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The ironic thing about this is that all of the well-considered counter arguments come off as exactly what a manipulative sociopath would say in this situation, and there are numerous comments pointing that out. "I condemn and distance from this bad thing now that it has come to light, but we should not link criticism to any particular people and totes promise not to do it again." What they fail to realize is that the credible pre-commitment to strong business ethics they are talking about is deontology.
In the sense that a real witch would condemn witches to maintain their cover, and maintain a long track record of doing so just to make it extra secure, sure.
It's more like "Yes, we all condemn witchcraft, it's the worst. But in the wake of this witchcraft scandal of my good friend, we should focus on general condemnations, and totally not worry about any particular people who might also be witches. Also, we probably don't need any particular new anti-witch policies beyond general frowning and finger-wagging."
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Aside from that plenty of claimed christian deontologists or liberals have committed similar scales of fraud over the years, meaning it's not clear EA somehow makes people more likely to commit fraud (crypto exchange rugpulls are incredibly common), 'deontology' and 'believing in business ethics' are rather different. Deontology is a claim about 'all morals and decisionmaking', business ethics are a specific set of rules (ones that basically all EAs and philosophical utilitarians endorse, afaik).
Also for deontology in a practical sense, the problem of 'which rules' confuses things, am i being consequentialist if I accept 'business ethics' instead of 'christian ethics' for finance? how do i decide that business ethics are better? aren't you just embracing rules 'deontologically' that were - literally - created by people who planned out the consequences of said rules? isn't that just consequentialism-by-proxy? Can I even think things like 'wow, liberalism and universalism maybe aren't ideal' under deontology, if those are the prevailing rules?
I mean the de-facto rules in crypto were, kind of, 'commit as much fraud as you can without getting caught'
I've argued before that ethics should be viewed as a stack, from virtue ethics to deontology to utilitarianism to consequentialism, where the core difference is the trade-off between ideal outcomes vs ease of implementation. My point is that the post you linked is, at best, arguing for accepting a trade-off down-stack in the case of business ethics. They want to implement a "No Fraud" rule because the risk of tricking yourself into harmful bullshit when doing business ethical reasoning on utilitarian grounds is too high, so you should just round off to "all clever plans to increase utility that violate standard business ethics should be assumed false on sight". And the way you credibly signal that commitment, is to switch to a deontological framework for those cases, instead of continuing in a utilitarian framework (which implies a whispered "unless it seems like a really good idea!" caveat).
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