[eddsh1994]

> whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward

EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.

[p10jkle]

But what in the philosophy of EA really disallows it? In a utilitarian model, if I can do a lot of good by doing some bad (eg, steal from crypto investors and give the money to AI safety research), what did I do wrong? I appreciate that this can discredit EA and hurt their efforts, but this is a short-termist concern; in the long run, the AI research might end up being more important than the transient reputational damage. Furthermore, what if there's only a 5% chance of being caught doing something immoral? Then, in expectation, the positive impact is even higher.

It's all very well to pay lip service to 'common sense morality' but it doesn't seem to fit into the actual theology of EA, and this is what fanatics are most likely to follow.

[ceras]

EA isn't limited to utilitarianism. A very substantial amount of people in EA would not consider themselves utilitarians. And of those who do, it's very rare to find a "pure" utilitarian with no deontological bent and thus willing to engage in fraud.

Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.

On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.

[eddsh1994]

> But what in the philosophy of EA really disallows it

Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people? Apart from that, there's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating. Sadly this SBF shit has really corrupted the core message which is to be skeptical of charities and view them like investments, picking the best one for QALY per $, and valuing all lives equally. I don't even like the futurist side of EA because I personally can't put the value of a hypothetical person above someone who's sick today and focus on global health & animal welfare. Honestly the core point of EA is imo very hard to discredit aside from longtermism.

[emodendroket]

> Because most people who are willing to donate x% of their salary to charity tends to be decent people?

I’m curious if you would accept the claim that a regular churchgoer is unlikely to act immorally, because I can’t see any difference in principle, down to the “donating a portion of your salary” part.

[skinnymuch]

I’d be interested in your response to emodendroket

[tomrod]

> There's tons of fundermental EA posts and writings that talk about how EA cannot be an 'ends justify the means' philosophy to donating.

This is at odds with its core adoption of utilitarianism, which is the movement's fundamental justification. Utilitarianism is sort of textbook "sounds nice on paper, works crappy in practice" outcome.

[eddsh1994]

That's because they're not the same thing and all the press EA has recently received is completely butchering the much more nuanced message.

It's covered briefly here https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs-criticism-objections

[tomrod]

Pushback: the press has gotten this correct, and EA's attempts at distinguishing itself as something else have failed.

[eddsh1994]

How can the press be correct about what something is, when that something has since its inception been both vocally and actively different? Even going back to Singers books that sort of kicked this all off its specifically said to be different to utilitarianism. Most advocates of EA say they're not utilitarian. I'm saying I'm not utilitarian. EA organizations actions are clearly not utilitarian in general.

I don't really know how to defend EA as not Utilitarian beyond that, except saying take a look at some EA-based books or blog posts that aren't from the last month and decide for yourself!

[readams]

Defining what is really good and bad is a very hard thing to do, and has been the subject of philosophical debate for millennia. It gets really hard when we try to construct a reasonable logical foundation for ethics, but then we always check it by comparing it to the intuitive ethics in our evolved/cultured meat brains. Of course, the intuitive ethics always "wins" and we conclude that the problem must not be there, but any conflicts must be problems with the ethical framework!

So you can conclude that you should just do whatever makes you feel good and all ethics are nonsense as you seem to prefer, but I'm not sure that you've really refuted the basic premise that you should try to maximize the amount of good you can accomplish.

[emodendroket]

If you reject appeals to intuition there is really nothing to base your argument for ethics on since at their core they all rely on one. Made that college ethics class I took a bit unsatisfying.

[chrchang523]

People are not forced to treat EA as an all-or-nothing package. If some of their claims are more convincing than others, and acceptance of only the more-convincing claims leads to SBF-like behavior with much-higher-than-background probability, it is important to strengthen some arguments, and/or withdraw community support for ideas that are currently too unsafe in practice.

[eddsh1994]

I agree with this. I think there are two sides of EA - the futurist utilitarian viewpoint and the rational QALY/$ viewpoint. I'm a believer of the latter, but do worry because this is boring (malaria nets and deworming) the former is the only one people hear of or see even if it's a minority group.

[zestyping]

[This has been moved to a top-level comment.]

[eddsh1994]

What enormous damage has it caused?

I say this as someone who took the Earning to Give path from 80,000 hours and happily donate to healthcare charities suggested by Givewell via Giving What We Can. My wife took the other path and is a postdoc at Stanford working on medical research with an EA focus (both in her field and on replication crisis in medicine). I'm pretty in this space so to speak, albeit only in a small way.