Perhaps we did not emphasise enough the simple point “never commit a crime”. As I said in the previous point, there have been extensive warnings against naive “ends justify the means” thinking from many leaders (MacAskill, Ord, Karnofsky, CEA Guiding Principles, 80,000 Hours career advice, etc).
Nevertheless, we could do even more, for example in 80,000 Hours resources or career/student groups, to emphasise this point. There didn’t seem to be much explicit “don’t ever commit a crime” warnings (I assume because this should have been so blindingly obvious to any reasonable or moral person).
There are many immoral laws in the world, particularly but not exclusively if you look outside Europe and the US, e.g. EAs living in countries where homosexuality is illegal should, I think, have our support in breaking the law if they want to.
In fact, I think most people with a cursory understanding of the history of activism will be aware of the role that civil disobedience has sometimes had in correcting injustice, so breaking laws can sometimes be even virtuous. In extreme cases, one can even imagine it being morally obligatory.
I think a categorical “never commit crimes” is hard to take seriously without some explicit response to this context. I definitely don’t think we should claim it’s obvious that no-one should ever break the law.
It is intuitively “obvious” that Sam’s crimes aren’t crimes like these. (I pretty much always second-guess the word obvious, but I’m happy to use it here.) But that’s because we can judge for ourselves that they’re harmful and immoral, not because they’re against the law. Perhaps someone could make an argument that sometimes you should follow the law even when your own morality says you should do something else, but I don’t think it’s going to be a simple or obvious argument.
There are many immoral laws in the world, particularly but not exclusively if you look outside Europe and the US, e.g. EAs living in countries where homosexuality is illegal should, I think, have our support in breaking the law if they want to.
In fact, I think most people with a cursory understanding of the history of activism will be aware of the role that civil disobedience has sometimes had in correcting injustice, so breaking laws can sometimes be even virtuous. In extreme cases, one can even imagine it being morally obligatory.
I think a categorical “never commit crimes” is hard to take seriously without some explicit response to this context. I definitely don’t think we should claim it’s obvious that no-one should ever break the law.
It is intuitively “obvious” that Sam’s crimes aren’t crimes like these. (I pretty much always second-guess the word obvious, but I’m happy to use it here.) But that’s because we can judge for ourselves that they’re harmful and immoral, not because they’re against the law. Perhaps someone could make an argument that sometimes you should follow the law even when your own morality says you should do something else, but I don’t think it’s going to be a simple or obvious argument.