“Just do good” is an easy heuristic up until it runs against “just kill yourself” at which point I think we should actually do the utility calculation beyond the 1st degree effects, yes.
My claim is that we shouldn’t be using utilitarian ethics to judge this and instead do the heuristically obvious things, that’s what EA <sometimes> does.
But those heuristics have boundaries which are usually set at harming self and others.
The reason I make this argument is because self-harm is only justified in a very naive utilitarian framework, I believe a mature framework of ethics avoids it in other ways. And I am making this argument primarily for young naive people (like myself) who might not have that fully developed frame of ethics. Some of which might still be utilitarians.
In other words, I would not do the reverse and I don’t think that the “makes the market less efficient” argument stands up to scrutiny in any sensible framework of ethics. But neither does altruistic kidney donation, so I am trying, to the best of my abilities, to showcase the fallacy in the ethical framework with which readers are likely to operate.
To quote my other comment:
My claim is that we shouldn’t be using utilitarian ethics to judge this and instead do the heuristically obvious things, that’s what EA <sometimes> does.
But those heuristics have boundaries which are usually set at harming self and others.
The reason I make this argument is because self-harm is only justified in a very naive utilitarian framework, I believe a mature framework of ethics avoids it in other ways. And I am making this argument primarily for young naive people (like myself) who might not have that fully developed frame of ethics. Some of which might still be utilitarians.
In other words, I would not do the reverse and I don’t think that the “makes the market less efficient” argument stands up to scrutiny in any sensible framework of ethics. But neither does altruistic kidney donation, so I am trying, to the best of my abilities, to showcase the fallacy in the ethical framework with which readers are likely to operate.