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Comment by DowsingSpoon | Hacker News Reader

It might be the parts that lead a person to commit large scale fraud with the idea that the good they can do with the stolen money outweighs all the negatives. Or, at least, that’s the popular idea of what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried. I have no idea what was actually going through that man’s mind.

In any case, EA smells strongly of “the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with strong arguments. One which resonates with me is that there are no “ends.” The path itself is the goal.

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> the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with strong arguments.

This is a false statement. Our entire modern world is built on the basis of the ends justify the means. Every time money is spent on long term infrastructure vs giving poor kids food right now, every time a war is fought, every time a doctor triages injuries at a disaster.

I don't think it's useful to conflate "the ends justify the means" with "cost-benefit analysis". You sometimes use the latter to justify certain means, but you don't have to, that's why they're different. When you believe that the ends justify the means, you can also just give no consideration at all to the ethics of the means. No doctor triaging patients would ever shoot a patient in the head so he could move onto one they thought was more important. Yes they might let patients die, but that's different than actively killing them.

In the framework of modern civilian medicine sure.

I'm sure exactly what you described was done plenty of times in ww1 and similar around that era, and seen as perfectly moral and rational.

I've noticed this with a lot of radical streamers on both sides. They don't care about principles, they care about "winning" by any means necessary.

Winning at things that align with your principle is a principle. If you don't care about principles, you don't care about what you're winning at, thereby making every victory hollow and meaningless. That is how you turn into a loser at everything you do.

> there are no “ends.” The path itself is the goal.

How does this apply to actual charity? "Curing malaria is not the goal. Our experiences during voluntourism are the true goal."

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