This is partially right, but missing an important part of the picture. If your level of analysis is too narrow, you won’t evaluate the trade-offs.
When one consideration is brought up, it’s as if it “cancels” the other.
And this is one problem that typically follows: You’re implicitly giving equal weight to every positive and negative point. If I gain a candy bar by stealing from a shop, it’s not a neutral act just because there’s one positive and one negative (i.e. positive for me, negative for the owner). Different effects have different weights.
And there doesn’t need to be an “overall goodness” of the job that would be anything else than just the combination of those two facts.
Rather than pick a limited number of factors, a better question is “Would the timeline in which I got this job be better than the timeline in which I did not” (which accounts for every factor). On this front, there is an “overall goodness”, for example “The average utility at any given point in time over the age of the universe”. You have to make a decision, so you have to weigh the trade-offs against each other into a single rule. This is true whether or not it’s acknowledged.
This is partially right, but missing an important part of the picture. If your level of analysis is too narrow, you won’t evaluate the trade-offs.
And this is one problem that typically follows: You’re implicitly giving equal weight to every positive and negative point. If I gain a candy bar by stealing from a shop, it’s not a neutral act just because there’s one positive and one negative (i.e. positive for me, negative for the owner). Different effects have different weights.
Rather than pick a limited number of factors, a better question is “Would the timeline in which I got this job be better than the timeline in which I did not” (which accounts for every factor). On this front, there is an “overall goodness”, for example “The average utility at any given point in time over the age of the universe”. You have to make a decision, so you have to weigh the trade-offs against each other into a single rule. This is true whether or not it’s acknowledged.