Wandering a road largely untraveled MacKenzie Scott is leading while others, including with me, are ordinary and evil..
My problem with Singer’s approach is that it is intent agnostic; it paints with broad strokes and claims that causing bad things, whether intended or not, is evil. It also claims that failing to stop bad things from happening is evil.
Me putting on a clean shirt after a workout, even though it will increase my laundry water usage, is not done maliciously. So I don’t think that is evil, even though drought exists somewhere in the world.
And if a child could stop a robber by turning a key in a door, but is too scared to do so, that doesn’t make them evil.
On the other hand, if I chose to drive a car that can roll coal specifically so that I could cause ill effects (such as upsetting or doing harm to people or the environment), that would be malicious and therefore evil.
I don’t necessarily agree with Singer’s points either, but I think Singer is running on the reality that we can really only judge intent when it comes to ourselves, it’s nigh-impossible to judge intent when we cannot know the contents of another humans mind. They can tell us how they feel, but some people are not honest about how they feel, and that can even come from things like social pressure or fear of rejection and other valid areas of feeling that are outside of “I am trying to deceive you for my own gain.” However, despite that, often giving into social pressure or fears of rejection often result in people making decisions that make things worse, not better. Despite the intent, the “deception” still ends up causing issues among a group of people.
So while I agree intent matters, I believe the position Singer is starting from is “with literally billions of humans, it’s impossibly to know intent of all of them and thus makes logical sense to judge by action.”
I think it would be more effective to critique his idea that evil exists as he describes it. Nature, from whence humans came, is brutal and unforgiving and many animals in nature eat their mates or their children for survivals sake. He would call those actions “evil” although they are, in the context of nature, merely survival instinct. In this sense, it’s easier to critique that he is essentially indicting nature itself as evil. Evil is a concept created by humans through our idea of “justice,” which is also a concept humans created. I just think that’s a more thorough way to debunk what he’s saying.
I think it’s an interesting idea to explore, but it doesn’t mean we have to agree with it.
Controversial, but this should be voted higher, and folks really should check the video. Thanks for the link.
I hope she fucks Jeff out of every penny possible
She gave more than a billion to food operations during COVID. She’s aces for me.
“And I am disproportinally in need of money, Ms. Bezobucks. Call me.”
i don’t even need that much, either. hell, you can keep the money–just gimme the investment proceeds from a few million. it’s sofa cushion money or a rounding error at your scale…
Good for her, but I’m gonna be real here for a minute:
Why isn’t she spending $16.5 on lobbying to ensure higher taxes for billionaires? As we’ve seen, House Reps and Senators can be bought for absurdly small amounts of money.
Oh wait, I forgot, it’s because she doesn’t actually want to be taxed. She, like all billionaires, still wants full control of what happens to her money, which means society still loses because we’re still reliant on billionaires pet projects to have any forward movement.
Charity is a farce, she needs to put her money where her mouth is and spend it on lobbying to remove tax breaks for people who have her vastness of wealth.
I strongly suspect she won’t, because this has all seemed like PR dedicated to making her seem “classier” than Bezos, despite her hand in growing a positively ruthless company with ruthless internal staffing environment.
Fair points, but I’d imagine any single person attempting what you propose would automatically fear for their lives, becoming a huge target. That certainly would be the hero move though.
Totally. This semi-reminds me of the story that was floating around yesterday (I think), about Arby’s Foundation wiping out student lunch debt for 8000 student in Georgia. Like, yes, that’s great, but also… how fucking sad we leave it to the “goodness” of billionaire’s charities so that *checks notes* CHILDREN CAN BE FED?? Sad state of affairs
Georgia… Sad state
FTFY.
Exactly. Why are the students in debt for lunch anyway? They’re children!
It’s literally the Orphan Crushing Machine. “We saved these orphans from being put in an Orphan Crushing Machine” while no one questions what the entire point of the Orphan Crushing Machine is to begin with.
Because they don’t get the benefit of claiming it’s philanthropy if it is enforced.
What I think of when I think of “philanthropists.”
Indeed, every individual who gets to repeatedly skim publicly-traded corporate profits just because they threw some money at it at some point, and then turns around and plays philanthropist… is essentially claiming money that could have been put into more livable wages and more reasonable work conditions for 1000s of people. And we’re expected to believe that money is better spent by them, precisely because they don’t need it.
still wants full control of what happens to her money
Yeah, people generally do lol.
Every other billionaire is spending their money on lobbying to get their taxes even lower. Maybe she could still have an impact through lobbying and influence peddling, but she’s outmanned and outgunned.
I’m not saying that she’s an angel. I haven’t seen anything in the press about her motives or political stances; you could be 100% correct. But paying politicians to go against all the other donors isn’t a trivial undertaking
This is a good point, and it brings to mind something I ignored from my previous post.
A lot of the people in congress can be “bought” for so little while in congress because the actual “payday” they get is when they leave office and enter into a cushy job where they’re paid to do not much at all, because they’ve already done the job of getting bad legislation passed.
Scott is not in a position to be offering them cushy jobs at Amazon once they leave, so one of the main ways to “pay off” this class of politician is actually out of reach for her as an individual instead of as the head of a business.
It’s easy to get lost in frustration with having to rely on charity, but it’s good to step back and think about it a little more clearly for a minute. Cheers, mate.
You make a great point here. The way that I think about it is that when you have a certain amount of money, it stops working like money and starts functioning as straight up power. Part of the “exchange rate” when considering money as power is the commitment to the cult of the line - the line must always go up. If you opt out from this, money starts being more like money.
Where does one go to find all of the pretty, available, philanthropic billionaires?
