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Nornagest comments on Open Thread, May 19 - 25, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (289)
This seems consequentially equivalent to "legal issues aside, is it ethical to steal from businesses in order to give to [EA-approved] charity, and if so, which ones?".
I suspect answering would shed more heat than light.
For fun, let's reshuffle accents. So, every time you make a contribution to an EA-approved charity, you can go and pick yourself a free gift of equal value from any seller, and the seller can't do anything about that including complain. Is that OK? :-)
Great example. It is an isomorphic situation, that paints it in a completely different light.
If you are asking me personally, I can see myself doing just that in some cases, though definitely not as a standard way of obtaining goods. The reason for the original question was to see what the rest of you think of the matter.
I don't recall any past controversy offhand, but given that business in general and many specific categories of business in particular are highly politicized, I suspect the answers you'd get would be more revealing of your respondents' politics (read: boring) than of the underlying ethics. For the same reason I'd expect it to be more contentious than average once we start getting into details.
There are also PR issues with thought experiments that could be construed as advocating crime, although that's more an issue with my reframing than with your original question. There's no actual policy, though; there is policy against advocating violence, but this doesn't qualify.