| > Maximizing profits often requires minimizing the welfare of others - for example through exploitative labor practices. I've had a long, albeit shallow, exposure to EA, and my model of altruism has roughly matched up with it for even longer. Most of the formulations of Earn-to-Give I've encountered don't fit your description here, of maximizing profit blindly, at any expense[1]. The formulation I'm familiar with is ceterus-paribus: choosing between two jobs as with much of EA, a gentle pushback against intuitive notion that you should privilege doing good with your own two hands over doing good with money. The exemplar here is not "sell meth to kids to buy mosquito nets", it's "be an accountant for a widget firm to donate enough to hire two Peace Corp workers instead of working directly as a PC worker". For a more explicit but more recent example, 80k Hrs published, 5 years ago, an explicit rejection of what you're describing: > We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it’s a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms. https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/ > ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others. Tangential, but I don't follow this. How does ETG give donors more control than working in an altruistic career, or than donors with a more traditional mindset? |