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ChristianKl comments on Persistent Idealism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (45)
EA do consider working for banks who are guilty of defrauding their customers on multiple occasions.
Could you expand more? EAs clearly shouldn't defraud people.
It's just guilt by association.
No, it's guilt by explicit participation.
Perhaps you'd like to unpack that a bit.
Suppose Al is a would-be effective altruist. Al estimates that his charitable giving can "save a life" (i.e., do an amount of good that he judges equivalent to giving one person a reasonably full and happy life instead of dying very prematurely) for about $5k. Al is willing to give away half of what he earns above $40k/year, and everything above $150k/year. He can work for $50k/year as a librarian (giving $5k/year, 1 life/year) or for $250k/year as an investment banker (giving $155k/year, 31 lives/year).
The investment bank that's offering Al a job was recently involved in a scandal that effectively defrauded a lot of its customers of a lot of money. Al doesn't know of any similar frauds going on right now, and is fairly sure that the job he's being offered doesn't require him to defraud anyone. But of course it's entirely possible that somewhere in the large i-bank he'd be working for, other equally nasty things are going on.
OK. So, if Al takes the i-banking job then he is "guilty by explicit participation". That sounds bad. Should Al regard being "guilty by explicit participation" as more important than saving 30 extra lives per year? If I am introduced to Al and trying to work out what to think of him, should I think worse of him because he thought it more important to save an extra 30 lives/year than to avoid "guilt by explicit participation"?
Does "guilt by explicit participation" actually harm anyone? How?
Most of the big banks where found to defraud people by US courts in the last years.
The for example rigged Libor exchange rates. Every employee of a big banks that participated in the rigging that made trades that depend on the Libor exchange rate and where the rigging was harmful to the client was effectively participating in defrauding the client.
A relevant Economist article.
Doesn't it follow from this (and the fact that fraud is illegal but the authorities are not very effective at ferreting it out) that it would be a good thing for the public if people who were more constrained by ethics than by money took jobs at these banks, so that they can blow the whistle on the next fraud at an earlier stage?
Such people are a very limited resource and I'd rather they go into three-letter agencies, if it's all the same to them X-D