The post isn’t trying to cover all cases of harmful careers, just ones where the career seems to be clearly net positive when approached from a costs-and-benefits framework, but still involves some harms. Trying to think about your class of objections, all the ones I can think of are covered by “that’s actually net negative” and not “that’s clearly positive, but you shouldn’t do it anyway”?
For example, say someone cares a lot about animals and thought their best altruistic option might be working in their family’s ranch. They’d (a) they’d earn a bunch of money (hypothetical!) that they’d donate to ACE recommendations, (b) they’d have some influence in the direction of better treatment of animals, but (c) they’d be complicit in raising animals for food. [1] It seems to me that the question here is whether (a) and (b) outweigh (c)? Or do you want to give additional weight to farms like this being incompatible with the stricter moral standard you think is correct?
[1] If the movement were working to outlaw ranches like this I see how working at one could undermine that, and so be another harm in addition to (c).
In the ranch case, I’m imagining that the protagonist believes that (a) and (b) do outweigh (c) to the net-positive.
But (c) is still significant, P says, so they conclude that “the benefits seem much larger than the harms, but the harms are still significant”. Furthermore, is (c) “the kind of thing you ought to be able to ‘cancel out’ through donation [and/or harm-reducing influence]”, or is it more like murder?
Is it sufficient that (a) and (b) outweigh (c), or is (c) the sort of thing we should avoid anyway?
In this situation, I feel like I’d be in exactly the target audience that a rule like you’re proposing would be trying to serve, but deferring to legality doesn’t work because society-that-makes-laws is way less strict than I want my decision-making to be about whether it considers (c) a notable harm at all!
The post isn’t trying to cover all cases of harmful careers, just ones where the career seems to be clearly net positive when approached from a costs-and-benefits framework, but still involves some harms. Trying to think about your class of objections, all the ones I can think of are covered by “that’s actually net negative” and not “that’s clearly positive, but you shouldn’t do it anyway”?
For example, say someone cares a lot about animals and thought their best altruistic option might be working in their family’s ranch. They’d (a) they’d earn a bunch of money (hypothetical!) that they’d donate to ACE recommendations, (b) they’d have some influence in the direction of better treatment of animals, but (c) they’d be complicit in raising animals for food. [1] It seems to me that the question here is whether (a) and (b) outweigh (c)? Or do you want to give additional weight to farms like this being incompatible with the stricter moral standard you think is correct?
[1] If the movement were working to outlaw ranches like this I see how working at one could undermine that, and so be another harm in addition to (c).
In the ranch case, I’m imagining that the protagonist believes that (a) and (b) do outweigh (c) to the net-positive.
But (c) is still significant, P says, so they conclude that “the benefits seem much larger than the harms, but the harms are still significant”. Furthermore, is (c) “the kind of thing you ought to be able to ‘cancel out’ through donation [and/or harm-reducing influence]”, or is it more like murder?
Is it sufficient that (a) and (b) outweigh (c), or is (c) the sort of thing we should avoid anyway?
In this situation, I feel like I’d be in exactly the target audience that a rule like you’re proposing would be trying to serve, but deferring to legality doesn’t work because society-that-makes-laws is way less strict than I want my decision-making to be about whether it considers (c) a notable harm at all!