Moving Moral Economics Forward

Diego_Caleiro21 Jul 2015 3:26 UTC
3 points
3 comments2 min readEA link

Moving Moral Economics Forward

In these writings we propose the creation of a sub-field of knowledge, Moral Economics, and provide in broad strokes its characteristics. We assemble previous writings that can be considered prospective subfields. We also discuss several concepts that have been developed in recent years that are instrumentally useful for Moral Economic thinking, and propose several new ones that could also bear fruit if the study of this area develops further in the future.

  1. Introducing Moral Economics

  2. Examples of Moral Economics Concepts

  3. Branches Within Moral Economics

  4. Moving Moral Economics Forward

  5. Direct Funding Between EAs

  6. Certificates of Impact, Doing It Right—Giles Edkins

    1. Moral market failure: how COIs might help

    2. Problems with COIs, and their solutions

    3. Implementing COIs

  7. Agential Identity in Moral Economics

Why Call This the Creation of a Subfield?

The intuition behind this I take from conversations with Duncan Germain, Stuart Russell, Davi Mamblona, Geoff Anders, where I got the intuition that the announcement of a field is a great way to generate a memetic attractor around an idea which permits people to look at it in a new light, as has happened to parkour, pilates, hiking, planking, memetics and others. For instance Bostrom starts his Hail Mary paper:

  • In the field of superintelligence control studies, which focuses on how to ensure that a hypothetical future superintelligent system would be safe and beneficial, two broad classes of approaches to the control problem can be distinguished: capability control methods and value selection methods.

In seven words and a stroke of genius, he created a precedent that I find of immense value. He created a field of study. I have already cited this passage in papers and writings of mine, and now others too can refer to superintelligence control as a field. My conversations with Stuart Russell (and many grad students) have the goal of creating an AI safety engineering course at Berkeley, to set the precedent for some of the 1500+ universities that use his AIMA textbook to also have that course. You can imagine how happy I was to see the first words of Bostrom’s paper. I literally grinned for some ten seconds. Academics are strange.

Moving Moral Economics Forward

There is ample room to consider other items in the moral economic cluster that are worth exploring but were not thought of by any of the cited texts or editors of this writing. Taking a glossary of economics, I can see within Moral Economics parallels with interesting and different properties to the following concepts:

  • Accelerator

  • Bank

  • Bond

  • Moral Capital Gain

  • Conditionality

  • Cost of Job Loss

  • Credit

  • Moral Debt (see e.g. Lakoff 1997)

  • Inflation

  • Deflation

  • Depreciation (see e.g. Haste consideration above)

  • Dividend

  • Effective Demand (is it approximately unbounded? unlike classical demand?)

  • Externalities

  • Finance

  • Gross Moral Domestic Product (How much moral good did an entity generate)

  • Inequality (who are the Moral 1%?)

  • Interest

  • Labor extraction

  • Macroeconomics

  • Microeconomics

  • Multiplier

  • Moral Poverty

  • Profit

  • Public Goods

  • Moral recession

  • Shares

  • Supply-constrained (more frequent in moral economics)

  • Value Added



All of these would behave in interesting and different ways in altruistic economics or moral economics—go back and try yourself to envision the differences. However, economics is not my field of expertise, so I can only show some of the pointers but not develop the concepts in full. This is a job for economists. As Bertrand Russell would say, one job of philosophy is to ask questions about what we don’t know and create ways for that to become knowable. Much of philosophical progress was the creation of what today are considered sciences. In Moral Trade, Toby Ord has set the ground for this to happen once again, I suggest we follow suit and begin exploring this unknown scientific territory.
In the next piece in the Moral Economics Series we take a closer look at Direct Funding Between EAs, a valuable idea that has not received a lot of attention so far within the Effective Altruist community, yet holds interesting promise as a way to generate altruistic value.
How do you think some of the concepts above would be seen from a Moral Economics perspective? How do they differ between trade and Moral Trade?
Diego_Caleiro21 Jul 2015 3:26 UTC
3 points
3 comments2 min readEA link