My naive moral psychology guessâwhich may very well be falsified by subsequent revelations, as many of my views have this weekâis that we probably wonât ever find an âends justify the meansâ smoking gun (eg, an internal memo from SBF saying that we need to fraudulently move funds from account A to B so we can give more to EA). More likely, systemic weaknesses in FTXâs compliance and risk management practices failed to prevent aggressive risk-taking and unethical profit-seeking and self-preserving business decisions that were motivated by some complicated but unstated mix of misguided pseduo-altruism, self-preservation instincts, hubris, and perceived business/âshareholder demands.
I say this because we can and should be denouncing ends justify the means reasoning of this type, but I suspect very rarely in the heat of a perceived crisis will many people actually invoke it. I think we will prevent more catastrophes of this nature in the future by focusing more on on integrity as a personal virtue and the need for systemic compliance and risk-management tools within EA broadly and highly impactful/âprominent EA orgs, especially those whose altruistic motives will be systematically in tension with perceived business demands.
Relatedly, I think a focus on ends-justify-the-means reasoning is potentially misguided because it seems super clear in this case that, even if we put zero intrinsic value on integrity, honesty, not doing fraud, etc., some of the decisions made here were pretty clearly very negative expected-value. We should expect the upsides from acquiring resources by fraud (again, if that is what happened) to be systematically worth much less than reputational and trustworthiness damage our community will receive by virtue of motivating, endorsing, or benefitting from that behavior.
My naive moral psychology guessâwhich may very well be falsified by subsequent revelations, as many of my views have this weekâis that we probably wonât ever find an âends justify the meansâ smoking gun (eg, an internal memo from SBF saying that we need to fraudulently move funds from account A to B so we can give more to EA). More likely, systemic weaknesses in FTXâs compliance and risk management practices failed to prevent aggressive risk-taking and unethical profit-seeking and self-preserving business decisions that were motivated by some complicated but unstated mix of misguided pseduo-altruism, self-preservation instincts, hubris, and perceived business/âshareholder demands.
I say this because we can and should be denouncing ends justify the means reasoning of this type, but I suspect very rarely in the heat of a perceived crisis will many people actually invoke it. I think we will prevent more catastrophes of this nature in the future by focusing more on on integrity as a personal virtue and the need for systemic compliance and risk-management tools within EA broadly and highly impactful/âprominent EA orgs, especially those whose altruistic motives will be systematically in tension with perceived business demands.
Relatedly, I think a focus on ends-justify-the-means reasoning is potentially misguided because it seems super clear in this case that, even if we put zero intrinsic value on integrity, honesty, not doing fraud, etc., some of the decisions made here were pretty clearly very negative expected-value. We should expect the upsides from acquiring resources by fraud (again, if that is what happened) to be systematically worth much less than reputational and trustworthiness damage our community will receive by virtue of motivating, endorsing, or benefitting from that behavior.