Seems kind of crazy to me, for what it’s worth. Really seems like if someone’s life was at stake, that you should do something else than just “not tolerate it”.
Like, we do live in a world where our grandparents (or parents) were sometimes faced with the real decision on whether to lie to gestapo officers about the jews in their basement. Please, if you are an accountant and you have to do some slight tweaking of numbers to save the jews in your basement, please do that. This is not a pure hypothetical, misappropriating funds under immoral and illegal regimes is an actual decision that people alive right now, and people in the future will face.
Maybe it is the right call for you to swear some undying oath to the accounting principles, but I don’t think most people should do that.
In my experience as an accountant for 10 plus years
My impression is that in the business world, “fraud” is pointing at a cluster of actions that’s more specific than most simple definitions. I’d assume that there are incredibly few cases where businesses are actually in situations where they feel they need to commit fraud to save a life or similar, especially in Western countries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even legal loopholes for these extreme hypothetical-like situations. Like, the person could say they were under effective duress.
My guess is that basically any of us would agree to hypotheticals or thought experiments that were wild enough. Like, “What if you knew with absolute certainty that America would be completely nuked unless your business commits a tiny amount of fraud? Would you do it then?”
Huh, I thought “fraud” was one of those categories that does indeed kind of criminalize a huge swath of behavior.
My model is that “fraud” (which includes e.g. tax evasion) is kind of the thing that prosecutors fall back on if they can’t pin anything else on you, but feel really confident that you did something wrong, like the famous case of convicting Al Capone primarily for tax evasion.
This suggests to me that the legal definition of fraud has a lot of degrees of freedom in it. I’ve heard it referenced as one of those things that might end up criminalizing a lot of relatively “normal” behavior (like I remember “wire fraud” as another one of these extremely general categories of crime that seems to often get used as a kind of catch-all of bad behavior using any kind of telecommunications).
This doesn’t mean that fraud isn’t a meaningful concept, or whatever, but I think it’s straightforwardly false that the legal definition of fraud points to a much more narrow subset than common-usage definitions. It’s probably somewhat narrower, as most legal concepts are, but I don’t think there is a huge disconnect between common-usage of fraud and the legal definition of it.
Fraud defined in this post is in business context—mismanagement, violation of internal controls or collusion, etc. The self defined position you are claiming Habryka for fraud is very different from what is acceptable in governance and internal audit standards that governs large organizations.
I’m confused. Your comment makes it sounds like someone reading this post might one day have to decide whether to commit fraud in order to save a life or do something else extremely morally important.
I can’t think of any examples of that in a democracy in the last 50 years*. Can you? If it’s so rare that neither of us can think of an example, I think condemning fraud unequivocally is the way to go, to avoid any confusion.
*I actually can’t think of any examples at all, but think this kind of example would be most relevant.
I’m confused about this comment tbh. I can’t tell if we just have very different life experiences or if there is some cognitive fallacy thing going on where it’s easier to generate examples for my position than examples against my position.
For example, (in my family’s lore) my grandfather was asked to cover up a (as I understand it) minor instance of corruption by his superior. He refused to do so, and was majorly screwed over during Cultural Revolution times as a result. Now this example isn’t a clean one since “doing the right thing, even when it’s hard” here pointed against fraud, and he in fact did not choose to do so. But I think I would not have faulted him if he chose protecting his family over loyalty to the party for some pretty minor thing. Particularly since his actual choice could easily have counterfactually resulted in my own non-existence.
As another example, at least some forms of American whistleblower animal activism involve skirting the edges of ag-gag laws, which may involve falsifying documents to be allowed access to factory farms to be able to film atrocities. Now maybe their moves here are unethical (I personally would hesitate to lie to an employer to that extent, though it’s unclear if this is judicious moral reasoning or just insufficient bravery). But I think this is at least the type of question that’s subject to debate, and I would not want to condemn such actions without substantially more detailed thinking and debate.
Note however that the post above only condemns fraud at FTX, not globally.
Those sound closer to what I’d think of as fraud, although I also wouldn’t encourage the fraudulent option in either case! But no, I really didn’t think of either of those examples when trying to generate examples of fraud that people might think is morally good
Yep, I think we are indeed living in pretty interesting times!
I think both my parents and grandparents in Germany faced similar decisions, and definitely within the last 50 years (half of Germany was under USSR occupancy around 30 years ago!).
Something being “a democracy” is I think only a weak filter on the actual need for this. The U.S. had various anti-gay and anti-communism periods in which I think lying to the government or committing fraud seemed very likely the way to go (e.g. I personally am sympathetic, though very tentatively still overall opposed to the people who committed minor fraud to e.g. dodge the draft for the vietnam war, and definitely in favor of military personnel who lied about their sexual orientation for most of the last 50 years).
I also think racism was a serious enough problem within the last 50 years that I would not judge someone if they had lied about their race in various government documents in order to gain access to fair treatment, and of course anti-semitism has been rampant enough that lying about your religious affiliation to the government or universities, even within the U.S. was an action I would not judge people too badly for.
It is indeed very easy for me to come up with a very long list of examples where committing minor fraud, with an intention of limiting the negative effects of it, was the ethical (or at least a defensible) choice. Happy to generate more if you want
(for some more examples:
Given that many universities have a policy of expelling students with mental health problems I would not fault someone for lying to their university administration when they are asked about whether they have a history of depression or are using anti-depressants.
I think various occupational licensing regimes are crazy enough that I would not fault someone for operating without a license for e.g. being a hairdresser, though I feel tentatively confused about this.
Various parts of immigration law seem crazy enough to me that engaging with the government fully honestly here seems like it could seriously endanger your life or the lives of your children.
Most recently the government had crazy enough lockdown restrictions, as well as rules about how vaccines should be distributed, that I think it was ethical to break those rules, which potentially would have involved lying to the government e.g. given that tons of vaccines were being thrown away, I think I support people who said that they hadn’t received a second dose yet in order to get a booster, since the only reason why boosters weren’t happening was crazy FDA shenanigans.
)
I also expect the world will end up more crazy in the future than it has been in the recent past. I assign substantial probability to additional widespread pandemics, major power wars, nuclear conflict and political polarization causing substantially more oppressive regimes in the west (not like, super high probabilities to any of these, but I think the last 20-30 years, at least in the western world, have been a very calm time in terms of radical global changes, and I do not expect that period of relative calmness to persist for that much longer). I think all of these are also associated with conflict that gives substantially more justification to lying to major institutions and governments and other things that might be classified as fraud.
lying to major institutions and governments and other things that might be classified as fraud.
Okay, that’s where I misunderstood you—lying to the government is not what I think of when condemning fraud. I think lying to government can be very serious and is often done too flippantly, but it’s not what I thought you were defending. In my mind, fraud is primarily about stealing money, and I just couldn’t figure out how you were defending that.
Yeah, in my mind fraud is not tied to financial benefit (and I don’t think it is legally either, any kind of personal benefit will suffice). I also think that if the government is asking you as a jew or as a gay person to pay extra taxes or pay other types of fines (as has happened in many jurisdictions, including in the last 50 years), I also think you are justified in lying in response to that, even if it would be for financial gain.
Like, we had sodomy laws in the U.S. until 2003, many of which carried fines (and were enforced within the last 50 years). I feel a bit confused about what you are allowed to do in order to avoid self-incrimination, but it wouldn’t surprise me that much if various people were pushed into various minor forms of fraud in order to avoid those fines and criminal penalties.
Separately, if there are substantial swaths of the population trying to discriminate against jews or gay people economically, I also feel a decent amount of sympathy for people trying to avoid that by lying, even if it is for financial gain (like, if many of the most prominent scholarships to U.S. universities explicitly exempt jewish or gay or black people, as I think wasn’t too uncommon within the last 50 years, then I feel pretty sympathetic to someone lying about their race/sexual-orientation/religion in order to still claim eligibility for those scholarships, though like, I do sure think this case isn’t obvious, and many quite nearby cases feel straightforwardly quite immoral).
I agree with the general tenor of your comment, but a) I think many of the examples you listed would not be considered financial fraud and b) I disagree on the object-level with several of your examples:
I also think racism was a serious enough problem within the last 50 years that I would not judge someone if they had lied about their race in various government documents in order to gain access to fair treatment
I’m not sure which are the specific examples you’re thinking of, but I know some people have advocated that Asian American students lie about their race and e.g. pretend to be white to gain college admissions. I think this is probably immoral and I do not recommend this.
I think I support people who said that they hadn’t received a second dose yet in order to get a booster, since the only reason why boosters weren’t happening was crazy FDA shenanigans.
I think I’m on the other side here, at least for healthy adults, and this was directly decision-relevant in me waiting to get a booster (but I will not fault people who have made a different choice here, particularly ones with medical necessity or who are caretakers for more vulnerable people).
a) I think many of the examples you listed would not be considered financial fraud
But nobody was specifically specifying financial fraud in any of this discussion, at least as far as I could tell. The OP talks about all fraud, and I haven’t seen anyone narrow things down to just financial fraud. I agree that most of the things I talked about don’t qualify as financial fraud, though I think I could also come up with many examples of it being justified to commit financial fraud within the last 50 years.
I’m not sure which are the specific examples you’re thinking of, but I know some people have advocated that Asian American students lie about their race and e.g. pretend to be white to gain college admissions. I think this is probably immoral and I do not recommend this.
Yeah, to be clear, I think I would not support this in the present day, where the forces of discrimination seem substantially weaker. There were however periods where the disadvantage seemed so large that I would have supported active civil disobedience against those rules.
I think I’m on the other side here, at least for healthy adults, and this was directly decision-relevant in me waiting to get a booster (but I will not fault people who have made a different choice here, particularly ones with medical necessity or who are caretakers for more vulnerable people).
Yep, I think this is a reasonable ethical position. I felt really quite on the edge about it, and still do, though I do feel pretty strongly that it’s not an obvious case and would feel bad about our community condemning it strongly, at least given my current understanding.
(I can’t believe I’m piling onto Kirsten with Oliver and Linch, weird).
I think the topic here is greater than financial fraud.
Some of these answers feel a lot like people who haven’t been in high agency positions with enormous responsibility and pressure.
I can think of several situations and people you would respect, who have to take special actions to shield their organization from unreasonable and disproportionate legal harm (often where they are personally uninvolved). These leaders are still good people, and try to do the best they can. Examples:
Due to difficult and bizarre legal issues, people have to characterize a highly dysfunctional and unreasonable employee’s misconduct in a way that anticipates post-termination legal exposure
Desperate and legally dubious manufacturing of stop-gap medical equipment in an extraordinary pandemic where major governments were grossly irresponsible—in this situation the CEO took on personal responsibility for the entire organization.
None of these dilemmas are limited to EA[1], it’s probably the opposite.
Although we are learning that EA seems to actually mean to a lot of people “a place where I can build a career and get resources when things are going well, and then personally evacuate and attribute responsibility to others when there’s a problem”. This is not at all unnoticed.
Hello there, lying to protect people in danger is actually truthful preservation of life. That is very different from fraud performed to serve one’s own interest. Two different situations..
You might need to read the Gulag archipelago where it accounts the best humans where the ones who have preserved their humanity even in the face of stalin’s communism—as deadly as the situation was for them, they chosed to do things right.
Not all people choose evil to fight evil my friend. There are those who have accepted their capacity to do great evil and controlled it—Jungian Shadow Embodiment.
Seems kind of crazy to me, for what it’s worth. Really seems like if someone’s life was at stake, that you should do something else than just “not tolerate it”.
Like, we do live in a world where our grandparents (or parents) were sometimes faced with the real decision on whether to lie to gestapo officers about the jews in their basement. Please, if you are an accountant and you have to do some slight tweaking of numbers to save the jews in your basement, please do that. This is not a pure hypothetical, misappropriating funds under immoral and illegal regimes is an actual decision that people alive right now, and people in the future will face.
Maybe it is the right call for you to swear some undying oath to the accounting principles, but I don’t think most people should do that.
My impression is that in the business world, “fraud” is pointing at a cluster of actions that’s more specific than most simple definitions. I’d assume that there are incredibly few cases where businesses are actually in situations where they feel they need to commit fraud to save a life or similar, especially in Western countries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even legal loopholes for these extreme hypothetical-like situations. Like, the person could say they were under effective duress.
My guess is that basically any of us would agree to hypotheticals or thought experiments that were wild enough. Like, “What if you knew with absolute certainty that America would be completely nuked unless your business commits a tiny amount of fraud? Would you do it then?”
Huh, I thought “fraud” was one of those categories that does indeed kind of criminalize a huge swath of behavior.
My model is that “fraud” (which includes e.g. tax evasion) is kind of the thing that prosecutors fall back on if they can’t pin anything else on you, but feel really confident that you did something wrong, like the famous case of convicting Al Capone primarily for tax evasion.
This suggests to me that the legal definition of fraud has a lot of degrees of freedom in it. I’ve heard it referenced as one of those things that might end up criminalizing a lot of relatively “normal” behavior (like I remember “wire fraud” as another one of these extremely general categories of crime that seems to often get used as a kind of catch-all of bad behavior using any kind of telecommunications).
This doesn’t mean that fraud isn’t a meaningful concept, or whatever, but I think it’s straightforwardly false that the legal definition of fraud points to a much more narrow subset than common-usage definitions. It’s probably somewhat narrower, as most legal concepts are, but I don’t think there is a huge disconnect between common-usage of fraud and the legal definition of it.
Fraud defined in this post is in business context—mismanagement, violation of internal controls or collusion, etc. The self defined position you are claiming Habryka for fraud is very different from what is acceptable in governance and internal audit standards that governs large organizations.
My fraud 101 post is very relevant here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h7gnYAvEpqBxAr3Wr/fraud-101
I’m confused. Your comment makes it sounds like someone reading this post might one day have to decide whether to commit fraud in order to save a life or do something else extremely morally important.
I can’t think of any examples of that in a democracy in the last 50 years*. Can you? If it’s so rare that neither of us can think of an example, I think condemning fraud unequivocally is the way to go, to avoid any confusion.
*I actually can’t think of any examples at all, but think this kind of example would be most relevant.
I’m confused about this comment tbh. I can’t tell if we just have very different life experiences or if there is some cognitive fallacy thing going on where it’s easier to generate examples for my position than examples against my position.
For example, (in my family’s lore) my grandfather was asked to cover up a (as I understand it) minor instance of corruption by his superior. He refused to do so, and was majorly screwed over during Cultural Revolution times as a result. Now this example isn’t a clean one since “doing the right thing, even when it’s hard” here pointed against fraud, and he in fact did not choose to do so. But I think I would not have faulted him if he chose protecting his family over loyalty to the party for some pretty minor thing. Particularly since his actual choice could easily have counterfactually resulted in my own non-existence.
As another example, at least some forms of American whistleblower animal activism involve skirting the edges of ag-gag laws, which may involve falsifying documents to be allowed access to factory farms to be able to film atrocities. Now maybe their moves here are unethical (I personally would hesitate to lie to an employer to that extent, though it’s unclear if this is judicious moral reasoning or just insufficient bravery). But I think this is at least the type of question that’s subject to debate, and I would not want to condemn such actions without substantially more detailed thinking and debate.
Note however that the post above only condemns fraud at FTX, not globally.
Those sound closer to what I’d think of as fraud, although I also wouldn’t encourage the fraudulent option in either case! But no, I really didn’t think of either of those examples when trying to generate examples of fraud that people might think is morally good
Yep, I think we are indeed living in pretty interesting times!
I think both my parents and grandparents in Germany faced similar decisions, and definitely within the last 50 years (half of Germany was under USSR occupancy around 30 years ago!).
Something being “a democracy” is I think only a weak filter on the actual need for this. The U.S. had various anti-gay and anti-communism periods in which I think lying to the government or committing fraud seemed very likely the way to go (e.g. I personally am sympathetic, though very tentatively still overall opposed to the people who committed minor fraud to e.g. dodge the draft for the vietnam war, and definitely in favor of military personnel who lied about their sexual orientation for most of the last 50 years).
I also think racism was a serious enough problem within the last 50 years that I would not judge someone if they had lied about their race in various government documents in order to gain access to fair treatment, and of course anti-semitism has been rampant enough that lying about your religious affiliation to the government or universities, even within the U.S. was an action I would not judge people too badly for.
It is indeed very easy for me to come up with a very long list of examples where committing minor fraud, with an intention of limiting the negative effects of it, was the ethical (or at least a defensible) choice. Happy to generate more if you want
(for some more examples:
Given that many universities have a policy of expelling students with mental health problems I would not fault someone for lying to their university administration when they are asked about whether they have a history of depression or are using anti-depressants.
I think various occupational licensing regimes are crazy enough that I would not fault someone for operating without a license for e.g. being a hairdresser, though I feel tentatively confused about this.
Various parts of immigration law seem crazy enough to me that engaging with the government fully honestly here seems like it could seriously endanger your life or the lives of your children.
Most recently the government had crazy enough lockdown restrictions, as well as rules about how vaccines should be distributed, that I think it was ethical to break those rules, which potentially would have involved lying to the government e.g. given that tons of vaccines were being thrown away, I think I support people who said that they hadn’t received a second dose yet in order to get a booster, since the only reason why boosters weren’t happening was crazy FDA shenanigans.
)
I also expect the world will end up more crazy in the future than it has been in the recent past. I assign substantial probability to additional widespread pandemics, major power wars, nuclear conflict and political polarization causing substantially more oppressive regimes in the west (not like, super high probabilities to any of these, but I think the last 20-30 years, at least in the western world, have been a very calm time in terms of radical global changes, and I do not expect that period of relative calmness to persist for that much longer). I think all of these are also associated with conflict that gives substantially more justification to lying to major institutions and governments and other things that might be classified as fraud.
Okay, that’s where I misunderstood you—lying to the government is not what I think of when condemning fraud. I think lying to government can be very serious and is often done too flippantly, but it’s not what I thought you were defending. In my mind, fraud is primarily about stealing money, and I just couldn’t figure out how you were defending that.
Yeah, in my mind fraud is not tied to financial benefit (and I don’t think it is legally either, any kind of personal benefit will suffice). I also think that if the government is asking you as a jew or as a gay person to pay extra taxes or pay other types of fines (as has happened in many jurisdictions, including in the last 50 years), I also think you are justified in lying in response to that, even if it would be for financial gain.
Like, we had sodomy laws in the U.S. until 2003, many of which carried fines (and were enforced within the last 50 years). I feel a bit confused about what you are allowed to do in order to avoid self-incrimination, but it wouldn’t surprise me that much if various people were pushed into various minor forms of fraud in order to avoid those fines and criminal penalties.
Separately, if there are substantial swaths of the population trying to discriminate against jews or gay people economically, I also feel a decent amount of sympathy for people trying to avoid that by lying, even if it is for financial gain (like, if many of the most prominent scholarships to U.S. universities explicitly exempt jewish or gay or black people, as I think wasn’t too uncommon within the last 50 years, then I feel pretty sympathetic to someone lying about their race/sexual-orientation/religion in order to still claim eligibility for those scholarships, though like, I do sure think this case isn’t obvious, and many quite nearby cases feel straightforwardly quite immoral).
I agree with the general tenor of your comment, but a) I think many of the examples you listed would not be considered financial fraud and b) I disagree on the object-level with several of your examples:
I’m not sure which are the specific examples you’re thinking of, but I know some people have advocated that Asian American students lie about their race and e.g. pretend to be white to gain college admissions. I think this is probably immoral and I do not recommend this.
I think I’m on the other side here, at least for healthy adults, and this was directly decision-relevant in me waiting to get a booster (but I will not fault people who have made a different choice here, particularly ones with medical necessity or who are caretakers for more vulnerable people).
But nobody was specifically specifying financial fraud in any of this discussion, at least as far as I could tell. The OP talks about all fraud, and I haven’t seen anyone narrow things down to just financial fraud. I agree that most of the things I talked about don’t qualify as financial fraud, though I think I could also come up with many examples of it being justified to commit financial fraud within the last 50 years.
Yeah, to be clear, I think I would not support this in the present day, where the forces of discrimination seem substantially weaker. There were however periods where the disadvantage seemed so large that I would have supported active civil disobedience against those rules.
Yep, I think this is a reasonable ethical position. I felt really quite on the edge about it, and still do, though I do feel pretty strongly that it’s not an obvious case and would feel bad about our community condemning it strongly, at least given my current understanding.
(I can’t believe I’m piling onto Kirsten with Oliver and Linch, weird).
I think the topic here is greater than financial fraud.
Some of these answers feel a lot like people who haven’t been in high agency positions with enormous responsibility and pressure.
I can think of several situations and people you would respect, who have to take special actions to shield their organization from unreasonable and disproportionate legal harm (often where they are personally uninvolved). These leaders are still good people, and try to do the best they can. Examples:
Due to difficult and bizarre legal issues, people have to characterize a highly dysfunctional and unreasonable employee’s misconduct in a way that anticipates post-termination legal exposure
Desperate and legally dubious manufacturing of stop-gap medical equipment in an extraordinary pandemic where major governments were grossly irresponsible—in this situation the CEO took on personal responsibility for the entire organization.
None of these dilemmas are limited to EA[1], it’s probably the opposite.
Although we are learning that EA seems to actually mean to a lot of people “a place where I can build a career and get resources when things are going well, and then personally evacuate and attribute responsibility to others when there’s a problem”. This is not at all unnoticed.
Hello there, lying to protect people in danger is actually truthful preservation of life. That is very different from fraud performed to serve one’s own interest. Two different situations..
You might need to read the Gulag archipelago where it accounts the best humans where the ones who have preserved their humanity even in the face of stalin’s communism—as deadly as the situation was for them, they chosed to do things right.
Not all people choose evil to fight evil my friend. There are those who have accepted their capacity to do great evil and controlled it—Jungian Shadow Embodiment.