Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But there is more to life than fair prices.
AOC seems to mean that in order for someone to get a billion dollars, they have to do something that society ought to forbid. In other words, billionaires can't get their wealth just by being lucky; they have to get it by being bad.
When I started paying my own rent and utilities, I frequently lied to the landlord and the gas company, saying the check was on its way when it wasn't. I didn't believe that scamming, or any illicit activity, even if done correctly, could ever be fruitful enough to get me or anyone else out of poverty—though it could easily attract the police or people of ill intent, who would make life worse.
Every time you shoplift, in other words, you're stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You're stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You're contributing to food deserts. You're raising unemployment. You're making food less affordable for the most vulnerable.
Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.
1mo ago
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. The coordination of all knowledge and all effort toward the human purpose, the welfare of life, is the purpose of wisdom.
1mo ago
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
1mo ago
To be entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. The first principle for the relations between States should be loyalty to natural obligations of human beings, not to the state, whenever these conflict. A man who truly believes in an ordered society must believe in the equality of human rights.
He felt the new contract wasn't true to the promise of tech: "This isn't what we came to the Valley to do. We came to build tech that makes people free!"
Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole.
The idea that humans will always be "in the loop" is quickly fading. National defense ethics is giving way to new engineering reinforcement learning optimizations.
2mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
