (particular) virtues leads to better outcomes in the real world than getting humans to engage in first-order outcome maximization. A true virtue-ethics take would be that SBF was inherently ennobled by good behavior or blemished by bad behavior, and the outcomes would have no relevance to this consideration. That's why I said virtue ethics is dead - approximately nobody argues like that today.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        Well yes, nobody in this subthread is arguing that outcomes have no relevance. We just object to Aaronson's rather extreme position that the correct measure of SBF's goodness is the single dimension of the absolute amounts he donated to notionally philanthropic causes (which seems like the reductio ad absurdum version of EA utilitarianism). And yes, I'm also unconvinced of the argument that behaviour and intent plays no role in ethics. It may be a good in terms of outcome that a sociopathic hereditary billionaire gives away 1%< of his fortune purely for reputation laundering purposes whilst minimising his interactions with other humans he declines to fulfil his rape and torture fantasies on purely out of rational self-interest, but I don't believe that would make him a "good person" by any reasonable ethical standard, never mind a "better person than all of us". At some point intent, relative sacrifice and what would other people have done in the same position become relevant to casting judgement on his benevolence, never mind his other vices. And certainly the courts will consider intent and not just the brute fact that SBF lost a lot of people's money when deciding whether to prosecute him, convictions and sentencing; I imagine most of his defence will be structured around that...
        FeepingCreature 4y ago
        I don't fully agree with Aaronson's take, I just think it's underappreciated. I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes. And I think there is an argument to be made that getting rich people to donate is a thing that a moral system that tries to lead to good outcomes, should focus attention on. Like it or not, we have set up our society so that economic decisionmaking power is to a large part concentrated in the hands of a small fraction of the population. This population is a moral fulcrum; the things they decide to do have a significant effect on actual events, in some ways even outstripping governments (which generally hold obligations on par with their power). I think an effective morality needs to acknowledge this and make special dispensation for these people if they decide to bend their power towards creating good outcomes, whether or not one approves of their existence in the abstract. Assume you are trying to invent a morality to sell to the one percent. The pass-or-fail condition is that this morality must absolve their sins. It seems to me that the default option here is laissez-faire libertarianism, which has cultural bias against doing work to improve the worse off; in my view, being able to make inroads in this moral market is a significant victory for EA and good outcomes in general.
  - aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
    All modern moral systems have extremely serious defects where they can be gamed. Repugnant conclusion, the entire concept of deontology, etc. Virtue Ethics is ungameable.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      Virtue ethics is gameable if you can make virtues conflict.
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        Which is trivial: pro-life vs. pro-choice, free-speech vs. anti-harassment, etc. I don't think there's anyone on any part of the political spectrum who thinks their ideas are not virtuous.
      - aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
        This is a feature, not a bug. Casuistry is the science of determining the correct course of action in a complex situation. It’s complicated because the world is complicated. Attempting to create a moral system from first order logic (deontology) or a linear system (utilitarianism) was doomed from the start.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    But even virtue ethics got parts of this right that EA seems to get wrong. From the very beginning, Aristotle caught on to idea that minmaxing a particular moral virtue gets you into deep trouble. That's precisely the hole EA falls into; see again Sam Bankman-Fried, and MacAskill's advice to him.
kethinov 4y ago
There are principled reasons to be against charity, namely that charity redistributes money to causes arbitrarily and undemocratically rather than to causes decided by a majority of people voting on what causes to support. When the government runs these programs, we get to vote on how they're administered. When billionaires run them, who gets help and who doesn't is entirely at the mercy of King Tech Bro the First. And to the extent that society heaps boundless praise on billionaires for their altruism, we are complicit in their reputation laundering; allowing them to continue to enjoy undue status in society in perpetuity that would not persist if we simply taxed that wealth away from them and did something like massively expanding public housing to end homelessness or something instead.
- endominus 4y ago
  There's also principled reasons to be against this. Namely, that government tends to be woefully bad at optimizing for moral good (cf. the American prison industry or California's attempts to end homelessness) and is just as likely to put that money towards things the majority of the population disagree with. The same logic would say that Russia is right to strip its billionaires of wealth to pursue foreign wars.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Yes, government is bad at optimizing for moral good. Which is why billionaires should give their wealth to their own workers. If Tim Cook paid the people building iPhones more it would do far more good than him donating the money that comes from increased margins to some charity. The workers could decide what they need for themselves! Instead, the idea seems to be that people are not properly qualified to identify their own needs and such decision need to be made by funneling profits to a CEO who then has superior knowledge of how to help the world and donates that money as he sees fit.
    - kethinov 4y ago
      Turns out that billionaires tend to not want to do that, so it also turns out that using government power to compel them to do so using the power of taxation is the system that scales best.
tptacek 4y ago
No, I pasted a quote from an extremely respected thinker who, in the context of Effective Altruism, said that a financier who gave away virtually all his earnings would be morally superior to most of us. Giving away money is a good thing, everybody does it, by all means do it more. But the idea that you can purchase moral superiority, and, moreover, that the superiority you obtain is proportionate to the amount you donate relative to the average person? That is literally the logic of indulgences. You've skipped the words "way ahead of most of us" in the quote I provided, is what I think happened.
- rcoveson 4y ago
  It’s not the amount you donate relative to others, it’s the amount you donate relative to how much you are capable of donating. Not many people would work a high-stress, high-barrier-to-entry job and give away almost everything they earned, while their peers live richly. Even if we accept that the average person usually acts morally when confronted with an obvious moral choice, they still fall morally behind someone who actively exerts themselves to the limit of their ability for the benefit of needy people who they’ve never even met. Maybe we just disagree about where the “average person” is morally? Or maybe you’re ascribing selfish intent to selfless action because the hypothetical person works in finance and/or makes lots of money?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    That is not what Scott Aaronson said. It's what you might believe; fair enough! Sacrificial giving is a big thing in the religion I belong to, too! Aaronson is making a point that minmaxing absolute donations (even, in this specific case, if it means defrauding thousands of customers) is a pathway towards moral superiority.
    - rcoveson 4y ago
      I think I'm confused about whether you're rejecting the proposition about the investor all on its own, or if it's the broader argument from the Aaronson post that you're rejecting. Your parenthetical makes me think we're not talking about the charitable-investor-propsition anymore; we're now talking about a specific investor who did something that appears to have been very risky and possibly very unethical. My interpretation of Aaronson is that he thinks the hypothetical charitable investor is a good example of a very moral person, and we can use that example to imagine how we might have felt about SBF in an alternate universe where his bets paid off. But Aaronson also concludes: > At any rate, I’d try to impress on him, as I do on anyone reading now, that the choice between linear and concave utilities, between risk-neutrality and risk-aversion, is not bloodless or technical—that it’s essential to make a choice that’s not only in reflective equilibrium with your highest values, but that you’ll still consider to be such regardless of which possible universe you end up in. This isn't a post lionizing SBF. He is compared to but also contrasted with the "charitable traditional investor". The contrast is the degree of risk which, as you say, could be considered fraud. I don't come away from this thinking that Aaronson believes that SBF in particular is "way ahead of most of us morally".

notahacker 4y ago

> Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard....But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism I don't think it's the idea of giving to charity that's being criticised here. Its the idea a rich person giving an absolute sum of money poorer people cannot match is "ahead morally" on some utilitarian scale no matter what else the poorer person does, particularly in the context that the poster boy example of "earning to give" was Sam Bankman Fried...

FeepingCreature 4y ago
Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.
- notahacker 4y ago
  The position that the virtue of SBF's actions are irrelevant, and he should be judged better than all of us because he could afford to give more money to give away to good outcomes sounds exactly like "buying indulgences" to me. Especially in Scott Aaronson's phrasing where it's the SBF's gross donation spend being ahead of all of ours that we should be impressed by, not the net impact of his actions (which I find difficult to believe is positive even on pure utilitarian grounds, given that he's not exactly inspiring others to "earn to give" right now, he's shrunk the world's balance sheet and I consider some of his [notionally] philanthropic spend pretty dubious)
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Sure, but then the argument is "SBF was bad actually". I agree with this take - this is going to lead to bad outcomes. But note that saying so already embraces a consequentialist framework. This is a common argument for "rules utilitarianism", which is that given human psychology, getting humans to pursue (particular) virtues leads to better outcomes in the real world than getting humans to engage in first-order outcome maximization. A true virtue-ethics take would be that SBF was inherently ennobled by good behavior or blemished by bad behavior, and the outcomes would have no relevance to this consideration. That's why I said virtue ethics is dead - approximately nobody argues like that today.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Well yes, nobody in this subthread is arguing that outcomes have no relevance. We just object to Aaronson's rather extreme position that the correct measure of SBF's goodness is the single dimension of the absolute amounts he donated to notionally philanthropic causes (which seems like the reductio ad absurdum version of EA utilitarianism). And yes, I'm also unconvinced of the argument that behaviour and intent plays no role in ethics. It may be a good in terms of outcome that a sociopathic hereditary billionaire gives away 1%< of his fortune purely for reputation laundering purposes whilst minimising his interactions with other humans he declines to fulfil his rape and torture fantasies on purely out of rational self-interest, but I don't believe that would make him a "good person" by any reasonable ethical standard, never mind a "better person than all of us". At some point intent, relative sacrifice and what would other people have done in the same position become relevant to casting judgement on his benevolence, never mind his other vices. And certainly the courts will consider intent and not just the brute fact that SBF lost a lot of people's money when deciding whether to prosecute him, convictions and sentencing; I imagine most of his defence will be structured around that...
      - FeepingCreature 4y ago
        I don't fully agree with Aaronson's take, I just think it's underappreciated. I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes. And I think there is an argument to be made that getting rich people to donate is a thing that a moral system that tries to lead to good outcomes, should focus attention on. Like it or not, we have set up our society so that economic decisionmaking power is to a large part concentrated in the hands of a small fraction of the population. This population is a moral fulcrum; the things they decide to do have a significant effect on actual events, in some ways even outstripping governments (which generally hold obligations on par with their power). I think an effective morality needs to acknowledge this and make special dispensation for these people if they decide to bend their power towards creating good outcomes, whether or not one approves of their existence in the abstract. Assume you are trying to invent a morality to sell to the one percent. The pass-or-fail condition is that this morality must absolve their sins. It seems to me that the default option here is laissez-faire libertarianism, which has cultural bias against doing work to improve the worse off; in my view, being able to make inroads in this moral market is a significant victory for EA and good outcomes in general.
- aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
  All modern moral systems have extremely serious defects where they can be gamed. Repugnant conclusion, the entire concept of deontology, etc. Virtue Ethics is ungameable.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Virtue ethics is gameable if you can make virtues conflict.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      Which is trivial: pro-life vs. pro-choice, free-speech vs. anti-harassment, etc. I don't think there's anyone on any part of the political spectrum who thinks their ideas are not virtuous.
    - aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
      This is a feature, not a bug. Casuistry is the science of determining the correct course of action in a complex situation. It’s complicated because the world is complicated. Attempting to create a moral system from first order logic (deontology) or a linear system (utilitarianism) was doomed from the start.
- tptacek 4y ago
  But even virtue ethics got parts of this right that EA seems to get wrong. From the very beginning, Aristotle caught on to idea that minmaxing a particular moral virtue gets you into deep trouble. That's precisely the hole EA falls into; see again Sam Bankman-Fried, and MacAskill's advice to him.

kethinov 4y ago

There are principled reasons to be against charity, namely that charity redistributes money to causes arbitrarily and undemocratically rather than to causes decided by a majority of people voting on what causes to support. When the government runs these programs, we get to vote on how they're administered. When billionaires run them, who gets help and who doesn't is entirely at the mercy of King Tech Bro the First. And to the extent that society heaps boundless praise on billionaires for their altruism, we are complicit in their reputation laundering; allowing them to continue to enjoy undue status in society in perpetuity that would not persist if we simply taxed that wealth away from them and did something like massively expanding public housing to end homelessness or something instead.

endominus 4y ago
There's also principled reasons to be against this. Namely, that government tends to be woefully bad at optimizing for moral good (cf. the American prison industry or California's attempts to end homelessness) and is just as likely to put that money towards things the majority of the population disagree with. The same logic would say that Russia is right to strip its billionaires of wealth to pursue foreign wars.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Yes, government is bad at optimizing for moral good. Which is why billionaires should give their wealth to their own workers. If Tim Cook paid the people building iPhones more it would do far more good than him donating the money that comes from increased margins to some charity. The workers could decide what they need for themselves! Instead, the idea seems to be that people are not properly qualified to identify their own needs and such decision need to be made by funneling profits to a CEO who then has superior knowledge of how to help the world and donates that money as he sees fit.
  - kethinov 4y ago
    Turns out that billionaires tend to not want to do that, so it also turns out that using government power to compel them to do so using the power of taxation is the system that scales best.

tptacek 4y ago

No, I pasted a quote from an extremely respected thinker who, in the context of Effective Altruism, said that a financier who gave away virtually all his earnings would be morally superior to most of us. Giving away money is a good thing, everybody does it, by all means do it more. But the idea that you can purchase moral superiority, and, moreover, that the superiority you obtain is proportionate to the amount you donate relative to the average person? That is literally the logic of indulgences. You've skipped the words "way ahead of most of us" in the quote I provided, is what I think happened.

rcoveson 4y ago
It’s not the amount you donate relative to others, it’s the amount you donate relative to how much you are capable of donating. Not many people would work a high-stress, high-barrier-to-entry job and give away almost everything they earned, while their peers live richly. Even if we accept that the average person usually acts morally when confronted with an obvious moral choice, they still fall morally behind someone who actively exerts themselves to the limit of their ability for the benefit of needy people who they’ve never even met. Maybe we just disagree about where the “average person” is morally? Or maybe you’re ascribing selfish intent to selfless action because the hypothetical person works in finance and/or makes lots of money?
- tptacek 4y ago
  That is not what Scott Aaronson said. It's what you might believe; fair enough! Sacrificial giving is a big thing in the religion I belong to, too! Aaronson is making a point that minmaxing absolute donations (even, in this specific case, if it means defrauding thousands of customers) is a pathway towards moral superiority.
  - rcoveson 4y ago
    I think I'm confused about whether you're rejecting the proposition about the investor all on its own, or if it's the broader argument from the Aaronson post that you're rejecting. Your parenthetical makes me think we're not talking about the charitable-investor-propsition anymore; we're now talking about a specific investor who did something that appears to have been very risky and possibly very unethical. My interpretation of Aaronson is that he thinks the hypothetical charitable investor is a good example of a very moral person, and we can use that example to imagine how we might have felt about SBF in an alternate universe where his bets paid off. But Aaronson also concludes: > At any rate, I’d try to impress on him, as I do on anyone reading now, that the choice between linear and concave utilities, between risk-neutrality and risk-aversion, is not bloodless or technical—that it’s essential to make a choice that’s not only in reflective equilibrium with your highest values, but that you’ll still consider to be such regardless of which possible universe you end up in. This isn't a post lionizing SBF. He is compared to but also contrasted with the "charitable traditional investor". The contrast is the degree of risk which, as you say, could be considered fraud. I don't come away from this thinking that Aaronson believes that SBF in particular is "way ahead of most of us morally".