No he will not and cannot. No amount of good deeds to people X makes up for destroying people Y.
I agree, this is a bizarre essay.
Your bar is very high. I hope you practice what you preach.
Personally, I think Bill Gates has been a net positive for the world.
That's exactly what will make you a better person. That's how it works.
> Change "apologize to 10 people" to "save 10 African children from starvation" and I don't see how you can possibly argue this hypothetical person is "bad"
Quite easily, let me fix your badly changed argument back to what it was, equal, because your change is an intellectually dishonest attempt to make the good outweigh the bad so much that it obscures my reasoning.
If I kill someone, and then save 10 African children from starvation, you're damn right I'm still a bad person. Helping people doesn't make up for hurting other people. Morals aren't math, doing good deeds doesn't balance some scale that makes the bad deeds go away.
> Your moral philosophy makes no sense.
It clearly makes far more sense than yours.
Then guy one will counter attack: You could just enslave a minority to make the majority happy!
Then guy two will make his counter: You could have everyone respect everyone to death while everyone is miserable!
...and so it goes on and on. A nasty syndrome. A classic case of Kant vs Mill. There will be no rest tonight.
I'm not super familiar with his work, but I've heard the popular guy these days is Rawls and his theory of justice. Maybe give him a look?
I wasn't using the "save 10 children" to obscure your reasoning, I was pointing out an extreme case where your reasoning breaks down. You can reasonably call someone who punches you in the face (without good reason) a "bad person". But if you find out they've personally saved 10 children's lives I'm pretty sure you'd think they were a good person. Plus what people mean when they call someone "moral" or "immoral" usually has to do with both their actions and their predicted future actions. Again, most people are fine with calling a reformed thief "moral" under certain conditions, even if they've never personally repaid the specific people they've wronged, because they don't seem likely to be immoral in the future. If you are not willing to do this you are in the minority. Your example is dishonest because murdering someone generally indicates a lack of self control or level of sociopathy that makes future violence incredibly likely. Also murdering someone purely because you don't like them very much or you have something to gain from it is generally seen as more evil than saving a life is good. If someone murdered in cold blood and then went on to save every starving person in the world, then they are also-fucking-lutley a good person. You might want to keep a watch on them, but that seems like a pretty strong indication their murderin days are behind them, and is way more than enough to make up for it.
No you weren't, you were setting up a straw man that you could easily known down, nothing more.
> Morals sure as hell are math, just like everything else.
No they aren't.
> If someone murdered in cold blood and then went on to save every starving person in the world, then they are also-fucking-lutley a good person.
No they aren't. They're a bad person trying to make themselves feel better by making up for their crimes. They don't ever become a good person after murdering someone. That line cannot be uncrossed.
Markets appear to aggressively favour so-called winners who aren't notable for civility or decency.
Gates 2.0 is tangential to the argument, because to some extent 2.0 is the creation of Melinda and a supporting PR machine.
Gates 1.0 was a borderline sociopath who did a huge amount of damage to personal computing. At the very least MS held back OS innovation by about a decade or so, and also wasted huge amounts of time and money by forcing IE on the Internet, and also became notorious for killing promising start-ups.
And yet MS was a hugely successful company.
So PG is factually wrong. Markets, investors, and business culture don't just tolerate meanness, they actively reward it, and actively punish its opposite. (Go on - think of a corporation which is known globally from board level down for its outstanding ethics, its intolerance of exploitation, and its generosity. Now - what percentage of successful corporations has that reputation?)
So I have no idea what the point of this essay is.
FWIW I think PG's lucid prose style should be taught in schools as an excellent example of how to write persuasive essays.
But I guess most people here understand the difference between persuasive stylings and factual correctness.
I'm not seeing much of the latter here. (Unless PG means people aren't mean to him? Which is possible, I guess - founders will generally not be nasty to the dude with the money.)
If I punch you in the face and then
apologize to 10 other people for
hitting you, it doesn't make me a
good person nor have I in any way
made up for wronging you.
But maybe we're just getting into the semantics of what it means to "make up for" or "excuse" wrongs.
Completely irrelevant to the points being made. No one is denying that.
How many more people are employed in, say, southeast Asia doing MS support work and development than were "destroyed" in Microsoft's heyday?
Also, what is "destroyed" to you?
The balance is well in favor of Mr. Gates.
EDIT:
Sure, sure, downvote away. It's my understanding that, for example, Thailand employs a large number of developers on Windows platforms and technologies.
The first is the use of the word "retarded" to mean "something I disagree with". The word itself is nearly a slur, but if that was all it was I wouldn't downvote just on that. The problem is your conflation of disagreement with stupidity. People can disagree without either one of them being stupid.
The second reason is because you're making assertions to the contrary (of the post you're replying to) without really making any reasonable argument in favor of your own position. It just adds nothing to the conversation. In fact, your own post begs a question: how many people ARE employed in SE Asia doing MS support work? What do you know about those people and their lives?
Morality isn't math, good deeds don't excuse bad deeds simply by outnumbering them. The very foundation of your thinking is flawed.