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Let's say charity X can save one life per $10,000 spent on average. Then $300M can save 30,000 lives. If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to

Let's say charity X can save one life per $10,000 spent on average. Then $300M can save 30,000 lives. If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to charity X, 30,000 people who could have survived are now dead. That doesn't seem like a fantastic outcome to me.

irjustin 4y ago
> If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to charity X, 30,000 people who could have survived are now dead. That doesn't seem like a fantastic outcome to me. This statement forgets that the person who donated doesn't care. They actively like to hurt companies who don't deserve it and profit from it (unlike Hindenburg Research).
- fasterik 4y ago
  I could say about someone who kills a million people "well, they don't care. At least they didn't kill two million people." That doesn't seem like the right way to evaluate ethical claims. If we're talking about what would have been the right thing to do, it would have been to kill 0 people, regardless of what personality traits they have.
  - irjustin 4y ago
    It's a bit weird to bring ethics into this. Of course, your example is unethical, but "donating to Harvard" is.... unethical? I have a really hard time with that. Is doing the Ice Bucket challenge unethical? The problem with ethics discussion is we like to boil it down to it binary, ethical vs unethical. And donating to Harvard is hard pressed to be unethical. It's just not ideal. And that's what I dislike about Effective Altruism, is it shames people for "not doing the _most_ ideal thing", which in my eyes is a pretty poor belief system to take on. I'm saying, we're human, it's okay just don't make the world net negative... i.e. don't do unethical things. Ken Griffin didn't do a net-negative thing (he's done plenty of net negative/unethical things in the past). So, can we just call this a win and move on? Name and shame? I'm just happy he's not deploying that money to destroy more companies.

irjustin 4y ago

> If you choose to burn that money instead of donating it to charity X, 30,000 people who could have survived are now dead. That doesn't seem like a fantastic outcome to me. This statement forgets that the person who donated doesn't care. They actively like to hurt companies who don't deserve it and profit from it (unlike Hindenburg Research).

fasterik 4y ago
I could say about someone who kills a million people "well, they don't care. At least they didn't kill two million people." That doesn't seem like the right way to evaluate ethical claims. If we're talking about what would have been the right thing to do, it would have been to kill 0 people, regardless of what personality traits they have.
- irjustin 4y ago
  It's a bit weird to bring ethics into this. Of course, your example is unethical, but "donating to Harvard" is.... unethical? I have a really hard time with that. Is doing the Ice Bucket challenge unethical? The problem with ethics discussion is we like to boil it down to it binary, ethical vs unethical. And donating to Harvard is hard pressed to be unethical. It's just not ideal. And that's what I dislike about Effective Altruism, is it shames people for "not doing the _most_ ideal thing", which in my eyes is a pretty poor belief system to take on. I'm saying, we're human, it's okay just don't make the world net negative... i.e. don't do unethical things. Ken Griffin didn't do a net-negative thing (he's done plenty of net negative/unethical things in the past). So, can we just call this a win and move on? Name and shame? I'm just happy he's not deploying that money to destroy more companies.