I mean, indeed the combination of “fraud is a vague, poorly defined category” together with a strong condemnation of said “fraud”, without much explicit guidance on what kind of thing you are talking about, is what I am objecting to in your post.
I guess I don’t really think this is a problem. We’re perfectly comfortable with statements like “murder is wrong” while also understanding that “but killing Hitler would be okay.” I don’t mean to say that talking about the edge cases isn’t ever helpful—in fact, I think it can be quite useful to try to be clear about what’s happening on the edges in certain cases, since it can sometimes be quite relevant. But I don’t see that as a reason to object to someone saying “murder is wrong.”
To be clear, if your criticism is “the post doesn’t say much beyond the obvious,” I think that’s basically correct—it was a short post and wasn’t intended to accomplish much more than basic common knowledge building around this sort of fraud being bad even when done with ostensibly altruistic motivations. And I agree that further posts discussing more clearly how to think about various edge cases would be a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion (though I don’t personally plan to write such a post because I think I have more valuable things to do with my time).
However, if your criticism is “your post says edge case B is bad but edge case B is actually good,” I think that’s a pretty silly criticism that seems like it just doesn’t really understand or engage with the inherent fuzziness of conceptual categories.
I guess I don’t really think this is a problem. We’re perfectly comfortable with statements like “murder is wrong” while also understanding that “but killing Hitler would be okay.” I don’t mean to say that talking about the edge cases isn’t ever helpful—in fact, I think it can be quite useful to try to be clear about what’s happening on the edges in certain cases, since it can sometimes be quite relevant. But I don’t see that as a reason to object to someone saying “murder is wrong.”
To be clear, if your criticism is “the post doesn’t say much beyond the obvious,” I think that’s basically correct—it was a short post and wasn’t intended to accomplish much more than basic common knowledge building around this sort of fraud being bad even when done with ostensibly altruistic motivations. And I agree that further posts discussing more clearly how to think about various edge cases would be a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion (though I don’t personally plan to write such a post because I think I have more valuable things to do with my time).
However, if your criticism is “your post says edge case B is bad but edge case B is actually good,” I think that’s a pretty silly criticism that seems like it just doesn’t really understand or engage with the inherent fuzziness of conceptual categories.