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Comment by xixixao | Hacker News Reader

Someone else will be the consultant, perhaps spending $20k on more useless products. In that case, you doing the consulting is still net positive.

Perhaps a better suggestion than not earning that $20k is to earn it by working with companies which do not produce useless products. Certainly worth considering for someone who wants to spend $20k to do good. On the other hand, perhaps they are already doing that .).

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Someone else will be the consultant, perhaps spending $20k on more useless products. In that case, you doing the consulting is still net positive.

Agreed, when you're evaluating the morality of the effects of an action - rather than the action in itself - you must compare them with what would likely have happened, not assume that nothing would happen instead.

A simple example is self-defence: punching someone it wrong - unless they would've harmed someone more if they hadn't been punched. Comparing the likely alternative scenario is essential to judge the effects of the action.

This argument is only correct under the assumption that you are the only person on earth making this decision. It is like arguing that you shouldn't go voting because the chance that your vote changes the result is, for all practical matters, zero.

No, it still works if you assume that enough people simply don't care about the ethics of the action. Only if the vast majority of consultants were asking themselves the same thing would it really matter.

Your analogy doesn't really work for me, because I do think the effect of voting for an individual, and therefore its moral outcome, is mostly irrelevant. I vote because I like the action in itself.

Granted, assuming you trust your own judgement about other people's values. Still, something doesn't feel right to me. It sounds too much like a "cognitive dissonance" type of justification for acting against one's own values. You have a lot more certainty about the effect and morality of things you yourself are doing, and a lot uncertainty about how much damage this other person (who would happily fill in for you) is doing now instead. It's hard to know if one less person willing to do "bad things" would simply cause another person (who doesn't care) to "turn bad". Or to put it more extreme: you don't become a dealer of illegal drugs because someone else will sell the drugs instead who would spend the earnings worse than you.

There's certainly a large element of uncertainty, but that is hardly a reason to avoid taking these into account.

You say it sounds like a justification for acting against one's values - I'd put it in reverse: values, much like rights, are a system for deciding what to do when the uncertainty or cost of making a decision is too great. Blindly following them is folly if you actually want to avoid harming people.

You're thinking on the level of decisional strategies across agents. Arguments earlier up the comment chain where thinking on the level of implementing decisions in a given context for one agent, where the context includes other agents with unmodifiable strategies.

Yes, and I believe it is very strange to assume that those other agents have unmodifiable strategies when you are discussing strategies with them :-)

I think that "work with companies that do not produce useless products" is a mildly positive idea, given the context of the system we're in. Even better - work with organisations that are not solely for-profit and that do work that genuinely benefits society, particularly the disadvantaged. Some examples:

1. the "getup.org / kickstarter" crowd-sourced lobbying suggestion made by `icanhackit` in this thread. Particularly if you can lobby to introduce legislation/regulation to bend the rules of the capitalist game in a socially progressive direction!

2. Pollinate Energy (http://pollinateenergy.org/) make solar-powered lights to displace the use of kerosene for lighting by some of India's poor. They run it as a mix of a business and a charity. Unlike a charity, they sell their products and make money to keep operating. Their products displace an inferior competing lighting solution (saving people money and reducing risk from fire). Compared to a pure-charity approach, people take better care of solar lights that they have to pay for (rather ones they are given for free).

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