I am having a hard time here and speckled throughout the rest of this post with people writing that we are doing the “good thing” and we should do that and not just what looks good with the “good thing” in question being buying a castle and not say, caring about wild animal suffering.
I guess I’ve gone off into the abstract argument about whether we should care about optics or not. I don’t mean to assert that buying Wytham Abbey was a good thing to do, I just think that we should argue about whether it was a good thing to do, not whether it looks like a good thing to do.
I’m arguing that deciding whether or not it is a good thing should include the PR impact (i.e. a weak consequentialist approach). I don’t care if things look bad, unless that perception leads bad outcomes. In this case, I think the perception could lead to bad outcomes that dominate the good outcomes in the expected value calculation
I am having a hard time here and speckled throughout the rest of this post with people writing that we are doing the “good thing” and we should do that and not just what looks good with the “good thing” in question being buying a castle and not say, caring about wild animal suffering.
I guess I’ve gone off into the abstract argument about whether we should care about optics or not. I don’t mean to assert that buying Wytham Abbey was a good thing to do, I just think that we should argue about whether it was a good thing to do, not whether it looks like a good thing to do.
I’m arguing that deciding whether or not it is a good thing should include the PR impact (i.e. a weak consequentialist approach). I don’t care if things look bad, unless that perception leads bad outcomes. In this case, I think the perception could lead to bad outcomes that dominate the good outcomes in the expected value calculation