By this logic, any instrumental action taken towards an altruistic goal would be “for personal gain”.
I think you are making a genuine mistake, and that I could have been clearer.
There are instrumental actions that favour everyone (raising epistemic standards), and instrumental actions that favour you (making money).
The latter are for personal gains, regardless of your end goals.
Sorry for not getting deeper into it in this comment. This is quite a vast topic. I might instead write a longer post about the interactions of deontology & consequentialism, and egoism & altruism.
(With “this logic” I meant to refer to [“for personal gain” = “getting what you want”]. But this isn’t important)
If we’re sticking to instrumental actions that do favour you (among other things), then the post is still incorrect:
[y is one consequence of x] does not imply [x is for y]
The “for” says something about motivation. Is an action that happens to be to my benefit necessarily motivated by that? No. (though more often than I’d wish to admit, of course)
If you want to claim that it’s bad to [Lie in such a way that you get something that benefits you], then make that claim (even though it’d be rather silly—just “lying is bad” is simpler and achieves the same thing).
If you’re claiming that people doing this are necessarily lying in order to benefit themselves, then you are wrong. (or at least the only way you’d be right is by saying that essentially all actions are motivated by personal gain)
If you’re claiming that people doing this are in fact lying in order to benefit themselves, then you should either provide some evidence, or lower your confidence in the claim.
If it’s clearer with an example, suppose that the first action on the [most probable to save the world] path happens to get me a million dollars. Suppose that I take this action.
Should we then say that I did it “for personal gain”? That I can only have done it “for personal gain”?
This seems clearly foolish. That I happen to have gained from an instrumentally-useful-for-the-world action, does not imply that this motivated me. The same applies if I only think this path is the best for the world.
I think you are making a genuine mistake, and that I could have been clearer.
There are instrumental actions that favour everyone (raising epistemic standards), and instrumental actions that favour you (making money).
The latter are for personal gains, regardless of your end goals.
Sorry for not getting deeper into it in this comment. This is quite a vast topic.
I might instead write a longer post about the interactions of deontology & consequentialism, and egoism & altruism.
(With “this logic” I meant to refer to [“for personal gain” = “getting what you want”]. But this isn’t important)
If we’re sticking to instrumental actions that do favour you (among other things), then the post is still incorrect:
[y is one consequence of x] does not imply [x is for y]
The “for” says something about motivation.
Is an action that happens to be to my benefit necessarily motivated by that? No.
(though more often than I’d wish to admit, of course)
If you want to claim that it’s bad to [Lie in such a way that you get something that benefits you], then make that claim (even though it’d be rather silly—just “lying is bad” is simpler and achieves the same thing).
If you’re claiming that people doing this are necessarily lying in order to benefit themselves, then you are wrong. (or at least the only way you’d be right is by saying that essentially all actions are motivated by personal gain)
If you’re claiming that people doing this are in fact lying in order to benefit themselves, then you should either provide some evidence, or lower your confidence in the claim.
If it’s clearer with an example, suppose that the first action on the [most probable to save the world] path happens to get me a million dollars. Suppose that I take this action.
Should we then say that I did it “for personal gain”?
That I can only have done it “for personal gain”?
This seems clearly foolish. That I happen to have gained from an instrumentally-useful-for-the-world action, does not imply that this motivated me. The same applies if I only think this path is the best for the world.