I agree with you, both that an impact-certificate market would likely end up a little decoupled from pure utilitarian impact, and that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since there are lots of forms of altruistic (or semi-altruistic) patronage that can help the world, and non-utilitarian uses of impact markets don’t prevent utilitarians from using the markets how they want.
But there are a lot of tricky edge cases when it comes to impact certificates! I recently made this list of five “sketchy certificates” exploring various potential dilemmas:
Here is some other recent conversation about impact certificates and various ways we might try to structure the market to avoid these and other problems.
Regarding the AMF case, your point (2) seems to be the central motivation for impact certificates, right? To reward people for having done impactful altruistic acts, so I’m not sure why you think it’s weird. Because the altruistic action is a donation instead of something more direct on the object level?
And at some future point malaria and co will hopefully be solved and the value of the 2015 donation will approach the much higher value of a life at this future timepoint (minus the contribution that belongs to others involved in the success of AMF).
I agree with you, both that an impact-certificate market would likely end up a little decoupled from pure utilitarian impact, and that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since there are lots of forms of altruistic (or semi-altruistic) patronage that can help the world, and non-utilitarian uses of impact markets don’t prevent utilitarians from using the markets how they want.
But there are a lot of tricky edge cases when it comes to impact certificates! I recently made this list of five “sketchy certificates” exploring various potential dilemmas:
Here is some other recent conversation about impact certificates and various ways we might try to structure the market to avoid these and other problems.
Regarding the AMF case, your point (2) seems to be the central motivation for impact certificates, right? To reward people for having done impactful altruistic acts, so I’m not sure why you think it’s weird. Because the altruistic action is a donation instead of something more direct on the object level?
And at some future point malaria and co will hopefully be solved and the value of the 2015 donation will approach the much higher value of a life at this future timepoint (minus the contribution that belongs to others involved in the success of AMF).