“But I would argue that one does not need religion to understand that the human spirit contains both good and evil, and the relationship between intentions and consequences can be complicated.”
Perhaps not. But I would argue that it is hard to internalize this lesson without a truly immersive experience with the relevant concepts and religion has done the best job of delivering such a thing at scale.
To highlight just one angle to this, substantive religion effectively teaches people of vastly different IQ. Low IQ people can understand the struggle with good and evil embedded in stories and act on that knowledge by applying simple constructive principles like repentance. High IQ people can engage with religion at greater intellectual depth, but are bound by socially observable constraints that limit their scope for rationalization.
Good intention - intended to be good for whom? So-called good intenders never consider the unseen - the cost and consequences to others - only the value to themselves. There are no good intentions, only self-serving intentions, because billions of years of evolution has made all organisms selfish. Flowers don’t produce nectar out of good intentions to help bees, but because it serves their reproductive cycle, bees don’t produce honey for my tea-time treat.
I follow the argument all the way up to the last section, where I'm not sure the conventional perception of non-profit vs profit is an example of the intention heuristic – is it not based on a instinctive recognition that the incentive structures are different in each case? We trust non-profits to stay truer to their good intentions because the profit motive is dialled down (though, as you say, other bad incentives exist – pleasing donors more than end users etc). But we treat the avowed good intentions of for-profits with scepticism because we know outcomes are dictated by incentives more than intentions. So Larry Fink and the US Business Roundtable may mouth noble platitudes about the 'social purpose' of business, but none of it translates into outcomes, and it may indeed enable worse outcomes – seeding a form of 'noble cause corruption' where companies become convinced they are pursuing noble goals and therefore can justify any means towards that end. That way a thousand Theranoses lie. Would be fascinated to hear your views on the corporate 'purpose' movement in general.
I think there is another good explanation for why the intention heuristic is as strong as it is. For example, when I worked in the healthcare field, I saw how the third-party reimbursement system worked. It wasn't pretty. I would try to explain to outsiders how the system artificially drove up both demand and prices, at taxpayer expense. My explanation contradicted the priors of those I would talk to. Talking with them, I noticed that their views were often shaped by the collective PR of governments, media, pundits and industry players. In other words, by the players with the most power and money on the line. It seemed to me that this PR messaging purposefully emphasized intentions, as it was a simpler and more persuasive message. The only way to overcome this type of messaging is with facts, but these facts are often complicated and are disputed. Most people don't have the bandwidth (or the desire) to hear details about the healthcare system, the banking business, or whatever, and they also may not have the patience to separate the facts from fiction. That is unless the issues impact them directly
"But I would argue that one does not need religion to understand that the human spirit contains both good and evil, and the relationship between intentions and consequences can be complicated."
I think we need religion to govern our behavior, and I write this as someone who has been mostly an atheist his entire life. I think humans need the idea of consequences for bad behavior that extend beyond the span of a human life, and rewards for good behavior that do so, too.
"criminal enterprises are the most blatant exceptions" - "the missions of profit-seeking enterprises are noble"
This charge against criminal enterprises does not appear to me a given. The assumption that legal and ethical are synonymous has been unpopular for quite a while.
A softball would be smuggling Bibles into Communist countries.
We are a species highly given to self-deception. We are not transparent to ourselves. Consider the recent revelations from the Twitter files showing the massive effort of government law enforcement, intelligence, and other agencies working with non-profit "NGOs" and for-profit entities to suppress desperately needed open discussion and debate on critically important policy issues, all under the purported good intention of avoiding supposedly harmful effects from "misinformation." Were many of the individual actors so misguided as to think they had good intentions? Or is it more likely that they had convinced themselves that they did but were in reality seeking other advantage? In fact, what they characterized as misinformation was often true but politically or otherwise inconvenient.
We cover up ill intention with spurious good intention. The easiest person to fool is oneself.
Re: "if you want to do good in the world, your chances are much better if you work in a profit-seeking business."
Perhaps other individual choices about work — besides the choice among working for a firm, a not-for-profit org, or the State — have more impact on doing good in the world.
1) Which firm? Which not-for-profit org? Which gov't agency? A person might do more good in the world, by working at a neighborhood center for troubled youths, rather than at a cosmetics firm.
2) Which job? A person might do more good in the world, by working as a detective in the homicide squad, rather than as a DEI officer in a firm.
3) Which individual work ethic? A nurse at a public hospital, who summons the serenity and courage to do her level best for patients despite the dysfunctional org, might do more good in the world than a nurse at a private clinic, who, say, lets the for-profit drive of the firm and the prospect of promotion overshadow the duties of her station.
My point is that there is more to trying to do good in the world when making choices about work, than the baseline idea that firms *on average* do more good than non-for-profit orgs. And even if, say, firms *almost always* do more good than not-for-profits, there remain fundamental individual choices about jobs and work ethic.
What's interesting to me is that my Christian theology and belief in Original Sin suggests that good intentions don't lead to good consequences because we've always got some "bad" intentions in anything we do...
Ther is a Right version of this fallacy, too: Leftists who are willing and even eager to use state power to achieve their favorite economic outcome -- taxing the rich, minimum wages, command and control for externalities abatement. -- is really just cloaking a power grab.
Yes, B&B a a very good read, but appears that you do not give much emphasis to the "domino effect" many if not all in power were concerned with regard to if Vietnam fell to the Communists.
Too many do not seem to understand that if profit seeking institutions, biz and commerce at large did not exist or was dramatically less, that there would be no money for the non profit sector.
So, yes at least equal worth if not more to get a job where profits are made that allow for non profits to exist.
“But I would argue that one does not need religion to understand that the human spirit contains both good and evil, and the relationship between intentions and consequences can be complicated.”
Perhaps not. But I would argue that it is hard to internalize this lesson without a truly immersive experience with the relevant concepts and religion has done the best job of delivering such a thing at scale.
To highlight just one angle to this, substantive religion effectively teaches people of vastly different IQ. Low IQ people can understand the struggle with good and evil embedded in stories and act on that knowledge by applying simple constructive principles like repentance. High IQ people can engage with religion at greater intellectual depth, but are bound by socially observable constraints that limit their scope for rationalization.
Good intention - intended to be good for whom? So-called good intenders never consider the unseen - the cost and consequences to others - only the value to themselves. There are no good intentions, only self-serving intentions, because billions of years of evolution has made all organisms selfish. Flowers don’t produce nectar out of good intentions to help bees, but because it serves their reproductive cycle, bees don’t produce honey for my tea-time treat.
I follow the argument all the way up to the last section, where I'm not sure the conventional perception of non-profit vs profit is an example of the intention heuristic – is it not based on a instinctive recognition that the incentive structures are different in each case? We trust non-profits to stay truer to their good intentions because the profit motive is dialled down (though, as you say, other bad incentives exist – pleasing donors more than end users etc). But we treat the avowed good intentions of for-profits with scepticism because we know outcomes are dictated by incentives more than intentions. So Larry Fink and the US Business Roundtable may mouth noble platitudes about the 'social purpose' of business, but none of it translates into outcomes, and it may indeed enable worse outcomes – seeding a form of 'noble cause corruption' where companies become convinced they are pursuing noble goals and therefore can justify any means towards that end. That way a thousand Theranoses lie. Would be fascinated to hear your views on the corporate 'purpose' movement in general.
I think there is another good explanation for why the intention heuristic is as strong as it is. For example, when I worked in the healthcare field, I saw how the third-party reimbursement system worked. It wasn't pretty. I would try to explain to outsiders how the system artificially drove up both demand and prices, at taxpayer expense. My explanation contradicted the priors of those I would talk to. Talking with them, I noticed that their views were often shaped by the collective PR of governments, media, pundits and industry players. In other words, by the players with the most power and money on the line. It seemed to me that this PR messaging purposefully emphasized intentions, as it was a simpler and more persuasive message. The only way to overcome this type of messaging is with facts, but these facts are often complicated and are disputed. Most people don't have the bandwidth (or the desire) to hear details about the healthcare system, the banking business, or whatever, and they also may not have the patience to separate the facts from fiction. That is unless the issues impact them directly
Religion and econ 101 help. :)
"But I would argue that one does not need religion to understand that the human spirit contains both good and evil, and the relationship between intentions and consequences can be complicated."
I think we need religion to govern our behavior, and I write this as someone who has been mostly an atheist his entire life. I think humans need the idea of consequences for bad behavior that extend beyond the span of a human life, and rewards for good behavior that do so, too.
….and all for the want of a nail—in this case Econ 101--was society lost, and not merely the battle for its survival
"criminal enterprises are the most blatant exceptions" - "the missions of profit-seeking enterprises are noble"
This charge against criminal enterprises does not appear to me a given. The assumption that legal and ethical are synonymous has been unpopular for quite a while.
A softball would be smuggling Bibles into Communist countries.
Yes, and when non-profits become intertwined with government agencies, they become rent-seekers just like any for-profit business.
We are a species highly given to self-deception. We are not transparent to ourselves. Consider the recent revelations from the Twitter files showing the massive effort of government law enforcement, intelligence, and other agencies working with non-profit "NGOs" and for-profit entities to suppress desperately needed open discussion and debate on critically important policy issues, all under the purported good intention of avoiding supposedly harmful effects from "misinformation." Were many of the individual actors so misguided as to think they had good intentions? Or is it more likely that they had convinced themselves that they did but were in reality seeking other advantage? In fact, what they characterized as misinformation was often true but politically or otherwise inconvenient.
We cover up ill intention with spurious good intention. The easiest person to fool is oneself.
Re: "if you want to do good in the world, your chances are much better if you work in a profit-seeking business."
Perhaps other individual choices about work — besides the choice among working for a firm, a not-for-profit org, or the State — have more impact on doing good in the world.
1) Which firm? Which not-for-profit org? Which gov't agency? A person might do more good in the world, by working at a neighborhood center for troubled youths, rather than at a cosmetics firm.
2) Which job? A person might do more good in the world, by working as a detective in the homicide squad, rather than as a DEI officer in a firm.
3) Which individual work ethic? A nurse at a public hospital, who summons the serenity and courage to do her level best for patients despite the dysfunctional org, might do more good in the world than a nurse at a private clinic, who, say, lets the for-profit drive of the firm and the prospect of promotion overshadow the duties of her station.
My point is that there is more to trying to do good in the world when making choices about work, than the baseline idea that firms *on average* do more good than non-for-profit orgs. And even if, say, firms *almost always* do more good than not-for-profits, there remain fundamental individual choices about jobs and work ethic.
Important essay.
short version
people give value for value
What's interesting to me is that my Christian theology and belief in Original Sin suggests that good intentions don't lead to good consequences because we've always got some "bad" intentions in anything we do...
Ther is a Right version of this fallacy, too: Leftists who are willing and even eager to use state power to achieve their favorite economic outcome -- taxing the rich, minimum wages, command and control for externalities abatement. -- is really just cloaking a power grab.
Yes, B&B a a very good read, but appears that you do not give much emphasis to the "domino effect" many if not all in power were concerned with regard to if Vietnam fell to the Communists.
Too many do not seem to understand that if profit seeking institutions, biz and commerce at large did not exist or was dramatically less, that there would be no money for the non profit sector.
So, yes at least equal worth if not more to get a job where profits are made that allow for non profits to exist.