To me it seems that moral action usually means something other than the profit-maximizing action. Not because there is something inherently bad about maximizing profit, it’s just that it would be too much of a coincidence if the same action that maximizes the profit also happens to generate lots of good. (But if it does, definitely take it!)
That usually requires having some slack. I won’t donate to charity if my kids are starving. And I won’t judge other people for not donating to charity when their kids are starving. It’s when you have some extra money, and your kids survive either way, that you get to choose whether to donate to some charity or buy one more beer that you probably don’t even enjoy much.
Do such actions improve the world? Well, what baseline are we comparing them against? Most actions fail to change the world, so it is perfectly natural that most of the morally motivated actions fail, too. The question is whether some succeed.
When people say that some change would have happened anyway… first, they may be wrong, sometimes they are multiple possible self-sustaining equilibria; second, even if they are right about the long-term unsustainability of something (e.g. that slavery wasn’t economically profitable anymore), it can still make a big difference whether something unsustainable collapses now, or a few decades later.
Ultimately, we do not have a good way to track credit. If a social change happened because of synchronized altruistic actions of millions of people, good luck proving that! Especially when people sometimes set up the incentives so that they support the right action. For example, some people don’t murder others, because of sheer altruism. But it makes sense for the altruistic ones to set up a law that every murderer goes to prison, so that even the non-altruistic people avoid committing murder. Now how much of the reduction in murder would you attribute to altruism and how much to following the incentives? What if the altruism shaped the incentive structure, by adopting the law?
To me it seems that moral action usually means something other than the profit-maximizing action. Not because there is something inherently bad about maximizing profit, it’s just that it would be too much of a coincidence if the same action that maximizes the profit also happens to generate lots of good. (But if it does, definitely take it!)
That usually requires having some slack. I won’t donate to charity if my kids are starving. And I won’t judge other people for not donating to charity when their kids are starving. It’s when you have some extra money, and your kids survive either way, that you get to choose whether to donate to some charity or buy one more beer that you probably don’t even enjoy much.
Do such actions improve the world? Well, what baseline are we comparing them against? Most actions fail to change the world, so it is perfectly natural that most of the morally motivated actions fail, too. The question is whether some succeed.
When people say that some change would have happened anyway… first, they may be wrong, sometimes they are multiple possible self-sustaining equilibria; second, even if they are right about the long-term unsustainability of something (e.g. that slavery wasn’t economically profitable anymore), it can still make a big difference whether something unsustainable collapses now, or a few decades later.
Ultimately, we do not have a good way to track credit. If a social change happened because of synchronized altruistic actions of millions of people, good luck proving that! Especially when people sometimes set up the incentives so that they support the right action. For example, some people don’t murder others, because of sheer altruism. But it makes sense for the altruistic ones to set up a law that every murderer goes to prison, so that even the non-altruistic people avoid committing murder. Now how much of the reduction in murder would you attribute to altruism and how much to following the incentives? What if the altruism shaped the incentive structure, by adopting the law?