This post argues against a strawman—it’s not credible that utilitarianism endorses frauding to give. It’s also not quite a question of whether Sam “misconstrued” utilitarianism, in that I doubt that he did a rational calculus on whether fraud was +EV, and he denies doing so.
The potential problem, rather, is that naive consequentialism/act utilitarianism removes some of the ethical guardrails that would ordinarily make fraud very unlikely. As I’ve said:In order to avoid taking harmful actions, an act utilitarian has to remember to calculate, and then to calculate correctly. (Whereas rules are often easier to remember and to properly apply.) The way Sam tells it, he became “less grounded” or “cocky”, leading to these mistakes. Would this have happened if he followed another theory? We can’t know, but we should be clear-eyed about the fact that hardcore utilitarians, despite representing maybe 1/1M of the world’s population, are responsible for maybe 1⁄10 of the greatest frauds, i.e. they’re over-represented by a factor of 100k, in a direction that would be pretty expected, based on the (italicised) argument above (which must surely have been made previously by moral philosophers). For effective altruists, we can lop off maybe one order of magnitude, but it doesn’t look great either.
I disagree that I argue against a strawman. The media’s coverage of Bankman-Fried frequently implies that he used consequentialism to justify his actions. This, in turn, implies that consequentialism endorses fraud so long as you give away your money. Like I said, the arguments in the post are not revolutionary, but I do think they are important.
You give no evidence for your claim that hardcore utilitarians commit 1⁄10 of the “greatest frauds”. I struggle to even engage with this claim because it seems so speculative. But I will say that I agree that utilitarianism has been (incorrectly) used to justify harm. As I stated:
“the EA movement is broadly consequentialist, so we should examine our own theoretical endorsements under a broadly consequentialist framework. If we determine that publicly advocating consequentialism directly causes many people to act immorally “in the name of consequentialism”, we should either 1. change our messaging or 2. stop advocating consequentialism even if it’s still what we truly believe”
Part of my motivation for making this post was helping consequentialists think about our actions—specifically those around the idea of earning to give. In other words, the post is intended to clarify some “ethical guardrails” within a consequentialist framework.
You give no evidence for your claim that hardcore utilitarians commit 1⁄10 of the “greatest frauds”. I struggle to even engage with this claim because it seems so speculative.
I mean that the dollar value of lost funds would seem to make it one of the top ten biggest frauds of all time (assuming that fraud is what happened). Perusing a list on Wikipedia, I can only see four times larger sums were defrauded: Madoff, Enron, Worldcom, Stanford.
Okay, I see now. I read that as “one-tenth” not one out of 10.
I’m on board with your lack-of-guardrails argument against utilitarianism. I hope arguments like the one made in this post help to construct them so we don’t end up with another catastrophe.
This post argues against a strawman—it’s not credible that utilitarianism endorses frauding to give. It’s also not quite a question of whether Sam “misconstrued” utilitarianism, in that I doubt that he did a rational calculus on whether fraud was +EV, and he denies doing so.
The potential problem, rather, is that naive consequentialism/act utilitarianism removes some of the ethical guardrails that would ordinarily make fraud very unlikely. As I’ve said: In order to avoid taking harmful actions, an act utilitarian has to remember to calculate, and then to calculate correctly. (Whereas rules are often easier to remember and to properly apply.) The way Sam tells it, he became “less grounded” or “cocky”, leading to these mistakes. Would this have happened if he followed another theory? We can’t know, but we should be clear-eyed about the fact that hardcore utilitarians, despite representing maybe 1/1M of the world’s population, are responsible for maybe 1⁄10 of the greatest frauds, i.e. they’re over-represented by a factor of 100k, in a direction that would be pretty expected, based on the (italicised) argument above (which must surely have been made previously by moral philosophers). For effective altruists, we can lop off maybe one order of magnitude, but it doesn’t look great either.
I disagree that I argue against a strawman. The media’s coverage of Bankman-Fried frequently implies that he used consequentialism to justify his actions. This, in turn, implies that consequentialism endorses fraud so long as you give away your money. Like I said, the arguments in the post are not revolutionary, but I do think they are important.
You give no evidence for your claim that hardcore utilitarians commit 1⁄10 of the “greatest frauds”. I struggle to even engage with this claim because it seems so speculative. But I will say that I agree that utilitarianism has been (incorrectly) used to justify harm. As I stated:
Part of my motivation for making this post was helping consequentialists think about our actions—specifically those around the idea of earning to give. In other words, the post is intended to clarify some “ethical guardrails” within a consequentialist framework.
I mean that the dollar value of lost funds would seem to make it one of the top ten biggest frauds of all time (assuming that fraud is what happened). Perusing a list on Wikipedia, I can only see four times larger sums were defrauded: Madoff, Enron, Worldcom, Stanford.
Okay, I see now. I read that as “one-tenth” not one out of 10.
I’m on board with your lack-of-guardrails argument against utilitarianism. I hope arguments like the one made in this post help to construct them so we don’t end up with another catastrophe.