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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

> Are you describing "giving virtually all of [your earnings] away to effective charities" as "literally buying indulgences"? That's literally the most cynical thing I've ever heard....But your reaction to the charitable investor thing makes me think that you actually disagree with... altruism

I don't think it's the idea of giving to charity that's being criticised here. Its the idea a rich person giving an absolute sum of money poorer people cannot match is "ahead morally" on some utilitarian scale no matter what else the poorer person does, particularly in the context that the poster boy example of "earning to give" was Sam Bankman Fried...

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Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.

The position that the virtue of SBF's actions are irrelevant, and he should be judged better than all of us because he could afford to give more money to give away to good outcomes sounds exactly like "buying indulgences" to me.

Especially in Scott Aaronson's phrasing where it's the SBF's gross donation spend being ahead of all of ours that we should be impressed by, not the net impact of his actions (which I find difficult to believe is positive even on pure utilitarian grounds, given that he's not exactly inspiring others to "earn to give" right now, he's shrunk the world's balance sheet and I consider some of his [notionally] philanthropic spend pretty dubious)

Sure, but then the argument is "SBF was bad actually". I agree with this take - this is going to lead to bad outcomes. But note that saying so already embraces a consequentialist framework. This is a common argument for "rules utilitarianism", which is that given human psychology, getting humans to pursue (particular) virtues leads to better outcomes in the real world than getting humans to engage in first-order outcome maximization.

A true virtue-ethics take would be that SBF was inherently ennobled by good behavior or blemished by bad behavior, and the outcomes would have no relevance to this consideration. That's why I said virtue ethics is dead - approximately nobody argues like that today.

Well yes, nobody in this subthread is arguing that outcomes have no relevance.

We just object to Aaronson's rather extreme position that the correct measure of SBF's goodness is the single dimension of the absolute amounts he donated to notionally philanthropic causes (which seems like the reductio ad absurdum version of EA utilitarianism). And yes, I'm also unconvinced of the argument that behaviour and intent plays no role in ethics. It may be a good in terms of outcome that a sociopathic hereditary billionaire gives away 1%< of his fortune purely for reputation laundering purposes whilst minimising his interactions with other humans he declines to fulfil his rape and torture fantasies on purely out of rational self-interest, but I don't believe that would make him a "good person" by any reasonable ethical standard, never mind a "better person than all of us". At some point intent, relative sacrifice and what would other people have done in the same position become relevant to casting judgement on his benevolence, never mind his other vices. And certainly the courts will consider intent and not just the brute fact that SBF lost a lot of people's money when deciding whether to prosecute him, convictions and sentencing; I imagine most of his defence will be structured around that...

I don't fully agree with Aaronson's take, I just think it's underappreciated. I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes. And I think there is an argument to be made that getting rich people to donate is a thing that a moral system that tries to lead to good outcomes, should focus attention on.

Like it or not, we have set up our society so that economic decisionmaking power is to a large part concentrated in the hands of a small fraction of the population. This population is a moral fulcrum; the things they decide to do have a significant effect on actual events, in some ways even outstripping governments (which generally hold obligations on par with their power). I think an effective morality needs to acknowledge this and make special dispensation for these people if they decide to bend their power towards creating good outcomes, whether or not one approves of their existence in the abstract.

Assume you are trying to invent a morality to sell to the one percent. The pass-or-fail condition is that this morality must absolve their sins. It seems to me that the default option here is laissez-faire libertarianism, which has cultural bias against doing work to improve the worse off; in my view, being able to make inroads in this moral market is a significant victory for EA and good outcomes in general.

>I am a sorta-rules utilitarian; in contested questions, I think the moral obligation is to behave in a fashion so that the standards by which we act, if universalized, maximize beneficial outcomes.

If you'll forgive the glibness, isn't that just deontology with extra steps? Sorry, it's just been on my mind since I learned (from Resident Contrarian article[0]) that many rule-utilitarianism is a functional reskin of disfavored deontological thinking.

[0]: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/the-weird-world-of-the-...

Every moral framework is every other moral framework with extra steps. They're all "morally Turing complete". However, which one you pick may make certain moral views significantly easier or harder to express. It's less that I think rule utilitarianism is morally compelling as a way of deciding what is good, as that I think rule utilitarianism captures some of my moral intuitions particularly well, so I use it to model (some of) the reasoning that my brain goes through when evaluating goodness. In other words, it's descriptive, not prescriptive.

All modern moral systems have extremely serious defects where they can be gamed. Repugnant conclusion, the entire concept of deontology, etc. Virtue Ethics is ungameable.

Virtue ethics is gameable if you can make virtues conflict.

Which is trivial: pro-life vs. pro-choice, free-speech vs. anti-harassment, etc. I don't think there's anyone on any part of the political spectrum who thinks their ideas are not virtuous.

This is a feature, not a bug. Casuistry is the science of determining the correct course of action in a complex situation. It’s complicated because the world is complicated. Attempting to create a moral system from first order logic (deontology) or a linear system (utilitarianism) was doomed from the start.

But even virtue ethics got parts of this right that EA seems to get wrong. From the very beginning, Aristotle caught on to idea that minmaxing a particular moral virtue gets you into deep trouble. That's precisely the hole EA falls into; see again Sam Bankman-Fried, and MacAskill's advice to him.

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