I’ve genuinely found it pretty useful in the past when people say ‘you could justify any career no matter how evil that way’ to say ‘actually there are industries that 80k doesn’t think are that great, e.g. tobacco’*. I haven’t had an easy way of linking to that opinion before; now I do. So as an 80k donor I’m glad they also see the value of distancing themselves from the ‘it’s all good as long as you donate’ position.
OP: “Several points in this article intrigued me, but what I would like reaction to is that there is a massive flaw in the seeming innocence of the work to give model, if that employment is based on an inherently exploitative system. As I see it, very few of our high paying positions in the US are not based on a system which exploits the labor and/or resources of people on other parts of the globe. Is it possible to calculate for the most good, while adjusting for exploitation?”
Me: ”...An alternative would be for me to decide that my job does so much bad that it can’t be outweighed by even the most-targeted donations. I think that claim fails a basic sanity check as Tilde has already highlighted, but again if the author and those who think like her would like to actually engage quantitatively with that analysis, I’d love to hear from them. It’s worth noting that there are a small number of industries that 80k largely avoids (e.g. Tobacco) due to exactly this concern.”
I don’t know if that convinced the person in the thread, but rationally that doesn’t really look like a sound argument. If finance exploits people too much then it’s still a problem regardless of what 80k thinks tobacco CEOs happen to do. Moreover, the article about tobacco will make 80k look even worse to these types of critics, because it’s implying that something even more morally repugnant than finance could be justified if the math worked out a little differently.
What exactly is rationally unsound about responding to ‘You/80k could justify any career that way’ with ‘Actually, I/they still don’t think it justifies this career’? You might disagree with the response or prefer to just focus on the direct career in question*, but it certainly seems like a valid response.
I feel like I’m missing something.
*I only didn’t do this because someone else (Tilde) had already done it; if you look you’ll see I did reference their response.
Edit: I realise that my OP makes it look like I’m trying to make an original argument. I’m not; Rob makes pretty much the exact same point in bold on the 80k post:
“The key point I want to highlight is that there are very likely jobs such as this, where even considering ‘replaceability’, and even if you donate all your earnings effectively, it would not be enough to offset the direct harm done.
If you are trying to do the most good by earning to give, you will probably do better by looking for a job that both pays well, and has either neutral or positive direct impacts.”
What exactly is rationally unsound about responding to ‘You/80k could justify any career that way’ with ‘Actually, I/they still don’t think it justifies this career’? You might disagree with the response or prefer to just focus on the direct career in question*, but it certainly seems like a valid response.
The point still holds because you still could justify being a tobacco salesperson in this way—if the math went a little differently, if you decided charity had better flow through effects, if you decided that smoking was not as bad as the article’s assumptions, etc—then you would justify being a tobacco salesman. If you wanted to alleviate animal suffering or x-risk then your calculations could come out in favor of that. That’s the problem: people have a moral issue with the idea that it could be acceptable to harm some to donate to others.
“The key point I want to highlight is that there are very likely jobs such as this, where even considering ‘replaceability’, and even if you donate all your earnings effectively, it would not be enough to offset the direct harm done.
If you are trying to do the most good by earning to give, you will probably do better by looking for a job that both pays well, and has either neutral or positive direct impacts.”
I’m sure he means well, but it does nothing to answer the criticisms: again, just because it works out this way for this one job with this one calculation doesn’t necessarily imply anything about other jobs with a negative impact. It doesn’t answer the moral objection to the assumed framework.
“That’s the problem: people have a moral issue with the idea that it could be acceptable to harm some to donate to others.”
Oh, I see. You think I’m addressing this argument to someone coming from a non-consequentialist framework who has inherent issues with dealing small damage to A through your work in order to deliver large benefits to B through your donations. If that were the case I agree this would be an unsound or at least barely-relevant response.
But that’s not the case. I’m addressing this to people who just have a feeling that the damage you do is greater than the benefits, i.e. they don’t have a problem with the framework, they are just suspicious of the seemingly fully general nature of the earning-to-give argument. E.g. the OP in the example I gave explicitly refers to doing a ‘calculation’ for the most good. If the OP had been about the moral un-virtuousness of EtG instead, then for sure I should respond differently.
Apart from that misunderstanding I don’t have any substantive disagreement with your points.
I haven’t had an easy way of linking to that opinion before; now I do. So as an 80k donor I’m glad they also see the value of distancing themselves from the ‘it’s all good as long as you donate’ position.
To be clear, you think it’s worth spending a few hundred quid apiece for linkable resources like this? (I.e. you’d pay others a similar amount in an impact purchase if they did so.)
Given that this particular straw man attack tends to be addressed to 80k and their public platform is relatively stronger than this forum or random blogs, there’s obviously higher value in it being hosted on the 80k blog. I wouldn’t be averse to someone else writing it and them hosting it though.
Btw, where are you getting a few hundred quid from? This strikes me as very much the type of thing Rob might spend some of his own time working on and thinking about anyway; the estimated cost of refining that into a blog post seems very high to me. Rob should obviously feel free to contradict me if I’m off-base.
I’ve genuinely found it pretty useful in the past when people say ‘you could justify any career no matter how evil that way’ to say ‘actually there are industries that 80k doesn’t think are that great, e.g. tobacco’*. I haven’t had an easy way of linking to that opinion before; now I do. So as an 80k donor I’m glad they also see the value of distancing themselves from the ‘it’s all good as long as you donate’ position.
*For a example from less than a month ago: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/990753924314298/
OP: “Several points in this article intrigued me, but what I would like reaction to is that there is a massive flaw in the seeming innocence of the work to give model, if that employment is based on an inherently exploitative system. As I see it, very few of our high paying positions in the US are not based on a system which exploits the labor and/or resources of people on other parts of the globe. Is it possible to calculate for the most good, while adjusting for exploitation?”
Me: ”...An alternative would be for me to decide that my job does so much bad that it can’t be outweighed by even the most-targeted donations. I think that claim fails a basic sanity check as Tilde has already highlighted, but again if the author and those who think like her would like to actually engage quantitatively with that analysis, I’d love to hear from them. It’s worth noting that there are a small number of industries that 80k largely avoids (e.g. Tobacco) due to exactly this concern.”
I don’t know if that convinced the person in the thread, but rationally that doesn’t really look like a sound argument. If finance exploits people too much then it’s still a problem regardless of what 80k thinks tobacco CEOs happen to do. Moreover, the article about tobacco will make 80k look even worse to these types of critics, because it’s implying that something even more morally repugnant than finance could be justified if the math worked out a little differently.
What exactly is rationally unsound about responding to ‘You/80k could justify any career that way’ with ‘Actually, I/they still don’t think it justifies this career’? You might disagree with the response or prefer to just focus on the direct career in question*, but it certainly seems like a valid response.
I feel like I’m missing something.
*I only didn’t do this because someone else (Tilde) had already done it; if you look you’ll see I did reference their response.
Edit: I realise that my OP makes it look like I’m trying to make an original argument. I’m not; Rob makes pretty much the exact same point in bold on the 80k post:
“The key point I want to highlight is that there are very likely jobs such as this, where even considering ‘replaceability’, and even if you donate all your earnings effectively, it would not be enough to offset the direct harm done.
If you are trying to do the most good by earning to give, you will probably do better by looking for a job that both pays well, and has either neutral or positive direct impacts.”
The point still holds because you still could justify being a tobacco salesperson in this way—if the math went a little differently, if you decided charity had better flow through effects, if you decided that smoking was not as bad as the article’s assumptions, etc—then you would justify being a tobacco salesman. If you wanted to alleviate animal suffering or x-risk then your calculations could come out in favor of that. That’s the problem: people have a moral issue with the idea that it could be acceptable to harm some to donate to others.
I’m sure he means well, but it does nothing to answer the criticisms: again, just because it works out this way for this one job with this one calculation doesn’t necessarily imply anything about other jobs with a negative impact. It doesn’t answer the moral objection to the assumed framework.
“That’s the problem: people have a moral issue with the idea that it could be acceptable to harm some to donate to others.”
Oh, I see. You think I’m addressing this argument to someone coming from a non-consequentialist framework who has inherent issues with dealing small damage to A through your work in order to deliver large benefits to B through your donations. If that were the case I agree this would be an unsound or at least barely-relevant response.
But that’s not the case. I’m addressing this to people who just have a feeling that the damage you do is greater than the benefits, i.e. they don’t have a problem with the framework, they are just suspicious of the seemingly fully general nature of the earning-to-give argument. E.g. the OP in the example I gave explicitly refers to doing a ‘calculation’ for the most good. If the OP had been about the moral un-virtuousness of EtG instead, then for sure I should respond differently.
Apart from that misunderstanding I don’t have any substantive disagreement with your points.
To be clear, you think it’s worth spending a few hundred quid apiece for linkable resources like this? (I.e. you’d pay others a similar amount in an impact purchase if they did so.)
Given that this particular straw man attack tends to be addressed to 80k and their public platform is relatively stronger than this forum or random blogs, there’s obviously higher value in it being hosted on the 80k blog. I wouldn’t be averse to someone else writing it and them hosting it though.
Btw, where are you getting a few hundred quid from? This strikes me as very much the type of thing Rob might spend some of his own time working on and thinking about anyway; the estimated cost of refining that into a blog post seems very high to me. Rob should obviously feel free to contradict me if I’m off-base.