AndyC comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2008 06:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (300)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: AndyC 22 April 2014 12:07:25PM *  2 points [-]

That makes no sense. Just because one thing cost $1, and another thing cost $1000, does not mean that the first thing happening 1001 times is better than the second one happening once.

Preferences logically precede prices. If they didn't, nobody would be able to decide what they were willing to spend on anything in the first place. If utilitarianism requires that you decide the value of things based on their prices, then utilitarians are conformists without values of their own, who derive all of their value judgments from non-utilitarian market participants who actually have values.

(Besides, money that is spent on "overhead" does not magically disappear from the economy. Someone is still being paid to do something with that money, who in turn buys things with the money, and so on. And even if the money does disappear -- say, dollar bills are burnt in a furnace -- it still would not represent a loss of productive capacity in the economy. Taxing money and then completely destroying the money (shrinking the money supply) is sound monetary policy, and it occurs on a regular (cyclical) basis. Your whole argument here is a complete non-starter.)