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.
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.