Thanks. I agree that we might endorse some (or many) changes. Hidden away in my first footnote is a link to a pretty broad set of values. To expand: I would be excited to give (and have in the past given) resources to people smarter than me who are outcome-oriented, maximizing, cause-impartial and egalitarian, as defined by Will here, even (or especially) if they plan to use them differently to how I would. Similarly, keeping the value ‘do the most good’ stable maybe means something like keeping the outcome-oriented, maximizing, cause-impartial and egalitarian values stable.
For clarity, I excluded profit maximisation because incentives to pursue this goal seem powerful in a way that might never apply to effective altruism, however broadly it is construed. (The ‘impartial’ part seems especially hard to keep stable.) In particular, profit maximisation does not even need to be propagated: e.g. if a company does some random other stuff for a while, its stakeholders will still have a moderate incentive to maximise profits, so will typically return to doing this. A similar statement is that ‘maximise profits’ is the default state of things. No matter how broad our conception of ‘do the most good’ can be made, it seems likely to lack this property (except for lock-in scenarios).
Thanks. I agree that we might endorse some (or many) changes. Hidden away in my first footnote is a link to a pretty broad set of values. To expand: I would be excited to give (and have in the past given) resources to people smarter than me who are outcome-oriented, maximizing, cause-impartial and egalitarian, as defined by Will here, even (or especially) if they plan to use them differently to how I would. Similarly, keeping the value ‘do the most good’ stable maybe means something like keeping the outcome-oriented, maximizing, cause-impartial and egalitarian values stable.
For clarity, I excluded profit maximisation because incentives to pursue this goal seem powerful in a way that might never apply to effective altruism, however broadly it is construed. (The ‘impartial’ part seems especially hard to keep stable.) In particular, profit maximisation does not even need to be propagated: e.g. if a company does some random other stuff for a while, its stakeholders will still have a moderate incentive to maximise profits, so will typically return to doing this. A similar statement is that ‘maximise profits’ is the default state of things. No matter how broad our conception of ‘do the most good’ can be made, it seems likely to lack this property (except for lock-in scenarios).