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The Arithmetic of Harm

Moral accounting, externalities, and the aggregation of welfare.

8 essaysStart reading

Chapters

  1. 01The Drowning Child Argument Never Accounted for My LoafersPeter Singer's drowning child has probably moved more money than any other paragraph in philosophy. You're walking past a shallow pond, a small child is going under, and wading in will ruin your shoes. Nobody hesitates, and Singer then points out that a child dying of malaria is in the same pond, only farther away, so the price of the shoes is owed to her. Half a century of seminars, a giving pledge taken by thousands of people and, last year, an entire book about the pond have rested on the assumption that the shoes are a trivial cost, and in the original 1972 paper they weren't even shoes, only muddy clothes. As far as I can find, nobody had ever stood at the edge of real water in a pair of Loro Piana Summer Walks, with a real child going under, and done the arithmetic, which is a strange omission for a movement that does the arithmetic on everything else.marginal_coping · Sep 9, 2026
  2. 02Jonathan Swift Was Right About Population EthicsI know *A Modest Proposal* is satire. I read it in tenth grade like everyone else. Swift wrote it in 1729 to indict the English landlords who were starving Ireland, and the joke is that his arithmetic arrives somewhere no decent reader will follow. The problem is that we now have an intellectual movement built around the proposition that when moral arithmetic produces a conclusion that feels horrifying, the responsible response is to inspect the arithmetic rather than recoil from the answer.bullet_biter · Jul 14, 2026
  3. 03Against Apologies: Reputational Damage Already Prices HarmIf someone is harmed by my conduct and subsequently updates negatively on me, that update is part of the social enforcement mechanism. Demanding an apology imposes an additional transfer after the market has already repriced the asset.reputation_market · Jun 25, 2026
  4. 04Against Hoarding Both of Your KidneysDaniel has two kidneys. I have a plan to sell shares in an option on one of them, finance the shares with debt, and hedge his refusal. He keeps asking whether he has agreed to any of this.organ_optionality · Jul 22, 2023
  5. 05My Tenants Would Want Me to Raise Their Rent if They Were SmarterMy tenants oppose the rent increase under their current beliefs and cognitive limitations. An adequately informed version of each tenant would have a considerably richer view of the situation.extrapolated_landlord · Mar 14, 2025
  6. 06Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-PositiveI sell fentanyl six days a week under the El at Kensington and Somerset, and every bag I sell is net life-positive. Each bag carries a small but real chance of killing whoever buys it. Each bag also sends $1.80 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which GiveWell estimates saves a child’s life for about $5,500. My customers die at a rate of roughly one per 4,000 bags. Four thousand bags at $1.80 buys nets for 1.3 children. Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.offset_plug · Oct 4, 2026
  7. 07Artists Deserve More Than Doctors and FarmersI keep seeing people say that generative AI “democratizes creativity,” and I genuinely need some of you to examine why you think wanting something means you are entitled to have it cheaply. I went to art school for 15 years.smol_creative · Dec 8, 2022
  8. 08Why It’s Actually Woke That I Work at PalantirI am a Maoist Third Worldist and a Senior Forward-Deployed Ontologist for Population Removal at Palantir. My team is building Project HAYFORK, a unified decision layer that combines immigration records, commercial location data, household graphs, employment histories, protest activity and other signals to estimate whether a person should be monitored, detained, removed from a geographic area, denied access to critical infrastructure, or escalated to a customer with more kinetic capabilities. I personally own the roadmap for reducing false negatives in the “Pre-Hostile Civilian” category.red_hobbit · Jul 30, 2026